Research Fellows

lo bil is a Toronto-based settler performance artist and York University Interdisciplinary Masters student creating body-based experiments to generate intuitive “felt” research into academic concepts and risk-based performance-making.

lo’s improvisatory performances involve spontaneous utterance, impulse-based scores, object manipulation, unexpected humour, and interrelational proposals with audience.

“I work speculatively, aiming for non-repeatability to generate performances as sites of collective activation rather than trying to reveal an aesthetic to passive consumers. What happens is the aesthetic I am working on. These once-performed experiments are my best attempt to understand the strangeness of the world.”

lo bil describes her actions as ‘anti-objective’ and ‘post-clown’. She allows the psychic space between performer and audience to direct the performance, creating circumstances for failure to open up the potential for magic, letting speech affect movement and movement affect speech.

Since 2014, lo bil has created 25 unrepeatable performances. In 2015 she was awarded the FADO Live Art Award at Summerworks Performance Festival 2015.

lo bil has presented solo body-based performances in Toronto at 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, HATCH at Harbourfront Centre, Duration & Dialogue Performance Art Festival, Rhubarb Festival, Flowchart at Dancemakers, Summerworks Performance Festival and Sick Theory Conference; in Montreal, for Victoria Stanton through Dare-Dare, curated by WIVES at Studio 303, and Words and [ ] a durational conference by School of Making Thinking; in New York at Panoply Lab Post-dance Conference, ITINERANT Performance Art Festival, and Movement Research Open Studio; in Washington at 25 Hours for 25 Years of the DC Art Centre; and in Berlin at Month of Performance Art-Berlin.