BODY PROOF: MASCALLDANCE OCTOBER ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
OCT 2024 & 2025
Title of Dance: My Mirror
For MascallDance’s October non-transactional/transactional residency, each Artist-In-Residence was tasked to create a dance. The title of this dance is “My Mirror”. The project began in October 2024, and was revisited again in Nov. 2024, May 2025, and then revisited for a full residency in October 2025.
The inspiration behind this dance:
I’m in a dance studio space every day, so I’ve grown accustomed to seeing myself in the mirror all the time. There are days when I look at myself and am happy with how I present, and there are those days when I wish I didn’t have to see myself. During the party, I asked the guests to use either one of their hands as a mirror and do different poses as they moved, danced, or stayed still in the space. At the same time when they look away from the mirror, they have to create an expression through their face. For me, this represents the reaction we have when looking at ourselves, and how that transcends into how we treat and talk to ourselves as human beings. This night was so much fun and extremely grateful for the love and support!
Biggest thanks to Mascall Dance for this residency and to the other AIR who shared their love for movement!
Musicians:
Kathleen Nisbet
Jack Garton
Space: Left of Main
Photo credits: Milo Carbol @milocarbol
About the Project
Taken from mascalldance website:
BODY PROOF aims to foster the multiple perspectives we each uniquely contain. Researching, the artists seek expressive relationships with worlds they've sprung from and worlds they live in. Each dancer weaves different ways of knowing together in a short, repeatable dance. Then, through spontaneous and convivial dancing with music in dance party/BODY PROOF, what they know lightly and infectiously travels into and through other people and places.
Begun in October 2024, the BODY PROOF residency involved a group of wonderful artists: Nick Miami Benz, Tobias Macfarlane, Marisa Gold, Ysadora Miranda Dias, and Mario Matias, in collaboration with DJ Dae Anteres, Kathleen Nisbet (fiddle, vocals) and Jack Garten (sax, accordion).
Their research results in the dance party BODY PROOF, which has been performed and developed several times, and continues evolving with each performance. Each artist teaches the audience their dance, dances it together with them, and then introduces the dance they made up and how they arrived at it from studying their heritage (Brazilian, Afro American (Tennessee), Mi'kmaq, Filipino, and Scottish/English).
This culminates in an open dance party improvising with solos, duets, groups, line dances, to the music of any of the dances they want.
The project posits yet another perspective on the future of dance performance. We think of a form of touring in which the dance is passed body to body in social dance settings, hatching an interest in the new people who learn it. Perhaps, through the bodies of dance party participants, the dances will travel on to new dancing settings in future. The work looks at and celebrates how our origins speak through us.
