Performatorium - Day 1
In a University classroom of mainly non-arts students, Cindy Baker began the events of Performatorium with a talk that set the festival off on a tone of generosity and openness. After describing the meaning of art as activism, Baker explained the ways in which she was brought to creating a space for the audience’s inevitable reading of her body as content within her performance work, though her early work was not rooted in those meanings. Identifying as an artist with a taboo body, social concerns became foregrounded for Baker through working from the position of “other” (fat, queer, feminist, craft-based artist), allowing her the advantage of being able to see and work from without and within this vantage point. Baker’s talk made explicit to the students that, through art, the world is capable of change; that the ways an artist creates imagery allows audiences access to a dialogue and, through conversation, complicating meaning, and asking pointed questions, gives them acc...