Recent Productions
Crux
Reclaiming a once identity-marking performance practice interrupted by trauma, childbearing and the pandemic via three distinct works symbolic of my collaborative trajectory:
Honouring an artistic relationship spanning decades, Verisimilitude (2019) draws on movement and spatial aesthetics from Indian martial arts (kalarippayattu) and acrobatics. In the solo, internationally acclaimed choreographer Brandy Leary (Anandam Dancetheatre) examines my physical structure’s folding and unfolding in a slowly expanding space of light. Working within a circularity that continuously inverts space, the dancing body moves towards the full verticality of standing.
Through Shadow Sound (2022), my own choreographic offering for the event, I explore the analytical psychology’s concept of Shadow Self. Physicalizing the stretching and distortion of self-perception through shadow images extending from one body to another, I perform this piece with emerging artist/ former student Cindy Ansah, as a mean of simultaneously investigating physical transference and shadowing through time.
Kimberley Cooper (Decidedly Jazz Danceworks, DJD), Calgary’s most celebrated dance company’s artistic director, developed a work within my present physical context. Shift Shaper (2022), indeed challenges my foundational European-descent contemporary practice by closely interweaving movement and musical intricacies in manners closer to Jazz choreography. With this exceptional creative contribution to the dance scene outside of DJD’s roster, Cooper staged a duet- or quintet- depending on the viewer’s perspective, where I morphed into different characters as I physically interact with live musician Jeremy Gignoux.
March 2022– Calgary, Canada. DJD Dance Centre. Sponsors: Canada Council for the Arts, Calgary Arts Foundation, University of Calgary.
Scars are All the Rage
Composing with animal training-like imagery, Scars parallels certain realities of abuse while remaining sensitive to psychological trauma’s complexities.
Cyclical by nature, abuse regularly results from learned behaviour: a perpetrator was often a victim in the first place.
While we grow culturally desensitized to violence in two-dimensional media, for real-life victims, unshakable traces linger. Somatic experiences are re-lived uncontrollably, and unwelcome images appear at intervals: graphic, distorted. Nightmare-like.
Choreography: Marie France Forcier/ Composition: James Bunton / Lighting Design: Gabriel Cropley / Performers: Justine Comfort, Molly Johnson, Louis Laberge-Côté / Artistic Advisor: Julia Sasso.
March 2015–Toronto, Canada. Harbourfront Centre Theatre/ DanceWorks Mainstage. Sponsors: Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council