A work by choreographer Michael Trent made in collaboration with the Dancemakers, composer Christopher Willes, dramaturge Jacob Zimmer, lighting designer Kimberly Purtell and costume designer Vanessa Fischer.
Photos: Omer Yukseker
Are there not alternatives to memory and forgetting?
“The history of time and the time of history should include a history of rhythms, which is missing… time is at once fleeting ungraspable… and grasped, timed, timed chronometrically. In historical time, what is the role of history in the forms of memory, recollections, narratives? Are there not alternatives to memory and forgetting: periods where the past returns – and periods where the past effaces itself? Perhaps such an alternative would be the rhythm of history.”
(Lefebvre: Rhythmanalysis , 51).
Silent negotiation / talking doesn’t always make things clearer
Two colours are modulated by permutations of the phrase “Talking Doesn’t Always Make Things Clearer” through an augmentation of text-to-speech software (in maxmsp). A third color (center) is created through the combination of the two.
Confronting our past, with love.
Choreography by Michael Trent
Created with and performed by Robert Abubo, Amanda Acorn,Kate Holden, Benjamin Kamino and Simon Renaud
Music by: Christopher Willes and Thom Gill
Lighting Designer: Kimberly Purtell
Costume Designer: Vanessa Fischer
Photos by: Ömer K. Yükseker
The ADAPTATION PROJECT re-imagines a dance from the Toronto based contemporary dance company Dancemakers 100-plus repertoire, a body of work amassed over its 38-year history. Wanting to engage in a process other than a traditional remount, resident choreographer Michael Trent and collaborators have created a new dance piece through collectively responding to choreographer Mitchell Rose’s 1974 piece Following Station Identification, originally set to music by Luciano Berio and Lukas Foss.
Working collaboratively in the studio the participating artists have gone through a shared process of encountering a variety of archival materials (rehearsal films, reel to reel audio recordings of the original score, and interviews with members of the original Dancemakers cast) which Trent likens to an archaeological dig – uncovering the original choreography, and finding responses to it, layer by layer. The result is a fresh new work exploring the vary nature of adaptation as process and product.
I’ve been working for the past few months on a new piece by Choreographer Meryem Alaoui called ‘Renvoi’. The piece explores themes of the documentary, the sensation of reflection in the body, and looking/feeling out ‘the other’. Meryem, and everyone else involved in the project, is super inspiring and it’s been a great learning experience. An excerpt of the work will be shown March 29th and 31st at Bad Ass Dance Fun, Harbourfront Center and shares a bill with Julia Male (Toronto), kirsch&keenan dance endeavors (Montreal/Germany), and Cara Spooner (Toronto).
by Julia Male as part of at the wrecking ball.
Created for Meryem Alaoui
Sound design by Christopher Willes
Next weekend I will be doing live sound design in Andrea Spaziani’s piece “The Moment Before” as part of Dancemakers TWOBYFOUR a festival of duets January 21-23, 2012. The festival as a whole runs January 17-28 and features works by George Stamos (Montreal), Peter Bingham / EDAM (Vancouver), Andrea Spaziani (Toronto) and Martin Nachbar (Berlin).
Andrea’s piece is a duet with Amanda Acorn and finds the two performers suspended in time as they prepare, warm-up, and freak-out in an attempt to come to terms with their scheduled debut. Their rituals, personal voodoo, and self-doubt intensify, as every second brings them closer to the edge of an incomprehensible future. The sound design explores live amplification of the space (feedback, sampling etc.), and the subliminal elements of sound (room tones, background noise), as a way to think about the body state just before and during action.
Click here for more information and tickets: www.dancemakers.org/twobyfour
“…Ive used the motif, I suppose it is, of the nurse and shop mannequins to try to feel what someone else feels. Looking for yourself in art, trying to see what someone else saw, this is to do with the separation that there is between people and the impossibility of completely feeling what someone else feels. I think that this is most extreme, and most human, and most painful when someone is caring for someone else or someone is nursing someone else and trying to feel what they feel while being a companion to them. This might be in friendship or in actual nursing, or in a relationship, but to try to feel what someone else feels and to accompany them in their experience of life and in their suffering to me is related to what I am looking for in language as I apprehend it from somewhere outside me…”
- Cathy Wilkes
Images from our show in August at labspace in Toronto.
unititled performance/video installation with Julia Male
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