Montreal Cultural Calendar

Public events take place on May 15 - 16 across spaces at Concordia University in the EV building at the SGW downtown campus. Embodied Interventions is a performance festival involving students from LePARC research cluster and beyond. This year's theme will focus on the overlapping spaces between labour and performance. The work of animation, and the animation of work: to animate a space, to be animated, animare, to give movement or life. In a cultural moment of increased automation and global upheaval, labour becomes disconnected and disembodied. Experiences of precarity and the realities of global capital touch many more of our lives; shaping the way we perform selfhood, making, and relationality. Work bleeds into life, love and leisure. Animation speaks to both the moving body as the sign of freedom, spirit, and liveliness, and to the movement of labour needed to put into motion, to make things happen, to endow matter with life. To (re)animate in this context might be to return to a politic of embodiment, to value both labour and labourer. Through social media and the digital, our relationships to performance are also changed; we take the invisible for granted and fetishize the performative. The machinations of labour are the undercurrent that animates our lives. The work of the performer becomes the work of the contemporary subject - the production of subjectivity, sociality and emotion.