Letters to Billionaires (2024)
An Art Fundraiser
Letters to Billionaires is a creative writing project that I began in 2023. It is a social critique on the wealth gap and current state of economic disparity, having increased exponentially since the covid-19 pandemic began (sources: World Inequality Report, Oxfam and The Economist).
I chose four billionaires to write personal letters to: Galen Weston Jr. (CEO of George Weston Ltd., former president of supermarket franchise Loblaw Companies Ltd.), Sherry Brydson (largest shareholder of investment firm Woodbridge, heiress to the Thomson family fortune, owner of Elmwood Spa), Chip Wilson (founder of lululemon athletica, owner of Vancouver based holding company ‘Hold it All Inc’) and Mark Cuban (investor, minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team, personality on Shark Tank tv series). The combined net worth of these four individuals is a staggering 38.7 billion dollars.
These letters are an irreverent and sometimes humorous request for $1.2 million dollars from each billionaire. The content leans towards the absurd, mirroring the status of billionaires as living beyond the bounds of reality that the vast majority of people experience, but whose manoeuvres impact this same vast majority.
Each letter can be personalized and mailed to said billionaire by anyone, or kept as an artwork. There were only 50 printed copies of each letter, and they can be purchased for $50 each. Each copy will be numbered and signed by hand. If you wish to participate but cannot afford to, please email amspaziani@gmail.com for free pdfs.
Letters to Billionaires is also a fundraiser for my current choreography projects. Specifically, an artist residency at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy, and an accessible web application/ creative tool called DoppelTone that transforms dance into spatialized sound, designed with and for individuals living with vision loss. The $50 cost of each letter will be put toward these projects, inclusive of printing and postage.
These letters were written from the perspective of an artist writing on behalf of a community of other artists experiencing crushing budget cuts and increasing costs of living. However, if you are not an artist please don’t let this dissuade you from participating. Anyone who has cause to request $1.2 million dollars from one of these billionaires is encouraged to participate, or add content to these letters as they they wish.
In any case, I hope that you are stimulated or even entertained in some way, or perhaps inspired to reach out for direct funding in your own way.
If you would like to purchase a letter for $50 or request a free pdf, please email me at amspaziani@gmail.com.
LETTER GALLERY (click to enlarge)
CHALMERS ARTS FELLOWSHIP
30 JUNE 2022
With generous support from the Chalmers Family Fund and the Ontario Arts Council, I have been writing and writing and moving and writing. Here are some reflections on choreographic scores and the wonderful scribbled notes that transform into dances and vice versa.
Some scores are supported by practices.
Some are not.
Some have internal operations that are not legible in the surface meaning of the text. These are the dancer’s secrets.
There are no secrets.
The words are deeply informed.
How instructive is the text? What words fill in the gaps in the studio that are not present in the score?
What do images really do when they capture a dance? What do images really do when they propel a dance?
Misinterpretation is important.
Trust is important.
Some scores describe an inner landscape that doesn’t look like anything.
Some scores say things like “explore comfort” but also ask “does comfort really look like anything?”
Some scores use fertile paradoxes.
It is not theatre. It is dance. What is the difference when it comes to words, scripts, directives, scores?
How does one score TIME? What is a time score?
There is the time of the dance, the time it takes to read the score, the time that fills the page, the time it takes to hear the score…
Is clarity important? For whom? Why or why not?
There is the word, the sound of the word, the meaning of the word, the word in relation to other words, the word’s typography on the page, the word’s placement on the page, and the word that hangs within the form of the dance.
Major scope questions…
What is the difference between a score and choreographic notes?
Revelations about language…
Who is the score for? Audience or dancer? How are they different?
Moving between improvisation and composition: scores are choreography. How open or closed are they? What does it mean to develop a score or its manifestation in movement?
Not everyone will meet the score’s language and meaning the same way, or with the same informed, or initiated kinds of knowledge. But this is not what it’s about (same, same) rather it’s about knowing nothing, and meeting the score where you meet it, differently each day even, and exploring the void between meaning, invitations to action, misinterpretation, and the creative production of knowledge that is indeterminate and not preemptively understood. To guide without explaining or offering information.
The score might be alluring.
Losing interest in text… how is text performing something?
Active/ passive dichotomies and relationships to time:
I wish I could just be a passive participant. It turns out that every engagement is active, including receiving.
I wish I could just be an active participant without going totally overboard.
Text directives can be really irritating. I don’t like being told what to do. Where did that style of saying ‘do this and do that’ come from? I usually cheat anyways, or ignore the textured layers of intricate instructions and turn up some music. How can words coax something more nebulous to initiate, even at a pre-conscious level?
A bruise that shows up and you have no memory of where it came from. Just a mark that something happened.
What else can a text score be?
How do you provide parameters?
Respect the amount of play it took to create the score.
How have things been working? Commit to that way.
It might be a disaster.
It might be a thick exercise in trust.
RESEARCH: THE SOUND and language OF THE MOVING BODY
2020-2021
I am very fortunate to have been awarded two long-term grants dedicated to research, public access to the arts, and expanding my practice. The first is a CHALMERS ARTS FELLOWSHIP administered by the Ontario Arts Council which I will use to deepen my understanding of how choreographic scores function, and to spend time writing them. The second is a project grant from the Canada Council for the Arts DIGITAL STRATEGY FUND - Public Access to the Arts and Citizen Engagement. For this project I will work with MIKUTECH Software Development Company and the CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind). Together, we will create software that records and mixes the 3D sound of a solo dancer. When these recordings are played back over headphones, the dancer’s movements can be 'visualized' by the listener, giving the sound of the human body an enhanced spatial presence. The software will mediate between choreography and its transmission to an audience that is inclusive of populations who are blind or visually impaired, serving to build upon existing access technologies such as audio described viewing.
These projects will involve a series of community extensions, such as workshops , demos, and sharing of research. Stay tuned or sign-up to my MAILING LIST for updates (FYI my emails are concise and infrequent. I will not spam you or share your information).
SILVER VENUS REDUX: at OFFTa
May 23, 2020
In collaboration with Matt Smith on the sonic re-imagining of Silver Venus, I presented SILVER VENUS REDUX at the 2020 dematerialized OFFTA festival based in Montreal / online / the world. “In the current context, OFFTA is opening up and invites you to experience remotely live art encounters, acts and performances envisioned by the artists. Inventing the 32nd of May”. The experience begins with a silent film made by Alejandro Fargosonini made from archival footage that taints the imaginary of the spectator before entering the sonic world of Venus.
Silver Venus’ world resists fixity. Like a teeming army of herring she continuously flip-flops and plops-out shimmery clumps of progenies. This time, she is expressing her sound. Listen for her cleavage. It cuts between the memory of an occasion spent together and an occasion that never materialized. She revisits the music and movements of her friends, laughing like clams with their non self-flagellating tongues. She wants to find a way to be in the same place again and to touch ear to ear. She is alone, but she is teeming.
Working from the choreographic score for the live ensemble piece Silver Venus (2018), Andrea Spaziani and Matt Smith will build the sonic environment and movements of a dance for headphones. Presented against a cinematic landscape of Silver Venus scenes by Alejandro Fargosonini.
…
Performed by Andrea Spaziani + Matt Smith Choir Nicole Rose Bond + Francesca Chudnoff + Alicia Grant + Megumi Kokuba + Julia Male + Devon Snell Choreographic score Andrea Spaziani Choreography Andrea Spaziani Sound design Matt Smith Cinema by Alejandro Michelangelo Fargosonini Dancers in video Nicole Rose Bond + Irvin Chow + Francesca Chudnoff + Alicia Grant + Julia Male + Claire Turner Reid
With the support of Canada Council for the Arts Co-production and residencies: Dancemakers Centre for Creation (Toronto) Curated by Amelia Ehrhardt
Photo of Julia Male by Claire Harvie
THE RIGHT eye of clint : scenography
july 27, 2019
I was very proud to participate with Matt Smith in the weekly, summer-long series Intimate Experiences at Mast on Fig in Los Angeles, California.
THE RIGHT EYE OF CLINT: Scenography
Choreography and Performance by Andrea Spaziani
Music and Performance by Matt Smith / Prince Nifty
Artistic Consultant: Danny Grossman
Made in-residence at The Dancemakers Centre for Creation (Toronto)
Saturday July 27 at 7PM
PWYC
The Right Eye of Clint digs up the embodied ruins of Western film tropes that have been lying dormant in my thinking and doing, and that I wish to challenge. I came to them by way of wearing Clint Eastwood’s right eye. His eye is a kind of camouflage that initiates me into a worldview/body that I don’t fully understand, and yet I perceive to be leaning on me. This lean produces pressure and I train myself to work with pressure like a horse, as an edge, as a precarious material, an atmosphere, and a feeling of being watched. Hiding in plain sight, I will extract scenes from the stage work The Right Eye of Clint that I made in Toronto, Canada and reconstitute them in Los Angeles: one of many immortalized landing sites that encapsulate the mythology of the West, and the desire for transformation and new beginnings. I am cognizant of making the westward trek towards this location and the complex history of this path.
Photos by Alejandro Fargosonini
residency at small arms inspection building, mississauga
June 17-28, 2019
With generous support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Small Arms Society volunteers, I met with an interdisciplinary group of artists for a creation project: Linda Duvall (Saskatoon), Christopher Willes (Montreal / Toronto), Kate Nankervis (Toronto), and Shan Turner-Carroll (NSW, Australia). We spent time in two locations: Neilson Park Creative Centre, and the Small Arms Inspection Building. Both of these facilities are situated along Etobicoke Creek which runs toward Lake Ontario, and forms a natural division between Mississauga and Toronto. Everyone was re-located daily. We came together to find a way to come together, and to produce a score for an event to unfold in the SAIB in 2020.
How can we share an entry point (a score) and express it differently through each of our mediums? What connects us and what are we resonating with through our time together, as a group, in these locations?
We walked and talked a lot. We recorded our talking so that the language of our score could be built from this emergent text, mainly composed of descriptions of what we were doing, thinking about, or experiencing as we moved through the spaces inside and outside these venues. Over the next year I will compose a score from these text fragments, from us, from this time, and from the particularities of what these spaces produced with and through our different subjectivities.
At this moment in time, the score might be to “FLOOD THE SMALL ARMS BUILDING” and the project (movements, photographs, video works, conversation pieces, experimental music, sculptures) will flow from there. What is a flood? As a substance, an occurrence, a disaster, an affront, a feeling or behaviour, an abundance or a lack, a game, a rising horizontal axis, becoming engulfed, or an indication of something to come or a result of something giving way?
Photos by Shan Turner-Carroll
DECADENCE WORKSHOP at the toronto dance community love-in
June 12-14, 2019
Fill your tanks and flex your transgressive spirits. Decadence for joy is a meeting of superfluous textures, poetical run-on sentences, artifice and embellishment. A flat-out refusal of spiritual exhaustion, doing anything for practical means, rationalizations and trying to be good.
As a starting point we will consider the decadent proposal: Life Imitates Art, and not the other way around. Working with various constraints (‘exercises’) we will invite excess. We will crack crème brûlée with our toes and try to let go of expectations except for the most grandiose.
We will make art accountable to nothing but itself for 2 hours each day while standing at the edge of a massive stockpile of dislocated content. This is a generative practice jam sesh for stimulation. An energetic nose blow for 2019 fatigue of all sorts. A workshop chock-full of content but with no purpose.
There’s a bibliography but it’s really just a point of departure. We can pool related and unrelated pdf’s over the week if everybody feels like it.
Indulgences of vibe, spirit, sound and anatomy will be leavened. We will facilitate giving ourselves many small gifts. Thank yourself for working hard.
Become an expert meanderer and see what presents itself. Rest racing thoughts by way of repetitive movements and absurd cleaning.
Reconcile the two opposing realities “this is enough” and “I want more”. Be lazy at the same time you are sweating. Welcome comfort at the same time as learning a decorative word. Be particular and frivolous. Exaggerate your birth, feign innocence, come as a character, come for the frill.
All practitioners and makers interested in what the body can do are welcome.
archaeology of the frivolous 4 : DEGUSTATION AND DECADENCE IN THE DESERT
MAY 24-31 2019
Food, films, excessive nature and decadence in the desert for 7 days.
Highlights include roasted rabbit stew and reenactments of scenes from Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981) in a residential backyard in Fort Davis, TX, a star party at the MacDonald Observatory with a laser pen that can point at the stars, and bourgeoisie swimming at the Marfa Pool.
Art NOW lecture and workshop at University of Lethbridge
8 FEBRUARY 2019
Inviting Alternative Agencies
12 pm | February 8, 2019
University Recital Hall
Free admission, everyone welcome!
In a time of questioning anthropocentrism, how might artists step outside themselves and glimpse at the elements or context of their work from a different reality – be it that of a paper bag, a balloon, a horse, a germ, an alter ego, an art lecture, a stone, or a pile of compost? Part lecture, part performance, Andrea Spaziani offers a choreographic sharing on creative processes that invite encounters with things, ideas, or points of view that are incompatible with habitual perception or push familiarity to its limits. She will share her process for making shifts in knowing and being from closed, inscribed definitions to a flow of contingencies, tangents, and complexities. She does this to challenge barriers that take hold on processes of thinking. How does the artwork itself think, uncover its own expanded definitions, or produce a dialogue through a multiplicity of relations?
A Trail of Crumbs - Interdisciplinary Creation Workshop
2-5pm / February 8, 2019
Room W420 (Drama Studio)
Free workshop open to all students in Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge
How can an artist find their way back from being lost? How can becoming lost lead to the discovery of something new that you might not otherwise encounter? In this creation workshop we will look for the trail that is left behind when we make work, even if that trail has already disappeared. We will turn our heads a lot and use our bodies, perception, and intuition. We will move forward while also looking back and develop our own tracking systems.
This workshop is for anyone interested in experimenting with how to make things (artwork, dances, music, videos, writing, baking, crafts, poems) and moving the body. We will make something together, share it, and talk.
Please wear comfortable clothes, running shoes, and bring something you think is unfinished and would like to work with (an object, an idea for a story, an image, a fragment of cloth, a costume, half of a drawing, a trace, a riddle, a recipe, a video file, a song chorus, etc.)
MENTORSHIP WITH MARIA JEREZ in MADRID, SPAIN
With support from the Ontario Arts Council, I spent 7 weeks in Madrid, Spain apprenticing with Maria Jerez.. I had the pleasure of investigating the difficult choreographic questions embedded in her creative process for ‘The Stain’. We talked about how to produce a ‘collage state’, how to transmit the gaze of the performer to that of the audience using a single light, what ‘MONDONGO STYLE’ means, and how to bring a strange miscellany of things and practices into one space. I also learned how to bake bread (masa madre and brioche) filled with strange things (a stone, a tree stump, a vase, a whole banana). During this time, she also presented ‘Yabba’ at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Móstoles – an abstract piece that takes place under a beautiful abundance of fabrics. Where the body begins and ends is impossible to decipher. I got to look beneath the fabric as well, seeing a world of wires, keyboards, inflatable bags, breathing tubes, walkie talkies, tiny engines, objects on long sticks, duct tape, random stuff of all sorts, AND 4 people. What a world.
SMALL ARMS BUILDING RESIDENCY
I will begin my residency activities at the SMALL ARMS BUILDING in Mississauga, at the edge of the Queen West streetcar and Long Branch GO station. On Friday, September 21st it is World Peace Day, and I will be hosting a session of HANDWRITING THE CONSTITUTION: a project initiated by MORGAN O’HARA in New York City in response to the 2017 Presidential Election and Inauguration in the United States. The project has grown internationally, with collaborators hosting sessions in Italy, Portugal, Germany, and Taipei, among others, handwriting their respective constitutions or documents written to protect the basic human rights of all people. It is a meditative, convivial space for introspective activism. PLEASE JOIN US, ALL ARE WELCOME.
SUMMERWORKS EXCHANGE
An excerpt of SILVER VENUS will be featured at the SUMMERWORKS EXCHANGE this August 14th, 2018.
We're doing the unplugged version: hardcore dance research.
AGGRO INFINITUM
w/ Alicia Grant and Andrea Spaziani
Coming soon, with subtitles...
Our aim is embodying aggression: something we feel is prevalent, and is yet difficult to express from our imposed positions of polite complacency. We search for “appropriate” expression, like kids trying on their parents’ clothes. We use the personas we find in costumes, WWE wrestlers, poop jokes through a microphone, and we coach each other.
There are no immediate threats within the sanctum of the studio, but we have experienced threats, and we can also deliver them. It is threatening when people forced or assumed to be “nice” and “complacent” express aggression, or at the very least are not agreeable and smiling, because it is threatening to the status quo.
This self-made mockumentary camera work exposes the scaffoldings of our process, and creating a “penetrative enigma” through the mysterious/seductive editing process. The dancing itself becomes a ritualistic culling of energy, empowering ourselves to express. Can we have fun doing it?
RESEARCH: THE WEST
(full work coming spring 2019)
I learned to ride horses last year and was struck by their behavioural relationship to 'pressure'. Horses move away from pressure (physical, focal, social / herd) and I wanted to understand that how to respond to and manifest pressure in the studio. I invited atmospheric pressure, minute points of contact, balance, and a few physical fitness contraptions that I found. And a rope.
I also spent time watching Hollywood Western films, and realized that although I haven't seen many Westerns, I have absorbed their tropes, values, prejudices, heroic fantasies, victim fantasies, hierarchies, and their dominating, intimidating, and isolationist attitudes.
How does the west, as a place, a culture, a film genre, and a political landscape, perpetuate itself (consciously or not)?
I'm working my way through this muck of psycho-drama, here's some rough footage:
SILVER VENUS
I'm proud to announce the premiere of my first work completed as Artist in Residence at Dancemakers. SILVER VENUS was made in collaboration with Nicole Rose Bond, Irvin Chow, Francesca Chudnoff, Alicia Grant, Julia Male, Claire Turner Reid, and Matt Smith. I feel very lucky to have worked with this abundant, energetic, and talented group.
Also, I'm publishing the choreographic score for SILVER VENUS and have had a great experience working with Gracia Gallo and Gabrielle Raill Design.
Hot off the press at the show! LINK TO FULL TEXT SCORE HERE
APRIL 26th-28th at 8pm
at the DANCEMAKERS CENTRE FOR CREATION
Tickets are priced at a sliding scale.
Seating is limited, reserve your tickets HERE
poster design by Eric Kostiuk Williams
photo by Ömer Kardeş Yükseker
photo by Ömer Kardeş Yükseker of Irvin Chow and Alicia Grant
ARCHAEOLOGY of the frivolous 3
Back at it in the desert in Fort Davis, TX with our friends climbing mountains and sweating and singing and flouting and performing for the dead and dancing in historic homes. MAY 24th-30th 2018
ARCHAEOLOGY of the frivolous 2
Coming soon to MARFA, TX at the INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S FOUNDATION a group of artists and lecturers will convene in the desert to share their stuff and laugh and swim and exist ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE FRIVOLOUS
DANCEMAKERS Local artist in residence
I'm working on a group piece with Nicole Rose-Bond, Irvin Chow, Alicia Grant, Julia Male, Matt Smith, and Claire Turner-Reid.
We are making a new VENUS. Our work-in-progress moment happened at the end of April, 2016 here.
Movement Research
April 17, 2017 at the historic Judson Church I'll be presenting some problems and questions. Stay tuned.
HEIMA ARTIST RESIDENCY
Three months at Heima in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland meditating on place, the affects of extreme conditions, and co-habitation as myself and the alter-ego in a small house in a fishing village. The fjords have spoken. We're making scores of scores until December 5th, 2016.
pastethisidiomainyourtongueportal.hol.es
A performance by SCHPANDO appropriating the words and movements of A. Spaziani
in TRIALOGUE with Analia Sirabonian and Abi Tariq
THURSDAY, JULY 28th, 2016, 7pm-8:30 @ Uferstudios, Studio 14, in Berlin, GE
SPACEBODIES II
Multi-multi of all things pixelated, for time-based works on expanded definitions of space.
At the Transart Triennale on August 6th, 2016 at Uferstudios, Berlin (GE)
lonedancer.ca
The website launch is almost here! On February 1st check out www.lonedancer.ca
Come party at HUB 14
February 1st, 2014, worldwide people
An online choreographic initiative in the form of an invitation to dance once a day, for any length of time, in any capacity, any location, privately or publicly, for a minimum of 1 month. Video submissions and responses posted on lonedancer.ca It is an invitation to experience a dance that exists outside judgement.
research lab
Overwhelmica: a soft archive at the Dancemakers Centre for Creation - January 20th-February 20th, 2014
Public showing: February 20th
Read the blog notes here
the moment before
at ps: we are all here
July 3-5 and July 10-12 @ 8pm, 2013
A duet with Amanda Acorn and Andrea Spaziani
Toronto Dance Community Love-In presents 6 evenings of experimental contemporary dance works by local, national and international artists. Bringing you a series of double bill performances and discussions for two weeks of mover, thinker mayhem.
Collective Space, 221 Sterling Rd, Unit 5. (Sterling Lofts)
Tickets: Single night tickets $15. Festival pass $75. Available at the door or for purchase online here:
In a limbo of anticipation, we prepare like it’s possible to feel prepared.
We are all intention and no delivery.
We are performance with an identity crisis.
We are afraid of being caught with nothing to show.
We are promo for the most fantastic virtuosic stuff you wont see.
We eat pressure, practice too much, and attempt to re-create the magic from last time.
It was so good last time.
Choreography by Andrea Spaziani, Created and Performed by Andrea Spaziani and Amanda Acorn, Sound Design by Christopher Willes, Lighting design by Simon Rossiter, Premiere: TWObyFOUR Festival of Duets, Dancemakers Centre for Creation, Toronto, January 2012
meet/meant/mtng/mning
February 21st to March 10th, 2013, In conjunction with Hub 14’s Incubator Residency, Andrea Spaziani's new work with collaborators Amanda Acorn, Alicia Grant, Mike Hughes, Brendan Jensen, Julia Male and Christopher Willes.
meet/meant/mtng/mning considers how we can say just enough, and where/when/how we come together and understand, or not. It is a series of interpretations of utterances, cues, and misappropriations. We will observe the language of making, surrender to horrible descriptive summaries, and never really know what we’re saying except for how we’re saying it. We will engage in pulsion, neotypisms, silent and invisible P’s, and be joyously thankful our bodies can do stuff too. There will be an audio guide of sorts.