Upcoming Workshops & Gatherings
Sarah Chase will offer a three hour intensive workshop focusing on how to draw upon story, narrative and memory from our own lives to create gestures and movement patterns in new and unexpected ways.
For many years her work has been centred on biography, memoir and storytelling, overlayed with looped sequences of gestures. She searches for ways in which people may share their rich inner worlds and magnify the gestures that belong to them in a danced expressive language.
“I think we are all in the middle of a mystery, and each of us experiences in our lives some kind of intricate predicament. In hearing other people's stories I often feel a deep sense of relief to know that I am not alone in feeling bewildered or overwhelmed by experiencing love and loss, which is inevitable in any life well lived. When I make work I am hoping that by arranging personal stories in a careful constellation, they become universal. A kind of poetic logic and rigour takes place, making sure that not more is said than needs to be said. I am always interested in specific details. Small histories say so much; the clothing once worn, beloved objects, animals and birds that entered our lives, routes walked day by day, songs played in the home while growing up, these particular kinds of details make a story vivid and alive.” - Sarah Chase
Sarah Chase is based on Hornby Island, in the Salish Sea. She is a performer and choreographer whose distinctive signature has garnered her an international reputation. Her work has been presented across Canada and Europe, at such venues as the National Arts Centre (Ottawa), Festival TransAmerique (Montreal), DanceHouse (Vancouver), the Holland Dance Festival, Klapstuk Festival (Belgium), Salzburg Szene Festival (Austria), Kaaitheater (Belgium), Tanz Quartier (Vienna), Fondation Cartier (Paris) and Theater der Welt (Germany). She has performed and toured with Benôit Lachambre’s Dance par B. Lieux, and German choreographer Raimund Hoghe, and has created work for many Canadian artists including Toronto Dance Theatre, Peggy Baker Dance Projects, Dreamwalker and Andrea Nann, Heidi Strauss and Darryl Tracy, Theatre Replacement, Jacinte Armstrong, Robin Poitras and Ron Stewart, Antonija Livingstone, Montreal Danse and Marc Boivin. Sarah is the recipient of the 2004 Jacqueline Lemieux Award for Excellence from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Prize of the Festival at the 2006 Munich Dance Biennale for her piece The Passenger. In recent years, solos she created for both Peggy Baker, and Andrea Nann won Doras in the category of outstanding performer in dance. She is an associate dance artist of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
Together, through our Branching Roots Community Practice, we are setting these intentions:
To attune to the rhythms of cyclical time
To welcome new relationships with the Moon, ourselves and others
To convene and practice Conscious Bodies Methodology
To connect with Indigenous Teachings
To celebrate the uniqueness of our individual lived experiences
We come together through Teachings On The Moon, Reflective Curiosities, and Facilitated Dives into the Conscious Bodies Cycle of Activations. For us, this practice is a gift of care to celebrate the uniqueness of our individual embodied stories, and experience kind connections to ripple out into our broader communities and Lands we call home.
