Measures of Motion

Online program. PROGRAM EXPIRED

PWYC Rental from May 26 to June 2, 2021

At a moment when the space between us is rife with anxiety and risk, the task of moving towards intimacy with comfort or ease can feel next to impossible. How do we move in isolation? Where do we move in spatial constriction? The term “social distance” became a part of our everyday lexicon this past year. But it seems as though our bodies have been rehearsing for remote dances in bedroom theatres and detached duets on sidewalk stages for longer than that. Our phones are keepers of ubiquitous, collective choreographies that we might not even know we’re participating in. Many of the videos in this program were created before the pandemic, and yet the ways in which each one uses choreography and movement to measure intimacy and distance or mediate desire and survival seems very much of this moment. In Measures of Motion, we see a multiplicity of ways that moving bodies resist social and political anxieties through connective gestures, solitary confrontations, and choreographies of care.

PROGRAM

Creatura Dada, Caroline Monnet (Canada, 2016) 03:04 min
Drills, Sarah Friedland (USA, 2020) 16:45 min
Face Rider, Francesca Chudnoff (Canada, 2021) 07:10 min
Moon in the 12th House, Jessica Karuhanga (Canada, 2017) 02:44 min
Dating for Export, Francisco Gonzalez Rosas (Canada, 2019) 07:43 min
Inclinations, Danielle Peers and Alice Sheppard (Canada, 2019) 5:40 min
Herr, John Greyson (Canada, 1998) 05:35 min

TOTAL TIME 48:41 mins.

Curated by Pleasure Dome Board Director Jennifer Laiwint.

Measures of Motion Curatorial Essay by Anna Khimasia

The title of Jenny Laiwint’s selection of videos, Measures of Motion, started me thinking about how we measure and what we measure; what gets noted and recorded, but also what gets forgotten or omitted. The ontology of the archive often overlooks the body as a site of memory and affect, as movement, gesture, and touch are rarely part of official archives.

These seven videos offer us ways of thinking about the body, its gestures, and movements, as an embodied archive for the transmission of histories, of memories, of learned behaviors, and of collective identities. The body becomes an alternative site for collecting, storing, and sharing. The videos in Measures of Motion provide a range of gestures and movements that focus on quotidian life, a life that has been significantly altered because of this pandemic as our movements have been controlled and measures put in place to keep us isolated. Measures in the title thus refers not only to what is recorded but also to ways of controlling our actions.

While some of these videos like Francesca Chudnoff’s Face Rider, Sarah Freidland’s Drills and Francisco Gonzalez Rosas’ Dating for Export speak to isolation, anxiety and distress we have felt over the last year, others hint at the return of pleasure, from the sumptuous feast in Caroline Monnet’s Creatura Dada, to the pleasure experienced through the freedom of movement on the new atrium ramp in Danielle Peers and Alice Sheppard’s Inclinations. Gesture and touch are so integrated into our everyday lives, and so much of how and what we communicate takes place in the way our bodies move and interact with each other. Everyday actions take on new significance as we yearn for community and contact with others, from the small intimate gestures in Jessica Karuhanga’s Moon in the 12th House to the playful and exaggerated choreographed movements in John Greyson’s Herr.

Over the course of this last year, our movements have been greatly restricted and Measures of Motion offers us a reflection of this time, but also a sense of what is possible. This series of videos reinforce the importance of gesture and movement as a form of embodied knowledge, memory, and desire—that cannot always be contained or controlled.

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