Deanna Peters, Ahmed Khalil; photo Max Brown
Deanna Peters, Ahmed Khalil; photo Max Brown
to sense in-to the ephemeral and untenable;
to meander in practice of naming of things;
to acknowledge
to unlearn
ways of being that atrophy
my and y/our inherit agency
the depths and joys of my and y/our entwined realities.
to be (in) the undoing.
Use the eyes of a sensitive observer Explore the eyes as soft puddles of feeling in your skull Touch with the eyes and attune to pleasure through your seeing May your seeing awaken your skin May your skin enliven your being Open your ears Hear with the same intensity as your looking Be with the others or rather notice the WITHness that is already happening Practice empathy as a way of feeling through the other Vibe with the things Ask the things where they’d like to go Take them there Build magic Vibe with the people Vibe with the space you are in Deepen Expand Keep going Sense the rhythm of things Sense the rhythm of the beings Dance the music Repeat Insist Adapt Be in a soft rigor Create a container for feeling Vibrate with the overwhelm Joyful saturation Feel the wind Rest Build a garden with your body Be still in precarity
H+N remixed on a cadence of 157 days (only spaces)
(empty space)
the space between August and 25
between has and as
after personal and before professional
between week and beginning early
between assuming and you
(empty space)
the space after a date and before a time
(empty space)
before extra and after needing
between process and individual
(empty space)
between you and have
the space after us
Evann Siebens, Natalie LeFebvre Gnam; photos Sophia Wolfe
Pam Tzeng is a Canadian Taiwanese choreographer based in Mohkinstsis colonially known as Calgary. Pam takes pleasure in extremes to craft humourous, visceral and urgent dances about the politics of the body with objects: pamtzeng.com
Deanna Peters/Mutable Subject creates for the stage, screen, web, print and DIY spaces. It’s all dance: mutablesubject.ca
Amanda Acorn is an artist and facilitator based in Tkaronto, Canada. She creates intimate, sensorial encounters and responsive environments for embodied exchange.
Lisa Mariko Gelley is an artist and mother, grateful to be living and working on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples.
Tasha Faye Evans is a dance and theatre artist from a legacy of Coast Salish, Welsh and European Jewish grandparents. Her career continues to be a collection of collaborations and performances with national and international Indigenous artists, including her new dance solo Cedar Woman in collaboration with carver Ocean Hyland.
Natalie LeFebvre Gnam lives, dances and raises her children on the unceded land of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓ilw̓ ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) people. She is working on new-futuring: plasticorchidfactory.com
between dog and wolf is an expression from old French commonly used to describe a time of day when the light is so dim you can't distinguish a dog from a wolf. Twilight, dawn, dusk. The gloaming.
In that time between the dog and the wolf, we might feel deceived by our eyes, caught somewhere between comfort and fear, between what is real and unreal. It is a time of transformation, “the hour in which every being becomes their own shadow, and thus something other than themselves. The hour of metamorphoses, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf.” (Barbara Bray, from the translation of Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love).
The work develops through cosplay and child-like inquisitiveness, reaching into the thresholds of the familiar and unfamiliar, of safety and threat, of human nature turning wild and uneasiness replacing certainty.
choreography, performance James Gnam
producer, rehearsal direction Natalie LeFebvre Gnam
lighting design James Proudfoot
media Eric Chad, James Gnam
music Loscil
outside eye Vanessa Goodman
images David Cooper
presented as part of plastic orchid factory’s adaptives series, with the support from the City of Vancouver, BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, The Province of BC, Lena Artist Residency, Lake Studios Berlin, Mile Zero Dance, ReLoCate, Sawdust Collector and productions 2PAR4.
James Gnam / Over the past six months, I have been watching with fascination as this public dance has evolved out of necessity. All of us learning (and some of us with a great deal of anxiety) about how we can share space together.
After four months of isolation, and the arts sector shifting almost constantly, we felt that it was essential to gather a group of artists that were interested in taking the COVID-19 Dance Score (above) and finding ways to fold desire, spontaneity and agency into it, to respond to pressures that we've felt to be creatively productive, by investing and working on something that could not be reproduced, sold or commodified. We wanted to build dances that could only live then, dances that were the sum of the people, places and publics they encountered.
For four weeks this summer, Ileanna Cheladyn, Shion Skye Carter, Bevin Poole Leinweber, Vanessa Goodman, Sarah Wong, Lorenz Santos, Hana Rutka, Adrian Deleeuw and Heather Barr joined Natalie and I three times a week to check in, dance and check out. We met at the Quilchena, Pacific Spirit and Jericho Beach parks. It was beautiful and essential and hard and we learned a lot about clear communication and protocol for safety and agency within the context of a global pandemic. We found new dances with new people. We were surrounded by people trained to see and feel the spaces between us.
We learnt to play with these spaces.
In a time when we need to recalibrate capitalism’s relationship to creative productivity, it felt important to invest in artists and process without an overarching goal of making a thing to sell.
Digital Folk is an interdisciplinary collaboration between dance artist James Gnam, visual artist Natalie Purschwitz, lighting designer James Proudfoot and 10 dance artists. It explores a generation’s approach to identity, physicality, social dance and performance and lives as a scale model built out of an in-between world that is not quite a home and not quite a theatre. It's where desire is focused through the lens of video game culture to create an irreverent and interactive world of virtual and physical community, feedback and paradox.
concept, creative direction James Gnam
scenography, costume design Natalie Purschwitz
lighting design James Proudfoot
sound design Kevin Legere
choreography, performance Shion Carter, Rachel Helten, Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, James Gnam, Kayla DeVos, Vanessa Goodman, Rachel Maddock, Lexi Vajda, Lorenz Santos
producer, media relations Natalie LeFebvre Gnam
associate producer Kayla Devos
lighting adaptation, stage management Jonathan Kim
set build Stuart Sproule
set design assistant Candy Wang
graphic design Ahmed Khalil & Deanna Peters/Mutable Subject
past collaborators Clare Twiddy, Siobhan Sloane-Seale, Rob Abubo, Walter Kubanek, Jane Osborne, Dario Dinuzzi, Bevin Poole Leinweber, Diego Romero, Hannah Jackson, Rachel Silver, Kim Plough
Media and dance coexist to frame an exploration on translation...
It occurred to me, at a shockingly advanced age, that my maternal spoken language (French) was the same language that taught me as a child how to move (ballet). There's something strange and fascinating about this massive disconnect and I became curious about the space, the rupture and slippery place, that's created when moving between one language to another. The work was created from a series of questions I was asking about what it means if the language I speak is also the language that moves me? What verbal instructions does my body perceive and hold on to? And what gets lost in translation in the process?
Originally commissioned for the Western Front in 2016, Translating the Archive evolved over several more kitchen table conversations and studio iterations, to become its more recent form, in traduction [le manifeste].
concept, performance Evann Siebens, Natalie LeFebvre Gnam
media, manifesto text Evann Siebens
choreography, text Natalie LeFebvre Gnam
technical direction, stage management James Gnam
i miss doing nothing responds to living in continuous action by creating an environment that asks us to focus on the spaces in between activities. Space, sound and movement are organized around the rhythms of memory, breath and patience in order to focus the sensation of time passing within our bodies and imaginations. Can we create an environment that invites and engages, but also creates space for focus to wander, then come back? Can we use our body of work in conjunction with the imperfect nature of memory to shape a dance that is rhythmically sourced in our physiology? Can we perceive the passage of time differently?
Time is so weird now. It feels faster. Thicker. More gets done in less time and more is expected in less time. But also, there's less time spent doing nothing. This speeding up is something we noticed in the late 90’s when we bought computers and opened hotmail accounts and it gained momentum when we moved those computers into our pockets. It’s also something that we've profoundly felt as our family grew from two, to three, then four. Part of this acceleration is natural and has been felt by parents since the dawn of time, but the other part is very new. As dance artists our relationships to time, memory and activity are precisely trained and tuned and we wanted to use this sensitivity to explore different ways of feeling time move through us.
creation, performance Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, James Gnam, James Proudfoot, Vanessa Goodman
sound design Nancy Tam
lighting design James Proudfoot
set design Paula Viitanen Aldazosae
In 2014, Tedd Robinson shared nearly four decades of dance archives with six choreographers from across Canada. The process happened at Tedd’s farm in Quyon, Quebec with an understanding that dance is an oral and kinaesthetic tradition. The objective was to move Tedd's archives from DVD/VHS and into the bodies and imaginations of another generation of dance artists. The end result was FACETS, which premiered at the National Arts Centre in May 2015. But, for Tedd, the legacy of the work was not in the final showing but in how the conversations, impulses and memories lived on in the creative practices of the dancers who shared the process with him. where this lives now is a continuation of this conversation...
creation Angie Cheng, James Gnam, Tedd Robinson
performance Angie Cheng, James Gnam
collaborators Ame Henderson, Riley Sims, Simon Renaud, Charles Quevillon, Paul Chambers
A co-production between plastic orchid factory and 10 Gates Dancing, this work has been generously supported by Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, City of Ottawa, Left of Main, Centre Q and National Arts Centre.
Modelled loosely on Lars van Trier’s film The 5 Obstructions and the Obstructions series produced by the indie theatre community a few years back, this project's goal was to move critical discourse into tangible action, while emphasizing risk-taking and experimentation with new forms of making dance. While the thrust of this project is to encourage and empower the artists involved, it also functions as a means to have a larger discussion around practice, process, aesthetics and form. It has been invigorating, challenging, exciting and at times scary. But, it's a process that has enlivened our artistic practices, while at the same time nourishing our sense of solidarity within our creative community.
REMIX is a procedural collapse of dance practice in order to build up new energy and shared perspectives through subjective filters. In June 2018 the paired artists worked at Left of Main to unpack the aesthetics, objectives, obstacles and concerns that underpinned one existing work respectively and invited the other artist to re-work their proposition using any and all tools necessary. In partnership with The Training Society of Vancouver, free daily practices were hosted at Left of Main, where the artists offered systems and strategies that prepared the body and the imagination for remixing by practicing remixing in a practice setting. There was a lot of doing and talking and doing. A relaxed sharing and social was held June 30. The next iteration of REMIX takes place in May 2021 (re-scheduled due to COVID).
Dance/Songs by Ame Henderson was remixed by Vanessa Goodman
Container by Vanessa Goodman was remixed by Ame Henderson
It Was/Wasn't All Worth It by Diego Romero & Ileanna Cheladyn was remixed by Rob Abubo
dedications by Rob Abubo was remixed by Diego Romero
Though repetition and accumulation, the dancers build and transform meaning by re-focusing the stage perspective with two moving cameras and two stationary projectors. It invites the audience on a journey of collective and individual memory-making.
Commissioned for EDAM dance choreographic series
choreography James Gnam
performance Natalie LeFebvre Gnam/Lina Fitzner, Bevin Poole, James Gnam
lighting James Proudfoot
media Josh Hite
music Kevin Legere
Four classical dancers, a deconstructed piano score and the unexpected use of ballet’s iconic tulle and pointe shoes create a thought-provoking and visually stunning examination of beauty, nobility, partnership and power.
choreography James Gnam
performance Bevin Poole, Ali Denham/Lara Barclay, Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, James Gnam
dramaturgy Daelik
costumes Kate Burrows
music Kenneth Kirschner, Taylor Deupree, Kevin Legere
lighting James Proudfoot
rehearsal direction Vanessa Goodman
Specifically, art is either a complaint or do something else questions the painter’s relationship to representation and how he addresses space and time within his compositions. As a dance artist, I am concerned with representation, embodiment and composition, so I was attracted to this piece. In 2004, I organized a first draft for two dancers. Over the years, plastic orchid has performed varied versions of this work. With questions sitting at the centre of the score, every incarnation is different and it's developed into a tool that re-focuses our practice every time we perform as it. How do we weave relationships between our bodies and the sonic environment to create and transform ephemeral moments of representation in space over time?
commissioned by New Forms Festival
choreography James Gnam
performance Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, Bevin Poole
composer John Cage
costumes Kate Burrows
media Josh Hite, Evann Siebens
