JOHN FAICHNEY & RON GILLESPIEMISSING ASSOCIATES12.10 - 13.10.1976

Excerpt from part of the poster text

The role of the CEAC (Centre for Experimental Art & Communication) in relation to this first Canadian Art Performances in Europe is to present to an unfamiliar audience the most recent directions of art performances from Canada as consistent identity from the Centre’s activities.

In the course of organizing a small but representational collective for an international tour, two parallel directions were considered: one dealing with reductivist-structural patterns, the other, being on the other side of the scale, concerned with improvisational body art actions. In different degrees all the performers operate in both methodologies.

All the performances in the programme are non-verbal, some involve the audience, others are abstract private expressions. The most extreme position is Ron Gillespie’s theatre of terror as a spiritual context for the prophecy of a new biological man, which — differently from Beuys — declares the essential need of a collective new perceptive communication.

The role of avant-garde art as destruction of obsolete rules is to trigger a creative freedom: spontaneity and intellectual activity by the mass.

AMERIGO MARRAS, Toronto, 1976

MISSING ASSOCIATES

Among the first ones to execute performances during the dark age of the first Canadian Avant-Garde, the Missing Associates (Peter Dudar, Lily Eng) stand out as some of the few to be called post-conceptual or more precisely reductivist-contextual.

There exists in the work of the Missing Associates a duality of intention while they modify the dance premises of the older generation of avant-garde dance in North America.
The duality outlines a dialectical space of art as contradictory element: On one hand Peter Dudar’s choreography is a work of relationships (sound-movement; field-periphery; speed-rhythm), on the other Lily Eng’s physical aggression against walls, corners, floors of a space.

Peter works in group, Lily performs alone.
The latter’s performances, sometimes sado-masochistic in nature, are rather electrifying, even more so for an audience too accustomed to the gestures of the old conceptual avant-garde.

The film “RUNNING IN O AND R SIMULTANEOUSLY,” the latest work by the Missing Associates, has been first screened at the CEAC, Toronto, then at the Jonas Mekas’ Anthology Film Archives in New York, in May 1976.

The work is a turning point or probably a clarification of the new contextual art in North America.