[Image Description: Dancer Danah Rosales is kneeling on the ground outdoors folding clothing as part of her performative response to b solomon's performance the that immediately came before this performance]

Describing Dance | The Longest Way Round is the Shortest Way Home: conversations on dance, access and archiving performance

December 10, 2022
1pm PST/ 4pm EST
ZOOM
ASL translation services provided

With panellists:

Harmanie Rose
Sophie Corriveau and Maud Mazo-Rothenbühler from Danse-Cité
Amy Amantea
Moderated by: Jose Miguel Esteban

Arts Assembly and Dancemakers have partnered to host a conversation on dance access, in particular for the blind / low vision community. Arts Assembly’s recent series two part series The Longest Way Round is the Shortest Way Home will be explored through this conversation, emphasizing the process and possibilities of programming and supporting inclusive dance, performance and visual art practices.

This talk is the launch of Arts Assembly’s archive recordings of The Longest Way Round is the Shortest Way Home which was intentionally designed with dance descriptions by Andrea Cownden in consultation with Amy Amantea.

Amy Amantea (she/her) is a white settler on the stolen lands of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-waututh first peoples. Living with blindness, dyslexia and chronic pain,  Amy aims to increase representation of disability within the Canadian theatre/arts/dance landscape. Her background is in acting having attended VFS and private acting academies before her sight loss. Amy has had to reinvent herself as a performer and has integrated access, advocacy, and activism into her work.  

Also working as an accessibility consultant, Amy works with theatre companies and independent artists on a creative access approach to their work in the hopes of opening to doors of accesses to more arts lovers who live with disability.  

Harmanie Rose is a disabled dance artist living and working on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.  She co-founded iDance Edmonton in 2008 (now known as CRIPSiE) before relocating to so-called Vancouver in 2014. Harmanie has worked as a facilitator for All Bodies Dance Project, New Works, National Access Arts Centre, Propeller Dance Theatre. She has created outdoor, site-specific pieces for Vines Art Festival and Arts Assembly. Harmanie has performed in Dance in Vancouver( DiV) and Dancing on the Edge (DOTE). Harmanie had a residency in October 2022 at Morrow, researching the creative potential of falling with disabled and non-disabled bodies. 

Her dance films include Alice Sheppard’s Inclinations, Carolina Bergonzoni’s Ho.Me and a collaboration Harmanie created with Rianne Svelnis and Martin Borden: Sanctuary. Harmanie is working on a film with Kelsie Acton thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts titled In Place. Harmanie wants to create reciprocal relationships through dance that deepen our understanding of our bodies and connection to people and spaces. 

Jose Miguel (Miggy) Esteban is a dance/movement artist and educator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. He shares his work through local festivals, community events, and showcases, through self-produced process showings with Impetus Movement Project, and through dance/movement workshops. Miggy is currently a PhD student at the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, where his research is oriented through disability studies and dance/performance studies. Influenced by disability arts and culture, Black radical traditions, Indigenous storytelling, and queer performance, his work engages in embodied practices of improvised research-creation to encounter the interpretation of gesture as a site for inspiring pedagogies of/through dance. His work has been published in Liminalities, Canadian Theatre Review, Disability Studies Quarterly, Journal for Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and in various edited volumes.

Sophie Corriveau has worked in the field of dance as a performer, choreographer, teacher, rehearsal director and artistic consultant. She is interested in the transformation of dance practices and the porous nature of the relationship between the work of the performer and the perception of the spectator, seeking to connect the sensitive aspects of the artist’s poetic and social experience.

Sophie Corriveau has been associated with the work of many choreographers, including Louise Bédard, Danièle Desnoyers, Sylvain Émard, Alain Francoeur, Benoît Lachambre, Jean-Sébastien Lourdais, Jean-Pierre Perreault, Manuel Roque and Catherine Tardif. Collaboration is central to her own creative projects; she co-created the solo Jusqu’au silence with her brother, visual artist Thomas Corriveau, and she collaborated with Marc Boivin, Michel F. Côté, Benoît Lachambre, and Catherine Tardif to create 6.3 évanouissements. Together with Katya Montaignac, she conceived the event Nous (ne) sommes (pas) tous des danseur.se.s, an unusual project that brought artists together to explore inherent issues in the field of dance. In the autumn of 2017, Corriveau conceived and created Fluid Grounds with Benoît Lachambre, an ambulatory work combining visual art and the somatic body that explores notions of connectivity and memory in a cartography of presence.

In 2016, she received the Prix de la danse de Montréal – Prix interprète, an award that acknowledged the longevity of her career, her ability to reinvent herself and her dedication to her practice and to her community.

In 2019, Corriveau becomes Executive and Artistic Director at Danse-Cité, a production company that supports numerous artists in Quebec’s cultural milieu and helps them to realize their creative projects.