PUBLIC ACTS OF WRITING: A PROFESSIONAL OCCUPATION TAKES STAGE IN PARKDALE
Lo Bil is going to work in your neighborhood. The local performance artist (and actor and clown and writer and …) has decided that it’s time writers got out of their nooks and crannies and started putting the word on the street, through her performance project: A Professional Occupation.
The performance piece will have the Toronto artist and “provocateur” setting up a writing desk in a variety of Toronto neighborhoods over the year, writing poetry inspired by her surroundings. With the idea of embedding a writer directly in the community and allowing interaction with audiences while in the process of writing, Bil hopes to collaborate with other writers as well as random passers-by and to integrate the outcome of those experiences into a final site-specific performance.
The project developed from another Bil had during this year’s Nuit Blanche at 401 Richmond, where after a week long study of the building culminated in her tour “Occupassion” which focused on the balance of business and art, with Bil using her body as a metaphor for the building. Questions raised in the process of that project, of the relationship and tensions between being an artist and the modern conception of work, proved to be an inspiration and starting point for Bil’s public writing projects.
“…what does it mean to be a ‘Professional Artist’? To be officeless? Isolated? Dislocated? Or free to move, happily on the outside of the 9-5 culture, undeterred by low wages or lack of determined location, inspired by everything seen, able to initiate conversations, and dedicated to expressing cultural experiences that can renew how all citizens can respond to their own city? If I’m not here for a paycheck, what the heck am I here for? To write in public situates my work in the culture without needing a marketplace to legitimize it. The conversations I had with passers-by during the action and performance [during Nuit Blanche] gave me a portal to the world of ‘seen labour’ and inspired content that was undeniably part of the local culture,” Bil said.
Lo Bil’s extensive clowning and improv training play a major parts in her performance technique. She likes to get people actively engaged – with each other as much as the work – and to situate the performance in provocative locations that “create juxtaposition, humour, or evoke some vital aspect of the community.”
It is the interaction with the audience that is key to her performance pieces, with the themes of the artist’s relationship with the community being actively explored, the art is created through the experience where, simultaneously, the artist and the viewer are occupied.
The writing project will be touring the city starting in Parkdale, July 7 at Queen and Sudbury, moving eastbound for 5 days.
Stay tuned to Lo’s website for locations and notes on the Professional Occupation Tour. Or contact her at xo@lbil.org if you’d like to participate as a co-writer, sponsor a writer, identify your business as arts-friendly by having her sit out front your shop, send her trivia about Parkdale poets, or by participating in the final performance.