Body to Land
Body to Land
body to land
Over a period of years (2019-present) we will study and re-create through video and movement, seminal works from the repertoire that explore our emotional, physical and cultural relationship to land.
The works identified as the focus for the Body to Land project: Stone Soup, The River, and Gawa Gyani. These works all embody powerful concepts that express the relationship of humans to land and have something to offer to the conversation around reconciliation and the role of dance in creating bridges between cultures.
Our objective is to create, from the analog video material, writings, photos, drawings and maps that remain from each piece, a documentary video and live movement work that can be grasped by an audience as a singular whole.
The first work we revisited was Stone Soup — resulting in a film entitled Gluk, which we premiered in December 2024.
The River (1998) – 2025-2027
The River is the second work we are addressing.
The River traces the memory of Brewery Creek (Vancouver) through the landscape it once flowed freely for centuries. KJD together with the S'pak'wus Slu'lum Dancers of the Squamish Nation, the Brewery Creek Historical Society and other community groups created a site-specific, processional performance to honour the layers of history and memory of the now buried waterway. The performance followed the path of a buried stream, exploring the land/body metaphor and the congruence of our bodies and the land.
Co-Director: Dr. Alana Gerecke (PhD) is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and educator in Vancouver. Her scholarly work has looked at the way settler choreographers tend to approach land through a colonial lens. She cited The River as a work coming close to honouring the land’s Indigenous integrity. As Co-Director, she will bring us closer to our goal of honouring the land’s Indigenous history. We are working to develop the choreography through a dialogical process.
Video Documentary: Flick Harrison, filmmaker, educator, and community-engaged media artist, will be creating the video documentary from the visual materials and documentation that we have from the original production, as well as contributing visuals to accompany the live performance.
Movement Investigation: Travelling the path of the buried Brewery Creek, investigating movement choices and choreography of the original work.
Collaborators:
Bruce MacDonald, historian, author, and original 1998 collaborator,
Cease Wyss, Indigenous Ethnobotanist, educator, and interdisciplinary artist.
Rianne Svelnis, dance artist and Carnegie Dance Troupe workshop leader.
This work is highly experimental. The audience, rather than observe the dance work as something outside themselves, is invited, encouraged, and guided to experience “The River” as going on within their own bodies as well as, simultaneously going on through the land we are travelling on. This was always the overarching goal, that the audience experience the congruity of their bodies with all our inner waterways and land with its waterways running through.
This multi-year project is funded by The Canada Council for the Arts, The BC Arts Council, The City of Vancouver
We are extremely grateful for the generous, multi-year, private donation from the Chapple Family for B2L.
