Dance West Network CO-PRODUCTIONS 2024/25
Collaboration between Dance West Networks and the Burnaby Art Gallery
A Studio Provoked: A Dancer’s Response
Sunday, November 3, 2024, 1-2:30 pm
featuring residency alumni:
Nick Miami Benz, Isaac Gasangwa, Vidya Kotamraju, Ana Sosa
Each artist responds to the artwork in the exhibition and the historic setting of the Burnaby Art Gallery. Guests are invited to a reception following the performances.
Click HERE for more information
Photos courtesy of the artists, (L-R, T-B): Isaac Gasangwa, Vidya Kotamraju, Nick Miami Benz, Ana Sosa
In response to the visual artwork from the collection of Harry Locke exhibition at the Burnaby Art Gallery, located near Deer Lake Park, October 2024, here are a few highlights from the essay written by Charlie Colbourne
“Nick Miami Benz held a presence unlike any other as the first performance. Every strand of their hair pulled and pried the artworks off the walls and into conversation with their gesture of daring command.”
Ana Sosa: “She ran, paused and posed glimmeringly in the midday light. She was prefaced with text of an eager heart and awaiting debuts. She stood with us in pauses, waiting in the wings of the hearth.”
Isaac Gasangwa: ”Isaac changed hands, and offered himself as beholder. He prompted the audience to continue the beat of his drum as he danced. We clapped. This changing of hands spoke to the relinquishing of power that the artists participated in— offering a new home to their hearts fractured over parchment in this house once again incarnate.”
Dance Artists
Nick Miami Benz, Ana Sosa, Isaac Gasangwa/Izo Dreamchaser, and Vidya Kotamraju
On that Saturday, the dancers entered a conversation with the shared air of parchment once freshly scrawled upon - Charlie Colbourne
Image credit: Gordon Smith, Untitled (detail), c.1965, serigraph on paper, 49.0 cm x 47.0 cm, City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection, Gift of the Estate of Harry Locke
Vidya Kotamraju: The way that she placed her gesture on the floorboards held a brilliant magnetism. She prompted such destabilization. The tactility, the physical action made visual, physical manifest— the auditory significance of the human body in the space and in doing so changing the space.”
“Definition is limitation, how, therefore, does one represent by definition what is boundless.” The inscription on the gallery wall instructs us, and I am called to posit that that definition was not what took place on that Saturday. What took place was a conversation that could only have been made into real dialogue through the presence of everyone who was in that room” - Charlie Colbourne