It’s complicated

Relationships can be complicated. The ways we impact each other – in our personal and our professional lives – can be layered. This ebb and flow plays a key role in our exhibition Mitchell/Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation, and it inspired our First Thursday on May 3. With or without you boasts an exciting line-up of performers, including headliner Prince Innocence, DJ duo LUXURY '66 and KTANA, DJ New Chance, and a project by Toronto artist William Ellis.

Making her AGO debut is Toronto-based actor, burlesque performer, playwright and producer Dainty Smith. In collaboration with artist and anti-oppression activist Rania El Mugammar, Smith will perform a specially commissioned work entitled Hunger. We caught up with Dainty to find out more.

AGO:  What can First Thursday visitors expect from your work?
Dainty: Hunger is a spiritual conversation between me and my collaborator Rania El Mugammar through movement and dialogue. I created this piece because I wanted to articulate what hunger means for me – living, dreaming and existing in the world as I do in a Black, female body. Watching it will be like watching a private and intimate conversation between two Black women in public.

AGO: Riopelle and Mitchell’s relationship had an impact on the art they created. You’ve said that Hunger was inspired by their work. Have you imagined what Mitchell was hungry for?
Dainty: Creative persons often live and exist in multiple universes and dimensions at the same time. When you're a creative person, you are someone who is deeply tuned in, deeply sensitive. I imagine that Joan Mitchell was hungry for understanding, but could never find satisfaction. To yearn and constantly seek for more is hard for a woman. Men are allowed large appetites, women are not.

AGO: As a playwright and performer, what role have you written or assumed that has made you feel most powerful?
Dainty: I’m constantly searching for that role. I might never fully find it but I've made my peace with that. The search and the journey itself is interesting.

AGO: Does the art museum setting, with its gendered and racialized histories, make talking about female empowerment easier or harder?
Dainty: As a Black woman, I am very aware of the beautiful complexity of what it means for my body to be in an art museum and to take up that space. I am vulnerable and exposed in this space. To be seen is to be consumed. And yet, representation matters and the act of pushing back – of asking of the audience to be responsible, to look at themselves and their own desires and hold themselves accountable – is important to me. Performing in an art museum and speaking on female empowerment is hard, but it might be more difficult not to do it.

Don’t miss seeing Dainty and other artists at this May’s First Thursday. Get your tickets now!

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