Raudvee’s float for QUIET PARADE is an intervention and a performance along the parade route. Raudvee’s site specific float re-imagines the maintenance crew of a parade, sweeping the parade route with a broom while supporting herself with her walker. She must negotiate a broom and a walker, finding balance between the two, to keep from falling.

Raudvee celebrates the performance of sweeping, an act of maintenance, that is often invisible while in full sight. She enters the parade as a hybrid creature, feathered and attached to a mobility device, a grounded bird that can no longer fly. The maintenance crew will act as caretaker who walks behind and among the floats, sweeping up the debris, the dust, the accumulations of human presence. A Dance with Walker and Broom is a play between the tools of daily survival and a dance between a broom and a walker and an evolving hybrid self.

Leena Raudvee will be joined in this performance of sweeping and caretaking by James Knott, an emerging, Toronto-based artist, whose performance-based practice employs tactics of self-mythologizing as a means to bridge personal narratives into communal ones. Combining theatre, video, and audio their work places an emphasis on movement/gesture to create immersive and emotionally resonant experiences, exploring themes of queer identity, archetypes of desire, and the commodification of the femme body.