News & Events

Heels for Ali and a gun for Billy

Heels for Ali and a gun for Billy. The rest of you just have to wait and see as ADAM-EVE comes to life as it unveils in December 2009. I'm back in the studio with Alison Denham and Billy Marchenski after months of clearing and figuring out our schedule as we return to the research process of this full-length duet.

Creative process and research without any pressure is honouring! Process is liberating, a time with endless possibilities, but also an edge to the curious unknown.

In our spring process I wanted to explore DUST and if there is an object, what would represent a woman and man?

This month of June also, I enter into reconstruction of PARADIS/Paradise, a 55-minute full-length solo. Alone in the studio before the noise composer Emmanuel St Aubin arrives from France. I feel the life and death of an entity when reconstructing an existing work. I viewed the work on video. I am shocked how I got to that physical dance and place. I fear how to come back to it again. It's like a journey, so far, yet so close, familiar and unfamiliar. In the studio, I ponder, doubt and question: why this dance, that movement; where is the source, why that choice?

I am reading and contemplating an essay or manuscript written by Butoh dance artist Natsu Nakajima entitled "Ankoku Butoh". I had the privilege of watching her small performance work and listening to her dialogue in the recent Vancouver International Dance Festival last March. Seeing Natsu was probably the highlight of seeing dance for me so far this year. (I hope to talk more about this experience shortly). She shared her writings with the audience and in keeping it I knew there was something important about it. I finally read and absorbed it this week.

In her words and writing, the simplest yet prevailing knowledge and mystery of the body is ever present, to express and find dance one can "return to the original body" be invisible, become nothing, not anything ... become empty but ... filled emptiness ..."

I think of my body as my most loyal companion, at times divided, at times together, at times eager, at times frightened. Our body is an impeccable palace of divine essence and expression, it can be empty and be very full.