The choreographer André Gingras with longtime collaborator, the dramaturge/associate director Sue Jane Stoker, create Readymade Dance, a response to Duchamp’s famous readymades. Gingras and Stoker are using found movements from boxing as the basis of a new choreographic language.
The artists consider the sport a “readymade” performance language with the essence of theater spectacle: extreme physicality, pathos and humor. The work is a duet for two performers, and a powerful link between the arena sensibility of professional fighting sports and theater, situating the former in the theater context. Readymade Dance was developed at Watermill for a premiere at Rabozaal in Amsterdam.
In his award-winning work, André Gingras strives to push dance to the limits of extreme physicality, working with other movement forms, such as break dancing (in the Bessie-winning CYP17), capoeira (in The Lindenmeyer System) and free-running (The Autopsy Project). He has also always sought to work in an interdisciplinary fashion, working with text and theatrical situations, video, animation and installation as important components of his choreographic vision. His work has appeared in a number of prestigious contexts, including the Venice Biennale. Gingras and Stoker have worked together on a number of pieces, beginning in 2000 with CYP17. Both have been collaborators of Robert Wilson since 1993. Gingras has just been appointed Artistic Director of Dance Works in Rotterdam.
cast – Vincent Morelle, Cherif Zaouali
dramaturg – Sue Jane Stoker
composer – Alexander MacSween