An experimental dance performance coming to Vancouver in April is flipping the script on the conventional performer and audience relationship.
Called Orange, the show is the fourth work in the studio’s adaptive series work of the Vancouver-based dance and performance company Plastic Orchid Factory and will be performed through the Left of Main arts studio. The performance begins with a 30-minute pre-show while the audience is joining the Zoom call. Once the performers are ready, another 30 minutes of dance starts.
Before its end, the show goes through “blind meld, threading, pressing, passing, mirror touching, holding, moulding, statues and tracing” stages. In a release, the Plastic Orchid Factory team says the audience is invited into the performer’s experience and asks audience members to consider their bodies and desires. The performers themselves will be directing the cameras throughout the dance through two laptops mounted on rolling tripods.
The dancers leading the show are Deanna Peters and Less San Miguel. Peters has been creating, performing and producing for the stage, club and web since 2003. Peters has also worked on projects across Canada and internationally, producing many indie dance shows and parties.
Less San Miguel is a dancer representing Winnipeg Hip Hop/BBoy pioneers’ Dangerous Goods Crew. As one of the more versatile dancers in Canada, Less is trained in many disciplines and dancing styles over the last 25 years.
"We’re shedding the formalized tropes of the performer-audience relationship in favour of something more immediate, strange and open, reaching towards a non-codified intimacy, an emergent togetherness that is greater than the sum of our body parts,” wrote Peters and Miguel in a joint statement.
Orange will be showing on April 9, starting at 7 p.m. and April 10, at 5 p.m. Tickets are by donation.
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