Monsters Made of Drooping Textiles

Kelly and I sit across from one another in a dance studio in the Trout Lake Community Centre in East Vancouver.  One of the four walls of the studio is floor to ceiling windows, looking out over a playground, and at Trout Lake itself, amongst trees in their full autumn display.  Between Kelly and I is a small mountain of second-hand clothing, high enough that if it’s stacked right, we have to look around it to see one another.  We wait in anticipation.

We use this mountain of clothing as props in our dance workshop.  We use them to create ropes between bodies, to create creatures and monsters made of drooping textiles, to tell stories about our most precious pieces, to imagine abstract landscapes and to embody the dance of a t-shirt thrown across the room.  

We start each class by sitting in a circle and offering an acknowledgement that we are guests on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territories.  In our check-in circle, we invite participants to give their preferred gender pronoun with their name and anything we might need to know in order to dance with them that day.

From there we approach the clothes and our bodies with an artistic rigour that makes serious content out of absurd tasks, makes extraordinary images out of ordinary chores and invites us to dig into the uncomfortable and the unknown with a playful and lighthearted spirit.

What a pleasure and rich learning experience it has been to engage with the youth of Trout Lake for the MINE Artistic Residency.  We have been working for the past 4 weeks and with over 10 different youth and 3 of their community center youth workers.  Alex Mah, musician and composer, joined us in the last two weeks to provide improvised beats and scores to accompany our creative movement tasks.

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‘Mine’ is in inter-disciplinary project that combines dance, storytelling, live music, and sewing to explore consumption, materialism, identity, value, fast fashion, history and memory, using clothing as the common thread.  

Trout Lake Community Center, 4-5:30 on Fridays