2boys.tv

2boys.tv (Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard) are a Canadian art duo based in Montreal, Quebec, active since 2001. Lawson graduated from the National Theatre School of Canada, and Pollard from the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design and Concordia University. Lawson and Pollard are also known both as Gigi L'Amour and Pipi Douleur. The team and real-life couple work in video-supplemented performance, video, and installation and have presented in arts and queer spaces across the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and New Zealand. The duo is known for its extravagant and intense stage spectacles.

Performance studies scholar Peter Dickinson notes that their performance work "supplements a camp aesthetic derived from drag with sophisticated video projections, original and found sound scores, the art of lip-synch and object-oriented and site-based installation (...)". 2boys.tv is interested in the plasticity of video, often using it in a sculptural way instead of as a large screen.

The name 2boys.tv resulted from looking for a web domain name for the project. "(...) We came across this .tv which both references transvestism and transversalism," the duo told The New York Times in a 2011 interview. "But it's actually the domain of the small island in the South Pacific called Tuvalu. The country sold off its domain name to raise money because it's sinking due to global warming. And, of course, we're two boys."

Selected performance and presentation history

CatoptROMANTICS (2019)

• Encuentro - Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics (Mexico City)

The artists set up a séance-like environment for a participatory, bilingual performance that explored who is missing at the table. Language, translation, and understanding were important themes and practices at Encuentro, with events in Portuguese, Spanish, and English. Canadian Art (magazine) reported that performance studies scholar Diana Taylor called this piece 'significant'.

Tightrope (2011–2016)

Source:

• 2011 - Buddies in Bad times (Toronto)
• 2011 - Triennale, Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal (Montreal)
• 2012 - Laboratorio Arte Alameda / International Festival of Cabaret (Mexico City)
• 2013 - Encuentro - Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics (São Paulo)
• 2015 - Bienal de la Habana (Cuba)
• 2015 - Phenomena Festival at La Sala Rossa (Montreal)
• 2016 - Operación Queer (Granada, Nicaragua)

Tightrope includes original music by Alexis O'Hara and Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, as well as kaleidoscopic video projections and shadow images by Montreal-based lighting designer Lucie Bazzo. Taking inspiration from the stories of the disappeared in South America, Tightrope features a cast of young, local drag queens recruited from the cities to which the work has toured. These performers channel a historical archive of grief and loss around HIV/AIDS. Together with their collaborators, Lawson and Pollard adapt the content of the piece, especially the language in which it is presented, to suit the local audiences. Tightrope has been presented in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, with the title shifting accordingly: Tightrope (EN) / Code raide (FR) / Cuerda Floja (SP), Corda Bamba (PT).

The show uses site-specificity as a key element. Since the piece debuted at Toronto's Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, every iteration begins outside, leading the audience on a public promenade from a place of local significance in the neighborhood towards the performance venue. For the 2015 version at the Phénomena Festival, the performance processed from Parc Lahaie in Montreal's Plateau Mont-Royal to the venue Sala Rossa, with members of Montreal drag troupe "House of Bogue" (Judy Virago, CT Thorne, Jamie Ross, and 2Fik) leading the way. During this procession, O'Hara gave random spectators letters written by the show's creators to read aloud, recounting different scenarios of vigil for the missing.

(re)Generation (2012)

• Phenomena Festival at La Sala Rossa (Montreal)

Created to mark the 10th anniversary of 2boys.tv's collaboration, (re)Generation pays tribute to the duo's body of cabaret work after the Phenomena Festival asked them to produce a retrospective. Reflecting drag culture, where knowledge is passed from queen to queen, 2boys.tv cast their favorite local drag artists to learn and embody the performances instead of performing the retrospective themselves. As Lawson says, "perhaps in a way own them afterwards." Lawson and Pollard were onsite, "like mad scientists to bring these Frankensteins to life." The re-performers included favorites of the Anglo-Montreal underground: Jordan Arseneault, Antonio Bavaro, Joshua Pavan, An T Horné and Holly Gaulthier-Frankel.

Phobophilia (2008, 2009, 2011)

• date unknown - (Argentina)
• date unknown - (Chile)
• 2008 - Studio 303 (Montreal)
• 2009 - National Review of Live Art (Glasgow)
• 2011 - Under the Radar Festival (NYC)

Designed as a meditation on fear following the Abu Ghraib photography torture scandal, Phobophilia (meaning 'arousal from fear') is a 1-hour multimedia production performed for very small audiences, typically 20 to 25 people at a time. Participants are blindfolded and led "in a human chain of trusting hands-on shoulders" to a second location, into the near darkness of a small room, to observe what Lawson calls "a peculiar interrogation." Canadian performance studies scholar Peter Dickinson notes, "In this piece a pop-up book is transformed into a scale-model theatre, which Lawson's projected shadow self navigates in a way that contrasts with our initial glimpse of his live body: perched precariously on a box, arms outstretched, head hooded by a paper bag (...)." Projection and shadow are used in this very dark, surreal, highly visual, and sonic piece, referencing the poetic and cinematographic World War II era work of Jean Cocteau. The piece examines the line between fear, torture, their sexualization, and pop culture's voyeurism of both. ""It is a project specifically designed to address fear, as an emotional but also as a political weapon," Pollard told Le Devoir.

Zona Pellucida (2009)

• Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (Toronto)

The title, Zona Pellucida refers to the translucent protective material around a human egg. This 45-minute performance, which Toronto's NOW magazine called "Queer film theory meets stylish techno-savvy (...)," works with multiple small-format projections and frequent audio samples of Vincenzo Bellini's opera La Sonnambula and Bing Crosby's Just One More Chance to create a dreamlike, filmic puzzle. An interrupted fairy tale allegory is replayed via projection on a succession of smaller and smaller miniature proscenium stages in what scholar Peter Dickinson suggests is a mise en abyme of each previous version. Lawson plays a gothic drag queen who communicates mainly through classic lines of film dialogue, invoking many campy screen heroines from cult movies, such as Anne Baster from All About Eve, Gene Rowlands from Opening Night, and Elizabeth Taylor from Suddenly, Last Summer. These lip-synced performances convey a sense of alienation and distance, exploring themes of victimization, internal struggle with sexuality, and guilt. Critics have compared the effect to the works of filmmaker David Lynch and Quebec playwrights, Marie Brassard and Robert Lepage.

Battle Hymn (2002, 2013)

Source:

• 2002 - Club Plastic, Festival Mix Milano (Milan)
• 2013 - Dixon Place (NYC)

Installation

ARCADE series (2009, 2011)

• 2009 - boutiqueARCADE - Festival Les Escales Improbables
• 2011 - darlingARCADE - Darling Foundry / Urban Occupations Urbaines

An ongoing work for the duo, the 2011 variation collaborated with an artist-run centre and Shauna Janssen's curatorial collective, Urban Occupations Urbaines, to create a site-based installation in Griffintown, one of Montreal's many historically working-class and rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Collaborators from the Montreal art scene were hired to produce short audio narratives with dioramas contained in shoeboxes. These dioramas were animated by Lawson and Pollard when visitors selected a corresponding shoe from the display on the walls of the venue. Laura Levin, writing for Canadian Theatre Review, remarked, "Soon, I had toured a dozen shoeboxes on my own, experiencing memetic, fantastical, strange, and celebratory performances."

Persephone (2007)

• La Biennale de Montréal

In this new-genre cabaret performance and installation, moving beyond cross-dressing and gender-bending, the duo collapses linguistic distinctions, bridges the divide between stage, gallery, and street, and operates as actors, directors, and audience to produce an incessant relocation of boundaries.

Selected film and video

• Teddy Bears' Picnic (2001)
• 15 Questions (Something Blue) (2002)

Publications

Lawson, Stephen. "Emcee Etiquettes: Experts Weigh In on How to Host the Perfect Cabaret Night." Canadian Theatre Review, vol. 177, 2019, p. 67-72.

Pollard, Aaron and Stephen Lawson. "Bonus Insert." Canadian Theatre Review, vol. 150, 2012, p. 1-17.

Pollard, Aaron and Stephen Lawson. "Tightrope, Translation and Transformation." Performance Research, vol. 21:5, 2016, p. 131-133.

Prizes and awards

They are recipients of the 2009 Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding achievement by mid-career artists working in the Interdisciplinary Arts, Canada Council for the Arts.

External links

• Official website