Pro Series I: isn’t this where & the flowing.

This year, Dance’s season at the School of Creative and Performing Arts launches with physical sophistication, bringing together two artists from far apart locales who share the rare ability to simultaneously hold viscerality and poise in performance. I have known Oriah Wiersma for over a decade, first meeting her when I created a work for her BFA Dance cohort at York University. More recently, I met He Jin Jang through the Transart Institute where we both study within a global community of academic researchers in Creative Practice.

When curating this Pro Series’ iteration, I was motivated by the similarities I had been noticing in how each artist articulates her own choreographic methods and questions. The two did not know each other prior to their respective arrivals in Calgary earlier this week and, beyond the immense pleasure I derive from seeing their work side-by-side in the theatre, I have been absolutely delighted witnessing how mutually animated they become when discovering these commonalities for themselves in casual conversation.
 

Marie France Forcier

isn’t this where is a somatic exploration of corporeal memory within a sonic landscape. This somatic performance draws inspiration from varied yet interrelated research such as, transgenerational epigenetic inheritance and mind/body dissonance and connection. Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is defined as: ‘environmental triggers that hit pregnant [individuals] can affect “directly” not only the first new generation but also its germ cells that represent the second generation’. isn’t this where is an attempt to understand how one is situated if there is no beginning or end and lives in the blurring space of past, present, and future. It is a meditation, allowing the body to speak as words dissolve. It uncovers the conflict that arises in the cognitive self when one has the desire to know and fears what will be known. What does one do with this knowledge? Where is it held? And can it be released?

Choreography + performance: Oriah Wiersma 
Sound design: Oriah Wiersma and Jaron Freeman-Fox 
Outside eye: Marie France Forcier
Outside eye for Winnipeg premiere: Alex Elliott 

This work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and was researched at the Young Lungs Dance Exchange residency in Winnipeg, the National Ballet open space program in Toronto, and Connection Dance Works in New Brunswick. Thank you to Jaymez, Dasha Plett, and Holly Small for their contributions to this project. 

the flowing. explores the body and force, patterns and rhythms, and nervous systems and ghostliness. It is a corporeal practice for mourning, a precarious song for the precarious, and a space for bodily requiem. Here, the process of grief is felt as ‘the flowing space’.  What if what we thought we lost is ever present, rippling and pulsing in and out of our body? By contemplating on the fluidity of the inner body, it imagines the body as something that has no beginning and ending. The body moves along the path of the lost force and learns the ghostly rhythm of the nervous system within and elsewhere. It sometimes grasps the external rhythms by drawing protrusions with movement to summon and celebrate the liminality of the body. A heavily swaying companion object, and its vital force act as portal for the ontological riddle of life and death. I welcome you to dwell in the flowing space where the soul is being thrown, shaken, given-up, and hesitated within the resonant event of Existence(Eksistenz).

*For full Choreographer’s Note, please take a look at https://shorturl.at/knDUY. (The link will be available to view after Saturday Performance.)

Choreography/Performance/Text: He Jin Jang
Sound Design: Jimmy Sert
Dramaturgy of 2021 Premiere: Bittnarie Shin
Visual Design of 2021 Premiere: Seung Woo Han & He Jin Jang
Visual Management of 2023 Touring: Yewon Seo


*the flowing. was first premiered in October 2021 at Seoul International Dance Festival. The work was created through the process of research laboratory ‘Weekly Weakly’ and the self-organized platform, ‘Flowing Residency’ from 2020-2021. The project was supported by Sinchon Arts Space and Dancers’ Career Development Center in 2021 and its touring in 2023 is made possible by the support from 2023 Arts Council Korea's International Partnership in Support of Arts Creation.