DANCE IN VANCOUVER STUDIO SHOWINGS

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 21

12 noon-4pm Studio Showings (Location: Scotiabank Dance Centre)

Action at a Distance / Belle Spirale Dance Projects: Tuning (excerpt)
Tuning is a duet commissioned by Alexis Fletcher, created and directed by Vanessa Goodman, which focuses on how we tune to one another in relationships. The performers create a live sonic and physical atmosphere using their voices to amplify the conversations of the body.
About Action at a Distance 
About Belle Spirale 

Adam Grant Warren: Good Bully (work in progress)
Adam Grant Warren invites visitors to witness and engage in the creative process for his new solo work, Good Bully. Combining his practices as a movement artist, a theatre-maker, and a writer, Good Bully is an interdisciplinary exploration of the tension — and the humour — between disability, masculinity, and the “dominance of the upright body”.
Includes strong language and mature content.
About Adam Grant Warren 

All Bodies Dance Project: Translations (full work)
Translations is an immersive performance for small audiences designed to be experienced with the “non-visual senses.” Accessible to both blind and sighted people, it invites everyone to hear, feel, smell, and imagine live dance. Paired one-to-one with a performer, audience members use everything beyond vision to perceive the dance which takes place all around them, unfolding through verbal description, touch, currents of air, and the sounds of moving bodies.
About All Bodies Dance Project 

Daina Ashbee: We learned a lot at our own funeral (excerpt)
Daina Ashbee’s compelling new solo, performed by B-Girl Momoko ‘Momo’ Shimada, probes the notion of death. Enveloping the audience in a potent sense of ritual, it evokes a battle with the self: the dancer challenges gravity, resists the ground, overcomes precarious balances. Finally, only the echo of the body, of its strength and fragility, remains.
About Daina Ashbee

Justine A. Chambers: The Brutal Joy (performative lecture)
The Brutal Joy unfurls Black vernacular line dance and sartorial gesture as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black-living, in a scored improvisation for dance, light, and sound. In this performative lecture, Chambers examines the work’s conceptual/personal/anecdotal underpinnings through images, video and research.
About Justine A. Chambers 

Mardon + Mitsuhashi: whereverever (excerpt)
A new work by choreographers Alexa Mardon and Erika Mitsuhashi, media artist Alysha Seriani and composer Sasha J. Langford. Across a sixteen-minute video and forty-minute dance performance, whereverever playfully traces possible beginnings and belonging by following the question “how did we get here?”
About Mardon + Mitsuhashi 

The Biting School: EMPTY-HANDED (excerpt)
EMPTY-HANDED explores the journeys of five cosmic characters through themes of darkness, deception, and greed. Audience members are invited to leave behind something from their past, which becomes part of the show. Each character guides the viewer through an emotional arc that honours the essence of their personal revolution.
Includes strong language and mature content.
About The Biting School 

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 22

2-4pm Studio Showings + Conversation (Location: Scotiabank Dance Centre)

Starr Muranko/Raven Spirit Dance: Breaking Bones (work in process excerpt)
Tracing Bones is a duet about memory and presence.  It reflects upon the question – what memories do we hold onto, what do we tuck away, what gets forgotten or transformed over time? What memories do we hold within our bodies, within our bones.
About Starr Muranko 

Tasha Faye Evans: Seed (work in process)
Seed is a personal exploration of Sxwoxwiyam, the original stories written into these lands to remind us how to show up in the world. Moved by the shapes and teachings of the ancestor’s eye, this work is an exploration of the fundamental elements of Coast Salish art and design.
About Tasha Faye Evans 

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 23

12 noon-1pm Studio Showing (Location: Scotiabank Dance Centre)
FakeKnot: MY HOUSE (work in progress)
Ralph Escamillan’s new performance work is based around the HOUSE that is represented through the familial physical bonds found in Ballroom. Escamillan, aka Posh Gvasalia Basquiat, uses the motif of trompe l’oeil to express the feeling of self-actualization that is manifested on the Ballroom floor. Bringing the BALL from runway to the stage, this piece features a team of Canadian Kiki legends, local commentators and DJs.
About FakeKnot

Photos: Tuning – Action at a Distance + Belle Spirale Dance Projects/David Cooper;  All Bodies Dance Project/courtesy of ABDP; Daina Ashbee/Yvonne Chew