The Rhubarb Festival: chase the unknown

03 Feb 2020

"Someone once described Rhubarb to me as the place where they learned how to be an artist," says Clayton Lee, the festival director. "I think about the professionalization of artists working in performance a lot, and the waythat success is defined. It feels like the goal is to make 'The Show,' something that can receive a few presentations in Toronto and then tour around Canada and, perhaps, internationally. I’m committed to a Rhubarb where it’s about the process versus the product. A commitment to the development of an artist, to give them space to explore, to fail, and, ultimately, try again."

This year's Rhubarb is officially defined as "an experiment in density: an intervention of the status quo through ideas, text, and bodies in and not in motion, an attempt at radical inclusion, and a purposeful collision of past, present and future.” What that leaves out is how wildly eclectic Rhubarb is, with performances for every taste but also full of tastes you might not know that you are ready to acquire. "Rhubarb continues to be framed as an experimental performance festival," notes Lee. "Determining what is or what isn’t experimental, however, is a Sisyphean task." And a subjective one.

"What I bring to the table is an interest in formal experimentation," says Lee. "I’m interested in works that have the capacity to respond to the context of Rhubarb in unexpected ways. It’s an admittedly specific lens to evaluate artists and projects, which is why it’s so exciting to have four other curators [Vanden Boomen, Theresa Cutknife, Claudia Edwards and Victoria Mata] bring their own lenses and their own subjectivity to the table and to the festival this year. The festival becomes an amalgamation of not only our individual ideas, but the countless hours of conversations we have about art-making and art-watching within Toronto’s performance ecology."

Rhubarb also consistently delivers surprises, those pieces that deliver an unexpected punch, laughter, gasps, or provocation. I ask Lee which shows will fall in that category. "All of them. That, in many ways, is an impossible question," he says. "As festival director and a curator, I miss out on the kind of surprises that exist for the audience, when the lights go down (or not) and the unknown makes itself known. For better or for worse, I have a general sense of what most of the artists are going to do, from having read their applications and having talked to them."

Then he adds, "With Last Yearz Interesting Negro’s practicing listening to subterranean murmurs, I have less of an idea. I first saw and loved her work in 2016 when she presented O with Alexandrina Hemsley at the Progress Festival and I have been following her practice from afar ever since. For her to be making a new work for Rhubarb and for me, to witness it with the audience collectively, feels like a real indulgence. Maybe I’ll close my eyes during tech."

When asked which other pieces he is looking forward to seeing, Lee replies, "I’m going to purposely, and perhaps: heavy-handedly and/or cleverly, re-frame that question and point you towards the three installation projects. I’m interested in the way the three projects - Cara Spooner’s Audience Handbook  with a dream list of contributors, Kenneth Koo’s Untitled Washroom Intervention, and Shannon Cochrane’s A Manifesto in Support of the Death of the Festival - will intersect with the artists, the audience and the festival itself."

Which shows, in the Rhubarb tradition, test the limits of form, sexuality, gender or expectations? "At first Lee wants clarification because he notes that, "There are the boundaries of the artists themselves and then those of the audience, all wrapped into the context of Buddies," but he forges on. "For the artists’ own boundaries, I’m thinking a lot about Nickeshia Garrick’s To All My Past, Present, and Future Lovers . . . I’m Sorry and the trajectory of her career. She’s built a career on interpreting other choreographers’ works and, as a first solo project, she’s offering a series of bold and exciting choices that will be pushing her practice into an entirely new trajectory."

But for the audience, "I think it’s about looking at the solo international projects and the ways in which their individual contexts rub up against the Toronto or Canadian context: Ursula Martinez’s Sometimes, Last Yearz Interesting Negro’s practicing listening to subterranean murmurs, Violeta Luna’s Frida, and Keijaun Thomas’ My Last American Dollar."

But Lee sensibly advises any audience member to "Chase the unknown, don’t just see the work of people you know, and come more than once.The latter, though it likely reads as a marketing ploy, is a real nod to the way the curatorial collective has thought about and planned this festival. We’re thinking about this year as an experiment in density and so much of that can only be accessed and, thus, will only emerge over multiple visits."

And of course pay attention to the copious content and trigger warnings - "Nudity, among others," notes Lee - or use them as a recommendation.