Queer Performance Camp

February 1 – 18, 2023 

A collaboration between Studio 303, MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) and La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines. Queer Performance Camp aims to create new ways to connect, grow and build community, while supporting the development of queer artists through workshops, gatherings and shows. Intentionally nestled into the dead of winter, QPC brings love, light, and queer self-care to a cold and dark time of year.

Our guest curators are once again Justin de Luna and Winnie Ho, who are offering their first ever in-person edition of QPC!

With the support of the Caisse Desjardins de la Culture and the Festival TransAmériques, as part of FTA Respirations.

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Opening Party: Karaoke + Puzzles  | Friday, February 3rd – 7 p.m. to 10 p.m

You are invited to an evening of Karaoke + Puzzles. Join us for a cozy and exciting evening! A bar and snacks will be available. Arrive before 9 p.m., as building’s doors (Le Belgo) will be closed. 

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Temple for Queers | Saturday, February 11th – 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

An event structured with facilitations throughout the day. Each facilitation offering a container for queers and queer artists to move through a physical experience, both individually and together, inspired by a spiritual lens and/or practice from an invited guest initiator. The artists are encouraged to weave their own practices, reflections, and curiosities into the fabric of the experience, centering their personal interests, desires, pleasures, and joys, however queer or traditional they may be, as an offering of a frame or conduit for participants to pass through as individuals and through being together in space.

Working themes: activities related to the ideas of hope/meditative states/transformations/transmitting (allowing something to pass from person to person or space), whether for the personal, the artistic and/or the spiritual.

☆ 10:30 a.m. | Come early, grab a hot drink, chat stretch !

☆ 11 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. | Queer Theatre for the Sacred… Manual devotion edition | Lari Jalbert & Naomi Moon [read more]

Down & dirty, hands on devotion, requiring your creative force to materialize those spiritual processes and invisible things.  Come ready (willing) to construct something (un)holy, invent/conjure/costume the sacred beings, and choreograph the devotions. The power of bad queer art compels you! 

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Lari Jalbert is an art school dropout based in Tiohtià:ke so called montreal, a trans witch, multidisciplinary artist, french canadian settler and filmmaker. They focus on intuitive work, researching what can’t yet be put in words and the translation from somatic experience to image, to sound, puppets and more.

Naomi Moon is a queer, mixed race artist and facilitator living in Tiohtiá:ke… hanging at the edges with experimental theatre, sound, movement, puppets, drawing, thinking etc. They are devoted to re-tuning the personal to the collective, and the conceptual to the sensual. Their practices are woven from embodiment, imagination, improvisation, and the role of the witness. They hate writing bios, but love having conversations/dances ~ come say hi. 

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☆ 12:45 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. | Lunch break !

☆ 1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. | Reflective Scores Toward a Third | Melek & Miranda [read more]

whenever a pair exists, there is always an implied third: the relationship between. through voice, breath, writing, and talking we will listen for the place that connects. this session is a collaboration between melek in tounes, and miranda in tiohtià:ke/montreal; two facilitators that meet in long-distance experimentation through games, questions, voice memos & songs

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Miranda Gee Jones is an artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, with a training background in devised physical theatre. She is always folding other things into her performance practice: contemporary dance forms, vocal music, radio art, listening practices, and foundry. Her work is collaborative, and often features game-like structures, scores, and performative objects.

Melek is a third culture kid of Tunisian-Canadian descent that grew up across 6 continents and speaks fluent English, French and Spanish. Their artistic forms of facilitation and event creation pulls together learnings from many places, schools & disciplines (including astrology, divinatory forms, non-violent communication & meditation).

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☆ 2:45 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. | Tapping in | Cosmique Tea aka Toni Fowler [read more]

A sacred space for transformative individual and collective healing, self-awareness, experimentation and JOY. Cosmique Tea invites you to explore new horizons real and imagined.

Accessibility: We might have medium level music playing, there may contain an element of movement but if people are less mobile adaptations will be provided.

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Toni-Anne Fowler (she/they) is a Cosmique Care Practitioner based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Toni aka Tea co-creates sacred safer-spaces for youth and adults to connect, release and receive care that is intentional, transformative and liberating.

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☆ 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. | Ancestral YUM | Jessica Lieu [read more]

Participants will be tapping into and honouring their innermost desires through a guided somatic ritual of ancestral pleasures using meditation, breath, voice, journalling and fruit eating. 

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Jess (she/her) is a queer somatic sex educator based out of Tiohtià:ke/Montreal who nerds on pleasure, desire and consent. Through workshops and one on one sessions, she guides people to notice, trust and express their desires through body based explorations. Jess celebrates aliveness in sensorial ritual and play. Her trauma informed, nature based practice supports folks in reclaiming their unique experience of pleasure as a portal to personal and collective transformation.

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No One Writes Alone | February 13 to 16th – 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

It is winter, and the writer has been getting stuck. The writer has been trying to write while alone, unmoving, in a small room. The writer is forgetting how to move the words from the interior to the exterior. The writer is forgetting how to move between rooms, and between texts. The writer needs other people in order to begin again, differently. 

In his queer sci fi epic, Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany writes: “You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city…you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn’t even know were there. Everything changes.” 

No One Writes Alone invites visitors into the writer’s tiny city of queer texts, in an attempt to bringing newness into the writing space. Participants will interact with a selection of books from the writer’s own library, facilitated by a series of writing prompts. The prompts aim to encourage movement—physically within the space of gallery, as well as between the provided texts, and between the participants and the texts. Anyone can participate by perusing the books, or responding to the prompts, or generating their own prompts, or leaving their writing in the space, or taking their writing home with them. Books, prompts, and various writing materials will be provided in the space, along with the writer. Participants are welcome to chat with the writer, who will be present, of course, attempting to write. 

Facilitated by H Felix Chau Bradley, a writer and editor, living in Tiohtià:ke(Montreal). They are the author of the short story collection Personal Attention Roleplay, and the poetry chapbook Automatic Object Lessons. They are an editor at This Magazine and Le Sigh, and the host of Strange Futures, a speculative fiction book club.

 

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Queerness in Performance, a Round Table | February 17th – 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. 

Our hope for this event is to investigate queerness in performance. What is queer art? And who can name their work as queer? We’ve been cooking up this event in light of our reflections on the current art economy. Seeing queerness and queer-identity being reduced as a ‘trend’ or a sort-of social commodity, a currency in which to name one’s work as queer, one can gain a kind-of capitalistic value. This has become a troubling issue for us hence the creation of this event. We hope that it can serve as a host for queer artists to have these conversations.

The set-up: several different tables spread out around the studio, each with an instigator and a question/reflection/opinion that they might have re: queer performance. The conversations will be fluid, open-format but contained or motivated by the instigators activation. Conversations can be in your preferred language. And guests have agency over choosing which conversations they would like to listen in on or participate in.  

Our instigators are : Arnaud Rochefort-Allie, Dani Carter, Aisha Sasha John and Michael Toppings. 

 

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CANCELLED – Queer Wisdom | Saturday, February 18th – 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.

Unfortunately this event was cancelled – hope you can use the time for some self care <3

What came before, what’s happening now, and what’s coming next. 

Taking the shape of an intergenerational conversation between two queer artists, Queer Wisdom places itself at the intersection of linear material time and the nonlinearity of wisdom. Queer Wisdom will host oral storytelling and the sharing of transgenerational insight; all in the name of hope and resilience for queers at large. Po B.K. Lomami will be hosting this conversation with Deanna Bowen.

This activity is supported by the Simone de Beauvoir Institute.

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 Queer Collective Residency | Not open to the public 

Studio 303 invites four local queer artists into its space for a collective residency. Coming together as individuals or as their own small-scale collectives, invitees are prompted to work in proximity to one another, treating the studio as a coworking space. There is no requirement for collaboration amongst the artists, however Studio 303 welcomes their respective practices to coexist in a shared, communal environment. Our hope is to provide fertile grounds for fruitful exchange and the emergence of new working relationships.

Resident artists are : Joliz Dela Pena, Mycelium, Dani Carter, and Kuntiana

 

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