Sounds For Dancers is a free, intensive six-day research workshop with artist/musician and performance maker Christopher Willes and collaborators (Toronto/Montréal) which will investigate sonic-somatic practices.
We are seeking five dance and performance-based artists to participate. No prior experience with music/sound-making is necessary. The workshop will conclude with a public exhibition/performance sharing of the research with the public at Betonsalon on December 2nd. Workshop participants will receive a 170 euro fee for contributing to the public event.
Co-facilitated with dance artists Ellen Furey and Brendan Jensen, Sounds For Dancers will invite participants into performance scores and exercises borrowed from a new work the group is currently creating, entitled RADIANCE, which places alternative healing practices in conversation with experimental music performance. Through sound and movement scores, hands-on experimentation, reflection and dialog, the sessions will explore choreography and sound-making as a unified practice that centres on collective care, sensitivity and awareness of others.
The sessions will oscillate between two modalities: 1) sound choreographies, which are scores for group improvisations that invite moving and performing with musical instruments in unusual ways; and 2) sound massages, in which individual listeners are led into direct physical and tactile experiences of sound through a carefully guided process. These explorations will be repeated each day with participants––examined and refined together—and eventually shared in the concluding public event in a live exhibition/performance of the practices.
Hosted as part of “Un·Tuning Together”, Sounds for Dancers reflects on the shared lineage of thinking and practice between North American avant-garde traditions of contemporary dance and experimental music. And the project’s title is borrowed from a note found in the Pauline Oliveros archives which appears to be the beginnings of a syllabus for a class entitled “Sound for Dancers 1”.
What to expect:
This workshop will involve sound making (no experience required), movement, some consensual touch (mediated by objects), discussion, reading, drawing and writing.
The workshop will be facilitated in english, but we will do our best to encourage collective translation and will gladly slow down when needed. Processes of facilitation and learning are not distinct from issues of social justice, democracy, and community cohesion. Active listening, care, consent, and responsibility to the group are values that as a facilitator we will work hard to continuously center throughout our time together.
The approach to facilitation will be informed by the groups combined backgrounds in experimental music, dance and interdisciplinary performance, along with studies in Conflict Coaching (Willes and Furey, University of Waterloo) and Alexander Technique (Jensen).
Performance Fee: 170 €
Christopher Willes
Christopher Willes is an artist, musician/composer, dramaturge, and researcher based in Canada. His interdisciplinary work focuses on the subject and practice of listening, and encompasses performances, exhibitions, concerts, recordings, publications, community arts and educational projects. Developed collaboratively, his projects often involve the direct participation of the audience, to explore how music and sound can divulge new forms of sensitivity and a recognition of our interdependence.
He is an associate artist and artistic producer with Tkaronto-Toronto performing arts organization Public Recordings, with whom he developed What’s Collective?– an itinerant studio research project on the subject of collective art practices. He also recently devised a publication on the work of Pauline Oliveros entitled Resonance Gathering, published by Art Metropole. Since 2013, Christopher has co-created several works with Montréal based artist Adam Kinner, including the one-to-one performance MANUAL, which has toured internationally. And he has worked as a dance dramaturge and sound designer for over a decade.
Christopher studied music at the University of Toronto and received an MFA from Bard College (USA). He is a former MacDowell Fellow (USA), an affiliated researcher at the Milieux Institute (Montreal), and is currently studying Conflict Mediation at the University of Waterloo. His work has been presented across Canada, in the USA and Europe.
Brendan Jensen
Brendan Jensen is a dancer, choreographer and movement teacher based in Tkaronto-Toronto. His current research investigates ‘practice as performance’, in relation to his work as a dance and movement teacher, and his ongoing training in Alexander Technique. He is a graduate of the National Ballet School of Canada and has worked with many dance artists and companies including the Toronto Dance Theatre. He was a recipient of the DanceWeb Europe scholarship in conjunction with the ‘2008 Impulstanz’ festival in Vienna, Austria.
Brendan is an associate artist with Public Recordings, a Tkaronto-Toronto based organization focused on interdisciplinary performing arts research. He has worked with Public Recordings since 2010, when he performed in the work relay, a dance work by Canadian choreographer Ame Henderson. Since then he has contributed to numerous Public Recordings projects, as a performer, outside eye, and facilitator. Between 2017-2019 he participated in a large-scale interdisciplinary performance of Pauline Oliveros’s music, and contributed to a subsequent publication on that project entitled Resonance Gathering, devised by Canadian artist Christopher Willes and co-produced with Public Recordings.
Ellen Furey
Ellen Furey is a dance artist and choreographer based in Tiohtiá:ke–Mooniyang–Montréal, Canada. Since 2012, she has worked on and within collaborative, interdisciplinary, discursive processes that insist on a mess of subjectivities. Her work uses potentials of dance virtuosities and performer type showmanship as material for living, oblique rebellion, and debate, entangled with heavy ambiguity. She collaborates with artists such as Malik Nashad Sharpe, Dana Michel, Christopher Willes, Audrée Juteau, N. Zoey Gauld, Catherine Lavoie-Marcus, Paul Chambers, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Alanna Stuart, Romy Lightman, and has danced in works by Dancemakers, Daniel Léveillé, Frédérick Gravel, Marten Spangberg (Sweden), Tina Tarpgaard (Denmark), among others.
Ellen’s work has been presented in Europe, Canada, in the USA and the UK. She has co-created two dance works with UK based choreographer Malik Nashad Sharpe (SOFTLAMP.autonomies (2018) and High Bed Lower Castle (2022, FTA)) and her most recent work Lay Hold To The Softest Throat premiered at Festival TransAmériques (Montreal) in June 2023. She is a 2014 recipient of a DanceWeb scholarship, ImpulsTanz, Vienna, and a graduate of the School of Toronto Dance Theatre. Ellen is currently training in both mediumship/psychic development and Conflict Management (University of Waterloo) and is a certified End of Life Doula. Since 2019 she has been Artistic Advisor at Danse-Cité, a contemporary dance presenter in Montreal.
