Double bill - Espace Vert

MARCH 12, 2022 - 7PM

MARCH 13, 2022 - 4PM

MARCH 14 & 15, 2022 - 7PM

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Discussion with the artists on March 14

WARNING: This show contains stroboscopic effects.

The order of the pieces is subject to change.

1st work - 25 minutes

Jimmy Gonzalez

Athlétisme affectif

What happens when a juggler goes on autopilot and stops paying attention to his balls? Inspired by the ritual of the warm-up, Jimmy takes us into a trance with him and lets his movements flow unconsciously, focusing instead on his physical sensations, his breathing. Circus becomes a somatic practice. Jimmy juggles an ever-expanding number of tasks. The action escalates, verging closer and closer to chaos. He challenges himself with this act that is five times longer than a classic juggling solo, finding pleasure in endurance.

Ritualistic·Physical·Live music

Concept, choreography and performance Jimmy Gonzalez

Sound design Olivier Landry-Gagnon

Lighting design Martin Sirois

Outside eye Erika Nguyen

Promotional video Vjosana Shkurti

2nd work - 45 minutes

Erin Hill

Smoke and Mirrors

To see it, you must believe it. Two dancers work with magic to explore the gap between what is noticed and what is taken for granted, what is felt and what is known. Through the invocation of the suspension of disbelief*, this work deconstructs Western theatrical traditions as an invitation to peer into the cracks between suspension of disbelief and belief itself. Not quite the masterful magician and her assistant, the artists must compensate in other ways. What makes the magic of illusion work? Is it a matter of distraction, of technique, or the mere conviction that it’s working? This performance is like seeing what’s offstage and onstage at the same time, like knowing then forgetting what the trick hinges on. Like real life magic.

*The intentional avoidance of critical thinking or logic in examining something unreal or impossible to believe it for the sake of enjoyment.

Playful·Intimate·Abstract

Concept and choreography Erin Hill

Creation, performance, and costume design Rebecca Rehder

Creation and performance Kelly Keenan

Lighting design and technical direction Jon Cleveland

Sound design and dramaturgical support Simon Labbé

Rehearsal direction and outside eye Camille Lacelle-Wilsey

Outside eye Katie Ward

Promotional video and images Nina Vroemen

Erin Hill is a choreographer, performer, collaborator, and writer. Through durational practices, she works with her body and life as a site of experimentation, noticing habits of perception and critically questioning from where these habits arise, as well as where they lead to. Erin dances in order to practice a transfeminist phenomenological approach to identity; one enfolded in fluid, horizontal, and somatic states. Currently, her work is drawn to the radical space and shape of imagination, and addressing notions of time as a main site for deconstruction and relearning. As a maker, performer and dramaturg, Erin is an ardent collaborator who finds energy through relation with many playful and engaged artists, such as Jana Vetten (together as Local Business), Nina Vroemen (together as Horizon Factory), Ira Melkonyan (NL/UA), and Charlie Prince (LB). In 2018, she received a Master’s degree from Das Theatre (formerly DasArts) in Amsterdam. Erin currently makes home as a settler in the traditional gathering place Tiohtiá:ke the unceded Indigenous lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation also known as Montréal.

Rebecca Rehder is a contemporary dance artist from Montréal. After graduating from Concordia University with a BFA in Contemporary Dance, she continued her choreographic research, focusing on the omnipresence of movement, its rhythmic mutations, and the stories within bodies. As a performer, she has collaborated with choreographers Camille Lacelle-Wilsey, Erin Hill, Patricia Gagnon, Mathilde Loslier-Pinard, Chloé Bourdages-Roy, and Christian Bakalov. Her parallel interest in light and how we perceive it has brought her to cumulate experience in stage technique. She has recently completed her studies at the Collège d’Études Ostéopathiques de Montréal, where she cultivated her fascination for human anatomy and the various mechanisms of the living body. In the juxtaposition of dance and osteopathy, she seeks to clarify the illustrated and felt passages of the living body.

Kelly Keenan is a Montréal-based dance artist and teacher. She has been teaching pre-professionals and professionals both locally and abroad for 15 years. Kelly’s teaching explores how different anatomical models that shape different practices influence bodily relations and dance practice. Strong influences include the Axis Syllabus, Manual Therapies, Feldenkrais, and Material for the Spine (Paxton). As a dancer, Kelly collaborates with several independent choreographers, most recently k.g. Guttman, Katie Ward, Adam Kinner, and Hanna Sybille Müller. Kelly is currently pursuing an MA in Concordia University’s Individualized program, at the hinge of dance studies, art education, and sensory anthropology.

Jon Cleveland is a Montréal-based lighting designer/visual artist. Working in theatre and dance, he has worked with the Segal Centre, The National Arts Centre, The Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Tangente, Cabal Theatre, Scapegoat Carnivale, Susanna Hood, Lucy M. May, Rabbit in the Hat, Malik Nashad Shapre, and Kim-Sanh Châu, among others. His design for Tragic Queens with Cabal Theatre was nominated for a 2017 META award for Outstanding Lighting Design. When not designing, he works as TD and head of lighting with the Tashme Project and Lara Kramer on tours around Canada, Europe, and the South Pacific.

Simon Labbé is committed to composition. His research borrows from architecture, cognitive sciences, speculative fiction, and complex systems theory. He uses listening and movement as modes of engagement for the deployment of performances, text-based and recorded pieces, architectural installations and experimental workshops through which he explores different forms of temporalities, relationality, and situatedness. His work engages with the intricate entanglement of agencies at play in our media environments and focuses on the dispositional dynamics that set them in motion. He often works collaboratively with performers and writers and has presented pieces in Europe, Canada, Mexico and the United States. He lives and works in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal.

Camille Lacelle-Wilsey is a choreographer, director, and performer trained in contemporary dance at Concordia University. She draws her inspiration from the aesthetics of photography and cinema to create works imbued with colors and textures, affect, and sensoriality. Her relation to physicality highlights interference, transformation, and sudden changes of state. Through her choreographic approach, she seeks to exhibit human expressions in constant modulation. In recent years, she has forged the link between image and performance, making Super 8 films, photographic series, and experimental short films. She also supports creative processes as a rehearsal director, a movement advisor, an interpreter-researcher, and on selection juries. She notably works with artists Sara Hanley, Louis Clément Da Costa, Émile Pineault, Erin Hill, Nien Tzu Weng, Eryn Tempest, Martin Messier, and Catherine Lavoie-Marcus.

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