The Power Plant

In anticipation of Ame Henderson’s new performance with Public Recordings entitled what we are saying, The Power Plant pairs this experimental choreographer with performance art pioneer Johanna Householder who will discuss the stakes of performance encounters that demand both openness and commitment. As a founder of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, Householder helped initiate the recent surge of interest in performative practice, while Henderson’s multidisciplinary collaborations evoke such precedents as happenings, constructed situations, and social aesthetics. Together, they will draw on their own histories and current curiosities to offer each other questions and provocations regarding notions of synchronicity and togetherness as well as the borders of sound and sense, physical gesture and utterance, considering thought as dance and language as movement.

Johanna Householder has been making performances, video and other artworks since the late 1970s. A member of the notorious feminist ensemble, The Clichettes, throughout the 80s, Householder practices her own brand of cultural détournement. Most recently, she has presented performance works in Guangzhou, China; Sweden; N. Ireland; and Peterborough, ON. She is a founder of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art. She edited, with Tanya Mars, Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance by Canadian women, YYZ Books, Toronto, 2005, and she contributed a chapter co-written with Selma Odom to Renegade Bodies: Canadian Dance in the 1970s, DCD, Toronto, 2012. She is a Professor at OCAD University.

Ame Henderson grew up on Vancouver Island and now lives in Toronto where she is the Artistic Director of Public Recordings, an atelier for choreographic experimentation. Committed to collaborative working structures both aesthetically and politically, she maintains ongoing collaborations with artists from across disciplines and continents. With her collaborators, Henderson has created the works Blue* *Disco (2003), memories and statements (2004), Manual for Incidence (2005), The Instruction Project (2006-07), /Dance/Songs/ (2006), relay (2010), 300 TAPES (2010) and Open Field Study (all together now), a durational, site-specific choreography for 50 performers created for Nuit Blanche Toronto 2007. In 2012, she created a one-night performance concert with Buck 65 for Summerworks. She has developed work in residence at TPW R&D, Harbourfront Centre, Tanz Quartier Vienna, Dance4 (Nottingham, UK), Le Groupe Dance Lab (Ottawa), and OBORO, Studio 303 and Tangente (Montreal). She has collaborated as a performer with Tino Sehgal, Fiona Banner, and Small Wooden Shoe and her duets ROOM with Tedd Robinson and The Most Together We’ve Ever Been with Matija Ferlin, both continue to tour. Henderson was the guest curator for HATCH 2010-11 at Harbourfront Centre and a facilitator for Interrarium 2011 at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

Henderson’s newest project what we are saying is presented by Harbourfront Centre’s World Stage and premieres at The Power Plant on May 22, 2013. Creating the conditions for spontaneous choral conversation, this project involves enhanced listening and embodied improvisatory systems and scores. Understanding this research as fundamentally choreographic, what we are saying explores voicing and movement within a network of co-presences enfolding guests, performers and objects.

Presented in association with