INCUBATIVE and ADAPTIVE underpin fever dreams, plastic orchid’s 2020–2021 season.
Artists-in-Residence will work at Left of Main to imagine how their interests reach into a world in perpetual transition. Sitting alongside these incubative deep dives, our collaborations for presentation will be adaptive and responsive in nature and by design.
The printed fever dreams book/lets have arrived and are ready to be shipped to you!
As we sit on the precipice of the unknown, where the unforeseeable and unimaginable are woven into the fabric of our daily lives, we’ve invited this season’s artists to reflect on their practices in this book/let, which we offer in print and digital forms. All of the messiness that binds us in this moment is bound here, as we search for and approach practicing in a different kind of tomorrow.
- Chris Bose
- Francesca Frewer & Erika Mitsuhashi
- Zahra Shahab
- Sarah Wong
- Jamie Robinson
- Ralph Escamillan
- Ileanna Cheladyn
- Avery Smith
- Livona Ellis
- Rachel Maddock
- Tia Kushniruk & Jenna Berlyn
Chris Bose
The year 2020 is the year of pandemic, of cancellations, of disappointment, of struggle and stress, of hustling to make a buck. It’s been tough and exhausting for myself and my collaborators. But, in a strange way, it’s been healing, this time of slowing down, of stopping, of breathing and becoming more aware of how fragile our system really is during these surreal times. I learned how to slow down.
I walk a lot more these days and I learned to enjoy the silence and strange tranquility. The wind through the leaves on the trees outside my patio, the different cycles of birds that flew about the skies as we transitioned from cold, endless winter to spring buds and leaves then finally flowers. I re-learned the little things, putting down tobacco and making food offerings in the mornings to N’shaytkin, those that came before us. These little ceremonies have grounded me back to the earth while opening up the sky a little bit more.
Re-learning, re-membering, I’ve found peace watching the clouds pass and the heat waves arrive baking the land and I kept walking. My body has been healing this year, all the little maladies that compile on us because we were driven by that pounding drum, HARDER! FASTER! MORE! Of failed capitalism. It’s no longer booming in my ears, in my skull, in my heart. My practice is finally returning little by little, a mural here, a song there, a story opens up and I am able to grasp it out of the sky and write it down.
I look forward to seeing my friends, my collaborators and seeing what we create as we’re a little calmer, a little wiser and more in tune than we might have been before this pandemic. That is where I want to be. At the gates before the race, the fall from the plane skydiving, rolling in the wind, the splash in the water during cliff diving and those tense, few minutes before walking onto a stage of people waiting to see you.
Chris Bose is a writer, multi-disciplinary artist, musician, curator and filmmaker. His newest book is N’shaytkin, a novella that in collaboration with David Mcintosh of Battery Opera was turned into a performance and music experience in December 2019. 2020 saw the performance and music being refined for festivals and touring, then the pandemic hit and shut things down. He is of the Secwepemc and Nlaka’pamux Nation in BC, and currently spends his time in Kamloops B.C.
Francesca Frewer & Erika Mitsuhashi
We use our dance practice and particularly our improvisation practices to hold the big questions we have about how we are in the world, as individuals and together. In this work that we are developing at Left of Main, the main big question is:
When we find ourselves faced with fundamental uncertainty, how do we make sense of ourselves, our perceptions, and one another?
We have been exploring how invisible forces of various kinds affect our conscious experience — from gravity to the structures we live under to our personal cares, doubts, and desires. In this work we are trying to take all this and put it into scores that emphasize agency and subjectivity, to work on meeting the unknown with humility and willingness.
Francesca Frewer / I think I love too many things but I love loving too many things. Lately I have been marvelling at tiny things and how the huge is contained within them. I have been wondering about big things like if it is possible to imagine beyond what is imaginable. I have been trying to bring an acceptance of impermanence into the way I relate to myself, to others, to things that happen, to things I do: francescafrewer.com
Erika Mitsuhashi / As I allow myself to follow genuine curiosity within my practice, I have been asking: Who’s in the room and when? What does it mean if I am spending most of my time sewing? And if everytime I go to make a dance, all I want to do is make a diorama? erikamitsuhashi.com
Zahra Shahab
trusting the holy instant while being flipped inside out by the love revolution. returning to darkness, my main bitch, a mine full of truth rubies.
Allah set these brown chairs up for us on the side of a road at night in hopes we would consider the multiple locations of knowledge making in the body for a sec. I sit beside myself, oppressor in one chair, oppressed in the other, we get really quiet.
I submerge my heart in loveblood by building an accidental altar. jesus and mary are there in whiteface and the knife has been sharpened.
Zahra Shahab is an artist based on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish people. She is interested in the word fantasy and the prophetic power of coaxing our imaginations beyond the confines of white supremacy: shahabibi.com
photos, drawings, text Zahra Shahab
Sarah Wong
FUTURE DREAMING SEEMS IRRELEVANT BUT THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF IT MAKES IT
THAT MUCH MORE DREAMY
For what has happened
has extended my vision
of the realm of possibility
Apocalyptic calm
The loving and the lonely
The able and the anxious
My unknowing is a vessel
A container, a stretching womb
Two feet flipped upside down
At night I shift until I’m shaped
Things can be both impossible
and shockingly real
If imagination stays fiction,
But soothes my heart for
this time held still,
Then please
Let me waste my hours with
fake imagery
With the sparks of colour
I see when I shut my eyelids
Let me dream what my
ancestors wouldn’t dare to
Take shape as the animal of
a long lineage of practicality
If not always care, then what?
Slowing down is thawing, is
My ability to survive tells me
I’m stronger than I think
To trust and to strip down
in an act of love and truth
UN/CONDITIONING IS UN/
LEARNING IS UN/SETTLING
IS UN/FORMING
I’m sore from trying
To fit and fight the frame
My second-generation ignorance
My Western freedom
of choice
The aesthetic of this
The abstraction of me
It’s my privilege to present
the non-literal
To accept the offer to speak
in printed colour
I’ve lived many lives and
I’m losing track of it
My children soon unfolding
And this:
Our precious heirloom
Sarah Wong is a dance artist and writer based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. She’s a second-generation Chinese Canadian who aspires to be her ancestors’ wildest dreams. She wants to feel her body in all of its romance and its functionality: sarahwong.ca
photos, paintings & text Sarah Wong
Jamie Robinson
Jamie Robinson is an artist living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil- Waututh Nations. Her work is focused through a lens of choreography and movement.
from Four Journeys Into Mystic Time: Mysterium, stills Jamie Robinson, Shirley Clarke
Ralph Escamillan
Ralph Escamillan takes and makes space through his making, dancing and wearing of clothing. He has founded two aliases as Van Vogue Jam (free, by-donation Vogue and Ballroom organization) and FakeKnot (putting things on peoples heads and making them perform). His mission is to make space and opportunities for Queer/POC in commonly white centered spaces. During spring of 2021 FakeKnot will be working on BLUSCRN with new media artist Milton Lim: ralphescamillan.com
Ileanna Cheladyn
CONVERSATION WITH SELF #384
What is dance to you, for you?
Good question; want the long or short answer?
Short, please.
Dance is messy, and
complicated, dependent,
productive, vast, world-
building, meaning-making,
war-torn, political, personal,
public, and private. It exists
on irradiated soil, on long-
haul flights with endless
plastic cups, on unceded
land, on promises of failure
entangled with productivity.
Dance tries to be reliable and
reproduce-able. Dance is not
always reliable or reproduce-
able. Dance is bound by
circumstances of form
(physiologies) but it works to,
and can, and does shove past
these forms. We are delightful
cyborgs, reach extended
by the technology of dancing.
A dance will sell if it is ‘the
same’ tomorrow. Dance is
perceived (mythologized) as
being consistent. Dance does
not feel consistent. I’m too
clumsy to be consistent.
Thank you.
CONVERSATION WITH SELF #1549
How do you feel about dance lately?
I don’t mind it. It’s fun. Like,
I can play around with different
futures, better pleasures, and
even anticipatory relations.
Even if it’s, you know, always
on an edge of legibility, I think
there’s a lot of room to explore
and unspool. It’s a good
material, dance.
CONVERSATION WITH SELF #9210
What is dance?
That’s awfully broad…
Take it as it is.
Dance is eroticism on the
edge, edging, entangled limbs
and lips just missing. It is the
potential disappointment
of erotics. The alien bodies
of untouchable others
intensifying. It is an amorous
exorcism and a possession.
It is the simultaneous
annihilation and utilization
of hard-to-handle practices
(and values). Dance is not
ahistorical. The history of
dance exists partially because
the bodies that keep dance
alive and pass it on change
and disintegrate and are
erased. Dance is forgetful.
And forgetful of those it’s
evicted and appropriated.
Dance forgets what it’s doing
(me too). Dance can dismantle
itself, can disconnect its
depersonalized appendages
to recreate itself in a gentler,
less problematic form. Dance
is where opinions can be
explored. Dance must be
that tough space of working
through an opinion. An open
space of asking hard questions.
Dance fears the rebuttal of
asking hard questions, showing
unformed opinions. Dance
works against a dooming
potential of being wrong, of
saying the wrong thing. It still
says a lot of wrong things.
Ileanna Sophia Cheladyn is an emerging dance artist and anthropologist who practices and lives with deep solidarity to the Coast Salish lands that host her and her collaborators. Her work is critical of prescriptive mind/body dualisms. She makes movement and text based art in discrete, quiet and rigorous ways: cheladyn.tumblr.com
Avery Smith
Set up your house of cards and care for it quietly
/
Witness an other. Stay close to and outside of them. Use them as a tether to time.
Acknowledgment as accountability.
The reflex for intimacy. An undercurrent.
Interface with the reflections of you. Wait for them to dissolve and reappear, dissolve and reappear.
Tack your ideals to a soft surface. Watch the surface be imprinted and eventually swallow them whole.
Build a fixed image. Carry this on your person.
Begin the process of encapsulation. Do you include yourself?
Reinforcing while unravelling.
Glass shovels in all parts of you excavating the things that sit below your surface.
Dig, decolonize, and pause.
It’s all work.
Are you a citizen of your body?
Transmit telepathic secrets to yourself. Whisper them to the shallow crevasses of you.
Tie down the ephemeral and ask its name. Watch the concrete fly away and evaporate.
Make a decision to give something meaning. Try this for a while and manifest anew.
Join yourself half-heartedly to something in sight.
Reward good behaviour.
Action vs. anything/everything else.
A difference that puddles and grows.
Tip between the two. Be In flux.
Choose something to carry alongside you.
Choose something to carry until the end.
//
Unlock Most Things. Undo whatever is left.
Amorphous and still becoming, coalesce all sensations.
Ghost body.
Sheer body.
Faceless Performer.
Anticipate the momentum of you.
Spread yourself wide.
De/construct and tangle the world with you.
Let a single impetus carry you. Float along this way for a while.
Find a pace that is all your own.
Breath, a gentle hammer.
Trace the thin layer of oil between you and the earth below.
Slip and slide.
To be a happy hostage to your container.
Find stasis and hold its weight.
You are total.
Retrieve a kinaesthetic memory of you.
Introduce yourself.
/
Dance is fluid and stubborn and swimming inside me
Avery Smith lives and makes on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-Waututh First Nations of Vancouver, BC. Avery uses her practice to explore differing gradients of effort and ease. She’s interested in subverting ratios of structure and freedom within physical tasks, creative processes, and already existing dance infrastructure: averymsmith.com
Livona Ellis
What Are My Options?
You should:
—be:
—the same
—different
—nice
—articulate
—courageous
—scared
—silent
—louder
—like this
—thinking about:
—the future
—the reason
—his feelings
—the right way
—what you want
—what she meant
—consequence
—yourself
—others
—sex
—do
—act
—say:
—that again
—it first
—it to their face
—it softly
—hi
—something
—you’re on board
—what you really want
—it wasn’t you
—sorry:
—I lied
—I’m late
—not sorry
—they left
—you can’t
—about that
—won’t cut it
—I missed that
—try
—smile
—not
—dance:
—that again
—like this
—better
—again
—here
—slower
—so I understand
—together
—for you
—get:
—that again
—going
—in shape
—in line
—her email
—groceries
—another one
—their word
—your nails done
—out of here
—in the shower
—them to listen
—tell me:
—what’s wrong
—I’m right
—a story
—who’s there
—why not
—your plans
—what I want to hear
—their name
—what they said
—you get it
—go:
—home
—to work
—again
—to therapy
—get him
—without
—ask
—look:
—for me
—like that
—down on
—away
—at the facts
—at them laughing
—in the drawer
—like you agree
—at the phone
—don’t touch
—in control
Livona Ellis is asking a lot of questions. She is curious about the how and why of people’s choices as a way to reflect on her own. She is fascinated by the reoccurring themes that are showing up in her life and also the things she didn’t expect to be there: @livona_ellis
Thank you to James and Natalie for sharing their space and supporting this incredible community of artists.
Rachel Maddock
I. WITHOUT DANCING
to be without to be withheld
to be alone, to feel vacant, to be a curtain drawn closed
a curtain
drawn closed
to find energy to reimagine
an ache
find energy to rethink
give and give
What do we have to offer but ourselves?
What do I have to offer
an ache
The dance of waking up
The dance of cooking, walking, chatting
The dance of laughing
wake
ache
give
II. CHAOS OXYGEN
I feel like I can’t breathe
the stress of it all.
imaging rolling, reaching
imagining bodies, rolling, diving, reaching
imagining the chaotic beauty of it all
things are so still
objects, are still
I’m stuck to the floor
my tongue, stuck in my mouth
life feels far away
life is here, now
I am far away
stuck in my imagination
rolling, reaching, sweating
hurling bodies, chaos
oxygen
III. SMALL DOSES
There are cushions on the floor, for us to sit.
tree branches wag and a loud cleaning noise comes
from somewhere
Around us, space, within us, space
we talk, the sun is hidden, but may emerge
What does it mean to the world to do what we do in the world
to be us
What does it mean to us to be here, in the process, just
On the precipice of so much
On the brink
On the ledge of a new process of, a new way of working of,
an imagined place
To be in space
To be
on the precipice
of the world, of so much
of it means
to the world
to us
Rachel Maddock is an independent dance artist and writer based in and around Vancouver and Port Moody, BC. She is still working out (with deep gratitude) her relationship to the land she lives on. Movement and words are her best options for expression — an anchor, a lifeline, and a harbour. An opportunity to come back to self and offer the world something true: rachelmaddock.com
Tia Kushniruk & Jenna Berlyn
Well. Hello there. We are Tia Kushniruk and Jenna Berlyn, respectively. Here are our intentions of play and research.
What is beauty in such an ugly, ugly, world? Is it hiding? Has it been hidden? Have YOU been keeping it from us? Have WE been denying its existence? Because of what? Ignorance? Naivety? Perhaps self-loathing and shame? Beauty is objective. It is placed upon objects to distill a sense of an unchanging infinity. But, beauty itself is contextually different for everyone of every class, race, sex, time period etc. So, how do we define it and why do we, as humans and particularly as artists, crave it?
Now, moving onwards and upwards into the deep abyss of the night, we found ourselves musing this sentiment – what is beauty, when everything, every single thing that we have been taught, shown, to have perceived as beautiful, has been curated by those with regard to perpetuating and validating normalcy. What are our preconceived notions in dance, of beauty. Of opulence. Of privilege. Of ugliness. Of real dance. Of performance. Of t e c h n i q u e. Of ritual. Of drama. Of reality or realness or real life living? And how do we, being privileged enough to study dance and participate in it, take a good step back and examine the value and worth of what is truly beautiful to us, and to try to explain why it is so.
We love live theatre. It’s something powerfully moving, and powerfully reflective at the right place and the right time. We believe it is high time to continue to challenge the status quo that we have readily accepted and have been spoon-fed. We want to tell and participate in stories that reflect the world around us, and the world we want to live in. And we aren’t saying we will get it right. In fact, we are certain we will fail. But, the point of the matter is that the exploration has started, and will continue. This is just a continuation of this ever-evolving, morphing, transformative process of curiosity.
A nagging itch to scratch, and lick, and heal.
My name is Tia Ashley Kushniruk and I am a dance-theatre artist born in Edmonton, trained in Edmonton and Toronto, and now working in Vancouver. I have applied to Danceweb 3 times, and have never gotten in. I have overdeveloped thumb muscles from years of playing video games. I love Stories: inuashnar1.tumblr.com
Jenna Berlyn is a contemporary dance artist based in Vancouver, BC, although she just spent 5 months in the Okanagan on her family’s farm. She is excited to be once again dancing, thinking and dreaming with her friends and mentors through films, performances and practices: jennaberlyn.wixsite.com
