Isolation + nation-individual
Embodied forces
Isolation
Bettina Hoffmann
20 minutes
Four female office workers give orders and pirouette around a conference table. One woman mounts it, and suddenly lays slack. Manœuvring her body carefully, the others don’t acknowledge her utterances. The scene turns violent. What emerges is a paradoxical ethics of care and indifference.
Choreographer
Bettina Hoffmann
Performers
Alice Bergeron, Katie Philp, Anouk Thériault, Mary St-Amand Williamson
I am starting with visual inspirations and images of slightly exaggerated everyday situations that I translate into small movement tasks for dancers. I am interested in ambiguous movements that can shift back and forth from violent or passive-aggressive movements to those that could be interpreted as caring or caressing.
During those short playful improvisations I guide the dancers toward unusual, sometimes slightly unsettling movements with contradicting elements. I propose changes with regard to intensity and purpose, as well as constellations in space. I use slowness, repetition, and touch as elements that reflect the pain and anxiety in contemporary urban live. After studying each dancer’s unique skill and presence, I place him or her accordingly within the whole ensemble.
In regular meetings over a period of many months we explored and developed short pieces (tableaux) based on structured improvisation. Four of those tableaux were integrated into a performance, which was titled ISOLATION.
Bettina Hoffmann
Bettina Hoffmann reconstructs and subtly dramatizes situations or uses displaced movements to facilitate examining the underlying mechanisms of social relations, conflicts and communication, subjectivity, interiority and exteriority. After many years of explorations in photography and video, she now develops performances that are inspired by contemporary dance.
Alice Bergeron
Trained in the humanities and contemporary dance, Alice Bergeron is interested in the relationship between words and movements. For her, life is played out in the breath of images, the colours of sounds and the dance of letters. She has participated in several projects in dance, physical theatre, and performance.
Katie Philp
Katie Philp began her professional training at The Ailey School in New York City, also attending company classes at Jennifer Muller | The Works as a scholarship student. She has worked with Mari Meade Dance Collective, Body Threads Dance and Amalgamate Dance Company and danced in the short film Temporal, choreographed by Mia Orozco She has also participated in improvisational dance in New York City with People Watch Project, headed by Deb Silver.
Anouk Thériault
A graduate from the École de danse de Québec in 2008, Anouk Thériault has contributed to several in situ projects during the OFFTA and Nuit Blanche. She works with Katya Montaignac and Lena Massiani, members of the collective ODNI, and took part in the exhibition project Out of Grace by Lynda Gaudreau, presented at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery.
Mary St-Amand Williamson
Mary St-Amand Williamson’s art practice includes choreography, dance, performance, installation, and sound. Her multidisciplinary installations have been exhibited at Harbourfront Centre, The Premier Dance Theatre, Art System, and AWOL Gallery in Toronto. Her independent and collaborative choreographic work with artist Zohar Melinek has been presented in Berlin, Montreal, and Paris. She also performed in Michael Toppings’s Diary of a Neighbourhood and continues an ongoing collaboration with choreographers Lena Massiani and Katya Montainac.
Nation-Individual
Mary Williamson & Zohar Melinek
60 minutes
Nation-Individual combines the full-length, original choreographies Collective Individual (2013) and Nation’s Legacy of Severance (2010). Through this revisitation the artists of the intercultural collective Thirst/Clarity – Zohar Melinek and Mary St-Amand Williamson– examine how solidarity is created and maintained among the collective and the individual, among disparate and diverse communities, as well as the psychological and physical implications of neo colonization. Nation-Individual incorporates dance, sound and video, and addresses a series of dualities and/or dichotomies inherent in civilian struggle.
Implicit in the performances and choreographies of Thirst/Clarity are the acts of revealing and concealing, of telling and muting. A recurrent theme throughout their work over the past four years is the relationship between seemingly disparate individuals and their shared sense of displacement, isolation, and privilege as well as their inevitable – yet strained— collaboration.
Mary and Zohar are Thirst/Clarity. This duet performance collective builds landscapes of bodies in urban settings, engages in processes of ancestral healing. Though integration of movement, sound and videographic imagery, these two performance scores portray scenes of civilian struggle, displacement and legacies of war.
Choreography and performance
Mary Williamson & Zohar Melinek
Sound design
Mary Williamson & Zohar Melinek
Costumes
Dotan Moreno, Shlomit Gopher, Thirst/Clarity
Lighting design
David Alexandre Chabot
Outside eye
Su Feh Lee, Ismaël Mouaraki
Mary St-Amand Williamson
Mary St-Amand Williamson’s art practice includes choreography, dance, performance, installation and sound. Her multidisciplinary installations have been exhibited at Harbourfront Centre, The Premier Dance Theatre, Art System and AWOL Gallery in Toronto. Her independent and collaborative choreographic work with artist Zohar Melinek has been presented in Berlin, Montreal and Paris. She also performed in Michael Toppings’s Diary of a Neighbourhood and continues an ongoing collaboration with choreographers Lena Massiani and Katya Montainac.
Zohar Melinek
Zohar Melinek Ezra is a multidisciplinary artist born in Jerusalem. Focusing on performance and film/video, since 2007 Zohar has been exhibiting work and performing in various institutions in Europe, North America and the Middle East. In 2006 he graduated from the Vancouver Film School in “Writing for Film and Media”. In 2013 he completed a bachelor degree in “Intermedia-Cyberarts” at Concordia University in Montreal and from the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem. His performance and video/film projects have been presented at various institutions globally such as M.A.I Centre Cultural (Canada), Hazira (Israel), Kulturhuset (Sweden), Dubrovnik (Finland), Kobro Gallery (Poland), ACUD theatre (Germany) and Terraza Bugambilias (Mexico). In 2011 he was selected for the M.A.I. Centre Cultural 18 months Long-term Mentorship Program and residency in Montreal. In 2012 he received the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec Viva-Cite grant for professional artists. His full-length performance piece Collective Individual has been programmed in the M.A.I’s 2012-2013 season in Montreal and at Monument National in Montreal in 2014. He is currently completing post-production of his 45 minutes-long dance film titled Legacy of Severance on which he worked with artists Mary St-Amand Willamson and Ray Lavers.
The creation of this work was made possible thanks to the support of
