Winter 2022
Dance Central A Dance Centre Publication
Content A Conversation with
Gabrielle Martin & Jeremiah Hughes Page 4
Kristen Lewis The Writing on the Wall
Page 15
Editor's Note Welcome to the Winter 2022 issue of Dance Central. As we glide into the second month of a new year, I would like to begin with this year’s theme for Black History Month—February and Forever: Celebrating Black History today and every day. Yes! We should and we shall celebrate in the roaring spirit of the Lunar Year of Tiger. How many celebrations have we called off or postponed in the name of COVID-19? Let us not forget how far we have come since the onset of the pandemic in 2020 and how much we have been through on a global, national and provincial scale in 2021. I start the ball of celebration rolling with a feature interview with Gabrielle Martin and Jeremiah Hughes. If you are a big fan of Cirque du Soleil like myself, you would be as thrilled as I am to feature these two amazing artists who are taking Vancouver by storm with their aerial dance performance. Martin is also the Director of Programming at PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. We celebrate not only the diversity of our dancers, but also how inclusive the genre of dance has come to be at Scotiabank Dance Centre. We continue celebrating the success of Dance In Vancouver 2021 with an article by Kristen Lewis on two audience engagement projects which captured the manifestations of the audience experience in writing. Dance writing, as it turns out, comes in many forms, including chalk graffiti on bathroom mirrors and glass balustrades. We thank all the artists who have contributed, and we welcome new writing and project ideas at any time to make Dance Central a more vital link to the community. Please send materials by email to editor@thedancecentre.ca. We look forward to many more conversations! Shanny Rann, Editor
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Limb(e)s Artists Gabrielle Martin and Jeremiah Hughes © Jessica Han
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A Conversation with
Gabrielle Martin and Jeremiah Hughes by Shanny Rann
Back when we could all still squeeze into a blue and yellow tent, attending a Cirque du Soleil show has always been the highlight of my year. Never have I imagined that one day I would have the opportunity to interview two lead artists of Cirque for Dance Central. In 2018, Gabrielle Martin and Jeremiah Hughes founded their aerial dance company, Corporeal Imago, and co-created its first show Limb(e)s with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, creative collaborators, and residencies at Cirkör LAB (SE), L’Espace Catastrophe (BE), and Le Centre de Création (FR). In 2019, they presented an initial version of Limb(e)s at Montréal Complètement Cirque (CA), La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines (CA), and Assembly Festival at Edinburgh Festival Fringe (UK) where it was shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award. Limb(e)s premiered in 2021 at the Dancing on the Edge Festival (Vancouver, BC) and toured in digital form to Assembly Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Among the themes we talked about, those of surpassing human limitations and saying less stood out for me and I was left feeling inspired about the future of aerial dance in Vancouver after our conversation.
Beginnings SR: I was captivated by your contemporary aerial dance performance Limb(e)s at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021. What led you to this point in your career today?
for circus was developing because I started performing through fire dancing. It was an immediate conduit to get me performing. I got a lot of experience in a short period of time, performing and choreographing my own, doit-yourself fire dance projects.
GM: When I was young, I was involved in competitive sports, ice hockey specifically. In my mid to late teens, I was seeking more opportunities for individual expression than what sports were allowing me. That brought me into hockey, somatic dance practices and contact improvisation. From there, I grew an interest in contemporary dance technique. At the same time, my passion
Aerial dance drew me for a few reasons. The physicality and intensity, which drew me to sports originally. There's also something about circus and the dramaturgy of it, which surpasses human limitations. I didn't come from formal training in ballet or gymnastics. I came to aerial dance through street circus which seemed more open and accessible. Along the way, I did a Bachelor of Fine Arts in
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Limb(e)s Artists Gabrielle Martin and Jeremiah Hughes © Jessica Han Dance Central Winter 2022
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Dance Central The Dance Centre Scotiabank Dance Centre Level 6, 677 Davie Street Vancouver BC V6B 2G6 T 604.606.6400 F 604.606.6401 info@thedancecentre.ca www.thedancecentre.ca Dance Central is published quarterly by The Dance Centre for its members and for the dance community. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent Dance Central or The Dance Centre. The editor reserves the right to edit for clarity or length, or to meet house requirements.
Editor, Art Director & Layout Shanny Rann
Copy Editor Nazanin Oghanian
Design Layout Becky Wu
Dance Foundation Board Members: Chair Linda Blankstein Secretary Anndraya T. Luui Treasurer Janice Wells Directors Samantha Luo,
Contributors to this issue:
Mark Osburn, Sasha Morales,
Gabrielle Martin, Jeremiah Hughes, Kristen Lewis
Andrea Benzel
Photo credits Front Cover: Limb(e)s Artists Gabrielle Martin and Jeremiah Hughes © Jessica Han Back Cover: Scribe anonymous Audience Experience Statement. From: Kelly McInnes, Blue Space. © Kristen Lewis
Dance Centre Board Members: Chair
Dance Centre Staff: Executive Director Mirna Zagar
Programming Coordinator Raquel Alvaro
Associate Producer Linda Blankstein
Director of Marketing Heather Bray
Digital Marketing Coordinator
Jason Wrobleski
Lindsay Curtis
Vice Chair
Membership/Outreach Coordinator
Andrea Reid
Secretary
Nazanin Oghanian
Tin Gamboa
Lead Technician
Treasurer
Chengyan Boon
Annelie Vistica
Comptroller
Directors Arash Khakpour, Rosario Kolstee, Anndraya T. Luui, Linda Gordon, Judith Garay, Katia Oteman, Zahra Shahab
Elyn Dobbs
Venue and Operations Manager Simran Ghesani
Founded in 1986 as a leading dance resource centre for dance professionals and the public in British Columbia, The Dance Centre is a multifaceted organization. The Dance Centre presents an exciting season of shows and events, serves a broad membership of 300 professional dance companies and individual artists, and offers a range of activities unparalleled in Canadian dance. The Dance Centre is BC's primary resource centre for the dance profession and the public. The activities of The Dance Centre are made possible bynumerous individuals. Many thanks to our members, volunteers, community peers, board of directors and the public for your ongoing commitment to dance in BC. Your suggestions and feedback are always welcome. The operations of The Dance Centre are supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia, the BC Arts Council, and the City of Vancouver through the Office of Cultural Affairs.
contemporary dance at Concordia University, and I studied aerial dance independently in Montreal for several years. I toured with Cavalia for four years and toured with Cirque du Soleil for four years. That's where I met Jeremiah. We both realized we were not able to express the range that we had as artists. That was what inspired Limb(e)s, it is about our journey from Cirque du Soleil into a rich, dystopian limbo. Limb(e)s is pronounced both ways. It's a play on limbs and the French limbes, which is limbo. JH: I was also big into sports when I was young. When I was eleven years old, at my mother and my stepfather's wedding, I went onto the dance floor, and I started to have the time of my life. I convinced my parents to get me into dance classes as soon as possible. I grew up in Toronto, which has one of the top competitive studios in North America (I'm a little biased). I trained at The Canadian Dance Company, and I got well-versed in ballet, tap, jazz, hip hop and gymnastics. When I entered professional dance, I moved to New York for internships and worked on cruise ships that led me to the Mediterranean, Orlando, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, where I stayed for seven years working with Cirque du Soleil and other large companies. I got the opportunity to be a lead character in a show for four and a half years, touring the world with Cirque du Soleil. I have always been trying to learn, adapt and grow, and that's probably why I was able to start dancing late. Around 2018, Gabrielle and I became friends, and it was a meeting of minds. We thought
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how interesting it would be if we could make creative projects together. Limb(e)s became a huge thing that would get us out of bed on the weekends because we were actually excited about it. We were physically exhausted by the end of the week from work, but we were emotionally uplifted to have this project of our own to look forward to. After our shows at Montreal Complètement Cirque and Edinburgh Festival, we took a slight break from it while we figured out life matters. When we came back to it, we got a different vision, pacing and approach, and the work was richer for it.
Transition from Commercial to Contemporary Aerial Dance SR: Even though you conceived Limb(e) s years before the pandemic, its theme fits in well with what we are going through on a daily basis, not just individually, but as a community, which leads me to my next question with regards to your transition. Perhaps in contemporary dance, we draw the line too clearly between what is commercial and artistic. Do you both feel that you have to make that transition consciously as an artist, when you're performing for Cirque du Soleil as opposed to in Limb(e)s? JH: When you are singing, there is a cadence, a timing with the presentation. Typically, in the more performative or commercial side of circus or dance, there are accents on shorter sequences allowing space for applause, or the wow effect, whereas I would find that in contemporary or artistic performance, one would take the time for nuances so that
when the audience leaves the theatre, there would be more of an impact. There could be moments of excellence and applause in art, but I think that more importance is placed on the whole experience and what you walk away with, versus any individual moment and any individual being deified or having an apotheosis. GM: We were working in entertainment, which is also needed in the world, but the range of emotions explored in the context of commercial entertainment is usually narrower, it's often the wow factor or the laugh, not necessarily the emotional impact that stays with you and haunts you for days to come. That is the work we were interested in both experiencing as audience members and creating as artists. One thing I would say that has been a struggle is that we do come from years of needing to have that show energy and to sell to big audiences. Working within the circus (it happens in dance a lot too), we were seeing shows where performers were doing so much but saying so little. This sounds judgmental, but we know it is not easy to create impactful work. It is hard, even in our process, to move away from having to do do do physically, thinking that just by doing a lot of impressive things, that somehow it is more meaningful, when often it is not the case. JH: We both have skill sets that would allow us to be far more impressive in the moment. I do not display any of my ability to do ground tumbling throughout the show. Gabrielle does not display her ability to do a straight vertical apparatus. Still, both of our skill sets interlace into the work; she is able to do a beautiful Dance Central Winter 2022
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Part of the process of becoming a circus artist was also proving to myself that things that did not seem possible were possible. Surpassing human limitations is quite inspiring and a mandate that I live by. aerial solo and my awareness in the air has been elevated due to that training. We are not trying to insert more noise than what would be beneficial to the work. There is a very sobering moment in our piece which I do not think has much of a space in commercial work.
Performing for Big Audiences and the Camera SR: Does it feel different to go from performing before big audiences to just the two of you in front of a camera at Scotiabank Dance Centre? GM: I know a lot of artists speak to the challenge of not having a live audience, but it was not challenging for me, maybe because I am also a co-creator of the work. When we went into filming, we were excited about how the medium of film could convey the dramaturgy of the work. We had a lot of buy-in doing it that way and we have been thoughtful about it. I have done 800 8
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performances of Toruk with Cirque du Soleil at arenas. They were not one of those performances where you see the person in front of you, and you have this beautiful exchange. The spotlights were blinding, and it was just a mass out there, still there was that energy. I do not need the public to tap into that commitment, maybe because I am too inside myself as a performer, but to me, it was not really a challenge. JH: As I was saying about timing, we were previously doing work that would have an element of twenty seconds of burst or two minutes of burst, then turn and face the audience. As actors, we had many things that we had to do internally, but then we were definitely doing it for an audience. Limb(e)s didn't even have a downstage or a front that we could cheat to have a better camera angle, many of the elements were quite insular and honest between Gabrielle and me. Had we been able to have an audience, it would have been wonderful
but just as well, we were able to be very honest with each other. It was just Gabrielle and me moving in space together and an amazing technical team that was supporting us. GM: And trusting the camerawork too! We knew we could also let the camerawork enhance the performance as it should. We don't have to sell it all the time because the camera is right there and doing its job. It is that balance. It is interesting that in dance, it is rare that we perform for the camera, so it can be destabilizing; but in theatre, there is the film industry and so many actors who love performing for film. It is not a problem and often, they just have to change how they are delivering the work to be in balance with the camera.
to strive towards—saying more—and what exactly is it that you would like to say more of? GM: Part of the process of becoming a circus artist was also proving to myself that things that did not seem possible were possible. Surpassing human limitations is quite inspiring and a mandate that I live by. What the aerial apparatus does for me, is look at the agency of the individual against external forces, which is gravity in the literal sense. It is a real struggle to stay up there. It is hard to sustain staying up there for a long time, that will it takes against external forces is something that is very honest when you are up in the air. I am interested in how much agency we have, or are we as humans, victims to the cosmos?
JH: When you have the camera up next to you, you are not trying to project as you would to fill the environment or exerting the energy to hit the back wall. We were able to be more natural while putting ourselves through this unnatural environment. We had a lot of communication, planning and storyboarding in our pre-production stage. We used many angles that we would not be able to do with a live audience in the film version. One of the things was taking aerial camera work from above. It is very beautiful, we do not have an audience up there, so why not just embrace the element and do something unique that the audience can appreciate in video?
There is a lot that does not make sense, and there's a lot of pain and suffering in the world. There's a lot of why that's still unanswered. We are both people who feel very deeply and have a need for a space to express that. Our work is a way for us to process some of our existential questions, whether or not the individual has agency over fate. In Greek tragedies, we are at the mercy of the gods. That is a belief I resonate with, even though I do not necessarily or consciously want to believe that, but innately, there is some belief there. That is the bigger existential theme that aerial dance has allowed me to explore.
Doing Less and Saying More
What I realized after obsessing fifteen years on becoming as technically proficient as I could in
SR: Gabrielle, what you said earlier about performance doing so much, but saying so little stuck with me. Is this something that you want
aerial performance is there is always one more trick that you can get, you can always make it that much more dangerous or impressive. Dance Central Winter 2022
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In that environment, you are never at the top. There is a new generation that is always coming up with more difficult and impressive skills. In some ways, the circus is very sport-like, as well as in commercial dance or classical dance, where it is all about the technique. It detracts us from what speaks. At least for me, as an audience member, what speaks to me is not seeing the most incredible technique. One of the greatest powers of theatre and dance is to provoke catharsis amongst the audience, that ability for the audience member to see, to resonate with the emotional process that's happening on stage or to have some sort of emotional transformation that is facilitated
by watching a human on stage going through these experiences. For our upcoming project we are working on, which is premiering as part of the Global Dance Connections series in the fall of 2022, we would rather have less happening in the air with the right quality, than a whole lot happening in the air without much subtle nuances. That is definitely something that we are continuing to pursue. This is the first work I will be outside of and that will probably help because it is hard after so many years to not think that you need to do more in that moment. So maybe from the outside, it will be a little easier to just stay honest to what is important.
Limb(e)s Artists Gabrielle Martin and Jeremiah Hughes © Jessica Han
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Training for Aerial Dancers SR: Virtuosity can be trained, but the subtle quality of saying more and staying honest that you are both working towards, how do you cultivate that? How do you communicate that to the dancers you're working with? GM: That is why we have chosen to work with dancers. We have been lucky in who has agreed to work with us. What we share with them is actually the boring technique, the propositions we have for creative exploration, but they bring that awareness. It is rare to find communities melding dance and aerial, even in Montreal, where you have an amazing, very
strong dance scene and a very strong circus scene. I think it is because the philosophies behind the training are so different with circus and dance, that they are not necessarily cohesive. In my early training, I did Body-Mind Centering with Jennifer Mascall. That awareness is almost in complete contrast with circus and aerial training, because it can actually be unsafe. You have to execute things in a machine-like way sometimes, because you are working with speed, where there is not a lot of time to think or feel to the same extent, and also the only way to do it safely is to be as tight as possible. JH: In circus training, if I wanted to do any aerial, I would already have to have a certain level of physical capacity. There is no space for processing “How does this make me feel?”, “How can we embody this sense of being?”. There is not a lot of space for sensitizing as much as now we do this. When I teach gymnastics, I am very conscious not to say “Do it one last time”, because if it is the last time, you approach it differently. It can actually affect how you are in the air, and people get hurt that way. I am very careful to say, “Let's do it again”. I want to end on a good one to get the mentality right. I do not want to inform the subconscious that this is to be treated differently. I don't want them to think. I want them to keep their feet together, keep their abs tight and jump backwards and we will get there. I'm not asking them to think about what it feels like because as soon as you start adding those elements, it detracts from that dynamic safety that has to happen. What we did, especially in this new project, is Dance Central Winter 2022
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prioritize people who are very aware of their bodies. We want good movers, who are very connected to their bodies and in connection with the aesthetic that we are going for. We teach them how to do aerial because we do not need people to go up and show off some of the most dynamic, impressive skills that circus has to offer. What we would love to see is for somebody to go up and have a moment of flight, just to be able to do that. It does not have to be a feat of strength for it to be impressive. We have been very fortunate with the people whom we are working with, and that we are able to have a very human experience in the air.
Why Vancouver? SR: What is the aerial dance scene like in Vancouver, and why Vancouver? GM: I grew up here. I left in 2006 to study at Concordia University in Montreal. It was not in my plan to come back. Both Jeremiah and I are passionate artists who want to be working as artists. Vancouver was not on my radar; we saw ourselves in a bigger city. Of course, the pandemic happened and for a few reasons we moved here, but it has actually been wonderful, because it is not oversaturated like the bigger cities are. We felt there is a lot of support here and a lot of room for growth. We are one of the two aerial dance companies in Vancouver. JH: While there is not much of an aerial dance scene compared to other larger cities, it has been very exciting for us to start from the ground level where we can have conversations and share with others. We arrived in Vancouver during the pandemic so 12
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we have not been able to network as deeply as we would with the community. We have been inviting artists to do a little bit of aerial with us, not only for us to meet each other, but also for them to meet this entire other realm of movement. Not only do we have a set of dancers whom we have already been able to connect to and whom we are excited to work with, but we also have an expanded list of dancers whom we have met and whom we are excited to work with on future projects.
Diversity & Inclusion and the Role of Teaching in Aerial Dance SR: Would you like to talk about the diversity and inclusion in Vancouver’s aerial dance scene as compared to what you have experienced elsewhere? GM: Yes, it is so important for us to create with people of colour and to show them onstage. That is actually part of why we have been reaching out, not just to meet people, but also to meet more diverse dance artists as well. There are a lot of ways dance can be inclusive and we are not going to pretend that we are making work that is accessible and representative of everybody, but we would like to start with the diversity of racialized artists, both behind the scenes and onstage. For our upcoming project, a third of the artists on stage will be of colour and our goal is 50%, but we need to support the infrastructure of that within the city. It is going to be a long-term process and that is why we are committed to teaching.
JH: What we are doing is taking our opportunity and trying to get as much diversity as possible within the support we currently have to present. As we gain more traction and funding, we would be able to go into more environments and create roles for all people, in particular people of colour. That is something to work towards. What we are trying to do is prioritize, because there has been such a history of not everyone having an equal opportunity or being supported to get the right training, we do not have as many professionals. What we have to do is to make training available. The teenagers I am teaching now could potentially be our performers in a couple years. That is our end goal: to have this entire community brought up. GM: Even in bigger cities, when you get into the professional level of dance or circus, you do not see that much more diversity than
here. Vancouver is really diverse in terms of its demographics, that is why there has been more discourse around racism and the intersections of race and class, how that relates to creating elite level physical performers, who have been able to dedicate much of their life towards something that usually pays so little. JH: Among the performers in Las Vegas, there was typically a smaller number of people of colour, that is disproportionate to the actual population. A lot of the training I received has been in professional environments. If I never had that first opportunity that led to the second and the third, I would not be having this conversation with you today. Recognizing that, trying to make opportunities available is a larger endgame that we have a lot more interest in. In our team, both on stage and off stage, we are honoured that it has been a very fortunate meeting of priorities.
Limb(e)s Artists Gabrielle Martin and Jeremiah Hughes © Jessica Han
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Audience Engagement and The Future of Aerial Dance SR: Having talked about the potential of aerial dance in Vancouver, how are you planning to engage with our audience here? How is The Dance Centre supporting your vision? GM: The Dance Centre has been incredibly supportive. We are artists in residence now and they have been very generous with us. We are excited about teaching and sharing our unique skill set because we both trained as dancers and worked in the circus. JH: I am not worried about finding our audience in Vancouver because the work is merited, and it is interesting. It is more about finding the right people to come, hang out and enjoy the work. It is also about meeting the times. If we were to look back thirty years ago at contemporary dance, there would not be elements of acrobatic floor movement. What The Dance Centre is putting on now would have not belonged with the programming then, because it would not fit with what we saw as contemporary dance. There is a future to aerial dance—how we went from a linear modality to this acrobatic, vertical modality. We are just opening up another pathway, we are getting off the x-axis, and going for the y-axis and bringing dance along.
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Gabrielle Martin is an aerial and contemporary dance artist, choreographer and artistic producer who has performed over 1,400 shows internationally. She studied somatic movement and contact improvisation and performed fire manipulation and stilt walking before obtaining her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Contemporary Dance from Concordia University (Montreal, 2009). In 2015, she began working with Cirque du Soleil as part of the creation of TORUK - The First Flight. She toured with this show until it closed in 2019, during which time she was the principal female character, Tsyal, and performed a solo aerial silks number. Jeremiah Hughes began his training in Toronto at the prestigious Canadian Dance Company. After a decade of competing internationally and representing Canada on the world stage he enrolled at the interdisciplinary Randolph College for the Performing Arts in Toronto. Apart from being a featured Soloist on So You Think You Can Dance and performing with artists such as Bruno Mars, Meat Loaf and Taylor Swift, he was also in the Lead Male Role of Ralu in Cirque Du Soleil’s TORUK - The First Flight where he was the show’s Dance Captain.
The Writing on the Wall: Scribe and Chora: Graphia listen to the audience experience at Dance In Vancouver 2021 Kristen Lewis, JD.
This article consists of a description of two related audience-engagement projects deployed during Dance In Vancouver (DIV) 2021, along with photos I took of audience experience statements scribed in chalk on the walls of Scotiabank Dance Centre. Rather than assigning a traditional narrative to these images, I present them as is, without commentary save references to the names of the artists and the shows that inspired them. Further, programme notes, summaries of the shows’ concepts, and such are deliberately omitted from my account here. I mean no disrespect to the artists or to the processes they use to describe their work. Instead, my account of Scribe and Chora: Graphia seeks to be faithful to the spirit of these works, which seek to foreground audience experience as authoritative sources on what a performance “means.” This article therefore approaches the act of show-signification from a different, perhaps disorienting angle–one in which ways that show land audiences are given primary voice. A thousand other narratives could be told other than the ones that surface in these images about the beautiful, generous, provocative work that assembled under the banner of DIV 2021 and IndigeDIV 2021. But these are the stories I gathered; the writing I wrote on the walls after listening to what the anonymous Yous that comprised the audience had to say.
Chora: Graphia and Scribe, installed in Scotiabank Dance Centre Lobby, November 25-29, 2021.
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Disorientation and the Loss of Experience In the wake of World War I, Walter Benjamin bemoaned the loss of the storyteller, a role he reasoned requires access to something trauma takes from people—the capacity for experience. For Benjamin, experience, as distinct from mere information about the world, requires an embodied connection to the sensory texture of existence, a connection that sudden change severs. When experience disappears, we are left with mere information, third-hand rumours about the world that filter through the numbed-out haze of our disorientation. He wrote: A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (The Storyteller, 1936; trans. in Illuminations, 1968)
When I thought about what it would mean to gather for DIV in late 2021, the first time the Biennial has occurred since the ‘beforetimes,’ I knew that disorientation would be a necessary part of the equation. (This is not to press the point of COVID-19 exceptionalism too much; the reality is that many, both human and non-humans, have lived with profound disorientation and manifold apocalypses long before COVID-19 united the world under the banner of a single crisis-narrative.) The wonderful curators for DIV 2021 and IndigeDIV 2021 (Angela Conquet from Melbourne, Australia, and Michelle Olson and Starr Muranko from Vancouver) were sensitive to the realities of this disorientation. (As were most of us, as evidenced in the title of artistscholar P. Megan Andrews’ installation, The Disorientation Project.) Rather than trying to recreate a pre-COVID-19 version of what live dance ought to be, they worked to create an event that celebrated and embraced the changes “these times” have wrought. In the closing lines of their beautiful curatorial statement, they wrote: This place between is a time to mourn what
This observation that “nothing remained unchanged but the clouds above” could be a commentary about the era of COVID-19 and all the changes, affective and practical, it has wrought. “These times” have been nothing if not profoundly disorienting— a truism so obvious it feels embarrassing to mention. This is true for just about every human on earth, but the brand of disorientation for those of us who work in live performance has been its own strange, strange animal. 16
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has been lost, let go of what we must and dive deep into ourselves for the impulses that will move us forward./This is a time for unusual art as agencer of change, porous in thought and anchoring in holding/ Place site and magma/ for/ emancipating inquiry,/ constellational imagination,/ potent becomings/ for every/body/ the body, irreducible and present and here/We invite you to gather with us to listen, to learn and to
discover through dance what this moment in time is whispering to us all. In my talks on zoom with Angela Conquet in the months and weeks leading up to DIV 2021 and in the reflections that followed these talks, I worked to imagine ways of engaging audiences that would resonate with this invitation to gather in a posture of openness to deep listening. I wanted my audience engagement work to be attuned to the peculiarities of “this moment in time” and to what it might be “whispering to us all.” I hypothesized that a choreographed method
of attuning to the experience of audience members could call attention to the threads of emergent meaning that connect us, through and past and as the disorientations that the COVID-19 times have wrought. From these talks with Angela and my meditations on what it takes to recover the capacity to listen to the tones of embodied experience amid the ruins of profound disorientation, a simple concept was born— that I would ask audience members, after the shows, to speak to their experience, by writing something down on a simple old
Scribe anonymous audience experience statement, from Participant #001. From Zahra Shahab, Al-Fattah: When I bow, I see the Opening (Work in Process). November 25, 2021. Text: “People generate heat, are a hearth. I feel like I’ve been returned to the hearth.” Kristen Lewis scribing text while listening to Making Ceremony, a Digital DIV conversation hosted by Michelle Olson with Tasha Faye Evans, Jeannette Kotowich, and Lee Su-Feh. Dance Central Winter 2022
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Chora: Graphia audience experience statements, gathered on index cards and displayed in the lobby of Scotiabank Dance Centre. From P. Megan Andrews, Disorientation Project, viewed on November 24, 2021. Text: “A Strange Calm is Found.” (Text displayed above audience experience statements gathered from The Biting School’s Orangutang.)
school index card, expressing a bit of what the shows stirred in them. These old index cards would be reminiscent of analogue archival processes, including the ones Walter Benjamin himself used, long ago, to catalogue an enormous collection of quotations that together resonated in ways that speak to the vastness of experience lost with the march of ‘progress’ and official accounts of “history” (in his monumental unfinished work The Arcades Project). I was conceiving of these audience experience statements as an alternate form of accounting for the “history” of a performance, a kind of counter-narrative that would foreground the “reverberations” of audience members’ experiences as authoritative sources on what a performance means. I wondered if this form of attention to audience experience 18
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might indicate something of the myriad and complex ways that a show lives on through and past the artists who author it, complicating in fruitful ways our ideas of what a show is, where it lives, and who or what authors it.
The coming together of Chora: Graphia and Scribe Often invisibly, as hidden weavers of the space itself, these reverberations of meaning not only articulate but also shape the space that births both artist and audience—or so I suspected. I reasoned that paying attention to these reverberations-through-and-as-space might expose a little bit of the “connective tissues” that bind all of us, human and not, who were in some way connected to DIV 2021. I proposed
a project titled Chora: Graphia, inspired by the roots of the English word “choreography” in the Greek words Chora and Graphia. Chora is a word with a complex history; it means at once space and in-between-ness, and has strong associations with the womb as generative space. Graphia means both writing and drawing and has associations with writingas-carving. I wanted a project that would tend to the writing that the generative space of DIV 2021 was carving in time—and conversely, that would imagine writing as a form of carving new kinds of spaces. As it turned out, my preoccupation with audience experience as an entry-point into the question of the life and afterlife of a work of art—its experience as opposed to an official narrative coming from either artist or expert of what it means—dovetailed well with the work of the acclaimed Melbourne-based performance artist and curator Leisa SheltonCampbell, who Angela had invited to deploy a work at DIV 2021 called Scribe. Scribe describes itself as a “live writing project within festival and event contexts in which artist Scribes capture the experience of members of the public to create the democratic document of the festival.” It has appeared in high-profile international dance and live arts festival contexts around the world, seeking to reorient the concept of authority over what a work means in the experience of audience members—thus democratizing the process by which a work acquires meaning. After it became clear, for COVID-19 related reasons, that Leisa and the Melbourne team could not travel to Vancouver, Angela asked
if I would be willing to act as an assistant to the project—the boots on the ground charged with the task of asking audience members, after select shows, to speak to the Melbourne artists on the phone. The Melbourne team would listen to audience members on the phone and, as in past iterations of the work, take careful notes. They would then send extracts of these notes back to me; my work would be to transcribe them in physical form on the staircase walls and mirrors of the Scotiabank Dance Centre lobby. DIV 2021 was the first time that Scribe took on this long-distance format; committed resolutely to liveness, Leisa was at first hesitant about whether this adaptation would work. With Angela’s encouragement and The Dance Centre’s support, we decided to go ahead with the project. I was fortunate to have an assistant on the ground to assist with this
These words are a reminder that dance has the unique ability to return us... to the ground of our shared being and to our belonging. Dance Central Winter 2022
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project, Vancouver-based dance artist Avery Smith whose able contributions and keen, deeply articulate sense of the continuities between dance and writing helped the project immensely. Thus Scribe and Chora: Graphia deployed together, around this shared commitment to listening attentively and democratically to how DIV 2021 was coming alive in the audiences who beheld its shows. The results were incredible beyond what any of us could have predicted. Audiences spoke generously and with incredibly sensitive articulation; a testament to the power of the presenting artists’ work, to the depth of the capacity, in this city, to experience performance deeply, through and across the multiple disorientations these last two years have wrought. After so much time apart, we felt the preciousness of live performance in a new way. It was so good to be together. The words of the audience members lived on after the show, for a time on the walls of Scotiabank Dance Centre—and now, as photos that remember the writing after it has been erased, the walls returned to other uses. These words are a reminder that dance has the unique ability to return us, even through the awkward and only-ever partial medium of language, to the ground of our shared being and to our belonging (however provisional and precarious). Beyond and behind these words are living bodies, assemblages of sensation, hope, fear, desire—as I was too, my tired hands writing in chalk on the walls of 20
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the lobby, marveling at the simple power of people gathering together, as we have done for eons, to watch how humans struggle to make meaning out of and through chaos— how we fight against the pull of numbness to experience, as artists and as audiences, our lives in time. A permanent record of all the notes taken by Scribe is now filed in the archives of The Dance Centre and will be available, in keeping with the democratic ethos of Scribe, for anyone to reference down the road.
Kristen Lewis, JD is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer, dance/performance artist, and movement educator. In all of these overlapping and intersecting roles, she is interested in how the beauty and intimacy of embodied, land-based approaches to movement and storytelling can open up information-saturated Human Persons to something of the experience we lose when we forget our emotional, sensory, animal selves and neglect the wider circle of relations that ground us in the places that hold us and make us. She is the artistic director of Gull Cry Dance, and is completing her LLM (Master of Laws) at the Osgoode Hall Law School.
Scribe anonymous Audience Experience Statement from Participant #008. From: Kelly McInnes, Blue Space and Mahaila Patterson-O'Brien, Mid-Light: A Translucent Memory. November 26, 2021. Text: “Suddenly I’m thinking about the ocean, about mothers, mother earth, a tearing apart and everything so wet.” With Scribe and Chora: Graphia collaborator Avery Smith. Dance Central Winter 2022
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