Founded in the spring of 2007, the TouVA Collective (Sylvie Tourangeau, Victoria Stanton and Anne Bérubé) is a Montreal-based performance art trio that has been researching the practice of performance through multiple frameworks and approaches. In addition to conducting workshops, creating dynamic artist talks and offering coaching to artists in a variety of contexts – including international festivals – TouVA is a group of artist-researchers interested in a profound exploration of “the performative.”
Working consistently from a model of exchange and dialogue, their activities have included participating at the M:ST festival in Calgary (2016), performances for the 30thanniversary of EXPRESSION centre d’exposition in Saint-Hyacinthe (2016) as well as for the Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent (2015), at the Darling Foundry in Montreal (2013, at the invitation of Berlin-based curator Janine Eisenächer), and at Fait Maison in Gatineau (2009).
They have collectively facilitated workshops with M:ST (2012, 2016, 2017) and at SKOL in Montreal (2009) and given performative lectures at VIVA! Art action in Montreal (2009), at the 7a*11d Festival of Performance Art in Toronto (2010), and again at M:ST (2014). They have also taken part in research and creation residencies, notably at Le 4330 and at the Centre d’information Artexte in Montreal (2011, 2008-09).
Their book, The 7th Sense, comprises essays, a glossary, as well as contributions by 30 contemporary performance artists. The production of The 7th Sense, received support through the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, The Canada Council for the Arts, and Heritage Canada.
About Us
Anne Bérubé has worked both as researcher and artist. Educated in arts and literature, she has participated in symposia as moderator and speaker, and published a number of texts about artists for exhibition catalogues. She is a member of several reflection and creation groups involving art and social justice. In 1997, Bérubé (along with Sylvie Cotton) co-edited Pistes et territoires, the definitive book on installation art in Quebec between 1975-1995. As an instructor of literature at the college level for over twenty years, she has consistently integrated performative aspects into her teaching methodology.
Victoria Stanton is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher/curator/educator working with live action, human interaction, video, film, photo, drawing, and writing. Exploring within diverse media, while the outward results of her practice manifest in various forms, performance is the invariable core of her research. Her time-based work includes performance for stage and for the camera, infiltrating actions in public spaces, and one-on-one encounters in intimate contexts. Investing a performative presence and consciousness within multiple spaces/times, she continuously underscores the complex aspects of “transaction” and the possibility for transformation. Considered a pioneer of transactional practices in Quebec, Stanton has presented exhibitions, performances, interventions, and films/videos in Canada, the U.S., Europe, Australia, Japan and Mexico. Her first book Impure, Reinventing the Word: The Theory, Practice and Oral History of Spoken Word in Montreal (conundrum press, 2001), co-authored with Vincent Tinguely, chronicled a vibrant artistic movement via interviews with over 75 artists. http://bankofvictoria.com
Sylvie Tourangeau is recognized as a pioneering Canadian performance artist. Since 1978 her actions, collective workshops and one-on-one coaching have offered multiple platforms in which active experimentation with performative consciousness via minimal actions have continually worked towards deepening a quality of presence, sustaining intensity, and embodying a link with the spectator. Performances, relational art projects, furtive practices, and rituals of circumstance are her main areas of investigation. She has also published artist books and more than sixty articles on a significant ensemble of performance artists. In 2017, she began a new initiative, creating a residence for artists in the heart of a Québecois heritage house, La maison aux volets jaunes, dedicated to performative practices (through workshops, self-directed residencies and collective laboratories).