MAINSTAGE 2026-27
WAIL
WAIL emerges as a new group work from Action at a Distance, directed by Vanessa Goodman. Crafted as a poem for our present moment, the work intertwines performative systems of sound and movement to embody the texture of shared experience. The collaborative team includes performing artists Anya Saugstad, Ryan Jackson, Shion Skye Carter, Marisa Gold, Hayley Gawthrop, and Allison Lang, with lighting design by James Proudfoot, sonic mentorship by Brady Marks, design by Ben Didier, and dramaturgy by Fay Nass.
The work unfolds as a shared act of listening. It begins before language, through vibration, and the low hum of voices finding one another in space. Voice and movement are inseparable in WAIL: humming songs, whispered words, and sustained tones pass through bodies, tuning the group moment by moment. The choreography is slow and attentive, guided by sensation rather than spectacle, allowing resonance to accumulate and dissolve.
In a time marked by stark social contrasts, the six performing artists navigate the delicate work of holding joy within community. Drawing inspiration from the natural world, WAIL moves through botanical distortions and auditory illusions, creating a fragile, immersive environment that feels at once intimate and expansive. Gestures ripple outward and return; sound bends perception; attention is continually recalibrated.
Rather than offering a narrative, WAIL creates a living field of co-regulation, attunement, and care. Grief and celebration coexist. Emotional landscapes are amplified through collective presence, deep listening, and shared timing. The result is a multisensory experience that invites audiences to settle, to soften, and to feel connection as something physical—resilient, humming, and quietly sustaining amid chaos.
Janet Smith’s Stir review of WAIL by Action at a Distance:
“A soothing, multisensory meditation on connection and co-regulation, WAIL sculpts voice and movement into humming songs, whispered words and hypnotic choreography that feels exactly what we need in a chaotic world.”
“Humming songs, whispered words and hypnotic movement bring a sense of serenity and connection to a chaotic world.”
“A timely and transformative work that weaves sound and movement into an intricately crafted, poetic experience.
Vanessa Goodman / Action at a Distance
photo David Cooper
TRAILER
ARTIST BIO
Action at a Distance Dance Society is a West Coast-based contemporary dance company creating on the stolen ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stóō, səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. Directed by choreographer Vanessa Goodman, the company is internationally recognized for creating immersive, research-driven performance works that investigate intimacy, perception, and the human condition through embodied and sensorial practices.
Since Goodman assumed artistic leadership in 2015, Action at a Distance has built a robust international touring history, with works presented by major festivals, producing organizations, and cultural institutions across Canada, the United States, Europe, and South America. The company has developed a distinct interdisciplinary approach that merges choreography, sound, architecture, and visual design through generative performance systems, creating immersive environments that prioritize sensorial engagement and relational encounter. Across all projects, performance is understood as a shared act in which audiences actively shape meaning through their presence and participation.
Presentations in Canada have included PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, DanceHouse, Simon Fraser University Woodward’s, Music on Main, The Firehall Arts Centre, The Dance Centre, Chutzpah! Festival, Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, SummerWorks Performance Festival in Toronto, BC Movement Arts Society on North Vancouver Island, Crimson Coast Dance Festival in Nanaimo, ArtSpring on Salt Spring Island, Living Things Festival in Kelowna, Fluid Festival in Calgary, Brian Webb Dance Company in Edmonton, La Rotonde in Québec City, MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) in Montréal, CINARS Biennale official programming, Kinetic Studio in Halifax, and Dance Made in Canada Festival in Toronto.
Internationally, the company’s work has been presented by On the Boards and the Seattle Symphony in Seattle, Risk/Reward Festival and Third Angle in Portland, OFFSET Dance Festival in Brooklyn, EstroGenius Festival in New York, Celebrity Series of Boston, Switch Lab in Bucharest, L1danceFest in Budapest, Moving Balkans in Zagreb, Biofriction / FACTT in Lisbon, Fabrik Potsdam, Tanz Bremen and Internationale Tanzmesse NRW in Germany, Spellbound Contemporary Ballet in Italy, the National Center of Dance Bucharest and Stere Popescu Hall in Romania, Vitlycke Centre for Performing Arts in Sweden, Antistatic International Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance in Bulgaria, Festival Internacional de Danza Contemporánea de la Ciudad de México in Mexico City, and the Bienal Internacional de Dança do Ceará in Brazil.
Action at a Distance is distinguished by long-term artistic collaborations with internationally renowned artists, including Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, lighting designer James Proudfoot, multidisciplinary artist Brady Marks, choreographer Simona Deaconescu, and composer and sound artist Scott Morgan / Loscil. These collaborations have become central to the company’s internationally recognized artistic language, which moves fluidly between dance, installation, sound art, and speculative performance practices.
The company has been artist-in-residence at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Cultivamos Cultura / BioFriction in Portugal, Harbourfront Centre, Dance Victoria, The Dance Centre, and Shadbolt Centre for the Arts. Under Goodman’s leadership, the company has received numerous honours and awards, including the Isadora Award, the Yulanda Faris Choreographers Program, the Iris Garland Emerging Choreographer Award, and multiple Chrystal Dance Prize distinctions.
Recent international touring for BLOT – Body Line of Thought includes a presentation at the Internationale Tanzmesse NRW Mainstage in Düsseldorf, followed by an extensive European tour with support from Perform Europe, featuring performances in Serbia, North Macedonia, Albania, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Romania.
The company also presented its slow-touring work, SOFT CURRENTS, this season, commissioned by Fluid Festival and Ballet Edmonton with performances at Contemporary Calgary and The Alberta Art Gallery. Touring engagements for the upcoming season additionally include presentations with L'Agora de la danse in Montréal, ArtSpring on Salt Spring Island and La Rotonde in Québec City.
Today, Action at a Distance continues to cultivate a globally engaged contemporary performance practice rooted in experimentation, collaboration, and embodied encounter. Through local and international partnerships, the company remains committed to creating transformative artistic experiences that foster intimacy, critical inquiry, and collective imagination across cultural and geographic boundaries.
Performance History & Upcoming Performances
This work premiered at The Dance Centre, co-presented by The Dance Centre, PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and co-commissioning partner Music on Main in January 2026.
It was then presented at Hearth Arts Centre on Bowen Island in Feb 2026
Project Created by: Vanessa Goodman
Key Artistic Collaborators: Created and Directed by Action at a Distance/Vanessa Goodman
In collaboration with the performing artists: Anya Saugstad, Shion Skye Carter, Marisa Gold, Ry Jackson, Hayley Gawthrop and Allison Lang
Also created in collaboration with our incredible swing, Natalia Martineau
Lighting Design: James Proudfoot
Sonic Mentor: Brady Marks
Dramaturgy: Fay Nass
Audio/Technical Director: Jack Chipman
Backdrop Designer: Ben Didier
Artistic Producer: Hilary Maxwell
Co-presented by PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, Music on Main and The Dance Centre
Commissioning partner: Music on Main
Created with generous support from The Dance Centre and The Canada Council for the Arts.
Performance type: THIS WORK IS BUILT FOR THEATRE
How do you define this work: Dance, Music, both a concert and a dance performance. Warm, inviting, physical.
Length of performance: 1:05 mins no intermission
Audience type: Children/Family ,General Audience
Number of Performers on tour (including choreographer): 6 artists on stage, 1 choreographer that travels with the group
Number of Support Staff on Tour: 2 tour staff, audio and lighting director
Availabilities: 2027 Spring Season (Mar - June),2027/28 Season,2028/29 Season
Project Details
Community Engagement
General Technical Requirements: We use seven live audio stations that connect to the house PA through xlr cables. The company brings microphones, loop stations, and a hanging backdrop that packs into three suitcases and can travel with the company.
Required amount of time for tech set up: 6-8 hours set up depending on pre-hang focus.
Alternative Venues: We could also perform this work in a space meant for sound performances as long as the floor was a marley.
Soft Currents is inspired by murmurations: vast flocks of starlings that fold, twist, and reconfigure in the sky through constant, responsive listening. This phenomenon—movement arising from shared attention and collective responsibility—forms a core value of Action at a Distance and grounds this tour-ready work.
Soft Currents is a task-based choreographic composition with original sound, shaped through a highly structured, co-authored score for a large group of dance artists or community members; it can be created with a group of people with multiple access needs and meets each person where their body is interested in exploring. The score invites performers to attend to internal sensation—weight, breath, timing, and spatial awareness—while remaining porous to the presence of others and the surrounding environment. Text embedded within the score directs attention toward proprioception and sensory awareness, asking performers to locate a shared sense of time through the body rather than through external cues.
Working with headphones, each dance artist listens to a text composed by Goodman in collaboration with the group—heard only by the performers—which guides moment-to-moment choices, impulses, and shifts in attention. From the audience’s perspective, the work unfolds as a series of spontaneous eruptions and emergent compositions, moving between moments of collective unison and individual articulation. The choreography is generated in real time, producing a palpable sense of anticipation as the group continually recalibrates.
Soft Currents employs slow touring as both a creative and ethical framework. Rather than operating through transactional or extractive touring models, the work is developed in close collaboration with local artists and partner organizations in each location, allowing time and resources to circulate within the community. This approach prioritizes sustainability, shared authorship, and care, supporting local capacity while enabling the work to be shaped by the specific bodies, spaces, and conditions of each place. Each iteration is completed over approximately seven days and may be presented in a traditional theatre setting or adapted for site-specific contexts, indoors or outdoors, allowing the choreography to respond somatically to place.
Action at a Distance’s Soft Currents has been presented by The Scotiabank Dance Centre on International Dance Day (April 29, 2024); Dance in Vancouver (November 22, 2024); the Vancouver Art Gallery (June 8, 2025); Contemporary Calgary in collaboration with Fluid Festival and Ballet Edmonton (October 6, 2025); and the Moose Jaw Art Gallery with New Horizons Dance. Upcoming performances include the Art Gallery of Alberta in March 2026, presented in collaboration with Ballet Edmonton.
Outreach Activities
Workshop:
Vanessa loves to exchange with people through facilitating workshops and classes. She has taught professional, pre-professional and community classes locally, nationally and internationally. She has recently taught at Simon Fraser University, Modus Operandi, The Vancouver Training Society and Lamon Dance. She has also facilitated for the Roundhouse Community Dancers, Trinity Laban’s Co-Lab (UK) and been on faculty at The Banff Centre for the Arts (Alberta).
Workshop/class description:
Throwing Bones, Sheading Salt
Exploring what is real and imagined, my class plays with the possibility of the body's capacity. Working with generative systems, we will work through anatomical organisation and curiosity of state. This class begins with guided self-TLC to ground us before moving into folding, softening, sliding bones, expanding and compressing. Using scale and architecture to explore inner and outer landscapes, we will move through concave and convex systems to uncover different layers of ease and effort.
Vanessa is also able to create community work; please see below for information about Soft Currents.
Contact information
New Works/Belsher Arts - Hilary Maxwell Hilary@actionatadistance.ca
https://actionatadistance.ca/, https://www.instagram.com/actiondistance/