“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” According to performance and video artist Tanya Mars, we are now living in those times.
When Mars created Crone, a six-hour performance, she wanted to examine the role of truth in the age of “alternative facts.” It was this year, 2017, but no words were more resonant for Mars than those of Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities.
“I’ll be reading a book and there will be one sentence that just lights my fire and I’ll go, ‘That’s such an interesting idea,’” says Mars, an associate professor in Studio at U of T Scarborough.
Mars has always been a bookworm, but wasn’t always a performer (although she was once a cheerleader). She says she became a performance artist almost by accident.
“When you go to art school and find out you’re a really bad painter, you have to find alternatives.”
After moving to Montreal from Michigan in the late ‘60s, Mars fell in with a theatre crowd. Acting wasn’t her forté either, but the experience ignited her love of the performative and led to a career that has spanned over 40 years.
“I’ll be reading a book and there will be one sentence that just lights my fire and I’ll go, ‘That’s such an interesting idea.’”
Mars is always reading something new — after finishing several novels about China’s Cultural Revolution, she’s now “on a Don DeLillo kick” — and her sources of inspiration shift “from lifetime to lifetime.” But certain themes remain consistent. An examination of power politics and feminism — this underpins most of her work and is also the anchor of her teaching career.
“I’m now 50 years older than most of my first-year students and see that those young women are often struggling with the same anxieties and glass ceilings that I was dealing with at that age,” says Mars. “Whenever I think I might hang up my hat, I’m compelled to be ever-vigilant.”