The concept of call and response evokes a dialogue rooted in musicality, a back-and-forth predicated on sharing and reflecting back, developing, and growing a conversation. #callresponse, co-presented by Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery and Eyelevel Artist-Run Centre, is an ongoing project that developed out of Tarah Hogue’s research on Indigenous feminisms and artistic practice at grunt gallery in 2014.

In collaboration with co-conspirators Maria Hupfield and Tania Willard (their preference for “co-conspirator” or “accomplice,” a specific politicized alternative to “ally” inspired by Jaskiran Dhillon’s “On Becoming an Accomplice,” explained in the stunning exhibition catalogue), this traveling and ever-evolving collection reflects on the specifically institutionalized site of “the gallery,” a series of conversations and interactions with the physical land, its inhabitants and keepers. These conversations center Indigenous women and their practices.

Artists Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory collaborated and conspired with Isaac Murdoch, Esther Neff & IV Castellanos, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Meagan Musseau, and Tanya Tagaq to create a series of site-specific works that have continued to evolve as an ongoing project, and result in unique gallery exhibitions and across the country. Engaging with the hashtag #callresponse—perhaps the most ubiquitous symbol of a modern form of conversational structure and organization—viewers are invited to peek into a much larger and more expansive meta-dialogue.

There is a sort of starkness in the placement of the various works in the gallery, and a bareness to some of the pieces themselves. This creates an intensity and offers a complex intimacy that permeates the entire exhibition. For example, Belcourt and Isaac Murdoch’s Reconciliation with the Land and Waters, is a physical record of ceremonies the artists led at gatherings on Indigenous governance across Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan in 2015 and 2016, and now exists in the gallery in absence. The robe was gifted to the artists, who are part of the Onaman collective, by the Grand Chief, and it was returned to the artists in support of their community work. 

The simplicity and deceptive familiarity of Ursula Johnson and Meagan Musseau’s collaborative audio-based endurance piece Ke’tapekiaq Ma’qimikew: The Land Sings belies the complexity and sheer breadth of the work. A map affixed to the gallery floor notes the “SMU Art Gallery, Halifax NS” as a sort of starting point for a journey charted across 13 maps tacked up along the gallery wall, which ends at “East Bay Beach, Cape Breton Island, NS.” Through a pair of headphones, the viewer is able to listen to Johnson’s “song from and for the land.”

Perhaps the most arresting pieces are Williamson-Bathory’s video-based works, which visually dominate the gallery with their size and activity, and are unflinchingly, almost confrontational, in their blend of intimacy and engagement. Timiga nunalu, sikulu (My body, the land and the ice) features the artist reclining nude upon a vast icy landscape, a classical art pose and composition which is disrupted by the artist’s use of “uaajeerneq,” a Greenlandic mask dance that plays “with elements of fear, humour, and sexuality.” The collaboration here features Inuk multidisciplinary artist Tanya Tagaq performing a contemporaneous vocalization, and in the moment a soundtrack of sorts for both the original video, and to Williamson-Bathory’s transformation into uaajeerneq, culminating in a physical performance between the women that exudes a sort of intimate kinship, and a demand to the audience to “actively experience, witness and remember.”

Maria Hupfield’s “call” to conversation is demonstrated simply by Bag, an industrial felt replication of Anishinaabe floral beadwork designs that the artist carried throughout a number of her performances. Post-Performance / Conversation Action is Hupfield’s adaptation of the highly institutionalized artist talk into a form of intergenerational community building, centering Indigenous women.

Feet On the Ground, the participatory group performance response developed with IV Castellanos and Esther Neff, challenges the viewer to examine their role in decolonization, explicitly asking “do you want to surrender or take action?” In the gallery, the physical evidence of this active collaboration (surveyor’s tape, tiny foam tools, stark black banners) lays on the floor, and the silence of the objects highlights the dynamic human component necessary to enact.

Tania Willard’s Only Available Light is perhaps most explicit in its confrontation of the manipulation and exploitation of Indigeneity by settler colonialism, something it achieves with brilliant simplicity. By placing selenite crystals in front of a projector, the silent 1928 film The Shuswap Indians of British Columbia, originally commissioned by the National Museum of Canada, Willard disrupts the transmission of the images and forces the audience to reconsider what they’re viewing. This disruption is underscored by Leela Gilday’s sound composition, and the placement of these crystals with a birch bark basket “rescued” from an antique store, and glass Listerine bottles salvaged from Willard’s reserve. The bottles are filled with seed beads and digital prints of the selenite windows of a Roman cathedral, and illustrate children on their way to residential school.

#callresponse cannot simply be understood as a response to reconciliation or a catalogue of resistance. Rather, it is an ongoing project of engagement that rejects marginalization in favour of an exploration and prizing of Indigenous women artists, and the impact of their work.

As Hogue explains, “We wanted to represent the fullness, the critical, vital abundance of Indigenous women’s artistic practices, who are leading conversations and actions for the future. It’s also important to say, however; that the invitations were all premised on a consideration of long-term engagement within the artists’ respective communities while recognizing that the ‘community’ would also be different in each case. It’s really that on-the-ground work that brings all of these artists together.”

Kathleen M. Higgins is a K’jipuktuk (Halifax) based arts writer, public servant, and dog aunt.

Maria Hupfield & Jason Lujan, DOUBLE SHIFT, (photo: Topher & Rae Studios)

In September 2004, Artforum published a paper Glenn Ligon mistakenly prepared and delivered for his part in a College Art Association panel on the artist David Hammons. The resulting text, “Black Light: David Hammons and the Poetics of Emptiness,” is a gift to anyone considering the ways in which contemporary art connects with people’s lives when it leaves the gallery and goes out to occupy other spaces. “Black Light,” was fresh in my mind when Visual Arts News editor Shannon Webb-Campbell asked if I would write a blog post about this year’s Nocturne events and has stuck with me as I took her up on it.

Before what we’ve come to call “Nuit Blanche” or “White Night” style events spread to Turtle Island, they started in Europe with events such as the Helsinki Festival’s “Night of the Arts” in 1989 and the city of Nantes’ six-year project “Les Allumees.” The latter invited artists from a different city each year to share one-night projects in Nantes between 1990 to 1995. The name “White Night” seems to have first cropped up to title St. Petersburg’s first art at night festival in 1993. Coincidentally, that makes the name “White Night” only as old as this writer.

In 2002, Paris launched its white night event, giving the world the title “Nuit Blanche.” Nuit Blanche reached Canada via Montreal in 2004. Toronto held its first Nuit Blanche in 2006, and in 2007, when Rose Zack, Laura Carmichael and a remarkably small group of volunteers set out to bring a nuit blanche style event to Halifax, the name “Nocturne” was chosen instead.

Maria Hupfield & Jason Lujan, DOUBLE SHIFT, (photo: Topher & Rae Studios)

This year was Nocturne’s eleventh edition, marked by a partnership with the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, who helped select Raven Davis as Nocturne’s first Indigenous Curator. Davis, in turn, selected this Nocturne’s theme: Nomadic Reciprocity, a multilayered reflection on what is given and what is taken as we move through space, and as we move here in Halifax over unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaq territory.

Speaking to CBC’s Rosanna Deerchild on the night of the event, Davis gave some insight into the success of how their theme opened up Nocturne to new artists. “What I’ve been told is that there’s been over 50% new applications to this festival. The majority of them from black, Indigenous and people of colour. Which for me is a great success. What it means is there is over 50% new work and new artists that haven’t felt like they’ve been represented in these festivals that are coming out to make work.”

The encouragement of Davis’ theme had a profound impact on the makeup of the festival.

Projects took a smaller scale; opting for thoughtful, political content over bright lights and visual impact. The body – its weight, its histories lived and inherited, and how its race affects its experience took centre stage.

Performance work by Brian Solomon (Red Flag), Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan (Double Shift, and There Is No Then and Now, Only Is and Is Not), Ursula Johnson and Angela Parsons (L’nuisimk: El-noo-we-simk: Speaking Indian) and Leelee Davis, Lisa Gambletron and Dayna Danger (That Which We Cannot Own) prioritized the presence of Indigenous bodies in the festival.

As I witnessed their performance, Danger, Davis and Gambletron spoke similarly in metaphor and laboured with their surroundings. In a black box theatre, they had staged with mics, projections, props and structures, they took turns uttering phrases that could have been sarcastic; could have been ironic; and could have been directed at either each other or the audience. “I need help. Can somebody help me? Please! I need to clean up this mess. I am trying to clean up this mess. I don’t know who made it. But please, can somebody help me clean this up?” said Danger. “We’re being good guests! Let’s be good guests, Danger! We’re just being good guests!” said Davis. Their props: leather, bones, tarps, drums and images of water protectors gave poignantly veiled reference to the colonial implications of their actions and dialogue. With great subtlety they depicted the difficulty itself of standing up and speaking to Canada’s colonial history.

Leelee Davis, Lisa Gambletron and Dayna Danger, That Which We Cannot Own, (photo: Kylee Nunn)

Similarly, Brian Solomon’s Red Flag, veiled the body of a performer with fabric hung from a flagpole in order to open up a multitude of new readings. Not the least of which being a powerful evocation of the bodiefs that have historically and today continue to disappear under the sign of the Canadian flag.

Ligon said, “It’s hard to leave your body behind, especially when your body is always being thrown up in your face. Being is heavy as a motherfucker. The question is: How to remove weight, to move towards lightness, as Hammons has? How to do this while still acknowledging the particular history of a body that has been used, as Stuart Hall suggests, ‘as if it was, and often it was, the only cultural capital we had?’ These questions now occupy several young artists who walk the threshold between a dematerialized and a historicized body.”

Brian Soloman, Red Flag (photo: Topher & Rae Studios)

Although, Ligon is speaking about a generation of black American artists who have since taken centre stage in the American art world, his articulation, “walk the threshold between a dematerialized and a historicized body,” resonates with the projects in Nocturne this year.

This seems especially resonant with Hupfield and Lujan’s There Is No Then and Now, Only Is and Is Not a single channel video set up outside the Old Memorial Library.

The street lights were turned off overhead, and a single projection played the video from behind a screen. The work asked viewers to consider something that many may not have before: the experience of Indigenous peoples with black bodies. The video alternated between an artist, Dennis Redmoon Darkeem dancing in regalia in a darkened room and black screens with white text showing excerpts of a conversation with Darkeem about experiences and confrontations he has had as a black bodied Indigenous person. The video shares as we listen in silence and watch in the dark. In front of this work it’s the audience that disappears. Reading puts us in our bodies, potentially, recalling the histories in ourselves as we read about Darkeem’s: the building blocks of empathy.

Maria Hupfield & Jason Lujan, There is No Then and Now, Only Is and Is Not, (photo: Topher & Rae Studios)

If you look long enough, you notice in the video of Darkeem dancing, Hupfield and Lujan have blocked out all of the light in the room except for a spotlight on Darkeem and a red ‘EXIT’ sign overhead. Like “Black Light” that ‘EXIT’ light has stuck with me. As if the video is reminding us that we can leave at any time. It makes me think about where I am: K’jipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki, but also a darkened patch of government property, open to an otherwise brightly lit city. It makes me think about the moment when I will turn and walk away from the video. When I exit and when I stop listening. Making the choice to stay and listen more conscious.

That feeling of being made aware of when I leave, made me come back to Hupfield and Lujan’s installation at the end of the night. When I did, there were more people there than I’d thought. Still listening in the dark.

I’ve descended into a dark room with a large video projection of what looks like a tropical jungle. The camera moves slowly and deliberately through rich vegetation while the narrator— New Zealand artist Mark Harvey—gently talks to you about Schrödinger’s Cat. Mark explains how plants absorb energy from other nearby plants, and the research suggesting this applies to people too. He talks about quantum entanglement. The whole thing is quite hypnotic. And sitting on the floor in the far corner of the room, is a small video monitor showing the artist wrestling with a young tree, yanking and pulling, trying to rip it out of the ground with his hands.

Mark visited Halifax’s Anna Leonowens Gallery this summer, presenting a video installation, Drop Point, alongside a series of daily public performances, titled Free Hand. I spoke with Mark over lunch about his work, colonialism, caring for plants, religion, quantum physics (some real, some not), optimism, and life advice from our grandmothers.

DANIEL HIGHAM: I found that small video of you wrestling the tree really interesting because it was just so violent compared to the rest of the work.

MARK HARVEY: It’s interesting to hear you say that. It seems a lot of people don’t notice the tree being pulled out in the corner. So the forest in the main video is, you could argue, “pure” New Zealand forest—all endemic and rare species—and it’s actually my back yard. We live out in the rain forest, and I do a lot of caring for it, and I look after other people’s land in the area as a hobby. I get rid of invasive weeds and replant native species.

DANIEL: You could tell by the way the camera moved through the space, that you really knew the land. It was almost intimate, very slow and considered.

MARK: Yeah, I did. I also filmed it with a Steadicam. I wanted to seduce or hypnotize the viewer. Some of my earlier background is in contemporary dance, holistic contemporary dance, conditioning your body, often touching on the New Age kind of thing. So there is that, but I’m also interested in the politics of the space—art galleries—and also the psychology of it. For this work, I collaborated partly with a physicist, Shaun Hendy. So some of the quantum physics that’s coming into the video is coming from him, but some of it is spoof physics—it’s not actually scientific.

DANIEL: But it’s presented in this authoritative sort of way, with a lot of seemingly factual information.

MARK: I was worried it might be a bit naughty to do it.

DANIEL: It is! At one point you say, “We’re all matter extending out into space,” and that we all contain lead.

MARK: Yeah! Apparently we do! That’s from Shaun.

DANIEL: So that part is real.

MARK: That part is, yeah.

DANIEL: It reminds me of something I read recently that said we’re actually all experiencing the Big Bang right now, that in this very moment it’s still happening.

MARK: It’s still resonating.

DANIEL: And we’re part of it—it’s what we are.

MARK: You know there’s an ongoing earthquake going on back home? It’s been going on for I don’t know how many years—five years, six years?—but it’s very slow and subtle, and there’s constant shifting going on.

DANIEL: And it’s always changing.

MARK: A teacher of mine years ago used to say that the landscape really affects and influences what you do on it, when you make stuff. I definitely think that’s true for what I do even if I don’t mean it to. And going back to the video off to the side, I wasn’t sure  at first if I would include that or not. All the species that you see in that are invasive weeds.

DANIEL: See, I wouldn’t have known that because I don’t recognize any of those plants.

MARK: It actually is a problematic tree and it’s really futile to try and pull it out with bare hands. It’s a work in itself that I’ve shown elsewhere, but I felt like bringing it back in as part of a conversation, so the New Age sort of experience doesn’t seem all too dominant—although people can relax, it’s not as simple as that. We often relax and accept our role as colonizers, we kind of take it for granted. Despite being half Scottish and English, there’s also Maori in my ancestry, so that does influence how I’m thinking about politics. But I don’t want to say it too directly. And it’s only recently that we’ve clarified in my family that ancestry. Years ago when I did a PhD, I was very interested in critiquing the position of White Man through being a white man.

DANIEL: I was watching that video, going along with it, feeling comfortable, relaxed. Then there’s a point in the video where you keep repeating the word “whiteness.” That really unsettled me.

MARK: Yeah.

DANIEL: And then you talk about the colour Alabaster White, and the history of the “white cube,” which may have been started in Nazi Germany, where they began painting the walls of museums white. You say something in the video like, “Whiteness… whiteness, and darkness.”

MARK: Yeah. “Colonizer and colonized. Breathe in. Now breathe out.” The landscape painting, going back to the nineteenth century, it’s often landscapes done by people from colonizing cultures representing land that was there to be conquered or taken over. Empty space ready to be tamed and pastoralised. I think there’s that kind of tension in the work as well.

DANIEL: That reminds me of the “Doctrine of Discovery,” where Pope Nicholas V basically said, go out into the world and take everything that isn’t Christian and make it ours.

MARK: Exactly. And then in the video I start going on about Roman arches, to reference that and all of the things we associate with Roman culture, patriarchal culture, colonization, all of these things.

DANIEL: You mentioned that you started in contemporary dance. How did you end up in performance art?

MARK: Yeah. I started in contemporary dance and very quickly moved toward performance art. You know, twenty years ago—I can’t believe it was twenty years ago, 1998—I was being told not to do that stuff by a lot of people in that community, that I would alienate people, so I moved into visual arts.

DANIEL: What kind of stuff?

MARK: I was doing these great big actions with very simple… for instance, I had my uncle’s drag racing videos—he was into drag racing, hot rods and things—and I had a friend on a reverb pedal playing the sound from the video of the revving engines, looking like a rock star. It was this white man thing I was looking at. It was quite theatrical. I called it HEMI 265, which was the name of an engine in these iconic Australian cars that were big back home, associated with masculinity, macho-ness, and tradesmen—guys who vote for the Tories, that kind of thing.

DANIEL: Toxic masculinity.

MARK: Exactly. And group-think. My first degree was in psychology, and a big thread in all of my work is: what decisions do people make, and why do they make those decisions? There’s a psychologist, Niki Harré, who’s written some books recently that look at why, in relation to sustainability and social justice, people make the decisions they do, and why they often don’t go near this stuff.

DANIEL: Why people avoid it?

MARK: Yeah, it’s fascinating to me. We are in a bubble in the art world, and that is a risk. Some of my works, I definitely try to do out in the public. The first performance I did here last week, I had this huge plastic container—made in Canada—filled with dirty oil, which was made in Canada too, and I was asking people, bystanders, to give me a hand and asking them what they liked about Canada.

DANIEL: I really liked how precarious that performance seemed at times. I was watching the oil slosh around in the bucket as people helped you carry it, wondering if it would spill. I think that’s a good metaphor for the situation that we live in: we’re moving around all this oil, always on the brink of some catastrophe, not really thinking about it. It was also interesting to see people react—they seemed scared of it, as if they’ve never actually seen oil before. But all of the lights in here are on because of oil.

MARK: And because of my accent, I could play the tourist. But I don’t want to take advantage of people, there’s a risk of that too, you know being patronizing.

DANIEL: Or tricking them into something they might not agree to.

MARK: Yeah. I did a work last year, where for five hours I was pulling things around this city precinct. Mostly it was wreckage left over from the earthquake. There’s still bits of wreckage. I would go from one place to another, but always towing something around, trying to look useful. And sometimes people would come up to me and ask what I was doing, so I’d ask them “do you wanna give me a hand?” It was really fun. I was also pushing a van sometimes, and that especially got people involved. I’d say, “Yeah, this is an artwork! I’m doing this for an artwork, do you want to give me a hand?”

DANIEL: I like that you tell people it’s art.

MARK: I believe in being up-front with people, and not taking advantage of them. I believe that art hopefully can be educational for people. One common response from people was, “Oh, I don’t think it’s art. But I still really enjoy it. I do really like it.”

DANIEL: [laughs]

MARK: While I’ve been here, in Halifax, I’ve been taking time to talk to people outside of the works, and I went and visited the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre and accidentally got myself invited into a language class. So I joined in! It was fantastic, I loved it because it was like an exchange, lots of conversations. In return I shared lots of the Maori language, Te Reo.

DANIEL: Is it spoken much?

MARK: We use Maori words all the time in New Zealand, I think four percent of our population are fluent, and there’s a lot of us, at least half of us, that understand quite a bit. They’re trying to make it compulsory. The Maori population is 15 percent, but it’s more like 25 for people who have Maori ancestry.

DANIEL: That’s great, that it’s being recognized at that level.

MARK: It’s an official language. We have three: English, Maori, and sign language.

DANIEL: Unfortunately Indigenous languages in Canada are at risk of dying out, because of the residential school system and many years of systematic cultural genocide. There’s a whole generation who were violently cut off from their language.

MARK: It happened too in New Zealand, but there was a bit of a renaissance in the ‘80s.

DANIEL: I’m excited about the new Friendship Centre. It will be this beautiful space right across the street from the Halifax Police headquarters, which is this really oppressive sort of building.

MARK: I know, I observed it while I was crawling around the Citadel. I was trying to listen to the power here.

DANIEL: Did the public interact with you while you did that performance?

MARK: A little bit, yeah. I had a whole bus load of tourists that were calling out to me and cheering me on.

DANIEL: What did they say?

MARK: People were yelling out, “WHY ARE YOU CRAWLING?” And it was the only work where I wasn’t talking to people. But it felt like a silent crawl might be the right thing. It was the day after I went to the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre. The Citadel is a place I know where people do drugs, and also a cruising place, but what it meant historically: the British colony, and because of my family, I felt like doing a listening performance. Just listen. It took nearly two hours.

DANIEL: Why were you crawling?

MARK: This idea of submission, submissiveness. Sometimes invaders might crawl before an attack, but in this case I wanted to put myself below, below them, below this place. It’s interesting because on the one hand, I come from colonizers, but on the other hand I don’t, I come from the opposite.

DANIEL: I think there’s important work to be done—by white men, like me—looking at what it means to be a white man, in what was the British Empire. That I need to figure out for myself who I am and how I want to participate in society. That we can’t just blindly follow along with how things are. Which reminds me of the performance you did today, Thought Leader, I think you called it? You put on a blindfold and asked people to guide you around Parade Square, but also to think for you. I feel like a lot of people unwillingly or unknowingly give away their agency. And I think a lot of people just want someone else to make decisions for them.

MARK: Yeaaaaah. I’ve been so wound up and bothered that we give all this power to the same, really powerful, usually white men, and follow what they say.

DANIEL: I’ve noticed in your performances, where religion comes up, a lot of participants are very anti-religion. And I think that’s sad in some ways. Obviously the church has done a lot of harm, and that needs to be acknowledged and repaired. But it seems like we’ve almost given up entirely on moral decision making, so that at the government level we purely rely on statistics or economic factors. And somehow we’ve come to accept that. Like trying to do good is too hard, so we gave up altogether.

MARK: I’ll go back to Niki Harré’s book. What I read from her writing, is that what influences people around big political issues—things like poverty, climate change, equality—is what’s sacred to people, what is going on for people at a spiritual level. And it’s only connecting people with that that moves people to make these deeper commitments or changes. It’s very hard to do. I’ve got this conservation buzz going, I guess that’s probably my religion. I go out into the bush and get really excited learning about different plant species, helping neighbours with them, it’s really wonderful. That for me is a big driving thing. Definitely. And I’m optimistic about it. I’ve got two kids, two daughters, and want them to be better people than we are, if I can help it. If my work can contribute to conversation about these things, that would be nice.

DANIEL: I think conversation is the only way to really make positive change, conversation in whatever form it might take. I really appreciate how some of your performances are actually just frameworks to have pointed conversations with the public. Like with Life Advice, there was this whole setup—you’re doing this workout routine, there’s free fish and chips—but really you’re just asking people for advice.

MARK: Life tips! We got a few too, didn’t we? It was really nice.

DANIEL: And most of the advice that people shared came from their grandmother.

MARK: You’re right! It really shows how important grandmothers are. How underrated they are.

DANIEL: One more question, on the theme of life advice. What advice do you have for someone early in their career in the arts doing something like performance art?

MARK: Keep trying stuff out, especially if others around you are not doing it. And definitely don’t feel like you have to follow the norms—performance has been around long enough now that it has its norms. That’s really important. There are friends of mine in Germany who say there are a lot of young artists that have been taught to do performance art and it all looks kind of the same, often just standing there and dropping things.

DANIEL: I think sometimes just trying to challenge the norm becomes the norm.

MARK: Exactly. Like the idea that all performance art should be about pulling apart things—that in itself is like a cat chasing its tail. That can undo the very essence of the work, if it has that potential. It’s like, when you try to fall over, you never are falling over because you’re conscious of doing it. Stick with concepts rather than trying to constantly pull apart things. And don’t listen to me about things. Or older people. Unless you really think they should be listened to.

Mocean Dance, “15 for 15,” presented by Live Art Dance for Mocean’s 15th Anniversary Celebration. Via Michelle Doucette Photography

Tenacity was nothing new to the dancers performing Mocean Dance’s anniversary piece, 15 for 15. Arms clasped behind backs and bathed in white light, their efforts were palpable as they attempted the gruelling task of moving forward on legs spread unreasonably wide. At fifteen years, Mocean is one of the longest surviving contemporary dance companies in Atlantic Canada and well-known for its highly physical and collaborative work — so much so that the dance company recently won the 2016 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award for Canvas 5 x 5, marking the first time in its 11-year history that the prize has gone to a dance work. To celebrate their fifteen-year milestone, the company asked fifteen choreographers, either based in Halifax or with strong Nova Scotian ties, to create one-minute works set on eighteen dancers. Mocean presented the resulting piece, 15 for 15, at the James Dunn Theatre in Halifax this fall to an audience made up of long-time arts supporters, dance enthusiasts, and young dance students.

     Video: Canvas 5 x 5 by Tedd Robinson from Mocean Dance

Stitching together light, darkness and a Nova Scotia-inspired soundscape

Sound designer Brian Riley’s soundscape provided a through line for what might otherwise have been fifteen disparate vignettes. Riley was given full freedom to create a cohesive sonic world. Amongst found, manipulated and created sounds, Riley’s source material featured rich Nova Scotia content—sounds from sculptor John Little’s ironwork studio, Kira Daube and Jacques Mindreau’s haunting layered vocals. In a nod to his history with the Mocean, Riley integrated segments of composition created for past collaborations along with music conceived and recorded on the spot while watching 15 for 15’s lightning fast rehearsals. In a few cases, dancers provided their own snippets of sound which Riley “sewed into the quilt by adding a little tops and tails.” Riley’s score was augmented by moments of silence that allowed the sound of moving dancers to take central stage. For instance, Nova Scotia born, New York-based choreographer, Rebecca Lazier’s gorgeously controlled maelstrom of bodies and limbs falling and rising sounded like a fisherman’s catch. One could imagine the flashing silver tails of trout flapping in a net.

Bringing together so many professionals from the dance community was an impressive undertaking and offered a snapshot of the current state of contemporary dance in Nova Scotia.  The fifteen choreographies comprising 15 for 15 were stitched together under the creative leadership of Mocean’s co-artistic director Sara Coffin, with Riley and choreographer Corey Bowles. Lazier stepped in as rehearsal director and a pair of outside eyes. Benoit Gavel’s strong lighting choices and unabashed use of darkness added a depth and sophistication to the work. The cast featured the bulk of professional dancers in the province, including Mocean’s founders, current company members, and a new generation of rising talent.

     Video: For a Quartet (2016), by Daniele Desnoyers, Mocean Dance

Animating themes of time and transition

Nods to themes of time and transition echoed throughout the work. 15 for 15’s first segment ended with the youngest dancer and the oldest dancer, standing spotlit on an otherwise blackened stage, the thirty year gap between them apparent. Sharon Moore’s, funny and irreverent take saw a throng of dancers dragging co-Artistic Director Susanne Chui around in a delightful circle of frenzy. “Tiiiime, tiiiiime, not enough time,” Chui dramatically moaned. Time was scarce in the work’s production. Choreographers each had a single hour to create and rehearse with the dancers. The dancers, juggling second jobs and family demands, periodically resorted to learning movement phrases via a dedicated YouTube channel when unable to attend rehearsal. At one point, a dancer was breastfeeding her infant mid-rehearsal.

The condensed rehearsals did result in a mixed performance—While 15 for 15 was fresh and energetic, there were also small glitches and moments lacking in synchronicity.  At times the choreographers’ voices were difficult to recognize amidst transitions and a cameo by the company’s long-time technical director was heartfull though mawkish. Ultimately though, the work was deeply pleasurable to watch, as seeing fifteen plus dancers on-stage is a rare treat in Atlantic Canada.

For choreographer Jacinte Armstrong, the short minute of time she was allotted doubled as a metaphor for the struggle, friction, and beauty that comes with creating dance in a small community. Armstrong teased out an undulating amorphous cluster of dancers that dragged out into a linked diagonal line of interlocking arms.  For Armstrong, the most powerful part of 15 for 15 lay in connecting with moments from  “everyone’s past, present and future in the one-minute that they [choreographed]. That was the greatest part.” Sara Coffin, befitting her collaborative practice and role as a mentor, took advantage of her minute by creating three moving wheels with fifteen of the dancers. Coffin taught the group a fairly simple form, but one that required counter weight, intricate bodily communication, and at least five bodies working together to create each of the wheels.

Celebrating collective efforts and individual choices

Mocean Dance, “15 for 15,” presented by Live Art Dance for Mocean’s 15th Anniversary Celebration. Via Michelle Doucette Photography

Veronique Mackenzie’s one-minute reflected a multidisciplinary art practice. Dancers crumpled, twisted, and smoothed paper over the sounds of an appropriated 1992 Mister Roger’s Neighbourhood segment: the episode where Mr McFeely describes how coloured construction paper is made. The witty combination of subversive paper manipulation with instructional voiceover was a refreshing contrast to the more traditional “dancerly” approaches to choreography.  Recently out of a training with the Creative Music Workshop, Kathleen Doherty’s task-based score took a decidedly different tack, using silence and stillness to highlight individual choices made by each dancer as they followed simple directions: “walk downstage; stop; walk downstage.” Among the least experienced of the group, participating as a choreographer allowed Doherty “to step forward and say what was important to me.”  

Even with such an inclusive project, there were some notable absences in 15 for 15 whether due to scheduling conflicts or other reasons. There was also a lack of male bodies or bodies of colour in the cast. According to Mackenzie, with the exception of Corey Bowles, “there just aren’t any professional male dancers [in the region].” This is a concern when we consider that this means a void of dance role models for young people in Atlantic Canada who are not white and female. When asked about the greatest impact of 15 for 15, Doherty recalls the young dance students crying during opening night reception following the performance. “Big feels” were Coffin’s words. These girls were responding to seeing three generations of Atlantic dancers and dance teachers on stage, and realizing that it could be any of them up on stage one day.

Images below courtesy of Lisa Lipton. Stills from her upcoming feature film, THE  IMPOSSIBLE BLUE ROSE, 2013.