Toronto Biennial of Art and Art Gallery of Ontario offer this unique performance experience.  For the duration of the exhibition, Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way, an invited dance artist will perform in the gallery, prompted by the sounds and visual elements of Boyce’s installation, This program is a part of Your Timing is Perfect: Moments and Movements of Inquiry, a performance series in which artists investigate the body as a living archive, exploring its extraordinary strength and resilience, as well as its tenderness, vulnerability, and limitations.  

 

Performances are improvised and approximately 30 minutes in duration.

​

November 6   Andrea Nann

December 4   Jennifer Dahl

February 5      Andrea Nann and Jennifer Dahl

March 5           Jennifer Dahl

April 2              Andrea Nann

​

*Outside Eye Michelle Silagy

​

Dance artist Andrea Nann/Dreamwalker will activate a performance practice called Embodying Listening.  This is an improvisatory movement exploration for which the dancer softens inward to elicit a heightened state of consciousness and connectivity — opening her body, mind, heart, and spirit for receiving and perceiving herself in harmonic resonance with the world above, below and around her.  In this case the world is the myriad sounds, actions, intentions, patterns, sensations, and stillnesses within Sonia Boyce’s installation.  Embodying Listening is a way of practicing being in empathetic and compassionate presence with what is. 

​

Embodying Listening is evolving in collaboration with visual sound artist China Blue for Saturn Walk and is collectively being researched by dance artists Andrea Nann (CAN), Laura Colomban (U.K/Italy) and Jennifer Dahl (CAN/Italy).  The artists typically practice within a hexagonal labyrinth replicating the cloud pattern over Saturn’s North Pole with sounds generated from Saturn’s rings as uncovered by China Blue for NASA.  They spend time in the labyrinth moving and listening into their own bodies and their unique lived experiences in relationship with the planet, the cosmos and one another.  They are interested in ways that embodied listening can impact human experience in the world.  This performance practice may take the form of improvised dancing, sounding, music making, stillness, silence, conversation, dialogue or other shared expression. Most recently Saturn Walk: Embodying Listening was performed in conjunction with the 2024 Venice Biennale. 

​

This program is presented in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario during the exhibition of Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way. The Canadian presentation of Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way is initiated and organized by the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art.