2YouTopia, 2014

Vertical City - Toronto, Canada

Performance Art

From Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International to Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine, Modernism is abundant with proposals towards the design of ideal structures and cities. But what does it mean when the plan becomes a fractured, labyrinthine construction occupied by the presence of a single, twisting, writhing individual? Enter Vertical City and their durational performance which combines dance, architecture, engineering, technology and musical composition.

2YouTopia (based on an earlier performance, YouTopia, originally executed in 2013) features a free-standing maze of construction scaffolding and architectural piping evoking a decaying residence suspended precariously over a pool of water, accompanied by a dense soundscape. A sole human inhabitant will navigate the structure in movement throughout the night, pushing through boredom, exhaustion, distraction and any number of human bodily effects. The work is an ultimately heart-wrenching meditation on the myth of stability, sanity and order in human existence, revealing instead a dystopian world of beautiful, uncontrollable fragility and chaos.  

Vertical City is an interdisciplinary arts and performance hub located in Toronto. Past works explore aerial movement and physical theatre within environments that combine installation architecture, interactive media, dense soundscape designs and spatial engineering. Recent exploration also includes interactive and participatory micro performance contexts. The team for 2YouTopia includes VC Artistic Director Bruce Barton, Kiran Friesen, Pil Hansen, Sherri Hay, Laird MacDonald, Richard Windeyer, and Marcus Jamin. 

Learn More

brucewbarton.com/vertical-city/

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Nathan Phillips Square - Parking lot P1, Underground

100 Queen Street West (enter via Trout staircase or elevator on Nathan Phillips Square South of Albert Street)

This project is indoors.