Dances for Elsewhere

September 2016 – ongoing In collaboration with Alexa Solveig Mardon, “Dances for Elsewhere” is a research process considering questioning the ontology of dance, while engaging in dance-making across geographic, temporal, and cultural boundaries. It is a project that seeks to continuously acknowledge new acts of production as always predicated upon histories of colonial conquest and violence. The initial research phase for this project will be shared at the Performance Studies International 2017 Conference in Hamburg, Germany.    

As two dance artists residing across national borders and on opposite edges of the same continent, we attempt a collaboration. How do we dance together when you are there and I am here? In order to connect, we rely upon popular technologies at our disposal: email, telephone, text, google docs, facebook, snapchat, instagram. These applications and epistemologies allow us to transcend certain borders, like the distance between the US and Canada, the time difference between the east and west coasts, the cultural chasms between Canadian-born European-descendant, and barely-documented Iranian-born immigrant. As dancers, we often come to know through embodied, sensorial experience. But working across such distance challenges our natural working conditions.

Digital technology allows us to make a dance together without our bodies ever being in the same room, or country. Our collaboration spills over borders. How do we come to know the world that is distant or far away from us in time and space? Can we get closer, when economic, sociopolitical systems of subject formation explicitly choreograph distance between us?

       

Dances for Elsewhere continues, as of March 2020, on this tumblr blog.