Peter BD presents: Connection

Canada is pleased to announce Connection, a six-day program of durational performances by the artist, author, director, and dramaturg Peter BD in which party, poetry, theater, dance, erotica, film, and music are multiplexed and metastasized into an exploratory critique of the aesthetic relations that constitute the material reality of our political economy and symbolic environment. Connection expands an extensive research practice investigating and subverting alterity, alienation, and societal spectacle. If the relations between selves are in fact the very material of our phenomenology, as Flemish School theorist and cultural critic Enzio de Kiipt wrote in his final work Immaterial Transgressions, then Peter BD is a great lattice the city pulls over itself like a cloak. He is the matrix of lead in the stained glass rhizomes of the social hypercathedral. With rotating performances every day of the program and the premiere of a new art film, these mixed media experiences reflect vacillating facets of the personal constellations crafted by Peter BD, featuring Benjamin Krusling, Bunny Rogers, Arjun Srivatsa, Bobbi Menuez, James Yeh, Kyle Dunn, Precious Okoyomon, Lindsay Dye, Azikiwe Mohammed, Sean J Patrick Carney, Umfang, Amber Later, Toya Horiuchi, Heather Lynn Johnson, Sarah Blazej, Francis Louvis, Morgan Võ, SK Lyons, Inpatient Press, Alex Tatarsky, and others. As part of Connection's special programming, artwork by Clémence Gbonon, Genevieve Goffman, Toya Hariuchi, Heather Lynn Johnson, Jacob Muilenburg, and Shane Rossi will respond to each day's performance.

Schedule:
Day 1, Tuesday, March 7: The Time For Us Is Now
12 – 7:30 PM
7:30 PM
Doors open at 12:30 PM

No tickets or RSVP required

Transposing both spatial and infratemporal presences, The Time For Us Is Now is a variegated system of voicings and intonations filtered through postdigital praxis. Because email was once his principal form of creative communiqué, Peter BD will be performing in the gallery from 12 PM to 7:30 PM, drafting correspondence and printing work available only in-person. Afterwards, an array of avant garde sculptures transformed into readers will orate, and their poetic interdictions will be accompanied by reverberations and parallel contemporary dance intervention.

Featuring: David Fishkind, Austin Islam, Kalli Mathios, Sarah Jean Alexander, Goddess Earth fka Gabby Bess, James Yeh, Uzodinma Okehi, Svetlana Kitto, Sean J Patrick Carney, Francis Louvis 

Day 2, Wednesday, March 8: "Art Film" & The Gallery 
7 PM: Premiere of new short film entitled "Art Film"
8 PM: The Gallery (play)
Doors open at 6:00 PM
No tickets or RSVP required

"Art Film"
A series of events unfold in a downtown gallery. The lines blur as the beholder becomes the beheld.

Starring: Sarah Blazej, Kyle Dunn, Ashley Guzman, Owen Prum, Justin Kamp, Tran Pham, Christian Dautresme
Film by: Peter BD & Caleb Bryant Miller

The Gallery 
Using the gallery space itself as a reflexive setting, Peter BD with music from transcendental virtuoso Noel Heroux, will stage an original play untangling the social realities and economic ideations of symbolic production and consumption under late neoliberalism in order to interrogate the post-Brechtian notions of self-as-audience contrasted with performance-as-self.

Cast: Bobbi Salvör Menuez as Alex XYZ, Joseph Brock as Tim, Kyle Dunn as William Ashley Guzman as Teri, Alex Tatarsky as Clown 
Special Guests: Owen Prum as A, Shane Rossi as D
Music by: Noel Heroux
Written/Directed/Produced by: Peter BD

Day 3, Thursday, March 9: Ìrètí
7:30 PM
Doors open at 6:30 PM
No tickets or RSVP required

Circumventing normative modes of religio-socio interaction, Ìrètí (which means Hope in Yoruba) convenes on an intersectional gnosticism informed by kabbalistic tonal investigations and spiritual movements that bridge kinetics and metaphysics as a means to supplant the current architectonics of worship. Attenuating dogma and embracing more fluid notions of faith, the third day of Connection serves as a celebratory dismantlement of Aristotelian order and an indictment of positivist catechism.

Featuring: SK Lyons, Gabby Bess Presents Goddess Earth, Heather Lynn Johnson, Diamond Stingily, Precious Okoyomon

Day 4, Friday, March 10: Dinner Theatrics 
By invitation only

Non-determinism and chaos are both essential components of contemporary gastronomy, in which experience and spectacle foment ideology and our fundamental biomechanical impulses are elevated in ecstatic activation. An extended relational experiment, Dinner Theatrics contravenes colonialist decorum and ritual, restructuring our relationship with the parapolitical consequences of agriculture in industrial society. Hosted by Monica Mclure & Peter BD. Sound design by Umfang.

Food, Performance, & Poetry by: Precious Okoyomon, Arak James, Azikiwe Mohammed, Benjamin Krusling, Laura Henriksen, Francis Louvis, Bunny Rogers, Willem Helf, Luke O'Halloran, Dean Kissick

Day 5, Saturday, March 11: Art Erotica 
8 PM
Doors open at 7 PM
No tickets or RSVP required

Is the sublime an ideal or an ethical trespass? To what extent should desire inform aesthetic, whether interiorized or explicative? The fifth day of Connection instruments a creative interrogation of impulse, sanctity, humor and seduction that interpolates a bawdy spectrum of modalities via psionics, poetry, and presence.

Performers: Lindsay Dye, Morgan Võ, Goddess Earth, Dennis Marcial, Francis Louvis, Julia Cooke, Joey Frank, Jem Bonilla, Daniel Genoves, Filthy Silky aka Silky, Justin Kamp, Allison Brainard and special guests

Day 6, Sunday, March 12: IL Finale x Club Canada 
5 PM 
Doors open at 4:00
No tickets or RSVP required

Literature, comedy and experimental performance join together with a multifaceted meditation on the myriad layers comprising our notions of translation. The finale of Connection is a poly-lingual oratory performance which dissolves audial syntax and supplants the semantic void with an asemic approach to the artifacts and artifices of memory and speaking. Following this, the isometric registers of translation are activated with a raucous and celebratory disco party where unaccompanied isolation transforms into interconnected jubilation that will bring the six day series to a wondrous conclusion.

Performers: Azikiwe Mohammed, Ming Lin, Sean J Patrick Carney, Arjun Srivatsa, Ana Fabrega, Jesse Prado, Charlie Markbreiter, Jonathan Larson, Amber Later, Toya Horiuchi, Jem Bonilla, Henry Truehart, Niki Schur Narula, Pietro, Uzodinma Okehi, Shimpei Nakagawa, Aidan Fitzgerlad, Ashley Guzman

Peter BD collates video and poetic and sonic activations. His short musical film Milk & Henny In Quarantine was screened at Canada in 2022. His writings have been published by Inpatient Press, e-flux, and the Poetry Project. Milk & Henny, a book of poetry, was published in 2018. Milk & Henny II, a new book of poems, will be published in 2023.