badlands: a dance in time (2024)

Badlands form a memory of the future. In an odyssey through time itself, layers of recordings made over four years carve out a landscape of bodily traces. Sound becomes a body of the real, chasing through pastures, interstellar strings, exquisite corpses of rhythm, shamanic whales, AI terrors, diesel roadhouse bars, truncated lifelines, and benedictions from the open road. Images cut into time like water cuts into stone. Happy trails.

August 23rd-24th, 2024
Doors at 7pm, show at 7:30pm
at LOBE 4D SOUND, Vancouver
Link for TICKETS
Sound-Choreography created and performed by Andrea Spaziani, Matt Smith / Prince Nifty, and Julia Male
Featuring recordings of Germaine Liu, Sofi Gudiño and Hurricane Hill
Made in-residence at Port William Sound (2021), Union Sound Company (2022) and LOBE 4D Sound (2024)
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Poster Design: domenicspaziani.ca
Images made by A.Spaziani using Openart AI generator

doppeltone 2.0 (2024)

Proud to report that after 5 years of work, DoppelTone has finally arrived!

It is an accessible web application and creative tool that allows users to create sound-choreography in 3-dimensions. It was made with members of the CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind), the Mikutech software development company, and a group of software experts, accessibility consultants, and community members specializing in arts and accessibility, including: Kathy Beitz, Meighan Duffin, Paul Pethick, Chyvonne Emile-Bray, Ramya Amuthan, and Jenn Goodwin, among others listed on the DoppelTone website. We acknowledge the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategies Fund (2019) and Strategic Innovation Fund (2022).

For more information and to try it out, please visit doppeltone.com

THE RIGHT EYE OF CLINT (2019)

This solo tracks the perception of pressure. I was inspired by time spent in the South-West of the the United States, learning to ride horses, and watching Western films. I invited Clint Eastwood and his many decoys to the desert for a small occasion. We swapped our right eyeballs. Eye for an eye, plus germs and a tiny stye. I am here now, hiding in plain sight, tying knots, and becoming an edge. Being in the presence of such resilient elements is not a new feeling, but wearing them and owning them is alien.

April 11th-13th, 2019
at the Dancemakers Centre for Creation, Toronto
Choreography and Performance by Andrea Spaziani
Music and Performance by Matt Smith
Artistic Consultant: Danny Grossman
PREVIEW by Sky Fairchild Waller
Poster by Eric Kostiuk Williams
Photos by Fran Chudnoff / franznfriends

LINK TO FULL CHOREOGRAPHIC SCORE

SILVER VENUS (2018)

SILVER VENUS is an ensemble reconstruction of the feminine persona VENUS that combines the activity of silver with aquatic behaviour  It is a procreative anti-altar that transforms water into deeply felt sound waves and black fabric.

April 26th-28th, 2018
at the Dancemakers Centre for Creation, Toronto
Choreography by Andrea Spaziani
Music and Performance by Matt Smith
Made in Collaboration with and Performed by Nicole Rose Bond, Irvin Chow, Francesca Chudnoff, Alicia Grant, Julia Male, and Claire Turner Reid
Makeup by Jooyeon Kim
Costume Design by Buzz / Rebaie by Rebée
Score design by Gracia Gallo of Concept Citron
Full Score text HERE

Poster by Eric Kostiuk Williams
Photos by Claire Harvie

Archaeology of the Frivolous (2017 - present)

MAY 2017, 2018 and 2019
Deep in the Chihuahua Desert a collection of artists and expansive thinkers came together in a landscape of superfluousness.

What is frivolity?
Its logic of supplementarity, excess, overabundance, overflow, and and and surplus produces a value beyond speaking and writing, towards something experiential, something akin to the wet spatter surrounding a tomato after whipping it against a wall - a wet spatter that was always there to begin with. Prior to its action it sat contained, in a hidden potentiality of collecting juices.
Frivolity is the abundance of residual stuff produced when, while, and during the crossing of a threshold. A threshold such as comfort, habit, words, and their individual containment - this containment loosening and shifting when combined with the particularities of the present moment, just before, and just after. The lazy hangover after a nap, an adrenal buzz, or disrupting a thought pattern.
This is a pedagogical experiment in getting outside of yourself through an immersive process of getting together.
This is a pedagogical experiment with too many ideas, too many groceries, and the too-much-ness of the desert plus cigars and violins.

MANIFEST DENSITY (2017)

April 17th, 2017
A work in progress shown at Movement Research at the Judson Gym, NYC
A study on emblematic ambition and power:
I want to take on the gravitational force of nine pendulous medals that I found in the garbage so that I can absorb their confidence through physical resonance.
I want to hear them clanging in my sleep, because I want to deserve them.
Only one is silver and I change myself harder.
Only when things work do they matter says the medals.

this desiring pony (2016)

December 15th - 16th 2016 at the Dancemakers Centre for Creation, Toronto

This Desiring Pony

This is an incantation for courage,

                   a quest to soften, and keep going.

It takes guts

                  to let go of my jaw for just a sec,

                  and feel for more contact

                                   with a satisfying bruise,

                                   or what’s always been so shady purple.

Optimism is dark.

It’s a crafty veil that I want to peer through with the sharp blue eyeballs

                  I anatomically re-positioned, 

                                    under my skirt. 

What do I do with this feeling,

                  of chronic low-grade emergency?

In-bracing, and waiting,

                  to sneak away for a Coke and dirty gossip sesh

                                       with a dollop of destruction cream.

I want to introduce you to the Sensory Overlord.

She comes from the blind fog rolling up the left leg of my leotard,

                    a gasping oil slick,

                                        pressing heart-ward like an immanent blood clot.

I work at it. I try to overcome her jargon by attending to a continuous flail,

                    but something keeps spilling out all over the floor.

I made her so well,

                    and didn’t know it at the time.

We will be eaten up after the next full moon.

Our anxiousness floats over Abyss Lake

                     where all that good shit from the dumpster is dripping, tempering, and lying dormant before it jerks off at the next family meal.

How can I possess what is already possessed?

Look, all this grey looks better in black.

                    Skintight like the bondage of performance

                                          the bondage of a brand new ‘you’

                                                             morphing behind skirtward eyes

                                                                                  The new demure damsel of downward gaze

                     Tactfully

                     Patiently

                                          watching the dirt-coma-kick-up

                                          collect beneath her heels.

...

This Desiring Pony is performed by the alter ego SCHPANDO. She materialized as a voice that brings consciousness to the unconscious of A Spaziani. She speaks indirectly, through technology, and performatively, in an attempt to improvise new forms that attend to the present moment as it is being listened to. She’s a character in a constant state of surrender, wearing the affects around her for the split second of their intensity. She is a strange mirror, reflective of the data of each moment. She is constantly morphing and slipping out from under the constraint of language. She is a representation of how to perceive the present as both incomplete and novel, and how to get out of a constraint by going deeper into its particularities.

This work is for accessing the courage to keep going.

PREVIEW by Fabien Maltais-Bayda

REVIEW by Victoria McKenzie

REVIEW by Robert Kingsbury

SPACEBODIES II (2016)

August 6th, 2016

In an experiment in choreography as curation, I brought 27 artists together for 2 hours at the Transart Tirennale in Berlin, GE

SPACEBODIES II is an exhibition featuring time-based work on expanded definitions of space and its affective (im)materiality. Can space exist without a body to contain it? Can a body exist without space to fill it? What is the affective dialogue between these enmeshed trajectories of flow?

This exhibition is for works that dance with their own existence.

FULL PROGRAM

It was an honour to have Morgan O'Hara there. She made this Live Transmission drawing during the exhibition:

Photos of some of the participating artists:

Video of my Performance of This Desiring Pony at SB II

UNBECOMING EGO (2016)

I deployed the Alter Ego, the magnanimous SCHPANDO, to edit my MFA thesis paper in a live moment of toiling and trolling.

Presented at Flowchart on April 7th, 2016 at Artscape Sandbox (Toronto), and at the Arcadia Co-op (Toronto) in support by Coman Poon and Brian Smith on April 9th and 16th, 2016.

RAFTERS (2016)

March 3-5, 2016

Witnessing the subconscious junk heap that charges the space between us. A meditation on hyper-empathy. 

Presented at Audio Guides produced by Project Humanity at The Citadel (Toronto).

Developed at Hub 14, and shown in progress at Performance Improvisation as Practice (PIAP) by Meryem Alaoui/ Soft Matter on May 28, 2015

Choreography by A. Spaziani, created in collaboration with Alicia Grant, and Julia Male

Performers: Alicia Grant, Julia Male, and Andrea Spaziani

HYDRA sounds at r.i.c.e. (2015)

A wash of life on Hydra, Greece, August 2015. Attunement, with voiceover, at the Ricean School of Dance.

Trio for four heads (2015)

Presented at the Transart Institute's showcase Loose Affairs at Somos Gallery, Berlin, July 25, 2015

Please listen using headphones. Lying down is optimal.

HORIZON (2014)

This is a wall. This is an arm. This is a place, not unlike some kind of moon. This is a movement study on nothing becoming something. An atmosphere that desires a location. A wall that tips, a body that fades, and a place that becomes a plane.

Chor, perf, vid, editing, tones by A.S.

W/ found binaural beats

Emptying Re-Existing (2015)

The HANDBOOK is here, check it out.

Lone Dancer (2013)

30 days of choreographic prompts, and an invitation to get down and make bad dances in your bathroom at 3am to techno hits. This is not an avenue for good technique, or skill of any kind, but a virtual space for bravery, a body that we don't know yet, and a dance that we don't make, but makes us.

lonedancer.ca

The moment before (2012)

January 2012

Choreography by Andrea Spaziani, Created and Performed by Andrea Spaziani and Amanda Acorn, Sound Design by Christopher Willes, Lighting design by Simon Rossiter, Premiere: TWObyFOUR Festival of Duets, Dancemakers Centre for Creation, Toronto

In a limbo of anticipation, we prepare like it’s possible to feel prepared.

We perform ourselves performing ourselves.

We are all intention and no delivery.

We only divert and never arrive.

We are afraid of being caught with nothing to show.

We are promo for the most fantastic virtuosic stuff you wont see.

We eat pressure, practice too much, and attempt to re-create the magic from last time.

It was so good last time.

The Moment Before is exactly that, beginning just before the beginning; waiting for some kind of performance to start. It is a dance that emerges from an impossible preparation, and lives in the space between thinking and doing, anticipation and unrealized potential, and between the dancers themselves. It is choreography situated in the tenuous space between spectator and performer.

Excerpt below from the Dancemakers Two by Four Festival of Duets, and here's a full length video from the Toronto Dance Community Love-in's Ps: We are all here in July 2013.

J (2010)

(is for jane caught adrift in the snow)

February 2010

Choreographed and Performed by Andrea Spaziani, Sound Design by Peter Katz with The House of the Rising Sun by The Animals, Premiere: Under a Paper Moon, Hub 14, Toronto

Jane is not alive. This is a 10-minute account of her life, mostly joy, mostly reconstructed. She had an affinity for horses, and a talent for undoing difficult knots. The people, places and events are perhaps based on real people, places and events.