Workshop | Craft Development
lossy bodies with Company 605
Lisa Mariko Gelley and Josh Martin of Company 605 guide participants through movement vocabulary and methodologies from their stage work lossy (2024), alongside discussion of their evolving concept of the “video body” — a digitally mediated understanding of the body that has threaded through their creations since their first work AUDIBLE (2009).
Anchored by the notion of “lossy”, a term suggesting compression, degradation and reformatting, the session follows the makers’ creative inquiry into what is lost, abstracted, remade or newly enabled as physical bodies encounter and are translated across new socio-technological conditions and increasingly unfixed realities. As choreography becomes captured, stored, replicated, and re-rendered through machinic systems, what happens to authorship, indexicality, and the authority of the live body? What new processes, aesthetics, and creative possibilities emerge when perceptions of real or simulated begin to blur or collapse?
Through collective dialogue and guided physical exploration, Lisa and Josh offer a case study and reflection on their own experience and artistic trajectory navigating the digital mitigation of bodies, tracing how ideas become embodied in choreographic propositions, how questions generate form, and how futurity has quietly guided their work. Exploring how notions of source, representation, and meaning shift alongside advancing technologies and cultural imaginaries, participants are invited to situate their own creative processes within this terrain, reflecting on where and how they are making from now.
Capacity is very limited, early registration strongly advised.
Contact members[at]thedancecentre[dot]ca to register.
Registration Deadline: March 30
Bios:
Lisa Mariko Gelley (she/her) is an artist and mother, dedicated to sharing experiences through dance and performance, and across generations. She is a mixed-race settler of Japanese, French, and Polish descent, living, working, and learning on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Some of Lisa’s works include MIDORI and Furusato, created with her grandmother, Lily Yuriko Tamoto, using intergenerational intuition and influences of ancestral memory in contemporary form. Lisa is currently in the MA Dance: Participation, Communities, Activism program at The Place, London, UK, growing social practice in dance with an international cohort.
Josh Martin (he/him) is dance maker and performer born and raised in Alberta, who has been based in Vancouver, and situated alongside partner and collaborator Lisa Gelley, for nearly 20 years. Exploring multiple roles and pursuits across the performing arts community, he remains committed to both a deep and evolving movement practice and choreographic curiosity. His solo works Brimming and Leftovers follow his ongoing investigation of the body as a container of held memory and trauma.
In their ongoing careers as interpreters and collaborators, Josh and Lisa’s independent practices have been connected to the works and projects of dozens of companies and independent artists. Since its inception over 15 years ago, Lisa and Josh have invested in the work and development of Company 605, an arts organization devising, producing and presenting new dance projects, and centering collaborative processes rooted in community. Together as Artistic Co-Directors, they have co-created many works including Inheritor Recordings, Vital Few, Anthem, Loop,Lull, After We Glow, Looping, and lossy. Through their work, Company 605 has built bridges with artists and audiences across the country and Internationally, reaching outward to connect and situate itself within the context of a global dance dialogue. In 2024, Lisa and Josh were named shared recipients of the Lola McLaughlin Legacy Award celebrating achievement in BC Dance.
Photo by Dan Loan