World Premiere: November 21 – 23, 2019 — The Dance Centre’s Dance In Vancouver Festival
Performers: Brandon Alley, Laura Avery, Jade Chong, Kate Franklin, Francesca Frewer, Bynh Ho, Josh Martin, Kylie Miller, James-Amzin Nahirnick, Jamie Robinson, Zahra Shahab, Avery Smith, Jessica Wilkie, Sophia Wolfe
Looping is a durational dance installation derived from the choreographic concepts of the ensemble stage work Loop, Lull which premiered at the 2019 Push International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver, Canada. Later that year 605’s Looping installation was created for a special presentation as part of The Dance Centre’s Dance In Vancouver Festival, guest curated by Dieter Jaenicke.
A highly-structured improvised score, the work explores looping and repetition of movement as means to track change – with human error, timing imperfections, and the performer’s own desires creating inconsistencies that allow for a constant emergence of something new. In different changing combinations, a rotating cast of performers trade in and out of the repeated ongoing score. All utilize their own offerings of movement and text to build their loops, with the ending of their action connected to the beginning, setting the performers into infinite action. There is no start and no stop, just an emerging patterning that can be expanded, contracted, or warped. It is a simultaneous doing and undoing, with each repetition of movement loop becoming a slight revision, erasing pieces of what has come before while successively building a way forward.
In this shared practice of attention, the performers are working on recognizing and remaining responsive to the emergence of change inside a system. They must all continuously evolve and transform their movement in direct relationship with one another, and across shared timings – a very difficult task requiring tremendous rigour and endurance. As their loops merge, the performers navigate complex feats as an ensemble, negotiating an embedded conflict as they continuously learn and relearn how to dance with one another, bringing either collapse or transformation. It is an evolving conversation with no beginning and no end, keeping the unique physicality and individual choices of each performer at play to become an eclectic meeting point of forms and backgrounds, tied together through the specificity and structure of the shared score.
Company 605 – Looping Installation – Sample from Company 605 on Vimeo.
Sound: Matt Tomkinson
Lighting consultant: James Proudfoot
Video Footage: David Cooper
Thank-you to: Eponymous, Company 605 Board of Directors, The Dance Centre, Neworld
Theatre/ Progress Lab, Maiko Yamamoto, Modus Operandi, Company 605 Associate Artist
Jamie Robinson
