The neck to fall + La synesthésie du dragon

Ziyian Kwan
Ziyian Kwan lives Vancouver where she has worked as dance artist since 1987. As an interprète she has performed close to 100 original creations by an eclectic range of Canadian artists on international stages. In January 2012, Ziyian formed dumb instrument Dance, a collage of activities that comprises her creative life. dumb instrument is a turn of phrase, the ineffable musings of the body at play in the imagination. « I am my heart’s dumb instrument. » – Denton Welch

Peggy Lee
Cellist, improviser, composer Peggy Lee is part of Vancouver’s rich creative music community. She collaborates with artists including Tony Wilson, Ron Samworth, Dylan van der Schyff, Dave Douglas, Veda Hille, Lisa Miller, Wayne Horvitz and Robin Holcomb. Other projects include The Peggy Lee Band, Film in Music, Waxwing and Beautiful Tool. She has also collaborated in theatre and dance with Ruby Slippers, Rumble Theatre, Presentation House, David Hudgins, Peter Bingham, Delia Brett and Ziyian Kwan. Peggy was awarded the Freddie Stone Award (2005) for innovation in music and a Jesse Richardson Theatre Award (2010) for outstanding composition and in 2013 was the recipient of the Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for music.

Dylan van der Schyff
Deeply involved in improvised and creative music for the past twenty years, Dylan van der Schyff has performed and recorded in over 100 creations in in Europe and North America with artists including: George Lewis, Joelle Léandre, Dave Douglas, Brad Turner, Tony Wilson, Michael Blake, Wayne Horvitz, Marilyn Crispell, Torsten Muller, Robin Holcolmb, Rob Mazurek, Talking Pictures, Ken Vandermark, Paul Rutherford, John Butcher, Louis Sclavis, and Rene Lussier. He has also appeared with Roswell Rudd, Kenny Werner, John Zorn, Butch Morris, Wadada Leo Smith, Misha Mengelberg, Gary Peacock, Barre Phillips, Fred Frith, Ellery Eskelin, Sylvie Courvoisier and Fred Lomberg-Holm, among many others. Articles about his work have appeared in publications such as Downbeat, Jazz Times, The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, The Wire, and Coda.

James Proudfoot
Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, James Proudfoot has been living in Vancouver since 1993. For twelve years he was the resident Technical Director at the Firehall Arts Centre. He is a much sought-after designer and has created lighting for many dance and theatre companies including; Lola Dance, Co. Erasga, battery opera, Kinesis Dance, Holy Body Tattoo, Anatomica, Les Productions Figlio, The Plastic Orchid Factory, Trial & Eros, Ballet BC as well as The Firehall Theatre Company. Recent designs include 7th Sense for Wen Wei Dance, City of Crows for EDAM, Retrospective for Joe Ink, Vessel for Out Innerspace Dance and Highgate for Tara Cheyenne Performance.

After working as an interprete for 25 years, Ziyian was moved to experiment with choreography. The resulting work was the neck to fall. She was inspired by the integration of Amelia Itcush’s somatic work, the way the somatic principles affected the release of her joints and how this liberated a plethora of images in her physical imagination. What began as an exercise in movement exploration became the translation of images into a collage of pre-conscious events.

Geneviève La
Born to a Quebecois mother and a Vietnamese father, Geneviève La completed studies in visual arts and contemporary dance (L’École de danse contemporaine de Montréal, 2000) and began her career as a choreographer and dancer, while simultaneously studying kinesiology and osteopathy at McGill. As a choreographer and dancer, her works Petites Prières, Des racines et des ailes, and L’heure bleu were warmly received by critics and audiences alike. As a performer, she has danced for many choreographers, including Iréni Stamou, Roger Sinha, Mélanie Demers, Sarah Bild, Jean-François Déziel, Brigitte Haentjens and Louise Bédard. She also participated in the re-mount of Évènements de la Pleine Lune with Dans-Cité, as well as the Grande Bibliothèque’s Cabaret Littéraire at Nuit blanche du Festival Montréal en lumières in the company of Marc Béland. In 2009, Dans-Cité, in collaboration with the Festival International de Littérature and À la2 Danse etc., presented Musica nocturna-La nuit sera longue. Along with comedian Jean-Francois Casabonne, La delivered an intimate duo, balanced between play and movement, with a text and set design by Catherine Lalonde (Émile-Nelligan prize, 2008).

Captivated by what is at stake between tradition and innovation, Geneviève La returns to dance with an enhanced interest in improvisation and choreographic structures the privilege authentic movement.

She also seeks to explore the influence of traditional Chinese and Vietnamese medicine, as well as osteopathy, on her upcoming creative work.

For this project, she wishes to work in synergy with her collaborators: rehearsals complemented by acupuncture sessions as prerequisites to research in different gestural veins, work with the constraints/possibilities of proposed costumes, the exquisite corpses between the author’s spontaneous words and improvised gestures, collective tastings to arrive at consensus, etc.