Tender Engine

Project Description

Tender Engine is a collaboration between choreographer Alexa Mardon, choreographer/set designer Erika Mitsuhashi, programmer Brynn McNab, a recursive neural network named UXIE, sound designer Paul Paroczai and performers Elissa Hanson and Zahra Shahab. Tender Engine is a contemporary dance/installation piece, with highly integrated new media elements (algorithms, projection design). An RNN which has learned to speak from the language the performers have spoken to it underscores the work. Tender Engine plays the line between intimate storytelling and highly performative false expertise, examining our relationship to language, technology, and meaning making.This work was developed with the support of VIVO Media Arts Centre, Boca Del Lupo, Kinetic Studios, Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, and Plastic Orchid Factory.

Company Profile

Mardon + Mitsuhashi’s work has taken the forms of durational performance, public installation, set design, printed publications, and projection design. Their choreography works with repetitive action, text, and projection to investigate themes of affective labour, inherited memory, and the body as a site for the choreographies of the political, geographical and technological structures we live within. Their work has been presented locally and nationally in platforms including Halifax’s Kinetic Studios’ Open Studio Series, Toronto’s PS: We Are All Here, Surrey Art Gallery and OFFTA Live Art Festival in Montreal. Most recently they co-presented their first full length work Tender Engine at VIVO Media Arts Centre with the generous support of the Canada Arts Council and the BC Arts Council.

www.erikamitsuhashi.com