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Animal Instinct: in conversation with Dana Gingras

“All radical engagements are inventions in some sense: unthought, untried, extraordinary.”
—Erin Manning, Politics of Touch

Movement is the body’s only constant. And movement implies uncertainty, change, risk. We never know when we move precisely where we will end up. So, a degree of belief is necessary.

A general sense of disembodiment has emerged in the digital age, as if the virtual is immaterial. We tend to get lulled into thinking that data is invisible. And free. We forget that it requires tremendous natural resources to produce and store and move information around. The digital world always returns to the physical.

“Bodies have a certain kind of weight, a certain kind of history,” the filmmaker and choreographer Dana Gingras says. “Just through the weight of our bones, we have this connection to the earth.”

Gingras has invited me round to her studio not far from the Rosemont metro on a particularly rainy afternoon, my soaking clothing a reminder of my own bodily weight. Weeks earlier, I had met Gingras at Cinéma Moderne for the first public screening of Jump Cut, a series of eight late-night cable access-style short films that Gingras had produced in association with the CTM Festival and Goethe-Institut.

Jump Cut began as a pandemic project when Gingras and her collaborator, the contemporary dancer and video artist Sonya Stefan, found themselves under the coronavirus restrictions and itching for a creative outlet.

“We thought we’d be back in the fall,” Gingras recalls. “It’s just a three-month blip, we thought. But by the latter part of 2020, I was like, ‘what are we going to do here?’”

That February, Gingras and her dance company, Animals of Distinction, were mid-stride with the Montreal post-rock band Fly Pan Am touring Frontera, a production that combines the band’s stark music and her troupe’s acrobatic performance. “We had all sorts of invitations that year,” Gingras says. “And then we all know what happened.”

In a tragic twist of irony, Frontera, a meditation on borders and mobility with a 33-member cast and crew, was reduced by covid protocols from travelling internationally to sheltering in place in the Mile End. Not content to sit still, Gingras and Stefan began inventing scenarios and sharing them via email.

“We started making up these characters — Max Clown and Dirty Ghost,” Gingras tells me. “We were going a little stir-crazy. And the building across the street at the time was completely abandoned, and I had a key. So, we were going over there to explore, and we just ended up doing it there.”

Gingras and Stefan shot and edited the first episode of Jump Cut that autumn and enlisted other co-conspirators including the video artist Sabrina Ratté, provocateur Peaches, Hotel2Tango proprietor Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Fly Pan Am’s Roger Tellier-Craig, and the electronic musician Marie Davidson to contribute to an ongoing series that would occupy their time throughout the depths of the pandemic.

“We didn’t think we would make it into anything. And then CTM came on board as a co-producer,” Gingras explains, “and we were able to do a whole series.”

A surreal digital artwork featuring a translucent waterfall effect, with abstract shapes and a figure partially obscured by flowing material, set against a gradient background.
“We talk all the time about the glitch.” Still image from Jump Cut #2 with Marie Davidson, Sabrina Ratté, and Dana Gingras.

A serial collaborator, Gingras is a rare artist who is able to immediately inspire trust and respect in her colleagues.

“She has a strong vision,” Marie Davidson tells me, “but also great intuition. Working with her was a real pleasure. She gave me a lot of space to explore, and doing a project with her brought back energy into my own practice afterwards.”

Tellier-Craig’s connection with Gingras dates back more than two decades when she commissioned him in 2005 to work on the original version of Monumental, the choreographic piece for which Godspeed You! Black Emperor ended up performing the live score.

“She really trusts people,” reveals Tellier-Craig. “She gives you a lot of freedom. It’s very fluid. I’ve seen her work with dancers, and she has this calmness and openness which is really surprising when the stakes are so high. There are so many people involved and there’s a lot of money being spent. She’s very together,” Tellier-Craig says. “I admire her.”

I note a thematic thread of glitchy aesthetics running through almost every Jump Cut episode. The author and professor Laura U. Marks writes in her essay entitled Loving a Disappearing Image that decaying media that flaunt their tenuous connection to reality “all appeal to a look of love and loss.” The materiality of the medium comes to the fore in each Jump Cut when the image is interfered with, and during the screening at Cinéma Moderne, even the Vimeo platform co-operates by dropping out at times and displaying just the spinning “throbber” icon.

“We talk all the time about the glitch,” says Gingras. “It is absolutely fundamental to my choreographic work. I’m not interested in perfection. I’m interested in how dissonance can create discomfort — but also discomfort because it decenters ideas of perfection, or standards of beauty. Those standards are so oppressive that you want to mess with them. I want to be reminded that there are other possibilities. Glitch is that,” she grins. “It’s the pearl. It’s the grit.”

A woman in a stylish gray shirt and black leather pants is sitting on the floor, posing with a calm expression against a plain backdrop.
“Sometimes things don’t go the way we want them to.” Dana Gingras photographed by Justine Latour.

Dana Gingras was born in a small northern British Columbia town and moved with her family to South America before ending up in Scotland in her teens, just in time for the post-punk scene to explode. “Music was really part of the water I swam in,” Gingras says.

“I saw Siouxsie and the Banshees when I was 13, the night that the original lineup broke up, and there was a huge riot in the theatre. Robert Smith of The Cure stepped in. They did a 20-minute version of ‘The Lord’s Prayer.’ I was like, ‘this is so amazing.’ It was chaos and cathartic energy and that’s what I was drawn to. I was like, ‘Aha, this is what I want to do.’ But what form it was going to take, I had no idea. I didn’t know it was called dance or choreography. I just knew that putting ideas together into some kind of cohesive structure and making something political, something that delivered some impact, I was like, ‘This is it.’ Just seeing what could be expressed through the body that wasn’t necessarily language-based. Or that the meaning could stay open enough that everyone could have their own emotional experience with it. I was very interested in that.”

Gingras eventually returned to Canada and studied dance, “probably to stay sane,” she deadpans. “Like, I feel much better now that I’ve thrown myself at the floor a hundred times,” she laughs.

Gingras started out and has since remained outside of institutional pedagogy, having taken technical classes but never studying formally. “It’s given me a lot of freedom to make it up as I go along, instead of feeling like because I’ve done that training, that’s how I need to express myself.”

In 1993, Gingras launched the contemporary dance company The Holy Body Tattoo in Vancouver with Noam Gagnon and composer-musician and co-founder of Voivod, Jean-Yves Thériault.

A performer in a sleek black outfit is dancing with dynamic movements, illuminated by blue lighting amidst a backdrop of vintage television screens displaying distorted images.
“I start from a very pedestrian place: how does the body move in space?” Still image from anOther by Dana Gingras/Animals Of Distinction. Dana Gingras, Sonya Stefan, and Group A.

“Our first work had a huge video component,” Gingras says. “William Gibson actually wrote the text for it. So, already then, there was this idea of bringing people from different artforms together. To make a performance for the body was at the center, but I’m not that inspired by straight traditional dance. I was much more interested in film and art. I wanted to speak to these other artforms, but with the body being central to choreography.”

While she was performing with The Holy Body Tattoo, Gingras suffered a torn anterior cruciate ligament which led to her first forced hiatus from dance and eight months of rehabilitation. “That was one of those moments of huge change in my life,” says Gingras. “But it ended up being a gift, so there was something in that and I tried to embrace it. Sometimes things don’t go the way we want them to. What’s on the other side of it?”

Gingras studied film in Vancouver and Los Angeles and relocated in the early aughts to Montreal. “The language here is very fluid, back and forth. Spanish is actually my first fluent language. But that’s what I love about Montreal is that you can respond in English and have someone speak to you in French and have a whole conversation in two languages. I love that.”

Nonverbal communication in many respects is by far the most effective form. Our bodies speak even when our languages are misunderstood. Gingras recognizes this crucial truth.

“There are obviously aesthetic languages that come with dance,” she says. “And I’ve always been interested in stripping that back. I start from a very pedestrian place: how does the body move in space? Stand up, sit down. What are the gestures, what are the tics? I like to strip it down, so I don’t see the dance in it, to start. To me, the dance is the game of the rhythm of these things, the repetition of these things.”

Gingras is currently working on two new projects. One is a solo performance for the dance artist Caroline Gravel, with a score by Sophie Trudeau and the visual artist Caroline Monnet’s scenography. The other is a larger undertaking called Trance Fiction, which Gingras is working on with Sabrina Ratté.

Digital art displaying abstract forms in blue and white, resembling fluid movement with dynamic, flowing patterns against a black background.
“Remember that you have a body.” Still image from Trance Fiction by Dana Gingras/Animals of Distinction and Sabrina Ratté.

“It’s a three-part project,” Gingras explains. “It’s a live performance with my dancers. It’s also an installation with performance. And it’s also video mapping for a building. So, it has different iterations of the same content.”

Without prompting, Gingras seems to confess: “I take a long time to make stuff. I like to work on things and leave them and come back and see how the world has changed, and how we’ve changed.”

We talk for over an hour about how to survive financially as an artist (she recommends that dancers have some kind of parallel career), about A.I. (Gingras promises that she does not use it for final iterations of her work), about augmenting the body with technology (she is also a Gyrotonic master trainer), and about the mechanics of the human body.

“I’ve been involved in cadaver dissection classes,” Gingras divulges. “Now, talk about a technology that’s mind-blowing, absolutely mind-blowing: the body.”

I suddenly become very aware of my own physicality: my damp garments, the way I am seated, my hand gently clenching the armrest. I relax and come back into the present moment to pet Gingras’s dog who throughout our conversation has been quietly seated at my feet. I glance down at my phone and notice the waveform of my Voice Memos app dancing in real time to the sound of our voices. I mention that technology deludes us into disregarding our bodies, mindlessly scrolling, passively consuming.

“First of all, remember that you have a body,” Gingras advises. “There is something about the body now that’s more important than it has ever been.”◼︎

Cover image: courtesy of the artist.

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At Street Level: FRGMNT’s Superheroes Cry Too

An old critic’s axiom says that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. In other words, it’s an absurd and seemingly irreconcilable exercise. Nonetheless, we do write about music, we do dance about architecture, and we dance, too, about lots of other matters of modern concern. The subject of a work of dance is often elusive and diffuse. But dance is nonetheless the operative mode proper to addressing life’s irreconcilable absurdities.

The Montreal collective FRGMNT’s latest performance, entitled Superheroes Cry Too, is an immersive work of art that addresses a number of ostensibly disparate themes: psychotherapy; structural restraint; cyclical nature; ubiquitous media. And the nonrepresentational qualities of movement—particularly the various styles of street dance the collective incorporates—are at once more suitable and also more immediate points of entry into otherwise complicated human conditions, and the more subtle everyday feelings they cultivate.

FRGMNT aims to “make the discussion around the communication of all kinds of difficult emotions fluid, open and empathetic,” their artistic statement explains, “and to normalize the respect of each other’s vulnerability.” There are no obvious markers of super-heroism on display, no capes or X-ray goggles, suggesting that we can seek to identify heroism in the quotidian. And while FRGMNT is an extremely hip collective of multi-talented hip hop artists, it is their vulnerable stance, a bold openness to be exposed and emotional, that ultimately endears Superheroes Cry Too to its audience.

FRGMNT consists of dancers Victoria ‘VicVersa’ Mackenzie, Ja James ‘Jigsaw’ Britton Johnson, Nubian Néné, Mukoma-K. ‘J. Style’ Nshinga, and the project’s co-directors, DJ and dancer Richard ‘Shash’U’ St-Aubin and choreographer Céline ‘ezzeC’ Richard-Robichon. And although the crew have known each other in intersecting circles since the early 2000s, they have come together in this configuration specifically for this work.

“It’s my first time being in this type of collective,” Shash’U tells me via telephone on the day before their premiere, “so I’m very excited about that.”

“Initially it was Victoria’s idea. She had this idea of bringing people together to work on a project, but also having the opportunity that we can develop and exchange different types of leadership. It was a cool exercise. It’s been a mix of all of our heads together.”

Superheroes Cry Too is presented at Ausgang Plaza in a series of loosely structured tableaus. The performers invite the audience to move about freely, obliterating the boundaries between spectator and stage. The narrator draws us into a story about a doctor-patient relationship while another dancer spins amidst a ceremonial circle of chrome handles, virtually hovering in mid-air. The dreamlike and aquatic electronic music and the dancer’s actions draw the audience from a claustrophobic wooden box to a circle of pink kitchen chairs, from one tableau to another, like chapters in a short story.

“We feel like it’s a whole experience,” Shash’U says. “It’s not really a Yellow Brick Road thing, it’s more like you’re in it and it’s a good vibe. For me, the meaning of the show is the experience that I’ve had through the collective itself. It’s essentially my experience with the collective expressed into a piece.”

FRGMNT’s members come from contrasting disciplines. “I really grew up in street dance,” Shash’U says, “so my styles were locking, popping, krump, and hip-hop. A lot of the dancers in this collective are very much familiar with hip hop. Néné is a pro at house dance. She also represents waacking, hip-hop, and house dance around the world. Ja I’ve known as a krumper and today he works with ebnfloh, which is mostly street dance. And Victoria worked with different crews. Everybody does have their experience in street dance and the stage. But to come together for this idea is very unique and also very unexpected.”

The collective also aims to break down the borders between institutional and more informal cultural traditions. “It’s different than going to a dance school and learning classical practices.” Shash’U says. “With something like Ballet, there’s a clearer structure in the way things are done, and that’s how they stay constant. For street dance, a lot of it is learned through human interaction. It’s very much a socially embedded type of thing. It’s hard to learn about street dance by sitting down and reading a book, or by following one way of doing things.”

There is a procedural quality to Superheroes Cry Too, an element of controlled chaos that exists between improvisation and highly choreographed movement. “All this is still a big process for us,” Shash’U explains. “A show is not really like a haircut. It’s never done, done. While you’re still getting it, you’re realizing this could be cool for next time, or that could be adjusted. This thing that we’re making makes us feel a certain way, and you just want to grow into that.”

It is ultimately the feeling that emerges between performer and spectator that makes Superheroes Cry Too so moving. There is no question that we can successfully dance about architecture, since dance is a powerful form of non-verbal communication, one which seeks to rationalize the irrational and grasp the unfathomable. “Because of the way it was taught to us, it has very much to do with communication skills,” Shash’U reminds me.

“The idea for me of street dance is sharing what they’ve learned, or wanting to showcase what they’ve learned to other people who understand. That’s the core of it. It’s the main reason why one B-boy thinks that they’re better than another B-boy. They believe in their passion, their art, their discipline. They think, I feel like I want to talk about this, I feel like I want to share this, and I want to show this to my friend who is going through the same things, and I want to have these conversations—but through dance. When it comes to us exercising our idea of art and discipline, the DNA of street dancing has to do with communication. You have no choice but to communicate.”◼︎

Superheroes Cry Too continues through December 11th at Ausgang Plaza.

@nichemtl

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