in movement and uncertainty, an inventory in minor light

Exccerpt of my performance: I asked the audience to close one eye. (2016)

in movement and uncertainty, an inventory in minor light

This live performance is a guided experience for collective listening, looking, and sensing. I will encourage the listeners/lookers/sensers to connect with their inner pulsations to be able to deepen their ways of attuning to their outer worlds and to diversify ways of attending.

in movement and uncertainty, an inventory in minor light is a performance, a ceremony, an inventory, that gathers gesture, images, breath, documents, glitches, things-to-hold. It is a situation that sources personal /political relations in the settler colonial context.

I am interested in images and movement as unfinished potencies, prompts for our somatic reception; an image as something that troubles the dichotomy between object and experience, between image and performance.

I situate the performance research in a colonial and capitalist regime, vitalizing the need to acknowledge and grapple with the ways in which performance and politics intertwine.

I’m thinking of ways of moving with images that don’t necessarily belong together immediately, that welcome a not so bright feeling, the blurred, the rubbed up against, the-object-dragged-across-the-floor, the hospitality of touch.

Key questions that nourish the work:

1. How to activate the potency of images in performance research?

2. How can performance further the problematization of everyday governance by proposing new configurations of gathering, modes of sociality, modes of remembering?

3. What are the links between visuality and memory/ hapticity and memory?

4. How to perform in the embodied threshold/ flesh relations between the senses and memory?

k.g. Guttman is a settler Canadian researcher, artist, and mother based in Tiohtiá:ke/ Montréal. She is a graduate of the PhD Arts program of Leiden University and the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (Netherlands). She has received funding through SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) for artistic research that considers territoriality discourse, choreographic practice, and site-specific interventions. Diverse invitations that bridge dance and visual art contexts include exhibitions at Gallery TPW and Blackwood Gallery (Toronto), VIVA! Art Action, RIPA, and La Centrale (Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal), Musée d’art de Joliette, Klupko (Amsterdam),

Espace Khiasma, Palais de Tokyo and Point Éphémère (Paris). Her choreographic residencies and commissions include l’Agora de la danse and Tangente (Tiohtiá:ke/ Montréal), the Canada Dance Festival and Dancemakers (Toronto), the University of Sonora (Hermosillo), and Kunstencentrum BUDA (Kortrijk). k.g. Guttman’s role as educator is intertwined with her artistic practices. From 2008 to 2013. k.g. Guttman was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Contemporary Dance at Concordia University, and in 2015 she taught in the photography department at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. k.g. Guttman worked as a professional

dancer with the company Le Groupe Dance Lab under the direction of Peter Boneham from 1999 to 2005, and freelanced with Lynda Gaudreau, , Antonija Livingstone, and Katie Ward among others.

The Activist Body: Unearthing the Hidden Story

Photo by Diane Roberts, Liliona Quarmyne (hands and feet)

--- My body is a conduit, a link to past and to future generations.

It takes me back, it takes me forward, it carries the present.

My body is story. ---

As members of the African Diaspora the session co-facilitators, Diane Roberts and Liliona Quarmyne, are linked through colonial legacies and silenced stories. They confront this living history through the Arrivals Personal Legacy Process, a transformational exploration of ancestry, ceremony, and root cultural practices for artists and creators of change. Unearthing embodied root practices and authentic creative impulses through ancestral connections, Arrivals develops collaborative artistic creations, and addresses transdisciplinary, intergenerational, and cross-cultural concerns. Arrivals demands a level of engagement that contradicts the traditional role of the artist or researcher as knowledge producer. Instead, those who engage with the process are asked to step into a state of unknowing and to grapple with the potentially unknowable.

Our mission is to enable BIPOC creators to access and re-root their creative impulses by attuning to the wisdom of their ancestral stories through embodied research and reciprocal knowledge exchange.

Starting from cultural humility and creative curiosity, we accompany artists from all disciplines as they unearth personal and cultural histories using conventional research and embodied recovery tools, cross-cultural exchange and performative story-making. Our workshops and residencies birth new discoveries and plant creative seeds that cultivate interdisciplinary works for performance and/or exhibition.

Diane Roberts is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Scholar and a 2020 Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship award holder. She is the founder of the Arrivals Legacy Project (www.arrivalslegacy.com) and has been the lead workshop facilitator for the past 16 years. The roots of storytelling and multi-disciplinary art forms (mixing of ritual song, dance, storytelling, live art and theatre) drive her arts practice as a director dramaturg and cultural animator. Her intuitive style of facilitation draws on specifically crafted creative engagement tools that inspire artists of all disciplines and cultural backgrounds to unearth their authentic creative impulses. Her working methodology draws out and establishes a common vocabulary amongst Indigenous and diverse artists, our ways of working and our sense of ourselves as artists in a global society.

Liliona Quarmyne is based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on the powerful, unceded and unsurrendered land of the Mi'kmaq people, Liliona is a dancer, choreographer, actor, singer, community organizer, and activist. Originally from Ghana and the Philippines, she has an eclectic background that has taken her through many performance styles on four different continents. Liliona performs across the country and internationally, creates original works as an independent artist, facilitates community programming, and is the Artistic Director of Kinetic. The scope of Liliona’s artistic work is broad, but is particularly focused on the relationship between art and social justice, on the body’s ability to carry ancestral memory, and on the role the performing arts can play in creating change. Liliona loves to work in collaboration and community, and is mom to two wonderful kids.

Photo: from k.g. Guttman's performance: Surface Rising (2015)