​
​
The Ghost Writing Dance
​
*click the photos for a closer look
* all photos here are stills from footage shot by Renée Lear
​
​1st iteration:
​
HATCH, Harbourfront Centre (Toronto)
April 2016
45 min.
​
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
​
In April 2016, I completed a HATCH residency at Harbourfront Centre for my dance and writing and video work The Ghost Writing Dance.
​
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.
​
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:
​
"Don’t fake it baby, lay the real thing on me.
​
I am the record. You are the record. Dance is the secret.
​
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.
​
On the morning of the performance I wake up too early...
​
​
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.
​
This private score has a kind of inverse relationship my to series mother drift dances to the songs in her head.
​
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.
​
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.
​
Further information and a video from
HATCH online here.
​