"Migration Parade : Helical Song"
A Collaboration with Charlie Prince
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE AT THE PENTICTON ART GALLERY:
March 29th-30th. 1pm-4:30pm daily.
April 2nd and 3rd. 1pm - 4:30 pm daily.
Admission by donation. This durational movement installation will take place in the exhibition, "Migration Parade: Holon"
“Apart and a part, only have one space in between” *
“Migration Parade: Helical Song”, by dance artist and choreographer Charlie Prince, will be performed from March 27th - April 3rd, 2022, at The Penticton Gallery in the “Migration Parade: Holon” Exhibition. This piece observes the nature of collectivity, of the hive mind as a force which shapes both the self-assertive and the integrative tendencies of organisms.
It is a journey of encounter between bodies weaving the mediums of dance, sound composition & sculpture.
In response to Migration Parade’s theme of the role of the individual within the group and the group within the individual, Helical Song addresses materiality as an exposure to others: How can matter, be it flesh, sound or textile, serve as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations?
Within a continuum of swell, flock, assembly, swarm, dispersal and everything in between, Helical Song engages with relational dynamics in the exhibition space, where the gesture of perception carries a reciprocal connection between bodies, audience and art objects.
Over the course of several weeks, the performers will embody and trace the invisible mycelium of the gallery space - and through a series of durational rituals, will spiral their way towards unraveling a mass devotional conversation — a resonance of steadily shifting and emerging relations between entities.
* phrase taken from a conversation with Canadian artist and choreographer Erin Hill
About Charlie Prince
CHARLIE PRINCE is a performer and dance-maker. Born and raised in the mountains of Lebanon - he later immigrated to Canada and is now based in Montreal.
As a movement artist, Charlie is interested in the place of the body within post-colonial imaginaries as a means to subvert and resist imperial legacies. He is interested in form as conceiving origin in imagined space, towards the abyss of an imagined future. He seeks to subvert cultural nostalgias in order to instil a progressive force, towards being a subject and not object of history. Charlie strives to articulate a somatic physicality which transgresses our bodily notion of border and sociality - and connects to an urgency of the within as a language of beyond.
As a performer, Charlie has worked with, among others, Compagnie Alias , Ballet BC, La Biennale di Venezia and has been working with Omar Rajeh - Maqamat as a performer and associate artist since 2016. In 2020, Charlie began a collaboration with legendary dance artist Benoit Lachambre in collaboration with Montréal Danse to create the durational solo work ‘l’ogre, le phenix, et l’ami fidéle’ as part of the choreographic trilogy All in All. Charlie is currently in creation for and preparing to tour his new piece Cosmic A* in Spring 2021.
His work has been presented in some of the most prestigious festivals - including SPRING Festival (NL), Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques internationales de Seine Saint Denis (FR), Oktoberdans (NO) and BIPOD (LB). Charlie also holds a Bachelor of Music from McGill University in Montréal and continues to engage as a composer for dance and film. In 2018 he received the prestigious Boghossian Foundation Prize for Dance and Performance awarded by Villa Empain in Brussels and Beirut.
For more on Charlie's work, visit his website.
About the Performers
GITA HARRIS completed a BFA Honours in Dance at Ryerson University's Performing Dance Program. Upon graduation, she lived and worked in Toronto until 2013 as an independent dance artist and member of Alias Dance Project. While dancing with Alias, she worked with choreographers in both urban and contemporary forms: Heidi Strauss, Apolonia Velasquez, Troy Feldman, Allen Kaeja, Valerie Calam, Emmanuelle Le Phan, Solidstate Breakdance’s Helen Simard and JoDee Allen, Lauren Cook, Geordan Coupland and Meghan Cafferky. She has performed in the music videos of Leslie Feist, choreography by Noemi LaFrance and the
Finnish band Apocalyptica, choreography by Ayelen Liberona. She also performed on stage with Feist at Massey Hall.
She moved to B.C. 8 years ago when she decided it was time to raise a family and be a full time mother. However, intent on exploring the role and importance of artistic expression for our well being, Gita is currently working on a masters degree in Intermodal Expressive Arts through the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Her thesis research aims to cover questions about the phenomenon of ‘presence’, the landscape of the present moment and ways artists can more rigorously attend to the emergent while in the studio.
NIKOS THEODOSAKIS is a Canadian multi-media artist who uses filmmaking, photography, writing, and performance to explore his relationship with identity, culture, and personal history.
A passionate advocate for meaningful education, he is the founder of the OliveUs Education Society, and the architect of the InStill Life, Preserving Your Culture, and The Director in the Classroom projects. His book "The Director in the Classroom: How Filmmaking Inspires Learning" examines connected learning through digital media production in the classroom and is a resource for teacher training around the world. He has worked with educators around the world and led professional development workshops across North America as well as in Europe and Africa.
Working at the intersection of storytelling and education, he works with educators to help inspire and grow meaningful learning projects that connect and matter to students, teachers, and communities.
After 17 years, JULIE FOWLER recently wrapped up her role as the Executive and Artistic Director of the Island Mountain Arts Society in Wells, BC where she ran a School of the Arts, Public Gallery, Artist-in-Residence, the Northern Exposure Conference and the ArtsWells Festival. Passionate about finding ways to celebrate and promote artists, she helped to create two award-winning festivals, both featuring a range of artistic mediums from performance to visual arts: the Art Matters Festival, Concordia University in Montreal, where she graduated with a BFA in Art History in 2001, and the ArtsWells Festival Of All Things Art, which began in 2004 and is the largest arts event in the Cariboo with over 2500 people converging in Wells on the August Long Weekend. Julie graduated with an Interdisciplinary MFA from the University of British Columbia, Okanagan in 2013 and Caitlin Press published her thesis project, a creative non-fiction novel called The Grande Dames of the Cariboo. In 2020 Julie was honoured with two prestigious awards for her work in the arts, the BC Achievement Foundation Community Award and the BC Museums Association Distinguished Service Award. Julie also sits on the board of Folk Music Canada and helped to found the BC Music Festival Collective, which has its first meeting on April 1st, 2020 in response to the pandemic.
PETER KOK is a dancer and somatic movement teacher based in British Columbia. He draws his experience from various dance forms including contact improv, butoh dance and authentic movement. Peter has studied dance with leading embodiment and dance teachers including Kathleen Rae (Toronto), Martin Keogh (Salt Spring Island, BC) and Denise Fujiwara (Toronto). His movement and dance exploration is founded in embodiment, relationality and expressive arts based practices.
MAIYA ROBBIE’s music is a textural, vivid experience. Influenced by the sensibilities of growing up in Canadiana folk music and under the light of contemporary poets such as Gwendolyn McEwen and Mary Oliver, Maiya has the finesse to not only see to the heart of a matter, but to take it in both hands and deliver it into the lap of her listeners. She resides in the ecologically rich Okanagan territory of British Columbia, where rabbit brush, clay banks, lakes and sage offer constant creative reinforcement. To her name as a musician she has one solo EP titled 'Should've Been a Mountain' and three full length albums as co-creator and guitarist/vocalist with the band Shane Koyczan and the Short Story Long. As an interdisciplinary artist, Maiya is constantly engaging with her senses and environment with a curiosity of ‘what if’? This opens into the work, the work opens into the question.
JESS GLAVINA was raised on Coast Salish territory in and around Vancouver, British Columbia and studied Geography at Concordia University in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, Quebec. Their interests include diaspora, somatics, and disability justice. Their theatrical writing debut, ‘ACOUS: A Chorus of Unidentified Singers’ premiered at Revolution They Wrote (Montreal, 2015) and was presented again in different iterations at: the World Social Forum (Montreal, 2016) in collaboration with visual artist Shanna Strauss, at Sundus Abdul Hadi’s Take Care of Yourself exhibit (Montreal, 2017) as a movement/gesture workshop, and translated to a graphic score and read as a bilingual choral piece at AADK (Spain, 2019). Jess currently resides on Syilx Territory near Lake Okanagan in British Columbia. When not growing grapes, they train in performance, write theatre, practice bodywork and dance outside.
