Concept and Choreography: Dana Gingras (in collaboration with the performers)
Performers: Amber Funk-Barton, Sarah Doucet, Dana Gingras, Shay Kuebler, Masaharu Imazu, Karen Fennell (apprentice)
Transmission Concept, Installation, Composition: Anna Friz
Dramaturgy: Ruth Little, Daniel Canty
Lighting Designer: Mikko Hynninen
Costumes and Styling: Sarah Doucet
Photography: Yannick Grandmont
Premiere: October 4, 2011; Vancouver East Cultural Centre
Commissioning partners: The Vancouver East Cultural Centre, The Brian Webb Dance Company, National Arts Centre, L’Agora de la danse, and The CanDance Network.
The fundamental need to connect, despite obstacles of time and distance, has become a central paradigm of human communication. Making these concepts flesh, Heart as Arena, a multimedia work for five performers, explores ideas of receptivity, transmission and the secret language of electricity that animates heart, mind and muscle.
Low-watt radio transmitters broadcast a fragile stream of love songs, snatches of static, and the deep silence of space. A constellation of radios hovers above the dancers, creating a living array of sound. The transmissions create a physical soundscape that is constantly acted on and disrupted by the slipping frequencies and electrical fields created by the dancers’ moving bodies. Bellini’s Norma, the canonical opera of desire, love and loss, acts as the emotional centre of the piece, emerging and disappearing throughout the piece like a distant station heard on late night radio.
This choreography explores the heart as an arena of electrical and emotional force fields; the attraction and repulsion of bodies in motion; physically demanding expressions of need and want; the electrical interplay at the base of our emotions; the firing and silencing of the very neurons that create our experiences of falling in or out of love.
Performers: Amber Funk-Barton, Sarah Doucet, Dana Gingras, Shay Kuebler, Masaharu Imazu, Karen Fennell (apprentice)
Transmission Concept, Installation, Composition: Anna Friz
Dramaturgy: Ruth Little, Daniel Canty
Lighting Designer: Mikko Hynninen
Costumes and Styling: Sarah Doucet
Photography: Yannick Grandmont
Premiere: October 4, 2011; Vancouver East Cultural Centre
Commissioning partners: The Vancouver East Cultural Centre, The Brian Webb Dance Company, National Arts Centre, L’Agora de la danse, and The CanDance Network.
The fundamental need to connect, despite obstacles of time and distance, has become a central paradigm of human communication. Making these concepts flesh, Heart as Arena, a multimedia work for five performers, explores ideas of receptivity, transmission and the secret language of electricity that animates heart, mind and muscle.
Low-watt radio transmitters broadcast a fragile stream of love songs, snatches of static, and the deep silence of space. A constellation of radios hovers above the dancers, creating a living array of sound. The transmissions create a physical soundscape that is constantly acted on and disrupted by the slipping frequencies and electrical fields created by the dancers’ moving bodies. Bellini’s Norma, the canonical opera of desire, love and loss, acts as the emotional centre of the piece, emerging and disappearing throughout the piece like a distant station heard on late night radio.
This choreography explores the heart as an arena of electrical and emotional force fields; the attraction and repulsion of bodies in motion; physically demanding expressions of need and want; the electrical interplay at the base of our emotions; the firing and silencing of the very neurons that create our experiences of falling in or out of love.
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