Sunday, July 19
11:00 am to 12:30 pm
Ages 15+, registration required
Join dancer/choreographers Sarah Chase and Andrea Nann for a 90-minute movement workshop. Beginning with gently guided exercises that bring awareness to the senses, body, and breath, participants will explore how gestures and movement patterns can carry memory and emotion, and how these movements can tell personal stories.
This movement workshop offers embodied insight into Chase and Nann’s collaborative performance A Crazy Kind of Hope, on view in the current exhibition Dancing through to the other side. Through this workshop they invite participants to explore their own movements and memories in a collective experience that celebrates the wisdom of our bodies, and the stories we hold.
This workshop is supported by Chase’s dance-story practice and the Conscious Bodies Methodology developed by Andrea Nann through Dreamwalker Dance Company. For many years choreographer Sarah Chase's work has centred on biography, memoir and storytelling, overlayed with a looped sequence of gestures. She searches for ways in which people may share their rich inner worlds and magnify the gestures that belong to them in a danced expressive language. The Conscious Bodies Methodology is a framework for connecting, perceiving, and experiencing oneself, others, and the environment through a holistic blend of the senses, mind, heart, and imagination.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sarah Chase (she/her) is based on Hornby Island, in the Salish Sea. She is a performer and choreographer whose distinctive signature has garnered her an international reputation. Her work has been presented across Canada and Europe. Chase has also performed and toured with Benôit Lachambre’s Dance par B.Lieux, and German choreographer Raimund Hoghe, and created work for many Canadian artists including Toronto Dance Theatre, Peggy Baker Dance Projects, Dreamwalker Dance Company, Heidi Strauss and Darryl Tracy, Theatre Replacement, Jacinte Armstrong, Robin Poitras and Ron Stewart, Antonija Livingstone, Montreal Danse, Mascall Dance and Marc Boivin. Sarah is the recipient of the 2004 Jacqueline Lemieux Award for Excellence from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Prize of the Festival at the 2006 Munich Dance Biennale. She is a core collaborator with Dreamwalker Dance Company and an associate dance artist of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
Andrea Nann (she/her/they) is a dance artist, founding artist of Dreamwalker Dance Company, and founder/co-creator of the Conscious Bodies Methodology, an embodied community practice. Nann is a graduate of York University’s Fine Arts program and creates work for stage, film and outdoor sites. She has contributed to over 70 dance and theatre works across Turtle Island. Recognized for choreography, performance, and community action, Nann’s practice celebrates possibility, plurality, and belonging, guided by a belief that embodied practice can transform how we experience ourselves and one another, deepening awareness of both our distinctiveness and shared humanity, and opening pathways toward wonderment, collective care and possibility.
Photo of participants in a movement workshop with Andrea Nann and Sarah Chase.