NEW WORKS AT NIGHT: UNTITLEdISTANCE & STUDY #2 MAY 12, 2018

NEW WORKS AT NIGHT:
UNTITLEdISTANCE & STUDY #2

Saturday, May 12, 2018, 8 p.m.
Waterfront Theatre (Granville Island)
1412 Cartwright St. Vancouver

Tickets: $20 advance / $25 at the door
Available via eventbrite.ca

New Works closes its 2017/2018 season with a double bill featuring the work of three outstanding local artists, who explore essential questions of what it is to be human: how we evolve and change, and how we relate to each other and the world around us.

UNTITLEdISTANCE is a duet about Arash Khakpour and Emmalena Fredriksson, two dancers based in Vancouver who grew up far from here and far from each other. Through their encounter, they tell stories from the past to illuminate their possible imagined individual and collective futures. They entertain, inquire and provoke as they move through universal themes such as togetherness, ageing and love to those more arrestingly contemporary such as our rapidly changing climates and migration.

What is it that links this wild range of themes? Us. Through questions, answers and attempts to understand this moment in time, Arash and Emma bring humanness to the foreground in far-reaching dances of seriousness and silliness, madness and hope.

Jennifer McLeish-Lewis’ Study #2 is about bridging divides between the known and the unknown. The piece foregrounds communication as an element of our shared human identity. In one of his lectures, Terence McKenna describes an octopus changing colour situationally — wearing its emotions as an overcoat; whatever it is feeling emerging as a kind of language. This emotional transparency gestures towards a lost openness in human communication. By dramatizing this encounter with the unknown, Study #2 invites the audience to release old thought paradigms and belief systems based on fear. By evolving beyond our more primitive instincts, we may find a deep and satisfying engagement with others around us.

Photos: Erik Zennström. Top: Study #2, by Jennifer Mcleish-Lewis, dancer: Marisa Christogeorge. Botom: UNTITLEdISTANCEby Arash Khakpour and Emmalena Fredriksson.