2019 Participants
(dancing at home + dancing computers + amazing feats + pivotal speeches )
House
Alea de Castro and Arnaldo Betancourt Silva
(MOOVE Ottawa Dance)
LAB EXPERIENCE
This piece, “House”, was inspired by our everyday movements in our Own Home. By incorporating our Street Dance background with our day to day activities, we were able to not only create a safe space to live in, but also to dance in. The initial idea was to exhibit a “Dance Circle” or “Cypher”, but with further exploration, the concept eventually gravitated towards showcasing our organic interaction amongst each other in our Home.
IMoove Ottawa Dance
Project Whirlwind
Elizabeth Emond-Stevenson
LAB EXPERIENCE
Whirlwind is a contemporary exploration loosely based on the development and theory behind Whirlwind I, a computer designed by MIT shortly after World War II, and inspired by software pioneer Margaret Hamilton, whose first major project was as programmer for a system based on Whirlwind I. Project Whirlwind translates key elements that made Whirlwind I an effective and innovative computer system for its time and transforms them into a physical language and instructions that guide solo structured improvisation in real time.
The elements serve as tools to create a universe that operates in the here and now (realtime output operation) and that is driven by multiple/simultaneous sub-tasks that exist independently of one another (parallel calculation), but is more than the sum of these tasks (flow production). Within Project Whirlwind’s framework I create pathways to access embodied information and apply it directly to the work as it progresses (magnetic core memory/ 3D information storage). On another level, Project Whirlwind evokes the singularity and loneliness of a female computer scientist starting her career during the Cold War within a massive male-dominated corporation, and makes space for mechanical computation/calculation to coexist with the female experience.
LATER
Project Whirlwind was presented at Free Flow Dance Theatre's WIP Series in Saskatoon, SK in Fall 2019
Daredevil
Emily Pearlman with Kristina Watt
LAB EXPERIENCE
How do you develop a performance language for characters PLAYING other characters rather than BECOMING other characters. Can one character also just be themselves and a secondary character simultaneously? During the lab we explored performance styles for a text in development, and in doing so, figured out some complicated relationships between female characters who are at times historical, imagined or autobiographical.
Emily Pearlman Kristina Watt
The Other Hand
Peter Froelich
LAB EXPERIENCE
Peter’s project considers the case of Chaim Rumkowski, one of the most problematic figures of the Holocaust.
A Polish Jew appointed by the Nazis as Camp Elder of the Ghetto of Łódź, Poland, King Chaim ran his fiefdom as a mini nation-state, printing its own money and stamps bearing his face. He sincerely believed that the only way to save his people’s lives was to make them indispensable to the Nazis. He turned his ghetto into an inhumane and lethal industrial machine in service of the German war effort, all in the messianic pursuit of a “Greater Good”.
Peter Froehlich