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Alexa Mardon, the writer for the Vancouver residencies during the recently concluded Migrant Bodies international choreographic research project, has created a beautiful book of poems, illustrations, photographs and collected materials which came out of the project. We have a very limited number of free copies available, which may be picked up in the main lobby of Scotiabank Dance Centre.
Here’s an excerpt from her introduction to the book:
From July 2014 to July 2015, Migrant Bodies brought together a group of artists in an attempt to grapple with a topic of immense political weight. As the writer for the Vancouver-based residencies of the project, I joined five choreographers and a dramaturge as they navigated a myriad of stories, voices, and histories related to migration and its consequences.
… This book is an offering, a continuation of the questions this project raises: what unheard stories does a body carry, in the form of illness, superstition, ancestry, doubts, dance, and language? What is passed on, and what is erased, written over, left behind? Through imposing erasure on a series of poetic responses to the project’s and choreographers’ work, I propose that redaction, a tactic typically employed to silence and conceal, may insist on another way of encountering this text. The poems, accompanied by excerpts of email exchanges between artists, exist in a bound and printed state of ongoing encounter. With the past, aching through a body into the present. With difficult truths. With the complex relationships to place that find us here, now.
Migrant Bodies, a major two-year international choreographic research project, was undertaken with partners in Vancouver, Montreal, France, Italy and Croatia during 2014-2015.
The Migrant Bodies Project is supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union and the Province of British Columbia.