Call for Participants // Tender City: The Silent Slow Dance Project
The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art is currently seeking community members to participate in a facilitated workshop and public performance of Tender City led by artist Kevin Jesuino.
Project Description
Tender City: The Silent Slow Dance Project is a site-specific performance and video installation that invites queer men to engage in consensual, silent slow dances in public urban environments. The project challenges the "hardness" of city infrastructure—spaces often shaped by efficiency and disconnection—by introducing collective softness. By slow dancing in historically significant or public spaces, we practice a "quiet resilience" that insists on care and relationality as foundational steps toward a more just and interdependent urban future.
The project is facilitated by Kevin Jesuino, a Vancouver-based Portuguese-Canadian Queer artist whose work has previously activated parking lots, street corners, and public parks across Canada. Committed to the labour of social justice and equitable liberation, Jesuino’s practice integrates movement and temporary public interventions to invite participants to navigate complex social questions through embodied actions. This ongoing series has served as a temporary reclamation of spaces that often feel indifferent to queer intimacy; by bringing the project to Kelowna, we continue this lineage, creating a localized archive of soft presence and collective witness.
Call for Participants
We are looking for local participants to join this Kelowna iteration. To ensure the project remains a safe and curated space, we are seeking individuals who:
Identify as a gay, bisexual, queer, and/or trans man.
Are comfortable engaging in a silent, partnered slow dance with another man in a public setting.
Share a sincere interest in the project's themes, such as cruising culture, male intimacy, and the reclamation of public space.
How to Get Involved
To express your interest, please contact the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art at info@alternatorcentre.com. Please use the subject line "Tender City Participation" in your email.
Next Steps
Initial Contact: After you submit your interest, a member of the project team will contact you to confirm your availability for the facilitated workshops and public activation on Saturday, May 23.
Review & Agreement: Once availability is confirmed, you will be asked to review and sign the Volunteer Participant Agreement.
Privacy & Safety: Documentation via video and photography will focus primarily on body language, hands, and the torso. Images will be captured from angles that do not include faces or visible identifiers to prioritize participant anonymity.
Commitment: Participants will take part in a back-to-back session consisting of a facilitated workshop, the public activation, and a post-activation de-brief. The estimated total time commitment is 4-5 hours.
Volunteer Basis: This is a volunteer-based project; participants will not receive financial compensation for their time or for the use of their image.
We are excited to bring Tender City to Kelowna and look forward to engaging our local community through this meaningful collaborative work.