PUBLIC EVENTS

Readymade Dance

André Gingras

Friday, June 18 7:30pm

FREE

photo: Lukas Wassmann 

In his Watermill Center spring artist residency, the choreographer André Gingras continues to work with his longtime collaborator, the dramaturge/associate director Sue Jane Stoker. The new piece, Readymade Dance, is a response to Duchamp's famous readymades. Gingras and Stoker are using found movements from boxing as the basis of a new choreographic language.

The artists consider the sport a "readymade" performance language with the essence of theater spectacle: extreme physicality, pathos and humor. The work, a duet for two performers, finds a powerful link between the arena sensibility of professional fighting sports and theater, situating the former in the theater context. Readymade Dance is being developed at Watermill for a premiere at Rabozaal in Amsterdam.

Choreographer: André Gingras in collaboration with the dancers
Composer: Alexander MacSween
Dancers: Vincent Morelle and Cherif Zaouali
Dramaturge: Sue Jane Stoker

Approximate runtime: 1 hour

In his award-winning work, André Gingras strives to push dance to the limits of extreme physicality, working with other movement forms, such as break dancing (in the Bessie-winning CYP17) capoiera (in The Lindenmeyer System) and free-running (The Autopsy Project). He has also always sought to work in an interdisciplinary fashion, working with text and theatrical situations, video, animation and installation as important components of his choreographic vision. His work has appeared in a number of prestigious contexts, Including the Venice Biennale. Gingras and Stoker have worked together on a number of pieces, beginning in 2000 with CYP17. Both have been collaborators of Robert Wilson since 1993. Gingras has just been appointed Artistic Director of Dance Works in Rotterdam.

The artists thank the Watermill Center for including them in their Spring 2010 Artist-in-Residency program, and the NFPK and Dance Works Rotterdam for making the residency possible.