In the weeks leading
up to Guelph Dance Festival 2013,
some of the amazing artists who will perform at the Festival will also share
their vision with us here on the blog. These intimate, behind-the-scenes looks
will bring us closer to the artistry, process, and experience of dance. We
encourage you to not just read these amazing stories, but to ask questions or
engage in conversation about dance in our comments section below. Welcome
to our 15th anniversary year!
On Friday May 31 from 5pm to 6pm at Dancetheatre
David Earle, the Guelph Dance Festival
in collaboration with Musagetes will
present IMAGEO artworks and the
premiere of Invisible Hands as part
of the Local Initiatives Series.
Georgia Simms joins us today.
Georgia: Invisible Hands is an experiment.
What happens when two social science students, trained in
dance, and a poet team up with a modern dancer and a context artist to explore
themes of transition, political relationships, community-engaged research and
dialogue through a choreographic process?
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| Photo by Peter Grimaldi |
The inspiration for this experiment began with questions of
transition, motivated by research conducted by Musagetes—a local organization that promotes the arts and artistic
creativity as tools for social transformation. The research consisted
of ongoing community dialogues hosted in Guelph in 2011/2012. An emergent theme
in these dialogues (which included a diverse array of topics such as food
security, affordable housing and cultural development) was the current state of
local democracy, and the shared desire to create thriving systems for citizen participation
in decision-making to refresh those that feel stuck, adversarial and reactive.
This was a common thread that spanned across the different topics.
Within a collaborative and adaptive creation framework, this
Guelph-based group has been kinesthetically exploring experiences ranging from conflict,
blame, avoidance and defensiveness to active communication, empathy, opening and
an embracing of change. The movement vocabulary is primarily informed by
gestures and metaphors that were collected during a movement-based workshop,
“Empowering the Public Body”, hosted in November 2012, where city staff and residents
of Guelph were invited to share their opinions and experiences about municipal
governance and decision-making, both with their words and their bodies. While
the workshop did not effectively capture a balanced set of perspectives, the
gestures, metaphors and messages that were collected, and our critical
reflections on the experience of the workshop, gave us much to work with in the
studio.
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| Photo by Peter Grimaldi |
By embodying the “harvested” gestures in improvisational
exercises, and allowing these shapes and movements to evolve and grow, in both
independent and relational contexts, we have been investigating the ways in
which persistent patterns of conflict and blame can shift into ways of being
that can truly hold complexity and foster empathy and understanding.
This video documents the process linking community dialogue and Invisible Hands.
The process has been guided by two overarching questions: How can we move past entrenched beliefs and assumptions about the way things are? How can we improve the quality of relationships that exist between people who engage in making collective decisions? By examining assumptions, clichés and the patterns revealed in the “same old stories”, we are discovering where there is potential for action and change. It is hoped that participants from the research dialogues and the workshop will attend the performance and witness their contributions in motion! The audience will be encouraged to take advantage of the opportunity for shared reflection, comments and questions following the performance.
This layer of experimentation, and part of the intention
behind this project, is the investigation of the idea of “policy theatre”. In other words, rather than having a group of
people who are wrestling with the challenges of decision-making sitting around
table, can you instead have them sit together as an audience to share in a
theatrical experience, and let that experience launch ideas and discussions in
new, unexpected directions? Can engagement in decision-making processes be more
attractive, fun and generative? And can creative processes actually help to
develop skills needed for civic literacy? A unique feature of this project is
the connection with the University of Guelph’s Institute for Community Engaged
Scholarship (ICES), linking artistic initiatives in the community with cutting
edge qualitative research, and refining techniques for mobilizing knowledge
through embodied interaction, creative exchange and performance.
Join us to witness the results of this experiment, and be
part of the evolution of the conversation about transition, political
relationships and community engagement in Guelph.
“…Extending a hand in a different direction with a new intention,
from a hard line to a soft path, paralysis to fluidity…”
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| Photo by Peter Grimaldi |
Georgia Simms is the creative director of IMAGEO artworks.
She is a professional dancer, choreographer, researcher and workshop
facilitator. She strives to combine her passion for performance with her hope
for social and environmental change.
Tanya Williams is a context artist with a passion for
dancing with systems, in community, land and body, drawing on many approaches
including physical theatre, contact improvisation and Alexander Technique
movement education. She founded Friends of the Floor Dance-Theatre and grooves
on residing in a dynamic community of practice called The Living Room Context.
