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The Ghost Writing Dance
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*click the photos for a closer look
* all photos here are stills from footage shot by Renée Lear
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​1st iteration:
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HATCH, Harbourfront Centre (Toronto)
April 2016
45 min.
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Dancer and Writer:
Aimée​ Dawn Robinson
Video Master:
Renée Lear
Outside Eye and Dance Dramaturg:
Allison Peacock
HATCH Curator and Co-Dramaturg to the piece:
Evan Webber
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In April 2016, I completed a HATCH residency at Harbourfront Centre for my dance and writing and video work The Ghost Writing Dance.
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Prioritizing embodied, feminist ways and records, The Ghost Writing Dance is part of a larger dance, writing and video experiment which complicates and questions layers of representation and self-representation in text and memory in live performance.
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A 45-minute video of writing scrolls upwards from the stage towards the sky. The writing is material I created during and alongside my dance, writing, research and archive project A Body of Memory. A mix of poetry, prose, philosophy, descriptions of memories.
Here's the opening lines:
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"Don’t fake it baby, lay the real thing on me.
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I am the record. You are the record. Dance is the secret.
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Memory is made to challenge loss. Forgetting inverts, eases, capsizes; the other side of memory. The body surges with both, dance is the space between.
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On the morning of the performance I wake up too early...
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While dancing this piece, I wear semi-concealed earbuds and a tiny clip-on audio player. I'm listening to a score. The score varies from each performance of the piece. This score is not shared with the audience, nor played through the speakers. It's not named in a program. Only I hear it, and only I know its' nature.
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This private score has a kind of inverse relationship my to series mother drift dances to the songs in her head.
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 Aimée Dawn Robinson, The Ghost Writing Dance |
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During the HATCH residency, I stayed in an old haunt of mine on Hanlan's Island. How marvelous to be back on the shore of Lake Ontario at the Gibraltar Point arts centre again. Everyday I arrived for work at the theatre exhilarated from biking too fast to the ferry in variable April-in-Toronto weather. It was a brilliant balance to working indoors in theatre.
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The theatre was dark and red and safe. Familiar and restorative. I'm grateful to HATCH, Evan Webber and the Harbourfront team for the residency.
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Further information and a video from
HATCH online here.
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