I See You

I am a movement artist. Which, when I say that I feel like I’m every single bad artist trope on a CW show, but I in fact and am an artist, I move, and sometimes I put those things together.

Today, I joined one of my dearest friends, Lara Lewis, to provide movement consultation for her upcoming solo show ‘I See You’ being presented at this year’s Mayworks Festival in Halifax/Kjipuktuk. What is movement consultantship? Well reader your guess is as good as mine, but I approached it like this:

I am there to find the physical language of the story. The show is presented as a live figure drawing class so already the body is a central focus of the work, which makes any heightened movement feel warranted. Together we explored what her goals were in regard to movement, how can her movement move the show along, and what the purpose of heightened movement means for this show.

Eventually, we came to the conclusion that movement could be used to obtain equal footing with her spectators. Using her poses and motion as a subconscious dialogue between her and the audience. Does this disrupt that relationship? Does it make it stronger? She even toyed with the idea of embodying the audience’s movement, since some would be drawing her the question arose what happens if she were to pose like them…what does that do to the audience-performer relationship. What happens when the spectator is faced with the reality that in a way they too are the spectacle?

By the end of it, I felt more like a dramaturge, peeling back bits of the story that only the body could tell. I hope to do more work like this, I wasn’t confident I really knew what I was doing but what artist ever does right?

Xoxo