Rhubarb breaks the fourth wall and shrinks the audience to one
By: Jonathan Vallely, Xtra, 2012
"Johnson Ngo wants to get personal with you. That is, if you’re willing to get personal with him. Ngo’s upcoming piece, Make Your Own China Doll, is one of 11 in the Rhubarb Festival that will employ a one-to-one performance format, bringing together just one artist and one audience participant for a brief interaction. Attendees thus enter into a substantially more active, and definitely cozier, relationship with the artist behind each piece...." Read more
By: Ken Moffat, C Magazine, Men, Issue 114, Summer 2012
"It is commonly assumed that men have a narrow range of emotional states that in turn lead to a limited range of masculine roles and behaviour. The assumption of pure male expression of emotions, most often anger, is related to the construction of the man as pure and whole—a raging beast or warrior who is intact and has firm personal boundaries. This thinking about emotions also assumes a singular notion of what it is to be a man. But what if we imagine men’s emotional state through the lens of marginalized men who negotiate emotions in the context of prejudicial social relations? One such emotion is shame. According to feminist scholar Sally Munt, shame is an emotional state that is multi-faceted; that can be experienced momentarily, or as “a cloud of feeling” palpable at all moments. Speaking as a lesbian of working-class origins, she knows shame as that sense of acute and intense humiliation and embarrassment..."
(pg. 7- 10) Read more