Choreographer Jamie Robinson comes through the void to explore connection in Paradise Replica
Using repetitive movement, the Iris Garland Award-winner deconstructs the way dance is made
Paradise Replica
Jamie Robinson. Photo by Shay Saver
Paradise Replica streams via The Dance Centre from August 20 to September 3
IT’S TELLNG THAT Vancouver’s most exciting new emerging choreographer struggles to describe herself as a choreographer.
Take it as a sign of how fresh Jamie Robinson’s approach is, and how much she involves the input of her dancers in her new filmed work, Paradise Replica.
“It’s not that I'm coming in telling someone how to move their body or how to feel something,” she explains to Stir over the phone, “it’s that we’re both pursuing an experience together and then reflecting on that together. That feels a little closer to dismantling some type of hierarchy.
“And then with this process, it felt like I completely let go of the choreographer role by the end. It was always being choreographed in front of me by the people doing it. So, yeah: it’s a confusing grey area but I’m really interested in it.”
The artist’s first full-length ensemble creation, made as part of The Dance Centre’s Iris Garland Emerging Choreographer Award, finds four dancers—Kate Franklin, Avery Smith, Jessica Wilkie, and Shion Carter—following repetitive, evolving groove patterns to a transcendent place of shared movement.
Robinson’s initial inspiration for the piece was reading Simone Weil’s book Grace and Gravity, and the way it talks about moving through a void to a place of enlightened transformation. If you think of the pandemic shutdown as a sort of void, the idea provides a beautiful metaphor for this time of seismic shift.
Robinson, who got her start in dance as a highland dancer and later trained at Modus Operandi, was in the midst of a busy schedule when COVID-19 hit the world. Having seen her work shown everywhere from Dance Victoria to Left of Main, she had just received the Garland award, and the funding and studio time that allowed. She was also working as an associate artist with Company 605, an ensemble preparing to tour abroad. As she puts it, it felt like “going from having so much on your plate to literally nothing.”
“I was experiencing all these questions in my own life of, I guess, moving through a nothingness into something new,” she relates. “So it was this idea of almost going through a void into something else, and maybe how that could dismantle and change everything. I was wondering, Is that a possibility with movement? Is there anything inside of movement that can transcend the past, that can go from where we start to a sense of a connectedness to maybe a dance that we’re not even aware that we’re creating?”
And so it was that when the artist was able to enter the studio with her dancers earlier this year, they started experimenting with an open score of continuous, repeating movement.
Paradise Replica
“It feels really similar to club dancing in that you're responding to a group of people but you're also an individual making your own choices,” Robinson says. “And I think we tried to lean into that as far as what was going on—just really trying to find pleasure and joy in movement, and just dancing to music a lot!”
She says most of the oscillating choreography is centred in the core: “It felt the most true to keep it close to the heart.”
Robinson hopes the effect of watching Paradise Replica is of witnessing connection and change happening in real time—a heady piece that feels like the dance loops and evolves on continuously, before we tune in, and after.
Will we see that connection happen on a live stage sometime in the future?
“I don't know in what capacity that might happen, but I think most of all I’m just excited how the people inside it get to feel,” she says. “I think there's a lot to learn inside it.” And outside of it, maybe it will help the rest of us see a way through the void.
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