saturday night red light district in t.o.

the notice is short, i know, but i've been lax in my blogging ways. my friend jp (not to be confused with monsieur le jp, my yoga teaching friend) is window display/performing at this tonight, here's the plug:

Watch out Toronto! You have a new red light district but it ain’t what you think.  Store front windows on and around Parkdale’s Queen Street West set the stage for a truly unique event created specifically for the Queen West Art Crawl.  Performance artists step into the store front windows of Parkdale to unleash a collection of provocative and engaging human stories.

Willing spectators are asked to meet at The Parkdale Public Library at 1303 Queen Street West at 8pm SHARP.  There, you will receive the Red Light Guide Book directing you to the various installations.  The Red Light Project is a self guided tour and free to the public.

for more info check toronto artscape

.....

"and after the fact.... you know, toronto is doing some REALLY really cool stuff. the crawl was fantastic, jp's piece was GREAT. and i'm not even saying that 'coz i'm biased.

it's not news that i usually find performance art sketchy to say the least. i find a great deal of it seems to be doing its best to shroud itself in vaguaries and "i'm-above-my-audience" type behaviour. so to come upon an empty window with a guy standing behind it writing out in first-person narrative a detailed account (backwards, to be legible for the audience outside) about feeling self-conscious and fucked up during his adolescence about BDSM until Reagé and a GGG girl set him more at ease...and writing with a pen of all things (for a Geek a rare occurence...well, increasingly rare, to the best of my knowledge) and strangely giving this impression of being behind a computer screen nonetheless...
...the only thing that would have topped the whole thing is that if the performance had continued long enough he would have had (did you realize this JP?) to end up on his knees in front of his audience in order to write on the lower part of the window.

dude, it was Fucking Brilliant.





another favourite, tho' the picture below doesn't do it justice: Allison Rees-Cummings standing in a bowl of water collecting lucky pennies and putting them on the scales to try to weigh out either end:
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