LURCH

a durational collaboration examining a body and an inanimate object.

The artists:

Justine Chambers, Sarah Chase, Ame Henderson, Jennifer Mascall, Nick Miami Benz, Dario Dinuzzi, Ralph Escamillan, Bynh Ho, Benjamin Kamino, Alexa Mardon, Alan Storey, Bennett Tracz, Chris Wright.

The inanimate object:

a sculpture by Alan Storey.

The full-length work will be produced for both live and on-line presentation with the potential to tour in galleries, large exhibition spaces, outdoor public spaces and prosceniums.The choreographers are investigators distinguished by mature work with big ideas. The performing collaborators span four decades in age and bring diverse movement origins - from ballet and contact improvisation to drag, street, contemporary dance, and vogue.

BELOW:

Check out short samples and read about the fur choreographers

LURCH TASTER VIDEO CREDITS

LEFT VIDEO 2022

with AME HENDERSON - BENJAMIN KAMINO, ALEXA MARDON, CHRIS WRIGHT, BENNETT TRACZ, RALPH ESCAMILLAN,

CENTRE VIDEO 2021

WITH JUSTINE CHAMBERS - CHRIS WRIGHT, NICK MIAMI BENZ, BENJAMINO KAMINO, CHRIS WRIGHT, RALPH ESCAMILLAN, BENNETT TRACZ.

RIGHT VIDEO 2020

WITH JUSTINE CHAMBERS - CHRIS WRIGHT, NICK MIAMI BENZ, BENJAMIN KAMINO, RALPH ESCAMILLAN,

A-Bi-racial black woman of Scottish/Irish and African American descent; a dance artist living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her movement-based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. The anchors of her movement-based practice are found in collaborative creation, close observation, and the idea of choreography as living archive. She is concerned with a choreography of the everyday; with the unintentional dances, as she describes them “that are already there.” She emerges from the Black American Diaspora, bi-racial and a dual citizen. Her practice extends from this continuum, and its entanglements with western contemporary dance and visual art practices. Chambers is a founding member of project bk, was artist in residence at artist-run centre 221A (2017), a selected artist for the Visiting Dance Artist Program at the National Arts Centre (2019-2020), one of three choreographers in the Yulanda Faris Choreographer’s Program (2017-2018), and associate artist and artist in residence to The Dance Centre (2015-2017),

Recent choreographic projects include Zephyrs, Heirloom, And then this also, One Hundred More, tailfeather, for all of us, it could have been like this, ten thousand times and one hundred more, Family Dinner, Family Dinner: The Lexicon, Semi-precious: the faceting of a gemstone only appears complete and critical; Enters and Exits and COPY. Her collaborative projects and hosts are detailed at justineachambers.com. As a dancer, she has worked nationally and abroad with choreographers including Kate Franklin, ame henderson, sasha ivanochko, battery opera, adelheid dance projects, Company 605, Tara Cheyenne Performance, Oded Graf and Yossi Berg, Wen Wei Dance, and Mascall Dance. Chambers teaches at The School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Working Class, Toronto Community Love-In, Modus Operandi Training Program and Ballet BC. She is currently engaged as an artistic monitor for the work of Mardon + Mitsuhashi, and Amanda Acorn.

Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.

A performer and choreographer whose distinctive signature has garnered her an international reputation. Chase’s work has been presented across Canada and Europe for over twenty-five years, at such venues as the National Arts Centre (Ottawa), Festival TransAmerique (Montreal), DanceHouse (Vancouver), the Holland Dance Festival, Klapstuk Festival (Belgium), Salzburg Szene Festival (Austria), Kaaitheater (Belgium), Tanz Quartier (Vienna), Fondation Cartier (Paris), Theater der Welt (Germany), and Kaaitheater (Brussels).

She has performed and toured with Benôit Lachambre’s Dance par B. Lieux, and German choreographer Raimund Hoghe, and has created work for Toronto Dance Theatre, Peggy Baker Dance Projects, Andrea Nann and Dreamwalker Dance, Robin Poitras and Ron Stewart, Heidi Strauss and Darryl Tracy, Theatre Replacement, Jacinte Armstrong, Body Narratives Collective and Montreal Danse. Sarah is the recipient of the 2004 Jacqueline Lemieux Award for Excellence from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the 2006 Prize of the Festival at the Munich Dance Biennale for her piece The Passenger.

Sarah is an associate dance artist of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

An artist of settler ancestry raised on Nuu-chah-nulth territory on the west coast of Vancouver Island and now living and working in so-called Toronto which stands upon territory of the Dish With One Spoon Covenant, an agreement made amongst Indigenous nations to share and protect the land and waterways around the great lakes. With a practice that spans publication, performance and exhibition, her work activates dance and choreography to propose experiential modes of being together. Henderson’s collaborations enfold a diverse assembly of people and organizations and have been created and shared across Canada and abroad.

With the Toronto collective Public Recordings she created over a dozen ensemble works including /Dance/Songs/ (2006), relay (2010) and what we are saying (2013). performance encyclopaedia (2013), a performance in the shape of a book, was created with Evan Webber; The Most Together We’ve Ever Been (2009) and Out of Season (2015) were co-created with the Croatian choreographer and performer Matija Ferlin; and, Room with Sticks (2013) with the choreographer Tedd Robinson and musician Charles Quevillon. As artist in residence at The Art Gallery of Ontario, Henderson staged rehearsal/performance (2014), a series of public performances that investigated that institution’s forgotten history of live work. She created three full length ensemble works for Toronto Dance Theatre exploring the relationship between movement and sounding: voyager (2014) in collaboration with the songwriter Jennifer Castle, Noisy (2017) with musicians Robin Dann and Matt Smith and RING (2019) with composer Sarah Davachi. Henderson has contributed variously as a guest choreographer, dramaturge and outside eye to the choreographic processes of artist peers including Joshua Beamish, Aleesa Cohene, Katie Ewald, Christopher House, Marie Lambin Gagnon, Emily Law, Katie Ward and Evan Webber. She has taught and facilitated in a variety of contexts including University of British Columbia Okanagan, University of Calgary, Toronto Dance Theatre, Toronto Community Love-in and Banff Centre.

A first-generation settler of Norman/Celt descent, MascallDance Founder and Artistic Director Jennifer Mascall is a Canadian choreographer, teacher, mentor and advocate for the art form.

Born in Winnipeg, Mascall studied dance in Toronto and New York with Merce Cunningham and Douglas Dunn.In her early twenties, she established an international solo dance career, wrote and published “Footnotes” a volume of collected choreographic notations, and co-founded GRID, a site-specific performance collective. In the 80’s she joined forces with like-minded post-modernist choreographers to co-found the Experimental Dance and Music (EDAM) Collective in Vancouver. Her unique choreographic style developed and in 1989 she launched MascallDance. As its’ Artistic Director she has created over 200 works, collaborating, researching, and providing somatic movement education.

Somatic movement inquiry is central to her practice, informed by studies with master teachers Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Linda Putnam. A committed dance innovator and thinker, she encourages new generations of artists through BLOOM and other MascallDance programs. Her work has received numerous awards and has been presented across Canada and internationally. Jennifer is currently creating three new productions in collaboration with over forty artists.