Photo Credit: Milo Carbol
ABOUT THIS PROJECT:
BODY PROOF aims to foster the multiple perspectives we each uniquely contain. Researching, the artists seek expressive relationships with worlds they've sprung from and worlds they live in. Each dancer weaves different ways of knowing together in a short, repeatable dance. Then, through spontaneous and convivial dancing with music in dance party/BODY PROOF, what they know lightly and infectiously travels into and through other people and places.
Begun in October 2024, the BODY PROOF residency involved a group of wonderful artists: Nick Miami Benz, Tobias Macfarlane, Marisa Gold, Ysadora Miranda Dias, and Mario Matias, in collaboration with DJ Dae Anteres, Kathleen Nisbet (fiddle, vocals) and Jack Garten (sax, accordion).
Their research results in the dance party BODY PROOF, which has been performed and developed several times, and continues evolving with each performance. Each artist teaches the audience their dance, dances it together with them, and then introduces the dance they made up and how they arrived at it from studying their heritage (Brazilian, Afro American (Tennessee), Mi'kmaq, Filipino, and Scottish/English).
This culminates in an open dance party improvising with solos, duets, groups, line dances, to the music of any of the dances they want.
The project posits yet another perspective on the future of dance performance. We think of a form of touring in which the dance is passed body to body in social dance settings, hatching an interest in the new people who learn it. Perhaps, through the bodies of dance party participants, the dances will travel on to new dancing settings in future. The work looks at and celebrates how our origins speak through us.
