Dance (re) Constructions

It was special to have 8 Days in Nova Scotia this year - even though it wasn’t because of me that we were in my home province (thank you Peter, Judith, Harvey…)! There is actually a history of expanded choreographic practice in relation to dance and choreography in Nova Scotia. The artists who first come to mind include the late Diane Moore, who lived and worked in Halifax from the end of the 1970s until her passing in 2003; and Sara Shelton Mann, who also spent time here in the 1970s and again in 2003. Tracing this history also leads to post-modern dance artist/dance elder Simone Forti, whose iconic book Handbook in Motion was published in 1974 by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD - now NSCAD University).

I began the MFA program at NSCAD last September (2018), as the first and only dance-based artist the program has seen (this seems to be important mainly/only to me). I am heartened to find Simone’s connection to NSCAD and Halifax. I see/feel the effects of Simone and her work on the people who became my teachers, and who formed the local artist community that I have since become part of.

For my practice sharing at 8 DAYS this year, I proposed 2 of Simone’s scores that are described in Handbook in Motion: HUDDLE and OVER, UNDER AND AROUND (see photos). This was, for me, a way to bring dance practice from the past into present, from global to local (and maybe eventually from ‘local to global’).

For HUDDLE, I read the score aloud while others performed it. It is worth noting that I learned HUDDLE in person in 2018 from Lin Snelling, who had learned it from Simone.

For OVER,UNDER AND AROUND we learned and practiced it from the written score (that I read aloud), and then performed with only the sound of the radio (CBC Radio One), as per the score.

Note: when reading aloud, I chose to change the pronoun ‘he’ to ‘they’ anytime it appeared. While it seems obvious that ‘he’ was intended as the gender neutral pronoun of the time the scores were written, it doesn’t sound neutral anymore.

from top-left: Handbook in Motion: book cover & copyright info; Handbook in Motion: page 59; Handbook in Motion: HUDDLE photo, page 58; L-R: Peter Trosztmer, bee pallomina, Molly Johnson, Davis Plett, Marie-Claire Forté, (Alexandra Elliott), Rianne Švelnis, Priscilla Guy; Handbook in Motion: page 69; Jennifer Mascall, Alexandra Elliott, Peter Trosztmer; Alexandra Elliott, Peter Trosztmer, Jennifer Mascall