Double bill

Michael Martini & Callan Ponsford + Jonathan Chomko

ÉDIFICE WILDER | ESPACE VERT

FEBRUARY 4, 2023 - 7PM

FEBRUARY 5, 2023 - 4PM

FEBRUARY 6 & 7, 2023 - 7PM

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Discussion with the artists on February 6

FB

The order of the pieces is subject to change.

1st work

Michael Martini & Callan Ponsford

Beep Test

The beep test is a fitness test often used in high schools. The goal? To continuously run between two lines 20 metres apart before the beep sounds. As the test goes on, the intervals between beeps become increasingly shorter. It is generally impossible to beat the test. In Beep Test, theatre artist Michael Martini and visual artist Callan Ponsford put their bodies to the test to explore both athletic and artistic competitiveness. Turning to notation as a common ground between their disciplines, they creatively interpret a series of abstract sports plays. Amid blaring disco, they aim for physical exhaustion in this humiliating and flamboyant performance.

40 minutes

Creation and performance Michael Martini & Callan Ponsford

Ligthing design Nien Tzu Weng

Michael Martini is a theatre artist who creates performances for various contexts, from the black box to the gallery to the cabaret. Since graduating from Concordia University in 2018, he has worked across Montréal’s bilingual interdisciplinary scene, often collaborating with dancers and visual artists. Notably, his co-creation Ça a l’air synthétique bonjour hi has appeared at festivals OFFTA and Summerworks, receiving numerous accolades along the way. In 2023, his first full-length production as a playwright-performer, Landscape Grindr, will debut at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines. His creations shift between the banal and the eccentric, layering text, video and dress-up with a highly social, DIY atmosphere.

Callan Ponsford is an artist specializing in drawing. Inspired by natural phenomena, he creates large scale works that exhibit a keen interest in both abstract and representational mark-making. His most recent body of work focuses on the biological processes of mimicry and camouflage. Rendered in coloured pencil, the pictures reference micro and macroscopic organisms in equal measure. While completing his BFA at Concordia University, he was awarded both the Lise-Hélène Larin and the Cecil Buller – John J. A. Murphy scholarship in drawing.

Nien Tzu Weng is a Taiwanese-Canadian interdisciplinary dance artist and lighting designer based in Montréal. She aims to build bridges between disciplines, pursuing an experimental approach to contemporary performance, and a laboratory-based approach to lighting design. She is currently a resident artist at Concordia University’s Topological Media Lab, where she studies the relationship between movement and new media practices.

We began this project interested in each other’s disciplines, with a goal not to prioritize one of our practices over the other. First, we used chalk and other materials to explore mark-making in public space- traces of the body. We then became drawn to skid marks, bruises, and notation. In theatre, notation serves to block scenes, to remember choreography. What if notation was considered as visual art in itself? We became interested in how different lines and colours might be treated as abstraction and/or instruction, and we turned to notation within sports in pursuit of equal footing between us.

By creating a work in which we read and respond to images, we give ourselves permission to poke fun at an especially adolescent competitiveness to read and understand artworks as correctly as possible, no matter how abstract the image. In Beep Test, we’re drawn to artistic as much as athletic competitiveness.

2nd work

Jonathan Chomko

www.grindruberairbnb.exposed

www.grindruberairbnb.exposed is a website that guides five participants as they follow instructions on their phones. The work only becomes a performance when volunteers lend their bodies to it. By expanding the scope of the interface beyond the screen, media artist Jonathan Chomko explores the increasing agency of digital systems in physical and relational space. The title of the project merges the names of three services that take advantage of technology to channel flows of bodies, vehicles, and goods. By recasting these networks onto a stage, this work brings to light their material influence while offering us a glimpse of their potential for collective action. Witnessing it is one thing; experiencing it is another.

30 minutes

Creation Jonathan Chomko

Choreographic guidance Andrea Peña

Facilitation Noël Vezina

Lighting design Nien Tzu Weng

Creative consultation Simon Portigal

Sound design Kízis

Software development Orgonomy Productions

Graphic design Huot Vallentin

Videography Isaac Vallentin

Jonathan Chomko (b. 1988, Canada) is an artist working with and against technology. His works examine the seam between physical and digital worlds, exploring how digital forces translate into and act upon the physical world, and how physical phenomena and expression are modulated as they enter the digital. Jonathan Chomko’s work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of 21st Century Arts (Italy, 2013), Sydney Opera House (Australia, 2014), Media Ambition Tokyo (Japan, 2016), London Design Museum (UK, 2015), Cube Design Museum (Netherlands, 2020), and Théâtre du Chatelet (France, 2020). His public work has been shown in Bristol (UK, 2014), London (UK 2016), Tokyo (Japan 2016), Austin (USA 2019), and Paris (France, 2020).

My background is in media arts, and much of my earlier work took the form of interactive installation. www.grindruberairbnb.exposed stems from my experience touring these interactive works, observing visitors in different cities performing the same types of gesture with my works.

Interacting with systems of social media networks, I noticed similar patterns in my behaviour; the systems encouraged certain actions, and discouraged or made impossible others. This work explores the prescriptive nature of the technological experience, narrowing the scope of possibility between interface and action.

Developing the work shifts between building technical systems and exploring the choreographic language the system makes possible. Through movement, I aim to build a sense of collective consciousness, bringing participants in and out of sync, as a way to explore the question of why we do not feel a greater sense of collective possibility despite our networked reality.

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