Public Programs
Opening
Saturday, November 18, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
At the Gallery
Free
You are invited to join us at the Gallery to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
جولة باللغة العربية
مع لين قديح
الأربعاء ، 10 كانون الثاني، 5:30 مساءً
في الغاليري
مجاناً، بالعربية
انضموا إلى الفنانة ومسؤولة البرامج العامة لين قديح في جولة ومحادثة باللغة العربية حول معرض
مسرح للتمرد (A Stage for Rebellion)
يجمع المعرض أعمال فنانين معاصرين ينظرون إلى التقاليد المسرحية الشعبية والراديكالية في القرن العشرين والتي خدمت النضالات الثورية
كجزء من برنامج متكرر، تخصص هذه الجولات مساحة للمتحدثين باللغة العربية في مونتريال للاجتماع في الغاليري والمشاركة في التبادلات النقدية حول الفن المعاصر وصناعة المعارض
GUIDED TOUR IN ARABIC
With Lynn Kodeih
Wednesday, January 10, 5:30 PM
In Arabic
Free, at the Gallery
Join artist-researcher and responsible of public programs and education Lynn Kodeih for a guided tour of A Stage for Rebellion. The exhibition brings together contemporary artists who look back on the grassroots and radical theatre traditions of the twentieth century that served revolutionary struggles.
Part of a recurrent program, these tours reserve space for Arabic speakers in Montreal to meet at the Gallery and engage in critical exchanges on contemporary art and exhibition making.
From Show-People to A Stage for Rebellion: Strategies and conventions for presenting radical theater
Lecture by Mark Sussman
Tuesday, January 16, 6 PM
In English
Free, at the Gallery
In response to A Stage for Rebellion, this talk revisits the landmark exhibit Show People: Downtown Directors and the Play of Time at Exit Art in 2002 that presented the work of six radical artists from the alternative theatre and performance scene in New York. During the 1960s and 1970s, artists had occupied a host of urban sites—lofts, churches, streets, art galleries—wherein they developed bodies of work informed by experiments across the artistic disciplines. At the same time, they built new forms of communal, and familial relations that persisted beyond the discrete performances of particular works, both on and off stage. In some cases, explicit political positions made them radical. In others, their ways of being an extended community transformed how, when, and where theatrical events could be made.
Where much subsequent popular and academic writing has focused on the well-known directors, Sussman turns his focus to the complex communities of practice, often featuring anonymous or lesser known performers, that enabled the work. How might a review of the Show People exhibit—in the wake of a rich subsequent history of presenting performance histories via print and video documents, props and artifacts, immersive spaces, and live reconstructions—allow us to interrogate the evolution of strategies and conventions for presenting the liveness of radical performance?
Mark Sussman is a theatre artist and scholar working on the animation of public space, material dramaturgies, puppetry and object performance, and the integration of old and new technologies in live performance. A co-founder of the New York-based collective Great Small Works, he is Professor of Theatre and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University. Sussman is also the founder of Café Concret, a Montreal cabaret of experimental puppetry and object-based performance. His writing has appeared in TDR, Connect, Stagebill, Cabinet, Radical Street Performance (Routledge, 1999), and Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (MIT, 2001). His “Notes on New Model Theaters” can be found in The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (2014), and an essay on New York’s Circus Amok can be found in The Routledge Circus Studies Reader (2016).
CURATOR’S TOUR
Guided tour with curator Julia Eilers Smith
Saturday, January 20, 2 PM
In English and French
Free, at the gallery
Join curator Julia Eilers Smith for a guided tour of A Stage for Rebellion for more insight on the exhibition that brings together contemporary artists who look back on the grassroots and radical theatre traditions of the twentieth century that served revolutionary struggles.
Night Just Before the Fire
Reading and conversation with Olivier Marboeuf
Tuesday, January 23, 2024, 5:30 PM
In French
Free, at the Gallery
In 1977, French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès wrote Night Just Before the Forests, a play that marked a significant turning point in his career as an author. This extensive monologue portrays a man teetering on the edge of madness, lost in a hostile foreign city, reaching out to another who will never respond. More than forty years later, Olivier Marboeuf reimagines and reinterprets the setting of Koltès’ work, creating a new theatrical piece where the drama of Haiti and the struggles of inter-Caribbean solidarity loom large. This play, written in conversation with author and actor Zakh Turin, resonates with his travels in Europe and everyday life in Solino, a popular neighborhood in Port-au-Prince plagued by gang violence.
Night Just Before the Fire is set to debut in France in 2024/2025.
Bio
Olivier Marboeuf is a writer-storyteller, curator and film producer originally from Guadeloupe. With Yvan Alagbé he founded Éditions Amok (later Frémok) in the 1990s, publishing research-based comics, and after the visual art and live literature centre Espace Khiasma, 2004 to 2018, dedicated to the representation of minorities, dedicated to minority representations, contributing to introduce postcolonial theories into the French art scene. He currently divides his time between speculative writing, drawing, and film production with Spectre Productions. Marboeuf is also a board member of the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne. He has been awarded the Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship at the Institut Universitaire de Londres à Paris (ULIP) for the 2023/2024 academic year, where he is developing research into the archive of Caribbean diasporic presences in Paris and London. He recently published Suites Décoloniales: s’enfuir de la plantation and the poetry collection Les Matières de la Nuit, both with Éditions de Commun.
James Peter Étienne lives in the Solino neighborhood of Port-au-Prince in Haiti. He operates artistically under multiple identities; sometimes as Mimétik Nèg, the smooth-talking slam poetry artist frequently seen at the slam nights of the Fokal Foundation and elsewhere, at other times as Zakh Turin, the actor who slips into the skin of Mackandal in the film Ouvertures (Berlinale 2020), and incarnates the role of the sarcastic advocate of Fire in The Wake.
Artfully extending rebellion through voice, poetic gesture and performative co-creation
Workshop generated and facilitated by Ange Loft
Saturday, January 27, 3 PM to 6 PM
In English
Free, at the Gallery
RSVP: lynn.kodeih@concordia.ca
Join multidisciplinary artist Ange Loft for a workshop reflecting and extending on the political demands of the works in A Stage for Rebellion. Employing rhythmic, poetic and art-based research, attendees will be invited to co-create brief performative, multidisciplinary responses, drawing on text excerpts, generated poetry, and the sonic and movement cues of the exhibited works. Collectively moving across the Gallery toward an impromptu performance, the participants will be guided through a series of context-generating activities, and participatory prompts drawn from the Treaty Guide for Torontonians by Talking Treaties Collective and Ange Loft.
ANGE LOFT (Kanien’kehá:ka, from Kahnawà:ke, QC, Canada; lives in Toronto, ON, Canada) is an interdisciplinary performing artist. Her collaborations use arts-based research, voice, wearable sculpture, theatrical co-creation and Haudenosaunee history to facilitate workshops and community-engaged spectacle. As a performer, Ange has graced international stages with musical act Yamantaka//Sonic Titan and as an interpreter of Indigenous lead theatrical narrative, experimental composition and performance.
A Stage for Rebellion
This series of public programs is part of the exhibition A Stage for Rebellion, presented at the Gallery from November 18 2023 to January 27 2024.