SILVER VENUS
April 26th-28th, 2018
at the Dancemakers Centre for Creation, Toronto
Choreography by Andrea Spaziani
Made in Collaboration with and Performed by Nicole Rose Bond, Irvin Chow, Francesca Chudnoff, Alicia Grant, Julia Male, Claire Turner Reid and Matt Smith
Makeup by Jooyeon Kim
Costume Design by Buzz / Rebaie by Rebée
Score design by Gracia Gallo of Concept Citron
Full Score text HERE
Tickets HERE
April 27, 2018 at Dancemakers Centre for Creation, Video by Victoria Cheong
Archaeology of the Frivolous
May 9th - 15th 2017
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
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 the medals declare.
Dancemakers local artist in residence
I'm very proud to announce the beginnings of a new group work at Dancemakers. I'll be churning out/in something with glorious fervour over the next three seasons. First up was This Desiring Pony on December 15-16, 2016. Coming soon: Silver Venus work-in-progress showing at the end of April 2017
this desiring pony
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 questions how to be in the world by shining a light on the immediate affects of its force. She is ‘human’ only insofar as the definition holds. She is constantly morphing and slipping out from under the constraint of language, turning its meaning into malleable material for its own annihilation. 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
Heima residency
September 1st - December 4th 2016
In a flurry of making at Heima in Seydisfjordur, Iceland, I shot out two performances:
1. With my fellow residents we live streamed performances for 8 hours to Kvit Gallery in Copenhagen to celebrate their 1 year anniversary. I contributed BLOWOUT: Not a Confession which informed further research with the medals (found in the trash by fellow resident Heidi Zenisek
I used the medals to make this POWER STUDY with slow motion video shot by Allen Ferguson and Directed by Shan Turner-Carroll
2. For the Unofishal Sea Men show at a local fish factory turned art space in Seydisfjordur, curated by Heidi Zenisek I made Open Fortune
SPACEBODIES II
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.
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
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
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.
A wash of life on Hydra, Greece, August 2015. Attunement, with voiceover, at the Ricean School of Dance.
Trio for four heads
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
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
The HANDBOOK is here, check it out.
(The ebook is free, and the pdf cheap. Print costs are high, but planetary resources gotta cost right?)
Lone Dancer
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.
Research LAB
A new work made on the Dancemakers company members Robert Abubo, Amanda Acorn, Ellen Furey, and Simon Portigal. Something about hyper-empahty and playlists, reading bodies through other bodies, shifting perception, and hijacking sensation. We are sourcing the magic of 'the first time' that imprints locations in memory, time, space, and the body in order to compose a fragile and shifting group. A liminal space of togetherness, compassion, and composing identity. Read more here
meet/meant/mtng/mning
A work in progress, initiated at Hub 14's Incubator Residency in March 2013.
We came together to make a space, invent an engagement, and design an interconnectivity that has nothing to do with productivity. An antidote to the efficient, ubiquitous modes of communication that affect how bodies exist together. There are pillows, blankets, naps, and ASMR style audio guides. Read up on the process in my blog
TedX Waterloo 2013
a little dance party on a wednesday afternoon, in waterloo, with friends
something about letting go
we did it all. miami techno, colours, video, dance moves, drama lifts
tone on tone on tone on tone
all that's left to see is us
Amanda Acorn, Melissa Dozois, Andrew Hartley, Julia Male, Kate Nankervis, Simon Reneaud, Christie Stoeten
New Country Rehab
Music Video directed by Christopher Mills, made in collaboration with Amanda Acorn, Gaëlle Legrand, and Kate Nankervis.
The moment before
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
(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.
Student Works:
Passenger
November 2012
Choreography by Andrea Spaziani, Performance by Holly Norris, Commission by Pivotal Motion Dance Theatre / Alias Dance Project, Premiere: Convergence 2012, The Winchester Street Theatre, Toronto
A recollection, here now in past sepia photo, she remembers to remember from the tacky white leather bucket seat beside the steering wheel.
In Other Words
April 2009
Choreography by Andrea Spaziani, Performance by Lara Roberts and Amy Strizic, Commission by YMI Dancing / Pia Bouman School for Ballet and Creative Movement, Premiere: Delicate Structures, Scotiabank Studio Theatre, Toronto.