Incandescent Visions: George Stamos’ "Sister Nightlight" Debuts in Toronto

George Stamos. (Photo: Susan Moss.)

George Stamos’ Sister Nightlight, which opened Thursday at Toronto’s Citadel and closed March 8, was a daring fusion of performance art, dance improvisation, and narrative storytelling. The piece began in darkness with Stamos—a Montreal-based artist and performer renowned for his inventive explorations of memory and identity—speaking into a microphone. His voice was unpretentious and intimate, drawing the audience into a fireside-style monologue that recounted a joyful childhood beachside campout with family and friends. Among the vivid details was a stumble into the bushes for a long, relaxing piss at night—a moment both mundane and evocative.

From this grounded opening, the work transitioned seamlessly into improvised movement—fluid, instinctive and rooted in the body’s own memory. While it may have evoked Stamos’ club-going days, the dance resisted easy interpretation; it was less about spectacle and more about the internal experience of moving—a kind of embodied storytelling that invites the audience to feel rather than analyze.

As the solo performance unfolded, it spiraled into wild flights of imagination. Stamos conjured surreal images of deer adorned with neon-bright eyeshadow, silver antlers, and red nail polish on their hooves—absurd yet strangely vivid moments that tumbled forth with the same sincerity as his childhood recollections. These transitions felt disjointed at times but held power in their unpredictability, mimicking the fragmented flow of memory and creativity. The audience was pulled into a dream state where logic dissolves into sensation.

A duffle bag carried throughout becomes a central motif—a Pandora’s box for Stamos’ imagination. When unzipped, it spilled out shimmering costumes in electric aqua and gold, changing him into a dazzling drag persona before our eyes. The act of transformation was raw yet celebratory: he smeared makeup across his face, pulled on towering disco boots, and wrapped a vibrant fabric around his head in the style of a ceremonial turban. This moment encapsulated both vulnerability and artifice in equal measure—a symbolic unveiling of creativity in its most unguarded form.

The approximately hour-long evening began with three short dance films showcasing Stamos’ collaborations with key figures in contemporary dance. Louise Lecavalier (of La La La Human Steps fame) appeared in one film amid a kaleidoscope of Barbie doll wigs and glittering artifice—a nod to 1980s performance art aesthetics—while another highlighted his mentorship with the San Francisco-based choreographer Sara Shelton Mann through introspective movement. The third film featured striking imagery of Stamos and Karla Etienne slapping their hands against the concrete walls of Montreal’s Palais de Justice—a visceral act hinting at political undercurrents without overtly stating them.

While Sister Nightlight had moments of unevenness—some transitions felt abrupt or overly indulgent—it ultimately succeeded as an exploration of memory, identity, and queer creativity. Stamos has a gentle yet magnetic presence that draws us into his world, even when it veers toward the surreal or opaque. Through his eyes, we glimpsed incandescent deer nibbling at the edges of his imagination alongside tender memories of childhood shadow play. The piece resists easy answers or linear narratives but invites us to revel in a liminal space where storytelling merges with movement, artifice transforms into authenticity, and childhood wonder meets adult flights of fancy.

– Deirdre Kelly is a Toronto-based journalist, author and internationally recognized dance critic and style writer on staff at The Globe and Mail newspaper from 1985 to 2017. She writes for Dance Magazine in New York, the Dance Gazette in London, and NUVO in Vancouver, and is a contributor to the International Dictionary of Ballet and AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds. The best-selling author of Paris Times Eight and Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, she is a two-time recipient (2020 and 2014) of Canada’s Nathan Cohen Prize for outstanding critical writing. In 2017, she joined York University as Editor of the award-winning The York University Magazine where she is also the publication’s principal writer. In 2023, she published her latest book, Fashioning The Beatles: The Looks That Shook The World.