Biography
Christopher Willes (b.1986) is an artist, composer/musician, performance maker, and facilitator based in so-called Canada. His interdisciplinary work focuses on the subject and practice of listening, exploring both its individual and collective intricacies. He makes performances, concert works, exhibitions, printed works, publications, while also organizing curatorial projects, community arts and educational initiatives. With an emphasis on research and process, almost all his projects are developed in collaboration with other artists and contributors, and often the works involve the direct participation of audiences. Recent work explores issues of participation, perception, psychoacoustics, sociality and corporeality of music and sound, collective memory, care, conflict, and the aesthetics of shared authorship. His work has been presented across North America, in the UK, Europe and Japan.
Christopher is an associate artist and producer with Public Recordings, a Tkaronto-Toronto organization that develops interdisciplinary performance work. With Public Recordings he has created numerous projects since 2014, including Resonance Gathering—a publication on the work of Pauline Oliveros (Art Metropole 2023). Since 2013 he has also co-created several works with artist Adam Kinner that continue to tour internationally, including MANUAL—a one-on-one performance that’s staged covertly in public libraries.
Christopher has been active within experimental dance and theatre working as a sound-artist and dramaturge for over a decade. From 2011-2015 he worked as a composer and dramaturge with Dancemakers. And his numerous collaborations in the performing arts have been presented on stages such as Festival TransAmériques, PuSH Festival, The National Arts Centre (CA), Agora, Sound Live Tokyo (Japan), ImPulsTanz (Vienna) and elsewhere. He has also been active in experimental and improvised music since the mid 2000’s, performing on wind instruments, synthesizers and electronics in various groups, as well as composing.
A large part of Christopher’s practice is invested in organizing educational events, workshops and community arts projects centred on experiential and cooperative learning methods. He has taught in a variety of contexts, including the Studio 303 (Montreal), the Toronto Dance Community Love-In, University of Toronto, Concordia University, Tramway (Scotland), Betonsalon (France), MOCA (Toronto). He was a recurring artist-in-residence at The Toronto Public Library (2017-2023) where he produced performance projects and workshops with teenagers and seniors. And with Public Recordings he devised What’s Collective?, an itinerant workshop about collective art practices that has been shared in Ontario, Quebec, and Scotland.
Christopher studied Music at the University of Toronto and holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School at Bard College. He studied as a dance dramaturge through a Metcalf Foundation apprenticeship at Dancemakers (2010/11). He is a Chalmers Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow (USA), and an affiliated researcher at the Milieux Institute of Concordia University. He is currently completing studies in Conflict Mediation at the University of Waterloo.
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info@christopherwilles.com
christopher@publicrecordings.org
Selected press
List of collaborations
publicrecordings.org