I arrived in Toronto first and then Montreal after. I didn’t rush to the airport like I usually do. I rush around constantly. I don’t travel during the morning rush because it gives me panic attacks. The sky is lower in London and I feel tense unless its sunny. When its sunny I feel really happy.
I didn’t rush to the airport like I normally do. I don’t travel in the morning rush because I get panic attacks. I felt distracted by something else so I didn’t have a panic attack even though I felt weird about taking up space and having a big luggage on the train.
Coming back to North America made me feel really excited. Right now I feel vaguely intense. We are performing tonight in Toronto. The sky is really big here and I have too much space. My mind is really wandering all over the place because there is too much space. It is a good place to start making a new work.
I used to come to Canada every summer growing up because some of my family lives here. It is nice to be here now because for the first time I can engage with something else in a familiar place.
And its hot and sunny and I love that.
Montreal/Studio303/Nationalism/NO NATIONALISM/Deppaneur/Dancing/Vaporwave/Canada Day/Haudenosaunee Confederacy (What is now called Montreal)
Me and Ellen are making a new work around Nationalism and we are calling it “Nationalism”. At least at the present moment. Maybe that will change. We both have a practice of obfuscating one-one relationships between the title of work and what appears in the work so maybe all of this will change. Maybe we won’t arrive at any conclusion of what Nationalism may look like in the form of our duet.
We started soon after I arrived in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which is now known as Montreal. There is a big conversation here around the indigenous population of Canada and I would like to recognise that as the place where we are making this work and as the activity being supported by a-n.
As me and Ellen talk and dance and talk and dance and make drama and dance and talk and make drama and cry and talk and dance and dance and dance and perform and dance and talk and cry and make anti-drama and dance we are also witnessing the tenseness of the topic of nationalism and our relationship to that term as artists.
We started our rehearsals by having a photo shoot for the Toronto Star. We joked about starting all new work by having a random photo shoot first because it really is interesting how we come to conceptualise something and relate to each other for a photograph of a work we have not made yet. At some point along the process, we got approached to perform a work-in-progress at the Toronto Community Love-In’s annual PS We are all here festival.
Then we worked and worked and worked in Studio 303. Studio 303 is a great space with great people running it and we were so supported. We had unfettered access to the space which means that we worked and worked and worked. Every day we rehearsed up to 3 times in one day, starting in the morning, breaking for lunch, coming back, breaking for dinner, and coming back again. We’ve made a lot of material; dances, songs, organisations, patterns, structures. This culminated in a showing of our work to the staff of Studio 303, including the Director, Miriam Ginestier, and writer Jacob Wren. We are waiting for photos and video and I will update this post with them later.
We are performing tonight in Toronto. We are excited to continue both of our practices of making and putting it out there because performance is another kind of studio research, for us.
**I had some issues creating this blog because there was something wrong with my membership.**
