World Premiere: 2013 — Dancing on the Edge
Choreography and Performance: Josh Martin
Lighting Design: Won Kyoon Han
Music: Lightning Bolt / Polmo Polpo
Rehearsal Direction: Lisa Gelley
Special Thanks: Lee Su-Feh and Barbara Bourget
Nominee for 2020 Dora Awards in Outstanding Performance by an Individual: Josh Martin / Leftovers
Performed by Company 605 Co-Artistic Director Josh Martin, this solitary dance began as an investigation surrounding an idea that the body holds a separate memory bank. Muscle tissue, bones, tendons and organs all storing their own accounts of past events, actions and trauma, with this collected information not readily shared or easily accessed by the mind. The process has been an exploration of how to consistently find, enter, and move through different states and sensations. In a constant effort to disconnect movement from thought, the dance is an attempt to externalize the inner moments of body recall, and an expansion of what gets churned up in the retrieval.
Leftovers is a piece developed through support from The Canada Council for the Arts, The Dance Centre and mentorship from Kokoro Dance’s Barbara Bourget. The work premiered at the Dancing On The Edge Festival 2013 (Vancouver), with additional presentations at the On The Boards Northwest New Works Festival (Seattle), Risk/Reward Festival (Portland), Vancouver International Dance Festival, Atlantic Dance Festival (Moncton), Fluid Festival 2016 (Calgary) and in Ottawa as part of the National Arts Centre’s 2014/15 Dance Season. Leftovers was also performed at the 2014 Internationales Solo-Tanz-Theater Festival in Stuttgart, where it received two prizes (1st Prize for Choreography and 2nd Prize for Performance) and an invitation to tour across seven cities in Germany through November 2014.
“Martin’s concept of the body as storage container for the assorted artifacts of cellular memory has him turn himself into a kind of stop-action figure. His muscle isolation skills are amazing (…). But this is more than just weird virtuosity; Martin gives shape to the subconscious conflict between action and thought, and between past and present.” – Natasha Gauthier, Ottawa Citizen, 2014
Photo by Christ Randle
