whereverever is a new work by Mardon + Mitsuhashi—the collaborative entity of Alexa Solveig Mardon and Erika Mitsuhashi—made with media artist Alysha Seriani and composer Sasha J. Langford. Across a sixteen-minute video and forty-minute dance performance without intermission, whereverever playfully traces possible beginnings and belonging by following the question “how did we get here?” The work is presented live in two parts, with a choreographed transition between parts. During this transition, Langford plays sound live, the lighting in the space changes, and the curtains are drawn on the video screen, as Erika and Alexa enter the space, setting the space for the live performance.
The 16 minute film recorded on location in ancestral places (Finland and Japan). In it, we open ourselves up to instruction: celestial, familial, and invisible. Using the term docu-poem, the film (recorded partially with a newly obsolete 3D camcorder) disrupts/queers the conventions of a family-history-documentary, honouring disorientation as approach, and play as a guiding principle. whereverever is a spell to visit with entities past and future through the technologies of dreaming, dancing, and fabulating what we don’t and cannot know — treating the gaps, tears and absences of settler-colonial relocation + disruption — as valuable knowledges too.

In the performance, to a musical score performed live by Langford, Alexa and Erika practice channeling through staying in the continuous present side by side, hosting known and as-yet-unknown dances in our bodies. Drawing from a 6 year collaborative research of a movement quality we call “blurring”, we surprise ourselves in highly scored improvisation, allowing murky and ancestral dances to burst through our bodies and then disappear again. We dance seperately but always connected, tethered to the other in a wide web of highly attuned attention. Eventually, we come together and dance in imperfect unison, a devotional and celebratory dance. We dance ourselves home. The live music performed by Sasha Langford gives the feeling of a ceremony, a party, and a calling in of spirits.