Photo: David Cooper
Looping
‘Looping’ is a unique dance installation featuring highly-structured improvisation where dancers follow and re-adapt a movement score that evolves with each loop. What results is a collective movement that blooms and goes through a continual process of death and rebirth. Built on a foundation of connection, adaptation, and transformation—performers focus on solo and group loops—loops of specific size, scale, duration and proximity. There is no true start and no clear end. The work explores looping as a means to track change—with human error, imperfections and desires creating inconsistencies and cracks that allow for a constant emergence of something new. As new loops emerge, the performers must navigate complex, near-impossible feats as an ensemble that can bring either collapse or transformation in the work. Using a basic sound system and speakers, the accompanying Sound Artist generates an electronic soundscape (also an improvised looping structure), with support and input from the performers.
Photo: David Cooper
Project Created by: Artistic Co-Directors Lisa Mariko Gelley and Josh Martin
Key Artistic Collaborators:
Sound: Matt Tomkinson
Lighting consultant: James Proudfoot
Performance type: This work is built for the theatre
How do you define this work: Contemporary dance
Length of performance: The duration of each Looping session is typically 90 minutes, with multiple throughout the day, for multiple days if required. The company can adjust the duration for showing purposes.
Audience type: General Audience
General Technical Requirements: STAGE REQUIREMENTS: The installation can exist in either indoor (studio/stage/gallery, etc) or outdoor settings, so long as there is a centralized performance area with even surface/flooring. This could take the shape of “in the round”, ¾, or stadium style with or without seating (seating is not required), with no need of well-defined separation of audience and performer areas, which may occasionally blur. ‘Looping’ is an ongoing improvised practice that expands and evolves differently each time, with changing combinations of performers, and therefore never the same twice: spectators, or bystander/witnesses can stay as long as they wish, can sit, stand, move around the space, and continuously change locations and perspectives.
LIGHTING AND VIDEO: There isn’t a specific lighting plot for ‘Looping’ due to the fact that the installation can inhabit a range of contexts, either indoor (studio/stage/gallery, etc) or outdoor settings. Though there is no standard space or lighting design required, the attached PDF is the most extreme version of what we have used. The installation can exist with far less, such as simply the lights in a room and a few reading lamps. The seating arrangement shown is not a requirement for ‘Looping.’
SOUND: Show requires a basic sound system and speakers.
Required amount of time for tech set up: 1 day
Number of Performers on tour (including choreographer): 10
Number of Support Staff on Tour: 1
Availabilities: 2025/26 Season, 2026/27 Season
Company 605
Led by artistic co-directors Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin, Company 605 is an arts organization based in Vancouver, on the unceded Indigenous territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Producing various dance projects and performances through shared creative process, the artists place emphasis on movement invention and physically demanding works, juxtaposing raw with precision, and highlighting effort, risk and interconnection. 605 is an ongoing exchange between separate people, bodies and ideas, recognizing and celebrating the unique possibilities created in their attempt to co-exist. Valuing collaboration as an essential tool for new directions in dance, Company 605 continues to awaken a fresh and ever-evolving aesthetic, together building a highly athletic art form derived from the human experience.
Performance History & Upcoming Performances
On 2 September 2022 ‘Looping’ was presented at Internationale Tanzmesse in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Project Details
Outreach Activities
605 opens opportunities for communities to interact and experience artistic works. Often this takes the shape of multiple performances and showings of work-in-progress and open rehearsals, where the process is described and there is a Q&A period. Partnerships with many organizations locally and on tour has allowed the company to connect with young audiences and high schools. 605 works to connect the pre-professional and professional dance community locally and on tour, often through workshops and master classes.