Clayton Lee: The Goldberg Variations
Residency period: July 14 – October 7, 2023
Duets for Beginners, SummerWorks Performance Festival (2016), performed with Josephine Lee (photo by Dahlia Katz)
The Goldberg Variations is an iterative research project that freely references and entangles queer diasporic sexuality and aesthetics with classical music (Johann Sebastian Bach) and professional wrestling (Bill Goldberg). Intentionally conceived to respond to and re-shape itself across spatial contexts like clubs, galleries, theatres and public space, it serves as a foundation for collaboration between Clayton Lee and invited artists, musicians and wrestlers.
Using deadpan humour, generosity and a low-vibrating mischievousness to facilitate and indulge the “what-ifs” of the live encounter, The Goldberg Variations will manifest in the AGO as a series of performative interventions and audience engagements. The project not only grounds the artist’s body as a site of humour but deepens the texture of this humour by playing with power dynamics while simultaneously inviting in layers of sexual desire, fantasy, domination/submission, heartbreak, vulnerability, tenderness and the tensions that exist within.
Portrait photo by Kenneth Koo
Clayton Lee (he/him) is a Toronto-based performance artist and curator. Performances include (◕‿◕✿) at The Performance Arcade in Wellington, New Zealand and Chapter’s EXPERIMENTICA in Cardiff, Wales; Ways of Being, co-created with Michael Rubenfeld (FOLDA, The Kick and Push Festival); Duets for Beginners (SummerWorks); and Informal Beginnings (Katzman Contemporary’s Duration & Dialogue II). He is also the Rhubarb Festival Director at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and the Curatorial Associate at the Luminato Festival.
