CHRONIC by Jehan Roberson at FADO’s On the Table Off the Table

CHRONIC is an iterative meditation on the incurable and the unrelenting. As the child of a fully disabled Vietnam veteran, Jehan Roberbson is devoted to exploring legacies of state-sanctioned violence and neglect, chemical warfare, and what gets passed down to/on future generations, and the ongoing dehumanization of Black peoples as intrinsic to the American global project. Repurposing pill bottles collected from the various medications she takes, CHRONIC invites audience members to offer their own remedies and prescriptions for healing. These sourced remedies will form the basis of a poetic address, a collective call for redress and for healing. From the material to the physical and psychic, CHRONIC is a collaborative performance that asks us to confront the chronic conditions we all live with and within, and to begin to imagine otherwise.

On the Table Off the Table was a series of commissioned performance works by FADO Performance Art Centre engaging with the table as context, stage, and trope. Aspiring to aesthetic neutrality or demanding attention as a chosen object, the table reappears throughout the history of performance, at times taking center stage, at other times hiding in plain sight.

For this series, artists working at the confluence of performance art and a range of diverse practices—from writing to dance, from sound to magic—created live work in conversation with performance traditions about, around, and on tables.

As FADO’s first post(?)-pandemic live series, On the Table Off the Table intended to provide artists and audiences with an opportunity to re-learn together how to inhabit the space of public presentation, rediscovering the solitary workstation as a place of gathering and play.

Jehan Roberson’s performance was co-presented by FADO and Hemispheric Encounters on October 1, 2022 @ FADO, 401 Richmond Street West. On the Table Off the Table was curated by Shanon Cochrane and Francesco Gagliardi.

Watch the performance of CHRONIC on FADO’s website. (Scroll to the documentation section, select Jehan Roberson’s performance, scroll to image 10 which is the video).