By Brody Weaver
Holly Timpener is a non-binary performance artist, facilitator, and PhD Candidate in the Interdisciplinary Studies program at Concordia University. Their extensive body of performance art addresses themes of trauma, resistance, and transformation, particularly as they overlap with their own lived experiences. Making use of the body, duration, and minimal materials, there is something classic and pure about the performance work that Timpener creates. In Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia), where I have been living since 2018, this branch of performance art is less common than it’s more hybridized and interdisciplinary forms.
What draws me to Holly’s work are the containers they create through collaborative performance-as-research projects. Discussed in depth in this interview, Timpener has brought together more than 50 trans and non-binary artists to create performance art addressing trauma, gender, and transformation, and has managed to foster intentional spaces for their creation and reception across physical and digital space.
Pi*llOry, cleverly appropriating it’s name from a medieval device designed to secure one’s body in place for public humiliation and abuse, took place through five iterations in Toronto, Ontario (and online) between 2019 and 2020.
Epicenter Revolutions, an ongoing project forming the core of Timpener’s work as a PhD student, began in 2021 and has featured five iterations across Montréal (Quebec), Saint John (New Brunswick), Kumeyaay (San Diego), Poznań (Poland), Berlin (Germany), Mexico City (Mexico), and was recently manifested as the exhibition Epicenter Revolutions: Self-Documenting Internal Transformations at Eastern Bloc in partnership with Fierté Montréal (Montréal Pride).
I met Holly in the way most great connections are formed–a mutual friend saying, “Hey, I think you’d like what this person is doing. You should talk to them,” and for this, I have Grey Piitaapan Muldoon to thank.
This interview transcription is an edited version of Holly and I’s two-hour conversation, which took place on the morning of June 20th, 2025. Note that Epicenter Revolutions: Self-Documenting Internal Transformations is discussed here before the exhibition had taken place.
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Brody:
To get us started, I would love to hear about how you began creating performance art. What was your catalyst?
Holly:
I danced and I went to theatre school, but I have a real problem with authority. Autonomy is a big value in my life, and I felt like it wasn’t being met in a theatre and dance context. I was searching for something where I could still perform and meld my life into the performance so that they weren’t so separate.
In 2011, I met Sylvie Tourangeau, who is one of the core members of the Montreal-based performance group called the TouVA Collective, with Victoria Stanton and Anne Bérubé. Sylvia was doing a performance workshop on Toronto Island, and it changed my life. She has been my mentor ever since. Some of the things I’ll be talking about today, I note back to this workshop, because it created my foundation as a performance artist and facilitator. When I opened the door to enter the workshop, I was hit by a wall of magic. I joined the circle with Sylvie and the other participants, and I was ready to learn skills. I was ready to learn technique, which comes from my theatre background. Sylvia’s teachings are open to letting people extend their life experiences into the art that they create. I wasn’t ready for the kind of radical openness she gave me, this permission to look inside and trust that I knew what I needed to do.
Brody:
A lot of people have stories of an influential teacher, mentor, or role model who changed their path forever–it’s informative to know who influences artists in their early stages. It’s clear to me that you are a performance artist before you are an academic, and I mean that as a compliment.
Holly:
I take it as one.
Brody:
What you’re saying about performance art as an accessible entry point for theorizing about lived experience and embodiment is so powerful and real. That’s its special power, and what makes performance a unique form of art.
I want to ask you about how that formative workshop experience influenced your approach to the collaborative projects you’ve organized, called Pi*llOry and Epicenter Revolutions. Can you describe these projects for readers who may not be familiar? They’re quite expansive with multiple iterations, locations, and participating artists.
Holly:
My curiosity and techniques for performance art developed through taking part in workshops, constantly in group settings, and I found that is where I grew. Right before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was craving queer and trans community, and performance community, those spaces of trust. I’ve been out for most of my life, and my experiences within these workshops were with queer people, and that’s how I developed trust and deepened relationships. Because of my history with trauma, I wanted to understand the relationship between queerness and trauma, which I had been questioning in my own art practice. Entering my master’s program, I wanted to further understand the relationship between performance and trauma, so I created Pi*llOry. Pi*llOry was an invitation for queer folks to perform trauma to shift it into something else.
I was curious how performance can help form queer networks of healing. There were five iterations of this project, with the last being online, and all of the artists who participated were shifting trauma in different ways. While I was researching, I became interested in how performance art transforms the self, not physically, but internally. Transforming trauma, and queer trauma specifically, has an impact on our internal sensations and internal experience. I was looking for existing resources focusing on the intersection of performance art and internal transformation, but I couldn’t find anything. Of course, external transformation is a huge part of performance art. They go hand in hand.
As Pi*llOry was coming to an end, I was in love with working collaboratively and feeling so fulfilled. These collaborations and groups helped get me through COVID–we were there for each other, online, and we were checking in on each other throughout the whole process. From the first iteration, we always kept in contact, and performers from previous iterations would attend the later iterations, and it was a real family. That was wonderful.
I wanted to create something that could address internal transformations through performance. Thinking back to my first workshop with Sylvie, something we said every day, multiple times a day after a performance, experience, or what have you–“I was transformed.” All the time. How was that? How was that experience for you? “I was transformed.” It’s funny, looking back on it. It could be so cliche, and perhaps it was. I have no problems with cliches. If it was said so much, why could I not read anything about it? Internal transformations initiated through performance art have helped me learn so much about my own gender identity, and I suspect that other trans and non-binary artists have had the same experience.
My response was to create the project Epicenter Revolutions so that we could create a family again, and continue the family created in Pi*llOry. It started in 2021, with the last iteration happening in 2024. The project travelled to Poznan, Poland, Berlin, Germany, and Mexico City, and some participants were in Guadalajara, Mexico, and San Diego, California. We were lucky to have participants all over the world who have different experiences of gender, politically and personally, which affect their gender and internal transformations. A lot of the work addressed trauma in different ways, so it has remained a through-line between the two projects.
Brody:
Jumping back to Pi*llOry, queer performers invited queer audiences who knew they would be witnessing work intended to shift trauma. You created a semi-closed space where the performers and the audience are signing on to something specific. I think that’s key to understanding the success of Pi*llOry, and in turn Epicenter. We’ve all had experiences where we are moving around an art gallery and encounter an intense artwork that we were not prepared to see. This brings forward a conversation about emotional safety and “trigger warnings,” if you will. This is a common topic in art spaces today, to which I think a lot of old school feminists and performance artists might say, “I don’t really care about any of that. The work is meant to be an affront.” At the same time, I think the container that you’re creating is intentional and wise. Can you talk more about your practice of inviting participants and witnesses into your projects and how you approach creating that container?
Holly:
I call myself a facilitator, but it is important to me to act without any kind of hierarchy. I consider myself an equal participant in all the projects. I separate myself as the academic who has the opportunity and privilege granted to me by an institution to act as the facilitator. In both Pi*llOry and Epicenter, I put out calls for participation through social media and people who participated often helped me disseminate the call. Since performance art is quite a niche category, it was important for me that anybody who wanted to participate could be in the project, regardless of whether or not they have performed before. I never asked for a CV.
Each iteration is structured differently because it has to suit the needs of each individual. There’s a lot of flexibility and creativity in the ways the journey might manifest leading up to the event itself. I try to facilitate in an open way so that everyone feels included and encouraged to participate in the way that works for them, while maintaining a sense of community and trust. This helps the community grow and has allowed us to become close to one another. When queer folks come together and are invited to talk about their experiences, that container holds us.
The second important part is the invitation–who are we going to invite? What I’ve asked the participants of both projects to engage in is deep and sensitive work. Throughout our meetings together, we talked about traumas, our experiences with gender and developed a container of trust. How do we transfer that into inviting witnesses? The difference between an audience and a witness becomes important in this context. Where the event takes place is equally important, choosing not theatres, but locations that would instigate an environment of containment and intimacy. There is a sensitivity within performance art of knowing that the witness holds responsibility, and the spaces that we chose were important in creating that. In Pi*llOry, there wasn’t a huge call out for an audience–we invited queer witnesses, we invited people personally. To witness actively, rather than “You’re here to perform for me,” we’re creating spaces where we’re allowing each other to embody something that’s very personal.
Brody:
Thanks for breaking that down on the back end of facilitating Pi*llOry and Epicenter. It’s valuable to document the processes that create events and showcases so that we can continually learn from one another. What you’ve shared makes me think of how these projects that you’re organizing are situated in a rich lineage of queer and trans performance culture: cabaret, drag, music, and all the oral and performative traditions that we have. Historically, who has known that these things are occurring? Who knows where to go, and when? Beyond getting the right people in the room, who shows up can have severe consequences, for example, in the case of police raids of bars and other performance spaces. In Pi*llOry, the iterations happened in Toronto, right?
Holly:
Yeah, it was all in Toronto. Except for the online iteration, which was a collaboration with GLAD Day Bookstore (the queer bookstore in Toronto), because they were administering a micro-grant program for artists to be able to continue their practices during the COVID-19 Pandemic. They were our hub, and they were able to support me with the technical aspects of the online iteration, which I am very thankful for. The artists were all in different places – Santiago Tamayo Soler and myself were in Montreal, Aisha Bentham was in Toronto, and Rahki was in Mexico.
Brody:
From my perspective as someone who began medical transition during the pandemic, I witnessed and participated in a resurgence of trans culture and embodiment that happened during that time, primarily and often by necessity, in online spaces. Both performance-as-research projects we’re discussing had at least one iteration purely online, and while someone might see that pivot as a compromise, I think that it reflects the moment in trans and non-binary culture from which they emerged.
Epicenter appears to be more complex, with iterations happening in different places across the globe. I feel like you built capacity with Pi*llOry and worked on a grander scale with Epicenter. Can you talk more about Epicenter, and break down what it was like to take your approach to different cultural and political contexts?
Holly:
Epicenter is different from Pi*llOry, particularly with how it concerns the witness and act of witnessing. I realized in my own practice: I don’t need a witness to perform. When I perform, I enter into a state of awareness with a specific intention, engaging in a kind of internal listening. I don’t need anybody to witness me to know that I have switched into a state of awareness, turning my attention focus on my own sensations.
Part of the invitation for Epicenter asked the participating artists to likewise turn inwards during performances, to listen to what is happening inside of themselves. This raises a question: do we need witnesses? In Pi*llOry, we would take turns performing one after another, aside from a few durational pieces, but in Epicenter, the works are explicitly durational. We performed for four to six hours alongside one another, engaged in internal listening in a shared space. Even though we performed individually, we came to the realization that we were also each other’s witnesses.
Several Epicenter interactions took place during COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, so the question of witnesses was concerned with safety and minimizing transmission of the virus as well. The first Epicenter took place at the Montreal LGBTQ+ Centre, a large space that allowed for physical distance between performers and attendees. At this iteration, we had invigilators, which is somebody who stays with a performer throughout a durational work to watch out for physical hazards, dangers, and to help maintain our immuno-accessibility protocols.
In second Epicenter iteration, we performed in our own physical spaces: Aquarius Funkk performed in their house in Guadalajara, Grey Piitaapan Muldoon performed in a studio space in Halifax, joey eddy performed in a gallery space, and I performed in a garage. We were connected through a shared video call, not publicly available online, but projected in each place for IRL witnesses to see the different performances. We invited people to attend who we knew and trusted, but it became more about witnessing one another than having external witnesses, or an audience, so to speak. Engaged in intense inward and collective listening, we were not trying to sell seats. It wasn’t part of the process.
However, in Poznań, possibly because there are so many people and because I was working out of a queer cafe during my time there, we did promote it more publicly in the cafe itself. If anybody wants to go to a queer hub in Poland, it’s Poznań. One of the reasons I wanted to travel with Epicenter was my curiosity about how people’s lived experiences with politics in different parts of the world have affected their gender identities and gender experiences. The participating artists and I spoke about how we felt safe inviting people from this cafe, and I had been there writing my dissertation, so I got to know some of the regulars, some of whom came to witness each performance. I think this pivot speaks to the reality that queers know how to witness queers. We know how to enter a space and understand that performing requires a great deal of care, and often we know this without being told. It’s a lovely thing about queer community that touches me and has touched both Pi*llOry and Epicenter. It felt like we were extending our family a little bit.
Brody:
The durational aspect of Epicenter is important, where you’re all performing alongside one another for an extended period. There are many art forms that break down the divide between art and life so severely that it can become hard to distinguish between the two, and durational performance is definitely one of them. It creates heightened senses, intense and sometimes painful physical sensations, and a tension between time and the body which likewise occur in different creative, spiritual, and even sexual practices. I’m curious to hear more about the relationship between the subject of internal transformation and its chosen expression in durational performance: what do you think are the ingredients that make it particularly suited for addressing the subject of internal transformation?
Holly:
I think one thing that often gets muddied is durational performance and endurance performance art. Duration has to do with time. There has to be a curiosity about what time will do to your intention. In endurance performance, it is more about pushing boundaries and borders, especially within the body, which time can influence but is not necessarily a foundational element. Over the past few years, it’s rare for me to perform anything that’s longer than four hours. I’m drawn to it because extending time pushes your boundaries of awareness and pushes your capacity to understand and meet yourself. You get bored, you get tired, you get disinterested, and you ask yourself: what is it that is making me keep going?
That is what I think is interesting, when you hit that border of, “Why am I continuing this?” That’s when magic happens, and for myself and some of the participating artists, that’s when internal transformation happens. That’s when you start uncovering new things about yourself. Time is a gift.
I connect internal transformation to gender identity because people who do not conform to binaries of gender are constantly performing different selves to fit into different social spaces, which in turn affects one’s internal sensations. It happens fast, and it’s not necessarily something that always feels pleasant. It’s tiring. It’s not something that you are often able to spend time investigating. Despite how valuable time is for self-discovery, we don’t often ask ourselves: What is this doing to me? What are these internal shifts? How is this affecting my experience of self? To experience the gift of time permits you to uncover aspects of yourself, some of which you’ll want to keep and others you’ll want to leave behind. At the same time, you might find power in meeting the edges of your own boredom, frustration, and exhaustion. It’s not always an amazing, “A-hah!” moment. It can be more like, “I have something inside of me that’s special, that’s mine, that’s unique, that’s powerful.” That can be harnessed for yourself and to support the community of people around you who are going through their own internal transformations. After doing this for five hours, radical empathy for yourself and the community of performers can rise up. Hopefully, that empathy can be transferred into other spaces beyond performance and Epicenter.
Beyond creating a durational performance, Epicenter was about embodying aspects of your gender identity. This was very different than Pi*llOry, where embodied trauma was the subject. In Pi*llOry, the invitation was not to relive, re-perform, or re-traumatize yourself. It was to use the space of performance to pick at and pull apart an aspect of a traumatic experience to intentionally shift it into something new. In Epicenter, each artist’s curiosity created their own performance intentions from their lived experience of gender.
Brody:
What do you think was the result of specifically looking at internal transformations of gender for the participants? It’s likely impossible to summarize with so many different artists, but if you have any examples or highlights to share, I would love to hear them.
Holly:
There was an artist in the Poznań iteration of Epicenter, Pipeq Szczęsnowicz, who performed a work where she had a trunk of clothes in front of her and wore noise-cancelling headphones. With each song that played into her ears, she would change her outfit and dance to the song. They were looking at performing different selves, and how you perform different selves, but rather than in the external world of others’ perceptions, they were celebrating the multiple selves within them that were all beautiful. Once their performance had concluded, they shared with me that they did not want to stop dancing. They did not want it to end. Through the performance, they realized that they did not get to have that amount of joy and fun in other parts of their life. I think for her, through this celebration of herself, she came to honour those parts of herself and recognize the need to find ways to continue that beyond the performance itself.
Damaris Baker was a performer in the first Epicenter, and Damaris has had a long journey with their physical appearance as a non-binary person. They have a beard while still having a somewhat femme exterior. During COVID, they were diagnosed with breast cancer, so they were really interested in death and how it could relate to an internal listening of gender. In their performance, they had mounds of dirt, cat claws, and hair. They glued the hair onto their body, and they were singing to dirt and bones, shaking with this exterior shell of dirt and hair. They wrote about how duration was a big part of that work, and how it confronted feelings of shame. I remember they shared their intention to add hair to their body to resist others’ discomfort in their interview: “You don’t want to see hair on my body. Well, I’m going to glue more on, and how do you like that?” They told a story about a passerby who had told her that she should stay at home: “Why would you leave the house with that hair on your face?” Gluing hair on her body was a way to help lay that shame to rest.
In the fourth iteration of Epicenter, Eva Gonzales-Ruskiewicz, who performed in San Diego, also talked about experiences with shame. They did this piece where they felted an outline of their body onto pieces of a trans flag, and they decided to be topless. They felt shame during the performance, this feeling of “I’m not trans enough, my body is not going to be seen as trans enough. I’m working with this trans flag, but I have a chest that doesn’t signify trans.” In their reflection and interview, they described how they invited a few close friends and their partner as witnesses, and emphasized how they held space and witnessed as an act of care. This, they felt, helped them transform that shame through feeling held by their community.
Those are some wonderful examples of how internal transformations about gender manifested through durational performance in Epicenter. Often, failure or unexpected issues can come up during a performance, and while this may feel uncomfortable at first, working through it and sticking with failure makes it easier to confront failure in everyday life.
Brody:
The examples you’ve relayed make me think of something you shared earlier–queer and trans people want to speak about their experiences, especially in a safe environment. I have a background as a facilitator as well, but primarily in social and community programming where direct conversation and verbal engagement are more common. When I’m facilitating in those spaces, I notice that there are always some attendees who don’t participate or who are not being given the right environment to serve their full presence. They might be having a hard time finding their voice or the right moment to jump in. Hearing about how you utilize performance as an arts-based method for community building and empowerment, creating the conditions for queer and trans people to see and be seen outside of the constraints of language, highlights performance as a more accessible and neurodivergent way to engage groups of people. It sounds like you’ve been able to help people find their power, and that’s an amazing gift to share. I think you should be proud of that.
Holly:
Thank you. Beyond accessibility, it is meaningful that the form of performance we’re engaging in Epicenter and Pi*llOry is not a solo endeavour: it is intentionally collaborative. I was gifted with early experiences of learning about performance art and myself through collaborative settings in workshops and community settings. Sometimes, I think that my performance-as-research projects are a selfish act–I crave that community, I need it, and I’m doing it for myself as well. This doesn’t just go one way. The artists in both projects have given me a space where I get to talk about my experiences and work through traumas, questions, and curiosities. I would never have been able to do that without each and everyone one of the people who have taken part in these projects. I would not be the person I am today without the containers they helped create.
Brody:
In my own life, I’ve often said that creating art has been one of the most healing things I’ve ever done. It far outpaces what formal therapy has ever done for me. It is transformational to create art from inside of yourself, collaborate with others, and have that be witnessed in the world.
You have a project alongside Fierté Montréal (Montréal Pride), the exhibition Epicenter Revolutions: Self-Documenting Internal Transformations at Eastern Bloc from August 1st–9th, 2025, with a performance event on the 7th. Can you tell me more about this project and how it extends or adapts your typical working method with Epicenter?
Holly:
Most of the artists in Epicenter are interdisciplinary artists, meaning they work in multiple mediums, including and other than performance art itself. The Epicenter performances were documented through photography, but we lost the documentation for the fifth iteration because the photographer’s roof caved in during a rainstorm, damaging his equipment. I saw it as a blessing in disguise, because it made us rethink documenting the project through photography alone. Obviously, we love having images of our work and need them for grants, funding agencies, and applications, but the performances’ focus on internal transformations raised a question of the appropriateness of a third party creating the documentation. We asked ourselves: How can we flip the traditional script of others documenting trans people, and create our own documentation of our own experiences? On a larger scale, there’s wonderful and challenging conversations to be had about trans people, documentation, and control. For example, the rigorous documentation required to access gender affirming health care.
I’m honoured that the participating artists have chosen to put faith in Epicenter Revolutions: Self-Documenting Internal Transformations and use it as an opportunity to continue our conversations about how best to create a record, document, or extension of the five iterations of the project. We all have different ideas and methods for engaging documentation, and these will make up the exhibition at Eastern Bloc in Montreal, including mediums like sound, video, installation, and ephemera. For example, Eva Gonzalez, the artist who used felting in their performance, has subscribed to major newspapers in the United States and has been clipping headlines and articles that talk about trans rights. Eva is creating a hand-drawn film from these materials which will be projected in the gallery, and the clippings will be present for gallery attendees and collaborators alike to create a papier-mâché sculpture that will hang in front of the projection to distort and reframe the headlines.
Another Epicenter artist in Poland, Kai Milačić, used a full-length mirror to paint and continually repaint their reflection during their performance, resulting in this layered depiction of themself and the internal listening they were engaged in. They have continued this process since the iteration in Poland, engaged in daily self-observation and self-portraiture, and these will be part of the exhibition.
Damaris Baker, whose performance featured gluing hair on their body, is going to be doing another participatory action involving dirt and a recording of themself singing, alongside a space for viewers to write down what the sounds bring out of them. While listening, people will be able to interact with dirt and feel their own internal sensations, and maybe even transformations. Freddie Wulf from the Berlin iteration is sending their top surgery band aids to display.
Since August of last year, we’ve been discussing and asking each other: What means and modes of documentation are effective for performance art? How and when can we document performance? Do witnesses alter or influence the nature of documentation? How does documentation create opportunities to reflect, reconsider, or extend performance? Through this process, artists from different iterations of Epicenter have gotten to meet one another over regular online meetings, so it has extended and strengthened our community as well. Eventually, materials from the exhibition will become a publication with writing from each artist about their performances and documentation process, and in their own languages, with English translations. They can use drawings, sketches, or whatever means of communication they want to express how they thought about documentation. It will be another document and archive of trans narratives, experiences and creations, with the artists having ownership and authority to discuss their own experiences, methodologies, and ways of living and creating for other people to come across.
Brody:
Both the exhibition and publication sound fabulous. It’s exciting to hear that the documentation emerging from the durational performances has a kind of durational or time-based element itself, manifesting in acts of collecting, repetition, and revisiting.
You have, alongside all the artists that you’ve worked with, created a performance art community that centres queer and trans experiences. That’s really admirable. Do you have any advice, words of encouragement, or wisdom to share with someone who might want to create a queer performance art community where they live?
Holly:
The first thing I would say is: just do it. Find a group of people that are curious and get weird. Just start. Nobody needs to know how to do performance art because we already do. We’re performing every day. Be brave and silly and find a group of people ready to do the same. Most of these things happen in people’s homes. There are quite a few collectives in Toronto that have happenings in people’s houses, where they invite friends and share small pieces of performance and talk about them.
You can easily find performance scores online. There’s a great book by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who is the founder of La Pocha Nostra, a performance group based in Mexico, creating art and resources on non-hierarchical performance pedagogy. They have a book that I highly recommend, full of scores, exercises, and teachings: La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post Democratic Society (2020).
You can also reach out to artist-run centres in your area and ask them if they know anything happening about performance art. There are often little workshops that happen that might not reach people widely. Ask: Are there performance events happening soon? Do you have any contacts of people who organize performance events? I think the best way to do it is to create opportunities for yourself and others from the ground up. It’s my favourite thing to do.
You can find more of Holly Timpener’s work on their website and Instagram.