SQUARED GESTURES : AT THE CROSSROAD OF DANCE AND VISUAL ARTS
The Darling Foundry has programmed throughout the season of 2015-2016 new projects where dance and visual arts meet, which corresponded with the arrival of Curator Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre in the Spring of 2015. From June 1 to June 5, GESTURES2 will present the Montreal première of works by two Canadian artists: Zoja Smutny and Catherine Lavoie-Marcus. These works aim to continue the appropriation of the Darling Foundry’s spaces in a singular and performative way.
Presented during the Fall 2015, the exhibition Hôtel Formes Sauvages of the Marseille artist André Fortino initiated the Darling Foundry’s interest in how the dialogue between a visual artist and a choreographer impacts their approach to creation and how the public looks at these outcomes. Fortino’s video triptych was based on the reinterpretation of gestures that were at the core of a first video, used as a score for the creation of the two following ones.
Wednesday June 1 + Thursday June 2, 9:30 PM – 10:30 PM | $20 (regular), $15 (students and cultural worker)
June 2, 2:00 PM: Choreographed Conversation | Free
Resident Choreographer with Dancemakers in Toronto, Zoja Smutny takes interest in the peripheral elements of the choreography, i.e. the sound composition, the set design as a form of installation, the role and place devoted to the spectator, in order to shake up the viewing habits and transform the spectators into participants.
By building on the creative possibilities offered by the idea of sharing - a space, a time, a context – her work unfolds around the capacity of all, spectators and performers, to be sensitive and responsive to the co-presence’s effects, that feed into the live creation.
Presented as a Montreal première in the Main Gallery, Rosé Porn, a new multidisciplinary work described by Smutny as a "concept album," is a choreography that intersects dance, music, cinema, installation, and merchandising. A living installation to be experienced in a gallery space, Rosé Porn was created in collaboration with Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Victoria Cheong. Along with her in the gallery space will be performers Brendan Jensen, Claudia Fancello, as well as Zoja Smutny. “The dancers control all the lights, sound, and video. We work with pink neon tape, plants, flowers, cameras, computers, speakers, projectors, fabric, lights, clothes, plastic, and paper. » - Zoja Smutny
Taking place on Thursday, June 2 at 2:00 PM at the Darling Foundry, Smutny also proposes a “Choreographed Conversation,” a performative platform for sharing artistic practice and thought. “Zoja is interested in creating a space that can house both the performance itself as well as a conversation designed as a kind of alternative to an artist talkback,” explains Dancemakers’ Curator Amelia Ehrhardt. This “Choreographed Conversation” will bring together Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre (Curator at the Darling Foundry), Amelia Ehrhardt, Zoja Smutny, as well as the invited artists Anthony Burnham, Ame Henderson, Guntar Kravis and Claudia Fancello. They will share their thoughts and questions on the influence between disciplines, thus mediating how it affects their own work and where it becomes visible.
Read more about Rosé Porn
Buy your tickets on the Dancemakers website
Read more about the Choreographed Conversation
Photo : Rosé Porn, Zoja Smutny in collaboration with Victoria Cheong and Brendan Jensen, project view, 2015 © Aundrea Bell
Wednesday June 1 and Thursday June 2, 5:00 PM - 9:30 PM | Saturday June 4 and Sunday June 5, 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM | Free
In the Small Gallery, Choreographer Catherine Lavoie-Marcus proposes four participatory workshops in which six performers and the public are invited to create choreographic scores taking the form of collages using Quebec’s dance archives. Performers Marie Claire Forté, Andrée Juteau, Brice Noeser, Georges-Nicolas Tremblay, Andrew Turner and Catherine Lavoie-Marcus will appropriate these new images and turn them, with the complicity of sound designer Michel F. Côté, into “tableaux vivants” physically enacting the history of dance, between the homage and the outrage.
With Dance Anarchives, Lavoie-Marcus questions the taboos of her discipline by inventing new ways of writing movements, based on an anarchic appropriation of the documentation of Quebec’s dance archives. In this exercise, leading figures in the heritage of dance collide in a disordered, disproportionate and anachronistic manner. “From this collision of images, new documents arise creating in turn new and remarkable memories. The archives’ anarchic potential bursts: no historical figure remains untouchable; no temporal or aesthetic hierarchy is maintained. Liberated, the bodies detach from their surroundings and defy the laws of gravity.” – Catherine Lavoie-Marcus
Read more about Dance Anarchives
En savoir plus sur les Anarchives de la danse
Photo : Les Anarchives de la danse, Catherine Lavoie Marcus, Collage 27,9 cm × 21,6 cm, 2016
Research: Gabrielle Larocque
—
A third part of this research will take the form of the exhibition Interprétations à l’œuvre, organized by the Darling Foundry in collaboration with Astérides, during the Festival international des arts & des écritures contemporaines Actoral. Including 14 Canadian and French artists and performers, this exhibition will be presented in Marseille, at La Friche la Belle de Mai, from August 27 to November 27, 2016.
