Archives Access: Margaret Dragu

Description:

Presented as part of Western Front’s ongoing Archives Access series, Archives Access: Margaret Dragu featured a screening of excerpts from three archival works created by Dragu, followed by a screening of her new piece Tick and Talk of Common Time (2023).

Margaret Dragu played a prominent role in the history of Western Front, creating and presenting performance and video artworks from as early as the late 1970s. This evening of archival screenings presented excerpts from video works Backup (1978), created with Kate Craig; and Urban Skills #5: Secretarial (1979), created with Cornelia Wyngaarden; as well as extracts from the documentation of the 2004 performance Bread.

In between each archival screening, Dragu was joined in conversation with Western Front assistant curator, Nathaniel Marchand. These question and answer segments explored topics such as durational performance, labour rights and unions, democratic production values, X’s and O’s compositional style, and other recurring themes that have emerged throughout Dragu’s practice.

The event culminated with the screening of Dragu’s latest video work, Tick and Talk of Common Time (2023), an opus of five variations and five entr’actes. Playing with the idea of TikTok dance trends, the variations feature fifteen Vancouver-based dancers, many of whom are dancing over Zoom, as well as several TikTok dance videos. Each variation presents a new choreography set to compositions from five different Canadian composers. The videos of the dancers are often in split screen or overlapping one another in the mainframe. The entr’actes feature improvisational dance by Dragu and Justine Chambers set to the sounds of live improvised vocal transcription.

Curated by Nathaniel Marchand.