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.
Photos by: Ömer K. Yükseker
ADAPTATION PROJECT 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
PERFORMANCE DATES:
Wednesday, April 18 ( PREVIEW ) at 8pm
Thursday April 19 – Saturday April 21 at 8pm
Sunday April 22 at 4pm
Wednesday April 25 – Saturday, April 28 at 8pm
Sunday April 29 at 4pm
Tickets $25 |
Student/Senior, CADA, Artsworker $20
Wednesday April 18, Sunday April 22 and Wednesday April 25 – PWYC
ON SALE NOW
Dancemakers Centre for Creation
The Distillery Historic District, 55 Mill Street
The Cannery, Bldg. 58, Studio 313
[directions]
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
“Even knowledge, in the final analysis, maintains a relationship with ignorance. But it does so through repression or, in an even more effective and potent way, presupposition. The unknown is that which knowledge presupposes as the unexplored country to be conquered; the unconsciousness is the darkness into which consciousness will have to carry its light. In both cases something gets separated in order then to be permeated and attained.
The relationship with a zone of non-knowledge, on the other hand, keeps watch over this zone so that it will remain as it is. This is done not by exalting its darkness (as in mysticism), not by glorifying the arcane (as in liturgy), and not even by filling it with phantasms (as in psychoanalysis). At issue here is not a secret doctrine or a higher science, not a knowledge that we do not know.
Rather, it is possible that the zone of non-knowledge does not really contain anything special at all. Perhaps a zone of non-knowledge does not exist at all; perhaps only its gestures exist. As Kleist understood so well, the relationship with a zone of non-knowledge is a dance.”
Giorgio Agamben, from “The Last Chapter in the History of the World” in Nudities, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford University Press, California, 2011
Found via – roblist.wordpress.com/
// Truth about me (august 29th 1956)
“Hi this is Elvis Presley
I guess the first thing people want to know is why I can’t stand still when I’m singing
Some people tap their feet, some people snap their fingers, and some people sway back and forth
I just sort of do ‘em all together I guess
I ‘spose you know I…
Uh
I got a lot of cars
Well when I was driving a truck every time a big shiny car would drove by it started me sort of day dreamin’
I always felt that some day some how something would happen to change everything for me and I day dream about what I would be.
And the first car I every bought was the most beautiful car I’ve ever seen,
It was second hand but I parked it outside of the hotal the day I got it and sat up all night just lookin at it
I suppose this kinda raises another question:
Am I in love?
No…
I thought I’d been in love but I guess I wasn’t – it just passed over.
I guess I haven’t met the girl yet but I will
And I hope it wont be too long because I get lonesome sometimes “
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