March 30, 2016: Lee Su-Feh’s Teachers

Last night choreographer, dancer and co-artistic director of battery opera performance Lee Su-Feh led us through her life and career by way of her teachers and mentors. Badass women, the colonial gaze, and the responsibility and complexities of “being with” all came up. Listen to the talk here:

Su-Feh is performing her solo “The Things I Carry” Thursday-Saturday at 7pm at her space The Hopbopshop. Tickets can be bought online here: 

Join us on Saturday afternoon at 3pm in the gallery for a workshop with Su-Feh called “Pleasure” in which Su-Feh will explore pleasure as the guiding principle in constructing a language – very old or very new, spoken or otherwise – out of the wisdom of our biology.

March 26: Justine A. Chambers’ Choreography Walk

On March 26, Justine A. Chambers led us on a silent walk through Vancouver, to observe the choreography at work in the city. Afterwards, we gathered in the gallery to discuss our findings.

March 25: Carolina Bergonzoni

On Friday, March 25, Carolina Bergonzoni took over our reading hour to share her methodology she has been working with The Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. We attempted to move with her through the steps she set out for us: Begin, Move, Dance, and Witness, with documentation of each step in between. How do we embody a text in a creative act?

Alexa Mardon used this structure to perform a duet with her phone:

March 23: Justine A. Chambers, Mutual Interview

 

Last night, Justine A. Chambers eschewed the formal tradition of the artist’s talk for a  mutual interview with the group that attended. All questions directed at her were answered with a reciprocal question pulled from various dance artists’ interviews, and/or the Proust questionnaire from Vanity Fair.

Justine A. Chambers will also be leading a workshop open to the public this Saturday, at 3pm at Unit/Pitt Projects.

If you missed it, the audio recording of the talk is available here:

March 19: Co-Writing Criticism

Today Wil Aballe was kind enough to host Brynn McNab’s workshop on co-producing a critical art text. We gathered in Wil Aballe’s space to view and write about Evann Siebens’ exhibition, THE INDEXICAL, ALPHABETIZED, MEDIATED, ARCHIVAL DANCE-A-THON!

A digital performative process, we wrote for 20 minutes, read through the document, and then made some editorial decisions as a group. The finished document is available here, in PDF form: 

Co-WritingCriticism

March 18: Alana Gerecke

Alana Gerecke shared the work that she has been doing in the gallery with us this afternoon. Related to her PhD dissertation on sites and site-specificity, she has been exploring these concepts with her own body and its accumulation of memory of the spaces and movements it has inhabited.

March 16: Poetics, Performance and Criticism

The discussion on March 16th featured  Alexa Mardon Brynn McNab, and Publication Studio Vancouver resident Jacquelyn Ross, and and was led by Peter Dickinson. Meant to connect the exhibition on the walls of the gallery, with the dance series’ concern about texts, poetics, and the idea of the score in movement based practices, It explored questions about what kind of dance is possible within the practice of writing, what role text and writing has in a dance practice, and the variations of  the use of poetics and criticism in both realms. This was also the launch of the pamphlet series put together by Jacquelyn Ross entitled I Just Want To Talk About How I Just Want To Dance With You. (Images shown above) which puts together correspondence on dance, movement, poetics, and criticism between herself and Jane Ellison, Deanna Peters, Alexa Mardon, and Brynn McNab.