Atelier Céladon

The actors in the moving image only appear as they in motion, regulated by the blink of the eye. As your lids drop, they freeze in time, waiting for the visibility that will regulate their slow stupor. The filmmaker, scientist, and doctor Ovanes Ohanian founded a film school called The Cinema Artist Educational Centre when he found it impossible to initiate silent film production otherwise. Modeled after performance and acting, he took an approach that was suspicious yet hopeful of the possibilities of cinema, taking an expanded approach to the notion of professionalized art spheres and field specialization. Thinking about what it means to perform and to act in order to revive or reenact moments past to set the stage for a future tense, The Cinema Actor invites you to join us for the opening night of Common Aliens: Diaspora in Time. We will open with a performance from choreographer, performer, and poet Aisha Sasha John called GENTLENESS and followed by a musical performance by Silver Shadow Counsel, who will be working off the visual score of Haji Agha, Cinema Actor (1933).

Aisha Sasha John is a choreographer; performance and poetry form the most prominent parts of her practice. Aisha is a member of the feminist performance collective WIVES, and makes solo performances as well as collaborating with Julia Thomas (WE ARE HANGING OUT RIGHT NOW) and Natali Igor Dobkin (Soft and Clear).  The 2016 OFFTA edition of the WIVES’ show FEELED earned the collective the festival’s 2016 Audacity Prize. In January 2017, WIVES’ ACTION MOVIE will debut at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines in Montreal. Aisha’s forthcoming poetry collection, I have to live. will be published in spring 2017 by McClelland and Stewart. Her most recent poetry work, THOU (BookThug 2014), was nominated for both the Trillium and ReLit Awards.  Aisha’s work has brought her to Kelowna, Marrakech, New York, Oakland, Princeton, San Francisco and Vancouver. She’s presented talks at numerous art institutions in Toronto including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mercer Union and the Power Plant. In 2016, her work was included in two group shows: How a Living Day is Made at the Doris McCarthy Gallery (U of T Scarborough) and Down to Write You This Poem Sat at Oakville Galleries.

Silver Shadow Counsel is a musical project that brings together four contemporary musicians and a projection coordinator to create a visual score in accordance with silent films and other projected material. The four musicians are Stefan Christoff, Amir Amiri, Catherine Debard, and Shota Yokose. Hera Chan is their projection coordinator. Their project seeks to facilitate dialogue between archival films and contemporary music production. Silver Shadow Counsel proposes questions toward what is lost and reconstructed in mediatic memory and the possibilities of creating new forms through musical composition. Silver Shadow Counsel had its first iteration under the name Spiritual Counsel in which they performed to A Page of Madness (1926) at La Sala Rossa as part of an Atelier Céladon and Festival Accès Asie co-production in April 2016.