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Some other projects from the past...
Vocabulary was a series of performance experiments on synthetic biology (an interdisciplinary science that seeks to create new lifeforms from scratch). It's a context for people to come together to engage with matters of belief and action in civic life; it's a site for sharing information about our future and talking about how we might collectively shape it.
^ Video notebook from Banff Playwrights Lab workshop, with Nadien Chu and Jeff Ho 2016
Vocabulary was in development at the 2015 and 2016 Banff Playwrights Labs.
It was been supported by Nightswimming Theatre; Nightwood Theatre; Factory Theatre; and The Ottawa Fringe Festival, through the Ontario Arts Council's Theatre Creators Reserve.
ALL OUR HAPPY DAYS ARE STUPID
Suburban Beast' s All Our Happy Days Are Stupid, by Sheila Heti, had it's World Premiere in Toronto October 24 - November 3 at Videofag. It was subsequently presented by Harbourfront Centre's World Stage February 11-14, 2015 and by McSweeney's and Warby Parker at The Kitchen in New York City, from February 19 - 28, 2015. The production lived in three very different sold-out spaces: The cast played first to audiences of 35 people, then to Toronto houses of 350 people, and finally to crowds of 150 New Yorkers. The colour images above are from the 2015 production and the black and white images are from the first incarnation in 2013.
All Our Happy Days Are Stupid was Directed by Jordan Tannahil with Erin Brubacher
Peachy Coochy on Ritual
THE EVERYDAY, THE OCCASIONAL, THE INVENTED, and THE INHERITED
FEBRUARY 27 – MARCH 3, 2013
A series for THE 34TH ANNUAL RHUBARB FESTIVAL
Curated by Erin Brubacher with Naomi Skwarna
EB invited people. They assembled collections of images on these notions of ritual. They had 20 seconds per image to speak about them. They had to be quick on their feet… Derived from the PechaKucha, a form devised by young designers, in Tokyo, exactly a decade ago, the Peachy Coochy is smart, sweet, reveling and revealing.
Participants included: a butcher, a critic, a kid, a couple, a designer, a producer, a wood worker, artists of many natures and more...
Ritual: The Everyday
Theo Gallaro, Lisa Giraldi, Liz Peterson and Carl Wilson
Ritual: The Occasional
Andil Gosine, Cara Spooner and Simon Rabyniuk
Ritual: The Invented
Gideon Arthurs, Shannon Cochrane and Katie Sly
Ritual: The Inherited
Michel Mersereau, Rachel Steinberg and Tawiah McCarthy
Ritual: Rhubarb
Franco Boni, Brendan Healy, Laura Nanni and evalyn parry
In 2012 EB curated the SummerWorks Performance Bar. Programming included:
★ John Porter, Super 8:
A series of performative film projections.
Artist John Porter has been making films, performances and photos in Toronto since 1968. He has made over 300 films, performed 100 solo shows internationally, and as such has been called “the king of super 8”. A prolific author and photographer, John continues to document and photograph Toronto’s independent and underground film culture. www.super8porter.ca
★ We Will WeeTube:
An Experiment with Theatre Replacement’s WeeTube
In conversation with artists Maiko Bae Yamamoto, James Long and Erin Brubacher, Toronto teenagers created an incarnation of Theatre Replacement's WeeTube. Using the publicly posted comments that follow some of the world's most notorious YouTube videos, Erum Kahn, Michelle Kuzemczak and Rashida Shaw engage in a revealing and disturbing dialogue that will make you question our species while at the same time have you ROFL.
★ John Moran’s John Moran...and his neighbor, Saori: World Premier Screening
Inimitable New York composer and performer John Moran offers SummerWorks the first ever public screening of the film version of this critically acclaimed performance piece. Moran became a protégé of Philip Glass upon his arrival in New York in the early 90s, and his works have featured performers such as Uma Thurman, Iggy Pop and Allen Ginsberg. He has been touring internationally since 2007, often alongside Japanese performer Saori Tsukada. Moran is presently lives in Bangkok and is currently touring his new solo performance The Con Artist across Europe. “I am convinced that there is no more important composer working today than John Moran.” - PHILIP GLASS
★ Match-Making Live:
Each night the Performance Bar paired a SummerWorks creator with a local visual artist for a blind date on stage.
★ A Peachy Coochy experiment with with Philip Akin, Tara Beagan, Ravi Jain, Matthew Jocelyn, Laura Nanni and Richard Rose:
Venn diagrams of artistic experience are shared when these thinkers and shakers from our creative and presenting communities each have 5 minutes to deliver 15 slides on their most informing theatrical experiences. With only 20 seconds to describe each image, they’ve gotta be quick on their feet. Derived from the Japanese PechaKucha, a night devised for young designers in Tokyo in 2003, the Peachy Coochy form is smart and playful, sweet and earnest, with a healthy dose of cheek.
Translations, an essay by Amanda Jernigan on photographs by Erin Brubacher in Canadian Notes and Queries, Spring/Summer issue, 2008.
See CNQ Brubacher.pdf for full PDF publication proof.
INUIT AND FILM AT THE NATIONAL FILM BOARD 1942 - 2005
In 2005, EB was commissioned by the Qikiqtani Inuit Association to research and create an index of every film made by the National Film Board of Canada, about or depicting Inuit or their land. This is an excerpt from the forward of that index printed in 2006:
Many films in the index address the power of the moving image and its importance to Inuit. Magic in the Sky (1981) and Starting Fire with Gun Powder (1991) discuss the impacts of television, film and video directly while many others such as Between Two Worlds (1990) and Through These Eyes (2004) allude to the necessity of not only harnessing the power of the image, but also understanding how the moving image has shaped and recorded representations of Inuit throughout a tremendously fast and momentous period of cultural change. Unlike the colonization of other aboriginal peoples of Canada, the period of Inuit colonization has been recorded on film. Film history and significant Inuit cultural change began at approximately the same time and this means that Inuit can use cinema as a tool for reconstructing and deconstructing their own history.
In partnership with this project, Vinnie Karetak and I travelled to three Nunavut communites to screen a selection of films that had never before been shown there. There were elders who saw themselves on screen as teenagers, youth who saw relatives they had never known. These films had been made of the North, for an audience in the South.