A 5-month cross-country tour in the Kootenay and Rocky Mountains inspired multidisciplinary artist Sophie Dow to conceive Mountain Duets. After growing up in the prairies, then spending five years in the urban Toronto jungle, Dow had found herself completely “enamoured by the magnitude and spirit of the mountains”. During that tour, she connected with a deep ancestral sense that was significantly larger than anything she could understand or explain.
So when Dow arrived back in Toronto after living out of her backpack, performing outdoors, and sleeping in a hammock for five consecutive months, she was hungry to understand more of what had happened. She brought her questions and curiosities into the studio: “We initially emerged with an 8-minute piece that continued on through many cycles and residencies over the last two years – we’re now at a 75-minute movement installation/ceremony for 5 dancers with an ever-changing base.”
Mountain Duets is being performed at this year’s Rendezvous with Madness arts and mental festival. Rendezvous with Madness, presented by Workman Arts, is the world’s largest and longest running multidisciplinary arts festival focused on the intersection of mental health and artistic practice. The 2020 version, which is the 28th edition, is being presented online. Dow choreographed Mountain Duets in collaboration with interpreters Shannon Flaicher, Maria Lucia Llano, Paige Sayles, and Tyra Temple-Smith. She also designed the sound and costumes.
Dow describes Mountain Duets as a ceremony for both the viewers and interpreters. It incorporates dance, live and recorded music, multimedia (projections) and a physical installation to hold the circular space. The audience follows an individual who falls into a chaotic haze, losing sight of balance and stillness. This solo mover serves as a symbol of both our independent and collective consciousness. Representing all we undergo on micro and macro scales, they are a testament to the cycles of the building, tearing down and rebuilding of humanity. From a dark place, the soloist calls upon the ancestors and wisdom of Turtle Island to journey together through traditional teachings.
The work offers both meditative healing and the opportunity to learn about teachings that Dow has been gifted, with the intention to share and pass forward. The audience of Mountain Duets will experience a 7-minute solo segment of the work that the dancers filmed as soon as the latest municipal restrictions on gatherings were announced last week . It will be a part of the festival’s virtual tour in replacement of the festival’s live exhibition component.
Ultimately, Mountain Duets seeks to remind audiences of “our deeply rooted strength, resilience and reciprocity to each other and to Mother Earth.” In this time of navigating pandemic fear and reckoning with social injustice, the message feels especially topical:. “There are many directions I’m aiming for with the piece,” Dow acknowledges. The world is finally recognizing and facing a hefty accumulation of collective trauma. Although Dow cannot heal it, she hopes to provide tools that can help others along their journey – and start conversations about how to effectuate much-needed healing. “Some of the themes in the work are about addressing personal imbalances and looking to our ancestors or past lives for support. Humans have existed here for times beyond our present memory, and we must recall that change, adaptation and survival is not something to be feared – it is something we work through and can celebrate if we hold each other up and move together.”
The online experience will be selective, and should be seen as a step in the continued evolution of the piece: “We’re specifically only sharing short digital segments, as it is currently most impactful in person. We are in the process of re-imagining the choreography off-stage – currently in the round – and eventually as a kind of community engagement gathering.” Dow comes by this deep and iterative commitment to her art honestly. She received her degree in Dance Performance and Choreography from York University, and has spent nearly 20 years training, competing and studying western dance forms intensively (ballet, modern, contemporary, jazz, lyrical, hip hop, acro, etc.). “At York, we had daily technical training in ballet and modern, though we also had classes in Breaking, West African and Filipino Folk dance, while studying the theory and history of a multitude of dances around the world.”
Considering the Métis-Assiniboine part of her ancestry and her dance training, Dow has become acutely sensitive to the inherent tension between the Indigenous themes within Mountain Duets and the western dance forms used to explore and express them. In fact, as she got more in touch with her own lineage, she spent about a year “angrily attempting to strip my body of the western [dance] forms”. Next came a year of coming to terms with the fact that a certain level of permanent physical ingraining did take place, and the realization that she could use her body self-consciously as a vehicle for effective communication. Specifically, she could move through her lifetime’s history, “honour the proprioceptive skills, the connection between emotion/body/mind/spirit, and allow certain movements to fall away as the traditional, ancestral memory reawakens”.
Dancer Aria Evans helped guide Dow to this sense of peace by re-framing the core challenge: instead of “decolonizing the body, it can be about re-Indigenizing the body”. But working through this is a lengthy process “to uncover the meeting points and accord of both my Indigenous and European blood, and to walk with a grounded sense. Somewhat intentionally, Mountain Duets has become a physicalization of this journey and bridging.”
Mountain Duets has offered Dow both change and challenge. “At first, it was simply an indulgence – a space for me to tap back into the overwhelming magic and impact that the mountains invoke, so that I could carry that same sense of stillness and ancestral information wherever the piece was performed.” Since, it has become a physical manifestation that sparks discussion of topics that Dow once struggled to bring forward – and provides an opportunity to help move us forward. It also forced Dow to step out of the “dancer” role and into the creator’s seat to conceive the costumes, music, scheduling, lighting, special FX, prop design, media (ideas for the projections,which are entirely designed by Connie O.). Dow has spent her life dreaming up major productions, but Mountain Duets is her first actualization of a larger artistic vision outside of a school setting.
It has also brought the realization that the current times have “presented a GREAT exercise in flexibility, availability, instant decision making and flowing with change, which has always been necessary if you’re going to make art beyond your home container”. Another effect of the pandemic is on Dow is a propulsive yearning to return to the collective experience of live performance. “I cannot wait to gather in person once more,” she enthuses. In the meantime, she extends a warm invitation to anyone who “wishes to learn more, share a live/video conversation about the work or become involved in the project”: “I am more than available and present!”
Rendezvous with Madness continues until October 25, 2020. Ticket information for Mountain Duets, part of the Re:Building Resilience exhibition, is available here.
© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2020
