In partnership with Ghost River Theatre, experience high fashion, drag culture, and mechanical magic in Object Drag + Object Runway: a pop-up exhibition by Robin Leveroos, GRT’s 2024-25 Artist-in-Residence!
Object Drag is an ongoing research project giving loving attention and flamboyant care to well worn objects. Through costumes designed to restrict their usual function, they are offered relief from their subservient role to humans. As a queer art form, drag subverts body expectations and, at its best, soars for collective liberation from our ongoing hostage relationship to systems of domination, through camp, humour, disguise, and a good dose of flash and dazzle. This language is brought to puppetry: allowing objects an imagined body autonomy, as comrades of miraculous joy and solidarity, to be seen and to perform in new light.
Combining the Object Drag designs with a fashion context, in Object Runway: alarm clocks become celebrity fashion models featured in this catwalk micro-performance. With the help of a mechanically turning runway, clocks strut the catwalk to an audio soundtrack mixing Madonna’s ‘Hung Up’ with Berlin drag queens giving their hot-takes on the clocks’ fashion choices in uplifting encouragement of the objects’ self-expression. Audiences are seated as fashion-week style-influencers to cheer the clocks on.
Robin Leveroos (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and designer working under the mark Macromatter. With a background in performance and design, her practice focuses on queer use of objects, experimental animation, and playfully questioning how we see and experience the material world around us.
Her work has been presented at festivals and venues around North America, Europe, and Asia. Some favourites include: Schaubude, Berlin, Festival de Casteliers, Montreal, PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, Vancouver, Macau Puppet and Object Theatre Festival, Macau, Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design, Prague, World Stage Design ScenoFest, Taipei, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Originally from Minneapolis, MN, Robin immigrated to Canada in 2005. She graduated from The National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal and holds an MFA in Performance and Design from Simon Fraser University. She is now based in Berlin.
Ghost River Theatre (GRT) is a Calgary-based leader in devised theatre, known for its immersive and boundary-pushing performances. For over 30 years, GRT has integrated high-tech spectacle with low-fi theatrical magic, constantly redefining the boundaries of live performance. Committed to artistic growth and excellence, GRT engages with both local and global audiences and artists through imaginative storytelling and intensive training. This dedication fosters future generations of theatre makers, continually challenging and enriching the theatre landscape. To learn more visit: www.ghostrivertheatre.com.
