PROJECT // Material stargazer
This residency is a two-week research process bringing together a small intergenerational and interdisciplinary group of professional and non-professional artists to share songs from childhood and explore improvisational performance structures. We will make a strange kind of band together. As well as exchanging and learning songs, we’ll make habitats of soft sculptures, luminous objects, movement, things from nature and domestic spaces as well as live music/sound and voice. The themes and ideas that animate this research are many at this point: “thick time” (described as a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past), synchronicity (acausal connection), home, the relationship between healing and remembering, darkness and light, sound and silence (Samuel Beckett says that “each word we write is an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”. This makes me chuckle and makes me very relaxed). I’m interested in the knot of the ephemeral (transience) and the eternal and how we hold both, always.
Collaborators for this residency are Nien Tzu Weng, Hanako Brierley, Anne Caines and Louise Jack.
This project got its kick start through the Respirations du FTA and a residency at the Maison de la Culture Marie Uguay
BIO // Hanako Hoshimi-Caines is an experimental dance artist and organizer. Her works play in the expanded fields of choreography, video, sculpture, musicals and haiku. Through methods like improvised meditative frenzies, intuitive somatizing and collage, she often tells humorous stories that deconstruct character, narrative and intergenerational relations. These material and embodied performance practices propose poetics of the mundane as strategies of resistance and transformation. She has collaborated with many dance artists and companies, notably the Cullberg Ballet (SE) and Make Banana Cry (Andrew Tay and Stephen Thompson). Her independent and collaborative works have been shown at the Montréal, arts interculturels, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art/TBA festival, On the Boards (US), Moderna dansteatern (SE), Fierce Festival (UK), Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery and Galerie de l’UQAM, amongst others. Hanako values reflection and holding space, practices that have led her to completing a degree in Western philosophy at Concordia University (BA honours), working as a dramaturge and sharing a curatorial position at the Centre de Création O Vertigo.
