A Choir of Demands and Desires on Repeat (Live Online)

Created by Annie Wong in collaboration with Faith Arkorful, Hanan Hazime, Fiona Raye Clarke, Angela Sun, and Rebecca Sweets, A Choir of Demands and Desires on Repeat is a choral performance that recalls, reminds, and reinstates the history of BIPOC cis and trans women desiring and demanding social justice. Borrowing from sound poetry, endurance performance, and the exhaustive labour of demanding, nuanced political desires overflow through generations and geographies in an orchestrated cacophony of sounds, breath, and live readings. 

In lieu of a live performance, this iteration of A Choir of Demands and Desires on Repeat will be reconfigured as a “zoom performance” for the Durham Art Gallery.

Faith Arkorful has had her poetry published in GUTS Magazine, Peach Mag, PRISM International, Hobart, Koffler.Digital, The Puritan, and Canthius Magazine, amongst other places. She was a semi-finalist in the 2019 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest and was shortlisted for the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize. Faith was born in Toronto, where she still resides.

Fiona Raye Clarke is an award-winning Trinidadian-Canadian writer and community-engaged artist. Her writing has appeared in various publications online and in print, including the Puritan Town Crier, the Room Magazine blog, and alt.theatre. Her plays have been produced by the rock.paper.sistahz festival and InspiraTo Festival, and her co-created short film won the 2017 CineFAM Short Film Challenge, screening at the CaribbeanTales International Film Festival and the San Francisco Queer National Arts Festival. She was a top ten finalist for 2018 Magee TV Diverse Screenwriters Award and is an alumnus of the Banff Centre for Creativity and Art. She is the Artistic Director of the Black youth oral history theatre project, INTERGENERACIAL, currently in its fifth year.

Hanan Hazime is a multidisciplinary artist, creative writer, community arts educator and writing instructor living in Tkaronto/Toronto. She identifies as a Lebanese-Canadian Muslimah Feminist and Mad Pride Activist. Through her intersectional and interdisciplinary artwork, Hanan aims to push boundaries, question arbitrary binaries, dispel stigmas and shatter stereotypes. Her primary mission as an arts educator is to provide accessible arts education to marginalized communities with a special focus on crafting safe, empowered spaces for Muslims, individuals with mental health challenges, folks with disabilities and BIPOC youth to discover and enhance their writing and art skills.

Angela Sun is a mad, fat, first generation/ settler theatre performer, creator, producer, arts administrator, and writer of Chinese descent. She has performed in or co-created works for Koffler.Digital (Koffler Centre of the Arts), The Bentway, and Gardiner Museum, Toronto Fringe Festival, Hamilton Fringe Festival, SummerWorks Performance Festival, and Paprika Festival. She has worked with numerous established and emerging artistic organizations including Cahoots Theatre, Factory Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille, The National Theatre School, Political Movement, Broadleaf Theatre, Theatre ARTaud,  xLq, Silk Bath Collective, Little Black Afro Theatre, Hart House Theatre, Canadian Rep Theatre, Mixed Company Theatre, and Toronto Playback Theatre. Angela's work was recently highlighted as a part of Swallow-A-Bicycle’s 2020 Asian Heritage Month programming in Calgary, and was a member of The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival’s Shorts Programming Committee this year. She is currently developing work with Toronto's Cahoots Theatre as a part of the Hot House/ Lift Off Lab & Showcase cohort. Her most recent work, 我妈妈的饺子 (My Mother’s Dumplings), is currently available online as a part of Koffler.Digital's exhibition A Matter of Taste.

Rebecca Sweets is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist, troublemaker, and doll collector. Through investigative, immersive, and dialectical processes, her mediums combine tangible, performative, and interactive storytelling. Her practice involves themes of virtual intimacy, slow web/slow art and vulnerability as power. You can find her at rebeccasweets.com.

Annie Wong is a writer and multidisciplinary artist working in performance and installation. Conceptually diverse, her practice explores the intersections between the political and poetic in everyday life. She has presented across North America including at the Toronto Biennale of Art, Studio XX, SBC Gallery (Montreal, QC), and Third Space Gallery (Saint John, NB) and held residencies with the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Power Plant (Toronto, ON), Banff Centre for Creativity and Art (Banff, AL), and the Varley Art Gallery. Her recent literary works in poetry, art writing, and non-fiction can be found in Koffler.Digital, The Shanghai Literary Review, C Magazine, Canadian Art, and MICE Magazine.

Rural Reading Riot

As part of the exhibition What Haven’t We Learnt Yet, Still? Artist Pamila Matharu dedicates a virtual space for gathering with Durham Art Gallery’s first annual Rural Reading Riot (RRR).  Taking place online over three days, from October 23-25, RRR combines performance, spoken, written and visual practices of artists and writers. While generated in so-called rural Ontario, RRR seeks to connect and reach beyond rural boundaries, gather and share through riotous collectivity, radical care and collaboration.

Rural Reading Riot brings you a series of commissioned letters by visual and literary artists, writing workshops and the first-ever online performance of A Choir of Demands and Desires on Repeat by Annie Wong in collaboration with Faith Arkorful, Hanan Hazime, Fiona Raye Clarke, Angela Sun, and Rebecca Sweets!