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2boys.

About 2boys.tv

Since 2002, 2boys.tv (Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard) have pursued a collaborative performance practice that disrupts both disciplinary boundaries and geographic frontiers. Emerging from Montreal’s eclectic cabaret scene, 2boys.tv have toured and taught at museums/galleries, theatres, artist-run centres, universities, and festivals across Canada. Their ongoing dialogue around performance and politics with international comrades has brought them to audiences throughout the Americas and in Europe. They have created and presented work at the Havana Biennial, La Triennale québécoise at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Under the Radar Festival (New York), the National Review of Live Art (Glasgow), and the Hemispheric Institute Biennial Encuentros (Santiago de Chile, São Paulo, Bueno Aires, Bogota, and Mexico).

As an artistic duo who have worked together intimately over twenty years and counting, Lawson and Pollard share authorship of all their projects from conceptualization to enactment. They are fueled by a distinctly queer cultural tradition that values play, iconoclasm, transgression, and the erotic, never hesitating to trespass across media and formats. This experimental practice generates artworks shaped by their shared ideas, concerns, passions, and conflicts of the moment, and incorporates novel approaches to moving images and projection, costume and makeup, music and sound, spectatorship and participation, and the dynamic manipulation of space and time.

Aaron Pollard

A Montreal-based performance, installation and video artist, Aaron maintains a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary practice that includes writing, creating, performing, teaching, and curating. He has created and presented resonant synesthetic artworks across Canada and to international audiences since the early 1990s. Aaron’s long standing preoccupations include challenging narrative forms, the ephemerality of live art, intersectional dialectics and the discursive power of landscape. He is a graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (Media Division), and he obtained an MFA in Studio Arts (Open Media) from Concordia University. Throughout the years, Aaron has assisted colleagues in deploying video and electronic media within their creative pursuits, including artists such as Ila Firouzabadi, Tammy Forsythe, Eman Haram, Shari Hatt, Diane Landry, Payam Mofidi, Chantal Neveu, Cheryl Simon and Laurel Woodcock. He has created video projections for various stage projects by Les Filles Électriques, opera and new music director Keith Turnbull, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Esmeralda Enrique Spanish Dance Company, and The Scandelles. Curatorial practice has included mixed programs of video and film works for various festivals and events, and collaborative group shows such as the international collaboration Où sommes-nous/Where are we. (Canada/Switzerland). Aaron has worked as a board member and advisor within the artist-run culture of Montreal, including holding positions on the board of directors of CQAM and the RAIQ (now known as REPAIRE). For over 20 years, he was a member of the team at the visual, media and digital arts production and exhibition centre OBORO, where his last position was that of Researcher and Head of OBORO’s Multimedia Sector (New Media Lab). Since 2001, Aaron has collaborated with Montreal artist Stephen Lawson, on multimedia performances, video and installation works that have toured nationally and abroad.

Stephen Lawson

Consummate chameleon, Stephen’s practice encompasses many roles: transdisciplinary artist, performer, producer, director, curator and educator. He graduated from the acting program of the National Theatre School of Canada where he met a key group of other aspiring performing artists along with his mentor, Richard Fowler, with whom Lawson co-founded the legendary Canadian performance company, Primus (1989-1998). Stephen’s rigorous training led to a singular approach to inhabiting his alter-ego, Gigi l’Amour and a host of other translinguistic drag characters of various genders that he has performed and toured internationally for 3 and a half decades.

Since that time, his work as a director has included several genre-defying and sometimes gender-bending live artworks. He has taught internationally on various aspects of devised performance through universities, community groups, and art centres.

Stephen moved to Montreal in 2001 at which point he began collaborating with his domestic partner multidisciplinary artist Aaron Pollard under the moniker 2boys.tv, and they have created a wide repertoire of transdisciplinary artworks and performances for museums, galleries, theatres, clubs, artist-run centres, universities and festivals, including the Havana Biennial, Triennale Québécoise at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Under the Radar Festival in New York City, the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow Scotland, and the Hemispheric Institute biennial Encuentros in Santiago de Chile, São Paulo, Bueno Aires, Bogota, Mexico City (and Montreal where he was the Encuentro Producer through Concordia University).

Recently, Stephen was awarded a PhD through the Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies of York University in Toronto.  His doctoral research project centred on critical drag practices throughout the hemispheric Americas, resulting in his thesis entitled  CRITICAL DRAG TRANS/FORMING: Stigmatized Bodies, Creative Perversions and the Performative Power of Shame. Stephen was a Collaborator Member of the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas, is currently a Collaborator Member on the SSHRC funded partnership project Hemispheric Encounters, and has previously been a Part-Time Faculty member in the Theatre Department of Concordia University.