Whereverever
Commissioned as a part of the Artist In Residence Program at Western Front
Premiere: 2023 Vancouver
Ehkä Kutomo, Spring Roll Festival 2024 (Finland)
YPAM, Japan 2025
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Across a sixteen-minute video and forty-minute dance performance without intermission, whereverever playfully traces possible beginnings and belonging by following the question “how did we get here?”
whereverever is a call and response: between us and place, between a film and a dance, and between one another. Filmed on location in ancestral places (Finland and Japan), we open ourselves up to instruction: celestial, familial, and invisible. whereverever is a spell to visit with entities past and future through the technologies of dreaming, dancing, and fabulating what we don’t and cannot know — treating the gaps, tears and absences of settler-colonial relocation + disruption — as valuable knowledges too.
In the performance, to a musical score performed live by Langford, we practice channeling through staying in the continuous present side by side, hosting known and as-yet-unknown dances in our bodies. We dance in imperfect unison, a devotional technology. We dance ourselves home.
click here to read a piece of writing by Christian Vistan about whereverever
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Videography and editing: Alysha Seriani
Composer: Sasha J. Langford
Costume design: Jaewoo Kang
Additional props and costumes: Natalie Purschwitz
Lighting design: Nien-Tzu Weng
Technical managers: Jack Chipman
Artistic mentors: Justine A. Chambers, Xwechtaal Dennis Joseph, Mala Kline
Dramaturgy support: Joanna Garfinkel
Accessibility consultation: Cara Eastcott, Amy Amantea, Shannon Gagnon
Audio description: Andrea Cownden
Photos: Rachel Topham
Acknowledgments:
Commissioned by Western Front as part of its artist-in-residence program, with support from the Government of Canada, Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, Leña Residency, MascallDance, Whatlab, Company 605 and Out Innerspace Dance Theatre.
Duration: ~60 min
Language: English, Japanese, Finnish (English subtitles)