Brimming

Premiere: April 29, 2021 (Vancouver International Dance Festival)

Duration: 60 minutes

Created and performed by Artistic Co-Director Josh Martin, Brimming is a solo investigating the body as a container: a rigid frame holding in and concealing its stored inner contents.

The piece unfolds as a live and intimate cinematic experience that imagines the body as a hollow interior space continuously shaped and reshaped, filled and emptied, and inhabited by different states. A performer trapped inside his own form, the dance is a meeting of both the seen and unseen – the invisible thoughts and contents that slosh up against the sides, welling up from beneath, and occasionally leaking under its pressure. Set against the haunting soundscore of Vancouver-based composers Ian William Craig and Matthew Tomkinsom, Brimming explores this shape we are in, how it holds us, and what may eventually spill out as the walls begin to bend.

This is a hybrid presentation utilizing live-feed cameras in tandem with a live in-situ performance. In-person audiences will attend an intimate and immersive experience, roaming freely to explore different perspectives and proximity to the work as it unfolds. Live camera capture of the performance is projected into the space as additional vantage points, which can be simultaneously broadcast for online streaming viewers.

“The emotions are pressurized, and when they start to spill out, Brimming takes Martin to some raw and exposed realms.” – Stir

Looping

Premiere: November 2019 (Looping Installation @ Dance In Vancouver Festival / The Dance Centre)

Looping is a durational dance installation derived from the choreographic concepts of Company 605’s ensemble stage work Loop, Lull, which premiered at the 2019 Push International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver, Canada.

In changing combinations, a rotating cast of performers trade in and out of a repeating improvised looping score, an evolving conversation with no beginning and no end. Each performer utilizes their own offerings of movement and text to build their loops (sequences or phrases that repeat seamlessly), with the ending of their action connected to the beginning, setting the performers into infinite action.

In this shared practice of attention, they are working on recognizing and responding to the emergence of change, continuously tracking themselves in relation to one other. It is a simultaneous doing and undoing, with each repetition a slight revision, erasing pieces of what has come before while incrementally building a way forward. The outcome is a collective movement that blooms and goes through a continual process of death and rebirth as each loop transforms and evolves over time. Keeping the virtuosic physicality and individual choices of each unique performer at play, 605’s Looping is a complex test of endurance and our capacity for adaptation, imagining new ways to be together through instability.

“an elaborate game of tag, where a touch or a word sets off ever more complex, circling patterns of movement. On another, it’s a chance for the audience to both watch the show and witness its creation at the same time.” – Georgia Straight

Future Futures

Created by Company 605 & Brian J. Johnson
Produced by Company 605 & Screen Siren Pictures

Premiere: Fall 2022 — streaming on demand on CBC Gem

5 Episode Series (each 7-10 minutes long)

How do we bring our physical bodies with us into our inevitably digitally-bound futures?

Future Futures is a collection of 5 short dance films that explore the digital destiny of humankind through a unique merging of camera and visual effects with an intensely specific choreographic vision. A narrative driven by movement and physicality, the films progress towards a not-so-distant future where the core characteristics of the human race are confronted by possible trajectories of technological singularity and a merging of artificial intelligence.

Embracing the absurdity of centering dance inside a sci-fi narrative, the experimental series collapses time to portray human culture at an unprecedented moment: an emergence of a new, autonomous and intelligent being – the digital reflection and culmination of ourselves. In a state of mass transition, and forced into a bizarre coexistence alongside this growing presence, the remaining population of embodied “real” humans confront their own fears and curiosity of this new dawn while grieving what might be left behind in their looming obsolescence.

Through its otherworldly imagery, choreography and driving electronic sound score, Future Futures evolves as a strange, highly visual and compellingly watchable exploration into what we are if no longer tied to our physical bodies, and how we will define humanity when being faced with a fading IRL existence.

The Replacements

Company 605’s new collaborative ensemble creation, The Replacements, is rooted in a shared process of futuring, and built through assembling divergent imaginings of where we are headed. Leaning into the tone of minimalist science-fiction, the work is centred around the concept of future as a construction of ideas so often anticipated and invented through pop culture’s own forecasting and projections of what future looks like, limiting our ability to imagine otherwise.

The performers inhabit and explore multiple possibilities of a physical evolution, and the construction or deconstruction of the body, taking on new forms of human. The piece and its six performers are in a continual state of becoming, navigating simultaneous conjectures of future selves and future togetherness.

In this peculiar temporal setting, where conflicting possibilities and outcomes are meant to overlap, challenge each other, and co-exist, movement and relationships between bodies must bend and distort, and an alternative form of “being” emerges. The process has involved researching rigorous states and movement qualities through imposing impossible tasks that fragment and abstract perception of the body in time and space – attempting to embody digital effects in real life, to move like video, and filtering these ideas through the actual body. Inspired by artificial intelligence and machine learning, the choreography explores a mimicking of human motions, slightly altered or revised. The result is an unnatural iteration of natural processes, with uncomfortable speeds, extreme body isolation, and segmented action, that combine to create a constructed or digital body, replacing what were once innate human movements with something “other”. 

The Replacements is an experiment in conjuring multiple futures simultaneously, and asks how we might move there.

Upcoming Presentations

Looping
September 2, 2022
15:00 – 16:30
Live at Tanzmesse (Düsseldorf)
MORE DETAILS

Brimming
Live-stream during TANZAHOi
September 11, 2022
MORE DETAILS

Future Futures
Premiere: Fall 2022 — streaming on demand on CBC Gem

Contact

Agent and Producer
Francesca Piscopo
francesca@company605.ca

Company 605 acknowledges that the land on which we work and create is the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Company 605 gratefully acknowledges the generous support from our funders: