In the weeks leading
up to Guelph Dance Festival 2013,
some of the amazing dance 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!
605 Collective offers
us a dialogue between choreographer Dana Gingras and Collective member and
dancer Josh Martin who discuss the piece they will present at our On the Stage A performance on Friday, May 31, 8pm, at the River Run
Centre. Gala and Talkback session to follow. Book your tickets now!
605 Collective also
performs at our In the Park series.
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| Photo: Yannick Grandmont |
Dana and Josh:
Humans are filled with beautiful beasts, our
world is constantly teaching us tricks that repress and tame their natures.
There’s freedom, dignity, fierceness and courage in allowing these animals
back, to allow them their full physical expression. ––Dana Gingras
New Animal is
605’s first commissioned piece, by Dana Gingras (Holy Body Tattoo, Animals of
Distinction), built over three years and between two cities. The initial
research began in 2009 and was continued through smaller processes either in
Vancouver or Montréal until the work had its world premiere at The Cultch in
Vancouver in February 2012.
New Animal’s
excerpt performance at this year’s festival makes Guelph the first city to
receive the work after its premiere, with a Canadian tour coming up in Fall
2013.
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"605 Run". Photo by Rob Sondergaard
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About the work
Dana: As my work at studying human movement has deepened over the past few
years, I’ve developed a fascination for what’s both common with and what
separates us from our animal ancestors. Theses animals are still inside of us;
in our needs for territory, in fear responses rooted in survival, in the fight
or flight, in the need for food, in our often unresolved needs for the limbic
bliss of the pack-mind. But in us, these drives are repressed by our daily
actions, social codes, and restrictions inherent in living on a vastly
over-crowded planet; these powerful, defining instincts become awkward, twisted
and neurotic. Instead of focusing on how these animals inside of us are tamed,
ritualized & socialized, the work looks into our bodies and our lives to
see where the animal cracks through to express itself most directly and
profoundly: the places where we mate, where we play, where we break, where we
survive. The theme of the piece is this: where the animal still speaks through
us, in its least neurotic form. Where it has a voice, or rather, where it takes
over ours.
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| "605 Run". Photo by Rob Sondergaard |
How the Commission came to be
Josh: This project actually began more than three years ago, just as 605
Collective was getting started. We were beginning to make more work together, which,
in its early phases, was really based on our desire for peer-to-peer
professional development. Work aside, it was clear that the more experience and
diversity of backgrounds we had with us in the studio, the more these creative
sessions were becoming personal learning experiences, expanding our practice as
both individual artists and as a collaborative team. With this mindset, we then
imagined how fantastic it would be to bring an inspiring established
choreographer into this same environment we had created for ourselves, so we
could all have a common experience of their creative process, their methods and
artistic choices. The idea was that we could all reference and grow from this
encounter, and, regardless of the outcome, apply whatever we had taken in to
our future art-making. We really didn’t care what the piece was or even if it
was performed. We just wanted face-to-face inspiration, and to learn through
building something together, rather than being taught.
Dana turned out to
be the most generous and thoughtful person we could imagine. She really went
above and beyond what we could have ever asked from her in terms of her support
and investment, in this project, and in us as young artists.
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| "605 Run". Photo by Rob Sondergaard |
How the work was created
Dana: In order to explore this theme, we began developing movement based on
extreme states of human experience—the places in our lives where the animal
voice can emerge. We started with research into these places, by reading
survival manuals for things like bear or shark attacks. We did research on
people’s physical responses to crises like earthquakes, floods, etc. We looked
at this research to find the way the body worked when the rational mind was
overwhelmed by the animal world, or by forces of nature. Through improvising a
movement vocabulary with the collective based on this material, we started to
enunciate the way our own animals moved, through and against us. During this
part of the process, it became quickly evident that the phenomenal prowess and
professionalism of the dancers quickly repressed the animals all over again!
Their skill with the movement quickly dominated the language we were developing
and made the movements beautiful, disciplined, full of rigour, but
all-too-human.
We solved this
problem by complicating the movement to the point where it nudged against the
dancer’s limits. We layered complicated tasks overtop of the established
movement; doubled vocabularies on top of each other. We did this to create
challenges that would push the dancers into a place that was at the absolute
limit of their skills, a place of near impossibility, with a vocabulary
individual to each dancer. I wanted the actual demands of the movement to bring
out the survival impulse, and to give the animal inside of these highly
skilled, virtuosic movers a chance to break through.
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| Photo: Yannick Grandmont |
Why lemons?
Dana: The lemons were a very powerful device to work with, in terms of bringing
out unconscious reactions and visceral responses. Imagine biting into a lemon,
for example. Simply thinking of this will cause your lips to tighten, and your
saliva glands to react, completely uncontrollably and unconsciously. It’s a
very visceral fruit, and pretty overwhelming to tear into. As well, lemon juice
is extremely acidic, more even than vinegar. It burns pretty relentlessly, and
causes real physical damage to the mouth and the skin. In research with the
lemons I wound up damaging my face so badly I developed skin problems that
lasted for almost a full year! So having the dancers work with the lemons
provided a really interesting way to compromise their bodies into evoking
involuntary animal responses. In the videos we created, we slowed down the
frame-rate, which powerfully draws the pain and intensity of the involuntary
physical response to the acid.
Here, the animal
emerges, in its full glory!
Across the entire
body of my work as a whole, I’ve always embraced imbalance and risk; in New
Animal, 605′s sheer athletic power, skill, and commitment have allowed this
exploration to go very deep.
605 Collective is
a Vancouver-based company dedicated to producing new dance work through a
shared creative process. As part of a new generation of creators, 605 places
emphasis on movement innovation to create physically demanding works derived
from the human experience, valuing collaboration as a tool for new directions
in dance.
In the past 20
years, Dana Gingras has established herself as a boundary-pushing
choreographer and performer. She is the artistic director of Animals of
Distinction, a multi-media dance company established in 2006, and was also
co-founder of wildly acclaimed The Holy Body Tattoo. Dana is an Associate
Dance Artist of Canada’s National Arts Centre.
