T.L. Cowan & Guests
with collaborating artists kelleY bolen, Kristen Hutchinson, Jan Olesen, Mickey Vallee, and Elaine Wannechko
Edmonton, Alberta
The Twisted She Project: A Collaborative Performance Cycle
Performance Summary:
The Twisted She Project will include three elements:
Part One: The Twisted She Living Room Co-Laboratory Installation
Texts, audio, video, and slides will be presented separately so that participants can experience them independently of the upcoming live performance collage. This Co-Laboratory will be available for two days before the performance at Latitude 53. Water will be served.
Part Two: The Live Performance
The 60-minute performance will be an experimental culmination of collaborative work between the six artists involved in this project. In homage to the alternate disciplining and cleansing, denigrating and forgetting of self that is required for autobiographical collaboration, audience members may choose one of two beverage options for the performance: water (discipline, cleansing) or vodka (denigration, forgetting).
Part Three: The Workshop
Participants/audience members will be asked to join the Twisted She performers/collaborators for a 60-minute workshop/critique/debriefing of Part One and Part Two.
Biography:
The work of Edmonton-based spoken word artist T.L. Cowan has been described as bitterly funny, cerebral, and shrill. Over the past ten years T.L. has performed in Canada and internationally, including at Toronto’s Festival of Original Theatre (F.O.O.T), Edmonton’s Visualeyez Festival, Loud & Queer Festival, Exposure Festival and Mile Zero Salon, and at The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts. T.L.’s work can be found in several publications including Push Magazine, Bent on Writing: Contemporary Queer Tales, and Notebook Magazine. In addition to being a writer/performer, T.L. is also a curator of many performance events and she is currently the Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Calgary. T.L.’s most recent art work reflects an exploration of alter-ego-based performance, and a commitment to collaborative creations. She has also recently taken to the screen in the short satirical activist films (with KingCrip Productions), G.I.M.P. Bootcamp and Bill 44: Smaller Classes, Smaller Minds.
Collaborating artist bios:
kelleY bolen is a performative media artist whose video work happens primarily live, in collaboration with dancers, theatre artists, musicians, and spoken word artists. kelleY has worked with many Edmonton-based artists including End of Time and a recent collaboration at the Edmonton International Jazz Festival.
Kristen Hutchinson is currently a full time sessional instructor of art history at the University of Alberta. She has published articles and reviews on contemporary art in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. and has participated in exhibitions in Canada and the U.S. Opening on September 25, 2009, she will be exhibiting a series of 320 landscape collages titled “From Sky to Ground: Fragmented Landscapes” in the Projex room at Latitude 53.
Jan Olesen’s musical career began in Edmonton, under the tutelage of Mike Lent, in the late 80s. Since then Jan has been fortunate to perform and record in a variety of musical idioms, including Jazz, Pop, Folk, and Classical.
Mickey Vallee has been active in various Canadian music projects since 1992 as an accordionist and soundscape designer and teaches in music and sociology at the University of Alberta.
Elaine Wannechko is an interdisciplinary artist that has exhibited in Canada and internationally. Since completing her MFA in Drawing and Inter-media at the University of Alberta in June 2008 she continues to collaborate with local artists and volunteer for local artist-run centers and not-for-profit organizations.
Artist Statement:
The Twisted She Project is an intermedia collaborative performance cycle that plays with themes of perversion, popularity, and pathology all funneled through conventional and unconventional performances of femininity. Although the written components of The Twisted She Project are predominantly based on autobiographical material, the aim in presenting this material is not a form of self-therapy. Rather, by integrating elements of many forms into this text-based performance, by inviting collaborators to produce sound and visual interpretations of the writing and performance, and by working with the themes and tropes embedded in the history of feminist and queer poetry and performance art, the autobiographical nature of this work is itself twisted in order to interrupt the notion of autoBiography as a form of unified truth. Finally, by incorporating installation, live performance, and a workshop session, The Twisted She Project at Visualeyez seeks to draw attention to the ways in which performance is always collaborative.
Website:
http://popstart.ca/en/members/tl-cowan
Performance Date / Time / Location:
PART 1 (installation): Friday September 18th / 10am-6pm / Latitude 53, 10248 106 street
PART 2 (performance): Saturday September 19th / 8pm / Latitude 53, 10248 106 street
PART 3 (workshop): Sunday September 20th / 4pm / Latitude 53, 10248 106 street