Elizabeth Chitty

Elizabeth Chitty is an interdisciplinary artist with a body of work spanning 29 years. She has created performance, video and installation works.

Her performance work has always been interdisciplinary and has had 4 phases:

-works influenced by conceptual visual art and the multidisciplinary climate of the 70s in Canadian artist-run centres (1975-82)

-epic spectacles with multiple slide projections (1983-90)

-landscape-based, in which the audiences followed walks and trails (1992-97)

-the current phase of embodied voice and movement with digital visuals and spatialized sound expressing social issues

She was amongst the first graduates of York University?s Dance Department (1975) and quickly established a reputation as a radical innovator in new dance and performance art using video and text in works that were both cerebral and emotionally visceral. In her early career she was associated with 15 Dance Lab in Toronto, run by Lawrence and Miriam Adams and she and the Adams? produced the dance newspaper, Spill. She was also associated with artist-run centres such as A Space.

She created video works in the late 70s and early 80s and her work was shown across Canada, in the U.S. and Europe in exhibitions including the 11e Biennale de Paris (1980) and the opening exhibition of the new National Gallery of Canada (1988). In 1980-81 she directed the video production and residency program of the Western Front in Vancouver.

In the 1980s, her performance work changed to an aesthetic of epic theatricality employing multiple slide projections, music, text, shadow play and dance in works performed in such large spaces as a hockey arena. During the mid-80s she was Managing Director of the Association of National Non Profit Artists Centres (ANNPAC) and in the mid-80s she founded and was Artistic Director of the producing company, Cultural Desire Projects.

In the 1990s, her performance work was primarily landscape-based and specific to sites including a public garden, gravel pit, quarry, woods and urban park. In 1990, she began creating installations, usually including a video component.

Since 1991 she has taught Creative Process in the Professional Training Program of The School of the Toronto Dance Theatre. Recent published texts include essays in So to Speak, published by Artexte Editions (1999) and Not Just Any Body, published by National Ballet School/Ginger Press (2001). The essay, Asserting Our Bodies, will be published in the upcoming book on Canadian women performance artists to be published by YYZ Editions.

Recent interdisciplinary performances include Song For A Blue Moon (in-progress). Episodic in structure, it includes digital visual, spoken and musical songs of praise to peace. Earth?s Flesh (2003) used dance, video, spatialized sound, text and digital imagery to explore a Gaian relationship between body and earth.