Ep. 54 - Conjuring the Future (The Goldberg Variations)
Description
Gabrielle Martin chats with Clayton Lee, who will be presenting The Goldberg Variations at the 2025 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Check out the show on January 30 at the Waterfront Theatre, supported by CMHC Granville Island.
Show Notes
Gabrielle and Clayton discuss:
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Why do you only perform the Goldberg Variations once per engagement?
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What does it mean to identify as a performance artist and not just a musician?
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What are your thoughts in relation to care and consent in your work?
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To what extent is your own story the subject of your artistic projects?
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How do you use performance to actively reshape your life?
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What is allowed and not allowed in different performance contexts, and how do you respond to this?
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What did it mean to get married as part of a performance?
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What contexts are you currently playing with in your future work?
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How do we continue this work beyond?
About Clayton Lee
Clayton Lee is a Canadian curator, producer, and performance artist. He is currently the Artistic Director of Fierce Festival in Birmingham, UK and, as part of the Living Room Collective, will be representing Canada at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Land Acknowledgement
This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.
Clayton joined the conversation from Toronto, on the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. We also acknowledge that Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit.
It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.
Credits
PuSh Play is produced by Ben Charland and Tricia Knowles. Original music by Joseph Hirabayashi.
Show Transcript
Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabriel Martin, Push's Director of Programming, and today's episode highlights a future conjuring and adding texture to the conversation.
I'm speaking with Clayton Lee, artist behind the Goldberg Variations, which is being presented at the Push Festival January 30th, 2025. Through an unapologetic investigation of desire, power dynamics, and identity, Clayton Lee explores his childhood obsession with the professional wrestler Bill Goldberg and the impact it has had on his sexual and romantic history.
The perplexing crossroads between dominance, submission, heartbreak, and vulnerability are laid bare in this candid and thoroughly unconventional performance, where fantasies are both indulged and deconstructed.
Clayton Lee is a Canadian curator, producer, and performance artist. He is currently the Artistic Director of Fierce Festival in Birmingham, UK, and as part of the Living Room Collective will be representing Canada at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Here's my conversation with Clayton. A thrilling to be talking to you, thrilling to be part of the festival. Before we dive right into it, I would like to acknowledge that I'm on the stolen, ancestral, and traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh.
And I think today it's important to acknowledge the recent passing of Murray Sinclair, the Anishinaabe Senator, and renowned Manitoba lawyer, who led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He passed on November 4th.
And he served as co-chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba and directed the pediatric cardiac surgery inquest into the deaths of 12 children at a Winnipeg hospital before taking the reins of the TRC, one of the...
important bodies in Canada's recent history, which released its final report in 2015. And his work with the TRC, well with his work, his conclusion was that residential schools amounted to a cultural genocide, or his conclusion with his collaborators.
And this conclusion, this document has reshaped Canadians' understanding of the government-run boarding schools that devastated generations of Indigenous communities. And I'd just like to share a quote from him.
We have described for you a mountain. We have shown you the path to the top. We call upon you to do the climbing. And Clayton, where are you joining this conversation from today? Well, normally I'd be in Birmingham, UK, but today I'm calling from Toronto, which is the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat, as well as the treaty territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit.
Unlike many artists, you prefer to only perform the Goldberg gradations once during an engagement. So for example, you requested to perform only one show at the Push Festival. Why is that? Oh, there's so many reasons for that.
You know, I think the kind of major difference between the ways in which I approach making versus other folks is I identify as a performance artist. And whereas I think most of the folks in the festival or in the festival circuit come from theater or dance kind of lineages and theater and dance, you know, have this kind of tradition of repeatability, right?
Where they make the work and then they kind of repeat it over and over again, hopefully on tour or over multiple weeks in a single city. And I'm, you know, for any number of reasons, I've framed Goldberg, the Goldberg variations as kind of a one-off live encounter event.
What this means for me is one, that the work is never the same twice. So the work is always being built and added onto it's iterative process. I kind of vaguely shape the conceptual framework for the piece is box sculptor variations with his 30 variations.
And the idea is every time I perform, I add one or two new variations to the work. And I'm interested simultaneously in what it means to present large
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