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.
Dance Central Winter 2022
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