TxLq bring the ritualistic, absurd and strange All for One for All to the CAMINOS festival

06 Oct 2019


The CAMINOS festival has a manifesto of "performance experiments" and the very name means "life journeys that take us from one place to the next." Jordan Campbell (The Youth/Elders Project), one half of xLq whose All for One for All is debuting at Caminos, says it is a perfect fit, "All for One for All is a big group experiment, that really gives the audience agency to create the piece. It’s an exploration of group dynamics, and how our choices create community."

xLq's SummerWorks piece 4inXchange was an award-winning hit but Campbell says that All for One for All is a unique, pressure free creation. "All for One for All did grow out of the audience interaction experiments we’ve been doing with 4inXchange, but it’s a very different piece and it has its own journey," he says. "The success of the piece is about whether we can make a collaborative, supportive community with the audience. The audience is highly involved, they actually create the games and dances of the piece. We create structures for them to play in, but they can do whatever they want. It’s all about collaboration, and less about competition."

xLq have their own manifesto, "radical forms of performance and complicit audience experience," which Campbell says also applies to All for One for All with it's "games, challenges, meditations and dances." "It's a pretty radical form for a theatre piece," he says. "and relies heavily on the audience’s complicity. This is always what we’ve been interested in. I think audiences in Toronto are excited to interact with live performance, because everything’s interactive now."

xLq was formed when "Maddie Butista [Paolozzapedia] and I met in theatre school at Humber’s theatre performance program," says Campbell. "We studied physical theatre there and created our own training practice inspired by what we were learning. We adapted it to have a very contemporary, queer pop aesthetic. We wanted to make fresh, cool performances that our friends would be excited to be a part of."

xLq grew to become more than just an exploration of "ritual, dance, music and pop queer aesthetics." "xLq is our company," says Campbell, "but it’s also our persona, our drag entity and our lifestyle. It is a performance duo and it is a particular version of us, informed by all our intersections with queer party culture."

In the same way that audience participation fuels xLq's work, Campbell helps fuel xLq. "When I’m xLq, it’s a particular version of me. It’s a drag persona. It’s still me but heightened in particular ways. xLq is very formal, ritualistic, absurd and strange. In my solo work, I do weird performance-arty drag numbers at west-end parties. I’m also developing some longer solo interactive works. It’s always versions of me, I don’t like pretending to be other people."

xLq are also looking forward to the collaborative artistic exchange that is CAMINOS. "Maddie went to Calgary," says Campbell, "and a friend on tour with her encouraged xLq to apply to CAMINOS. Lots of our artist friends have been involved with Aluna Theatre as well." CAMINOS is presented by Aluna Theatre in partnership with Native Earth Performing Arts and there are many intriguing shows. "I’m looking forward to my good friend and collaborator Ty Sloane’s piece Crystalize with Olivia Short and Maddie Bautista, directed by Elizabeth Staples. They’re all queer friends of mine. Also, my friend Monica Garrido [The Youth/Elders Project] has a piece, Bypass. The cabaret parties should be fun too!"