How I Learned to Serve Tea Performance Lecture and Workshop

How I Learned to Serve Tea is a creative research project that aggressively hosts a space for ugly articulations, uncertainty and failure from a working-class lens. Sometimes this project is a performance lecture, an exhibit, a series of photo essays, or workshops. Using everyday items and recognizable symbols, I get to show you what it takes to endure and survive a hostile field of representation. In this work, I ask who can afford to be seen and heard? This video lecture and workshop is welcome to all including advocates, activists, administrators, managers, equal-opportunity haters, for and against critics and of course, bootlickers and bootlickers in rehabilitation.

In the words of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge “ART MUST BECOME RESPONSIBLE FOR ITS POLITICS”

Shaista Latif is a working-class, queer, Afghan artist and writer. Her works playfully and directly confront the politics of inclusion and class. She’s been “legitimized” as a “professional” working artist for 15 years and she no longer wishes to list her credentials. All you need to know is that she’s got some things to show you this summer.

Collider: Behind-the-Scenes VR Tour & Talk

Single Thread Theatre Company is pleased to share its ongoing research in XR theatre with fellow creators. Join the Collider team in AltspaceVR for a talkback and peek behind the scenes, discussing how the team built and navigated this expansive virtual world, and brought decades of theatre experience to a new medium.

Read more about Collider.

Building Consent: A Conversation & Workshop

Together, participants will investigate our relationship to consent as we begin to re-enter public and private creative spaces together. Taking into consideration the different roles we inhabit within interdisciplinary processes, we will begin with physical explorations, cultivating a language of touch, and move into a facilitated conversation centred around care. This session is open to all arts practitioners.

Aria Evans brings a decade of experience working as a choreographer for film and stage to the field of Intimacy Coordination, Intimacy Direction and Intimacy Choreography. With a passion for realistic portrayals of intimacy, Aria has worked as an Intimacy Professional for stage and film. As an advocate for diversity and representation, Aria focuses on consent and inclusion bringing their intersectional experiences as a multiracial, queer and gender non-conforming person. Aria’s training, certification with the Intimacy Professionals Association and their knowledge of industry and movement combine for them to encourage compassionate, efficient, trauma informed and equitable work environments. www.intimacychoreographer.ca

Community partners: Theatre Passe Muraille & Generator

Land-based Practice Audio Casts

Each audio cast asks you to travel to a specific location to experience an artists’ consideration of place and how it informs their creation process and engagement with the land. We’ve invited three artists working in different, yet complementary disciplines to offer their perspectives for this audio series.

Artists: Jennifer Alicia, Jill Carter, Amy Hull

Photo of Taylor–Massey Creek by Jennifer Alicia.

Curating the Digital

The Curators of this year’s Artists at Work programming stream come together for a conversation about digital curation, how it forms an essential part of their practice, and the unique challenges and opportunities of exploring digital creation within each of their specific global contexts.

Conversationalists:

Faye Kabali-Kagwa (South Africa)

Liu Xiaoyi (Hong Kong)

Off-Site Project / Pita Arreola-Burns & Elliott Burns (UK)

AR(umination): Land-based Teaching through/with Technology

In this workshop, participants will learn the skills necessary to create an AR (augmented reality) installation that revises and reconsiders the buried histories, rivers and names of Tkaronto. As a place that holds a history of treaty purchases and their timelines that shape what we know of the city, the natural curves and contours of the land itself reveal stories that remain hidden, buried, or forgotten. AR technology will be employed to invite participants to tread gently and not trample over beings and animacy unseen but present in the city. With balance and kindness, participants will ruminate on the relationship between land and city, informed by land-based teachings that reveal cycles and patterns and encourage coexistence with them.

Amanda Amour Lynx (they/she/nekm) is a Two Spirit, neurodivergent, mixed urban L’nu (Mi’kmaw) interdisciplinary artist and facilitator currently living in Guelph, Ontario. Lynx was born and grew up in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and is a member of Wagmatcook FN. Their art making is a hybridity of traditional l’nuk approaches with new media and digital arts, guided by the Mi’kmaq principles netukulimk (sustainability) and etuaptmumk (two-eyed seeing), Lynx’s artistic practice discusses land and relationality, environmental issues, navigating systems and societal structures, cultural and gender identity, (L’nui’smk) language resurgence, quantum and spiritual multiplicities. Their facilitation work focuses on designing community spaces committed to creating healthy Indigenous futurities, guided by lateral love, accessibility and world-building. www.amour-lynx.art | @amour.lynx

David Han is a media artist, scholar and educator whose work employs emerging technology to explore the boundaries between computation, cinema and immersive media. His current practice employs a formalist approach to explore the unique affordances of virtual reality (VR) and aims to understand and expand the range of possibilities for creative practice in VR. www.friendgenerator.club | www.davidhan.ca

Kaya Joan is a multi-disciplinary mixed Black and Kanien’kehá:ka artist living in T’karonto (Dish with One Spoon treaty territory). Kaya’s work focuses on placemaking and storytelling. Black and Indigenous futurisms and speculative fiction are also themes present in Kaya’s practice, working through buried truths to explore how creation can connect seven generations into the past and future. www.kayajoan.com | @kayajoan

Part of the SummerWorks Exchange programming – a series of events to facilitate artist and community growth, to strengthen the ecology of live performance in Canada, and expand our dialogue and collaboration with the international arts community.