Arash & Emmalena are investigating and reworking their duet UNTITLEdISTANCE with a cast of 6 dancers. The studio research will include developing the choreographic structure and going deeper into the conceptual themes. This showing shares the first phase of UNTITLEdISTANCE(s): a series of three duets, performed one after the other, exploring notions of otherness through improvised dance and text. In the meeting of – and moving through – hard topics like race, gender, migration, climate change, aging, love, fear and hope.
Jarislowsky Studio
Through their encounter they tell stories from the past to illuminate their possible imagined individual and collective futures. They entertain, inquire and provoke as they move through universal themes such as togetherness, aging and love to those more arrestingly contemporary such as our rapidly changing climates and migration. What is it that links this wild range of themes? Us. Through questions, answers and attempts to understand this moment in time, Arash and Emma bring humanness to the foreground in far reaching dances of seriousness and silliness, madness and hope.
Photo: Yvonne Chew
Created by Arash Khakpour and Emmalena Fredriksson, UNTITLEdISTANCE explores contact and text improvisation in dance performance. The research began with a residency at Simon Fraser University in the summer of 2016. In 2017 they received the Chrystal Dance Prize from Dance Victoria to develop the project further through a residency in Victoria and in Örebro, Sweden.
As Artists-in-Residence, Emmalena and Arash are continuing the research with 6 Vancouver-based bilingual dancers in the fall of 2019 with the support of the Canada Council for The Arts.
Supported through The Dance Centre’s Artist-in-Residence program