Multiplying Intimacies Across a Room

Join us for a unique collaborative 50-minute performance designed for the occasion by Charlie Petch and Janice Jo Lee, two innovative multivocal performers-now-roomates who each engage with lyric-poetic spoken word and song, queer/drag cabaret, instrumental interludes, vocal loops and  projections, exploring solo and polyvocal capacities. Taking up themes of Distance as Keeping, they will share a pandemic-busting live show from their own domestic space. Followed by some collective sound-making and discussion.

Charlie Petch (they/them, he/him) is a disabled/queer/transmasculine multidiscplinary artist who resides in Tkaronto/Toronto. A poet, playwright, librettist, musician, lighting designer, and host, Charlie was the 2017 Poet of Honour for SpeakNorth national festival, winner of the Golden Beret lifetime achievement in spoken word with The League of Canadian Poets (2020), and founder of Hot Damn it's a Queer Slam. Charlie is a touring performer, as well as a mentor and workshop facilitator. They are launching Daughter of Geppetto, a multimedia/dance/music/performance poetry piece with Wind in the Leaves in April 2022, launched their full length poetry collection Why I Was Late with Brick Books which got a "Best of 2021" from The Walrus, and filmed their libretto Medusa’s Children with Opera QTO. They have been featured on CBC's Q, at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, and were long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2021.

Janice Jo Lee, aka Sing Hey, is a folk-soul singer-songwriter, spoken word poet, actor and playwright of Korean ancestry from Kitchener, on Haldimand Tract treaty territory. On stage she creates looping landscapes with her voice, guitar, trumpet and Korean jangu drum. Janice is a hard femme, queer, radical, comedian, truth-teller and trickster. She is interested in using art to build flourishing communities based in justice and joy. Janice’s work explores gender justice, antiracism, friendship, community, ancestry and the Earth. In Ontario her theatrical work has been produced with Green Light Arts, MT Space, Theatre Passe Muraille and fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre. Janice has worked as an educator for eight years facilitating arts, anti-oppression and leadership workshops across Canada.

Distance as a Keeping is a series curated and hosted by Margaret Christakos, the inaugural Meredith and Peter Quartermain Poet in Residence and the 18th Writer in Residence at Green College. This series features three creative public events featuring talks/performances by special guest artists on themes of mutual attention, solo/polyvocality, embodied apartness and tactical spaciousness.