Portrait credit: Dongbay

Francis St-Germain

Francis St-Germain is a Canadian composer, artistic director and interdisciplinary creator whose practice explores the transformation of perception. At the intersection of spiritual practice, physical performance and dramaturgy, his work investigates experiences of connection and transcendence through sound, movement, space and technology.

During his time at Last Ship, he developed the participatory performance Touch, as well as the conceptual foundations of the operatic cycle Annihilation.

www.francisstgermain.com

TOUCH

Participatory Performance for Therapist-Performer
Duration: 14 hours

Touch (2025) is a fourteen-hour, site-specific performance conducted in public space in Khajuraho, India. The work consists of a series of one-to-one encounters in which the artist offers free holistic therapy sessions, including massage and Reiki, to passers-by within a temporary treatment room installed outdoors.

The performance took place in two contrasting locations: near the Western Group of Temples, the city’s touristic and economic center, and within a nearby Adivasi community near Lalguan Road. In both contexts, participants received private sessions in full public view.

The encounters were documented through photography, video and sound. Visual documentation was conducted by Dongbay, while local interpretation and cultural mediation were provided by Rajesh Kumar Kushwaha. Additional environmental sound recordings were produced by the artist.

By bringing an intimate practice of care into public space, Touch questions the boundaries between private and collective space, care and performance, visibility and vulnerability. The work explores touch — understood both physically and energetically — as a medium of connection across cultural, social and economic differences, while foregrounding the ethics of encounter and the complex power dynamics inherent in cross-cultural exchange.

The performance took place on November 18 and 20, 2025.

Performance & Conception — Francis St-Germain
Visual Documentation — Dongbay (Yübo Xü)
Translation & Interpretation — Rajesh Kumar Kushwaha
Sound Recording — Francis St-Germain
Developed at Last Ship Residency
With the support of the Canada Council for the Arts

Credits

Deity reference: Yamantaka solitary

ANNIHILATION

Operatic Cycle in Five Parts

Annihilation is a large-scale interdisciplinary operatic cycle that questions the sovereignty of the self, using horror and the sublime as tools for transformation.

The project brings together voice, music, movement, audiovisual practices, technology and spatial experience within a unified dramaturgical system. Its conceptual foundations took shape at Last Ship through research into ritual, perception and embodied experience. It was also during this residency that Francis St-Germain met Romanian filmmaker and writer Monica Stan, who subsequently joined the project as a collaborator in libretto, dramaturgy and stage direction.

The cycle is structured in five autonomous parts, with three central dimensions — Body, Speech and Mind — unfolding across eleven sections of approximately one hour each, for a total duration of nearly eleven hours.

Drawing from Tantric Buddhist practices and other ritual technologies, Annihilation does not seek to reproduce these traditions aesthetically. Instead, it explores how principles such as repetition, concentration, gesture and duration can become artistic methods for transformation.

At the centre of the project is a question: what happens when horror and the sublime are experienced simultaneously?

Annihilation is conceived as a succession of perceptual states shaped by intimacy, destabilization and saturation.