Geneviève Duong + Keren Rosenberg

Since her studies in nursing at McGill University and the completion of her diploma in contemporary dance, with distinction, from L’École de danse de Québec (2012), Geneviève Duong has worked as a performer, choreographer, and teacher. With a strong desire to anchor her work in a process of scientific reflection, she enrolled in a bachelor’s degree in Historical Sciences and Heritage Studies at Laval University (2017). Her creations reflect one of her most profound interests, the development of a body language that is active, conscious and humane through a spontaneous multidisciplinary creation process. She participated in a research residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts (2017) in order to study the multiple ways of using the body and voice in dialogue with music, and all within a performance context. In a desire to continually learn and develop she participated in Springboard (2016). She is an administrator with the RQD (2015-2018) as well as with L’Artère.

In 2016 I completed a writing residence under the mentorship of Gatineau poet Mélanie Rivet. With the theme of collective memory, this performance solo was presented for the first time at the choreographic event La Petite Scène at the Cercle Lab vivant in Québec City in 2017. The scenic elements (a slide machine from the 1960s and a photo projection of my maternal grandparents); bodywork; voice; and shadow theatre are used to awaken the unconscious self in tangible ways.

Keren Rosenberg is a Middle Eastern, Amsterdam-based performer, maker, and movement researcher. Through her work and artistic practice, she seeks to articulate a new physical and socio-political gaze on the body and its environment; to hunt for rituals and a physicality that can liquify boundaries between body and environment, between social skins and the primal body underneath; to question queer and socio-political contexts from a hetero-fluid perspective while creating multidisciplinary collaborations with artists working with photography, film, design, sound, and theory. As a movement researcher, Keren was invited in 2011 by Ohad Naharin to study the Gaga movement language and become a certified teacher. Since then she has been invited to teach Gaga and her own choreographic practice, Body-House, in professional institutions, dance companies, and festivals around Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Oceania. Keren is currently artist in residence at Dansmakers Amsterdam.

Our commonalities started from our body language, which has been refined, composed and settling in our genes for thousands of years. The imprints of heat, our proximity to the Mediterranean Sea, and our profound connection to the land carry a distinct rhythm and urgency. This translated into a raw physicality and influenced the energy of our presence and exchange in the space, making for a charged and at times confronting dialogue. Our process for this work has been nomadic, taking us through Denmark, Italy, Ireland, and Amsterdam. Each place brought different perspectives and confrontations with respect to our origins and what has been imprinted in our cells and memory. We are constantly exploring different ways of dealing with experiencing and having experienced very different realities within close geographic proximity. These realities were often met with inconsistencies, different reasons to be right or wrong, informing what is to become this work.