“LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL 2.0 enigmatically commands and rewards your open attention with a palimpsest of existential, feminist and Late-Capitalist monstrosities. We want to flee and to follow at the same time the semiotic view of our own fragility and resilience in the face of a kind of perpetual bardo.”

— Coman Poon

about LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL 2.0 -2015

LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL 2.0 is a work by Alicia Grant in collaboration with Ellen Furey.

Throughout the performance, the two performers develop methods for resistance and resilience through dance moves and life moves. They engage in the labour of transformation of both themselves and the space. They participate in versions of self and environment that are constantly destabilized.

The work is located inside the artifice and reality of a black box theatre. It fully exists because it is being experienced by others.

The two performers have some help from a gong, fantastical dream outfits and hot water bottles. There is fear, there is desperation, there is joy.

Is the light at the end of the tunnel an end or a beginning?

ARTISTIC STATEMENT

I have a deep curiosity about how people continue participating in life through adversity.

Throughout this process, Ellen and I followed ourselves and lost ourselves. My interest was how to do this by developing our own, very specific, internal logic of navigation.

My interest in this work is how to inhabit and transform the violence and intimacy of the audience's gaze.

I am concerned with creating something that is not immediately decipherable, that morphs and shifts, stuns when least expected and creates an unwanted smile that can part your lips. I want to keep asking questions rather than arrive at any answers.

TECHNICAL

LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL 2.0 builds its own environment. Ideally situated in the artifice of the black box theatre, it can be adapted for elsewhere.

Some lights and some sound are needed.

One male technician is required to unveil the gong onstage during the show.

Curatorial Note

This is more of a memory than a note. I first encountered the work of Alicia Grant in 2009. It was a video of a performance she was working on, a solo, perhaps shot in Toronto, perhaps in Berlin. Grant traveled to Berlin in 2008, not for school, not for a job – simply to work elsewhere. This is the location of my great interest in Alicia Grant as dance-artist; her proclivity for hard labour and her investiture in doing. I still do not know why Alicia Grant moved back home, here to Toronto, but I am thankful for it.

Her work, always contained in the rigour of diligence maintains still the freedoms of humour and silliness. Combined with a laissez-faire attitude towards the unknown, Grant is culminating an exceptional body of performance here at Dancemakers and abroad.

Grant has been in the studio quite a bit this year. This is not the only project she has underway, and I have seen Andrea Spaziani coming and going. They both seem to be creating something very special.