May 28 – June 1st + June 4-8. 2:30 pm
In 1993, Dana Gingras co-founded The Holy Body Tattoo as a multimedia dance company. Since its inception, the company has toured extensively worldwide and captured a number of significant awards and honours for both its stage and film work. In 2006, she formed a satellite company called Animals of Distinction. She directed and choreographed two Bravo!FACT shorts and created Smash Up, a co-production with the Festival TransAmériques conceived as a collision between dance, animation and sound, with animators/programmers James Paterson and Amit Pitaru. Heart As Arena, the company’s most recent creation, premiered at The Cultch (Vancouver) in October 2011 and will be touring Canada in 2012-2013. Dana is an Associate Dance Artist of Canada’s National Arts Centre.
Dance is fundamentally a condition of risk and an embrace of that risk. As a dance artist, Dana is drawn to amplifying the sense of “physical possibility” (what the body is capable of) and allowing that to become manifold and present in the most innovative fashion possible.
At the very heart of her practice is the physical impulse. Her philosophy always begins with the body; it is the central starting point for all of her work. Although the body is the subject, the questions are many and mutable. What type of body? What physical state of tension? Dana is perpetually driven by an ongoing curiosity and interest in how the internal drives are made manifest. How situations generate choreographic states from the inside that are not superimposed from the exterior.
She is not interested in creating choreography purely for its own sake but in evolving a movement style and character that is specific to each individual work. She is continually drawn to a movement of extremity that utilizes a more expressionistic vocabulary. It is not about beauty or invention, it is about the “why” of making work. The intention, whether it is concerned with fragility or fearlessness, is to create a genuine emotional atmosphere and to physically render ideas. Dana is driven by the search for connection and articulation.
Double Bubble Trailer from Dana Gingras on Vimeo.
