The Theatre Centre in partnership with Cooking Fire Theatre Festival presents Z’s by the C
The Theatre Centre in partnership with
Cooking Fire Theatre Festival
presents
Z’s by the C
a radical crafting and public napping project
By Eric Moschopedis and Mia Rushton + You!
Saturday July 17 – Sunday July 18, 2010
Come decorate a sleeping mask before catching
some Z’s in downtown Toronto!
The residents of Toronto are invited to come personalize a sleeping
mask using simple crafting techniques before covering their eyes and
dozing off in the city. By creating a safe sleeping zone on the site
of a proposed park in the Queen West neighbourhood, Eric Moschopedis
and Mia Rushton seek to legitimize public napping under the aegis of
art - just sweet public dreams!
Z’s by the C: a radical crafting and public napping project is a
project in art and social engagement. A playful, but critically aimed
project, Z’s by the C looks to destabilize public and private space by
performing a highly intimate act - napping in the city. Increasingly,
neoliberal economic and cultural policies have led Western cities to
implement social strategies that prohibit loitering and consequently
limit public sleeping. Rushton and Moschopedis perceive this
criminalization of everyday behaviour as not only an affront to our
society’s marginalized and fatigued citizens, but also as an attack on
public dreaming. As a public intervention, Z’s by the C seeks to
rectify this situation, if only temporarily, by creating a safe
sleeping-zone that legitimates public napping under the aegis of art.
Mia Rushton is a printmaker, crafter and collector. By combining
the elements of silk screening, sewing, knitting, and drawing, Rushton
is among a new generation of do-it-yourself, indie artists who have
embraced handcrafting as a way out and a resistance to the overly
technocratic art industry. A graduate from Alberta College of Art &
Design, Rushton has shown her work at Alternator Gallery for
Contemporary Art, Choose Yer Own Fest and in Truck Gallery’s CAMPER.
Eric Moschopedis is an award-winning interdisciplinary
performer, facilitator, educator, and curator. A graduate of Master of
Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies at University of British
Columbia, Moschopedis creates community-specific, relational, and
participatory works that invite audiences to become active
collaborators in the creation of community. He also maintains a
performance practice that oscillates between staged performance,
performance for video, installation, performative work, intervention,
and walking, finding, and collecting.
Since 1979, The Theatre Centre has been Toronto’s home for experimental
performance. Serving as an arts incubator, the centre provides emerging
and established artists with the facilities, funding, mentorship,
profile and sense of community to enable new work to be created,
explored and developed. www.theatrecentre.org
Z’s by the C is presented in partnership with The Cooking Fire
Theatre Festival, an annual, week-long event held in Toronto’s Dufferin
Grove Park (June 23-27) which celebrates theatre, food and public
space. www.cookingfire.ca
Z’s BY THE C LISTING INFORMATION
COST: FREE. DATES: Saturday July 17 - Sunday July 18,
12-4pm
VENUE: At the proposed park located at Lisgar Street, south of
Queen Street West, Toronto
MORE INFORMATION: www.theatrecentre.org
The Theatre Centre is supported by The Canada Council for the Arts,
Canadian Heritage, The Ontario Arts Council. The Toronto Arts Council,
George C Metcalf Foundation, The Ontario Trillium Foundation.
The Cooking Fire Theatre Festival acknowledges the support of The
Ontario Arts Council, The Toronto Arts Council, and The McLean
Foundation.
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