her body as words (2021)

Nov 15

Originally conceived for the stage, this worked was re-envisioned as a film and sound installation due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and a shared urgency to bring this project (which had been the brink of an opening night) to completion. Collaborating artists who contributed to the original process, but were not involved in the film version, include dancer Siwar Soria; musicians Anne Bourne, Fides Krucker, and Ganavya Doraiswamy; as well as the young dancer Angelika Simpson and my assistant on Angelika’s scenes, Michelle Silagy.

From my earliest creations, a pervasive, underlying subtext of my work has been the embodiment of varied, authentic, and relevant images of women. Born in 1952, I came of age during the second wave of feminism, and as a young woman my notions of female identity were brought into focus largely through reading Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer. In 2019, I discovered that the translation of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex that I had read in my twenties was vastly abridged. Furthermore, the translation by H.M. Parshley ruthlessly revised the author’s Proustian style and philosophical language to conform to his own taste as a man of science. When I read the 2009 translation of the complete text by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, I was knocked over by the power of Beauvoir’s philosophical text and the epic proportions of her proposals. The force of this new encounter inspired me to create a work in which a group of dance artists brought forward current statements of female identity expressed in movement and in words. Originally conceived as a work for live performance, her body as words was ultimately realized as a series of short films.

The choreography arose from conversations concerning the philosophy, worldview, and lived experience of the dancers: Sze-Yang Ade-Lam, Nicole Rose Bond, Aria Evans, Syreeta Hector, Kate Holden, Tia Ashley Kushniruk, Alison Neuman, and Anisa Tejpar. Sierra Chin Sawdy, Katherine Semchuk, and Kirsten Sullivan joined the cast for larger group sequences designed as movement choruses. As a series, the dances and their accompanying text – written by each of the dancers – touch on themes of race, gender expression, sexual orientation, sexual appetite, pregnancy, miscarriage, motherhood, disability, physical labour, and aging.

Filmmaker Jeremy Mimnagh captured raw solo performances as a series of highly stylized films. The dancers emerge out of darkness, and while the films give a first impression of being shot in black and white, the lighting sources – revealed behind and to each side – produced an incredibly warm and glowing skin tone. Sound designer Debashis Sinha built a sonic world by capturing and then layering breath, footfall, the rustle of fabric…

her body as words premiered in September 2021 as an integrated exhibition – with sound design accessed via a QR code – on media screens in Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square; with a subsequent outdoor presentation on media screens for Festival Internacional Buenos Aires in February 2022. It was streamed world-wide as an on-demand film by Baryshnikov Arts Centre as part of their Spring 2022 programming; and presented in Dusseldorf, Germany as a lobby for installation for Internationale Tanzmesse 2022. In a public square, with sound available via a QR code, the films are experienced in relation to the advertising, architecture, traffic, and intersection of humanity present. Experienced in a gallery setting, each film – and its accompanying text and sound – is encountered on an individual monitor, and viewers move through the intimate installation at their own pace and according to their own interest. Wherever her body as words is encountered it clearly states, “We are here – just as you are – in the specificity of mystery, contradiction, eloquence, joy, struggle, loss, and accomplishment that is an individual life.” - PB