In multidisciplinary work Agrimony, a traditional flower remedy inspires artists to dissolve their masks
Dancer Sophie Dow and musician Laura Reznek join forces for a free-flowing work performed in intricate papier-mâché masks
Agrimony. Photo by Vitantonio Spinelli
The Dance Centre presents Agrimony on September 20 at 8 pm and September 21 at 2 pm and 8 pm at the Scotiabank Dance Centre
AGRIMONIA EUPATORIA, most commonly known as agrimony, is a perennial herb that bears tall clusters of small yellow flowers in the summertime, framed by serrated-edged leaves. In traditional plant medicine, agrimony is used as a digestive herb to restore stasis and as a lung remedy in tea form.
At The Dance Centre this month, Agrimony is also the title of a striking new multidisciplinary work by Métis-Assiniboine dance artist Sophie Dow and U.K.-based musician Laura Reznek. A blend of contemporary movement and evocative live music, the piece is based on the belief that agrimony can be used as a flower remedy to help dissolve the masks that society imposes upon people in their everyday lives.
When Dow connects with Stir by Zoom, she’s just returned from an off-grid trip to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where she was spinning fire staffs at Burning Man with Ember Arts Fire Society, a Vancouver-based dance company of which she is co-artistic director. Reflecting on Agrimony prior to the performances on September 20 and 21, she explains that the production is a visual journey in which four characters continuously wear and take off masks, riffing on concepts of revelation and evolution.
“All those layers that we put on, they’re not necessarily bad,” the dance artist suggests. “Sometimes we connotate them as negative, but it’s like, what mask are you wearing when you’re brushing your teeth, or what do you need to do to get out of the door in the mornings? What are those layers that we plaster on and that kind of stick over time? And the way that the flower remedy works is as you take it, it removes that edge so that you can start doing that work—looking what’s underneath, being able to dissolve those layers to find what’s at your core and at your centre.”
Agrimony. Photo by Max Putintsev
Agrimony is also the title of a full-length studio album by Reznek, which forms the basis of the multidisciplinary work. It’s woven from a tapestry of instruments, including piano, guitar, violin, cello, and some subtle drums. She worked with producer Shane Stephenson to create everyday noises and blend those into the soundtrack, too, in a way that’s reminiscent of a clever film foley artist—upon listening to the record carefully, expert ears might be able to pick out sounds born from a door slamming shut, or a whistling tea kettle, or spoons rapping against a metal garbage can.
“It’s almost like a rushing river,” Dow says of the album. “Laura has this phenomenal way of starting so softly with her voice and so gently, but will then grab you with some lyric that brings you to tears. Then she slowly ramps up, and all of a sudden she’s just gushing and flowing at the top of her lungs. And you know how she got there, you’ve been following the river the whole time—but then it’s like it opens up into a waterfall.”
Reznek will be performing the album live in Agrimony alongside musicians Jonah Ocean, Roisin Adams, James Daniel Baxter, and Chris Bede Marriott. Song and dance interweave in a symbiotic relationship, pushing and pulling between genres; the piece is far more than just a concert with some background dancers, Dow says, or vice versa.
In the piece, Dow dons an intricate papier-mâché ram mask handcrafted by artist Christian Borrego, characterized by coiled white horns and a black spiral adorning the forehead. That spiral ended up holding valuable symbology for her; prior to conceptualizing Agrimony, she suffered three concussions within a six-month period. Though her path to healing and regaining balance has been long, drawing on those circumstances and emotions in the choreographic process has allowed her to work through them.
“The ram is all about putting your head forward—diving head-first into life and facing things straight on,” Dow explains.
That’s a philosophy Dow applies to much of her practice; born in Treaty One territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, she is an artistic associate of O.Dela Arts, Chimera Project Dance Theatre, and V’ni Dansi with the Louis Riel Métis Dancers, as well as manager of Dance West Network’s annual Re-Centering/Margins Creative Residency project. Last summer, she partook in an off-grid creation lab in Six Nations of the Grand River territory in Ohsweken, Ontario called Inviting the Land to Shape Us with Kaha:wi Dance Theatre’s Santee Smith, during which she harvested food, learned about traditional Haudenosaunee pottery, and created a site-specific dance piece. She performed another recent endeavour, her deeply personal solo work Journals of adoption about her birth mother’s pregnancy experience and reflections on being an adopted child, at Nozhem: First Peoples’ Performance Space last November.
Sophie Dow wears a papier-mâché ram mask by Christian Borrego in Agrimony. Photo by Vitantonio Spinelli
Agrimony has been in the works for upward of six years now. Dow first met Borrego back in 2018 at the Abundance Harvest and Music Festival in Agassiz, just after she had met cinematographer Vitantonio Spinelli (who’s now the documentarian for Agrimony) at Shambhala Music Festival in the West Kootenay mountains. As it turns out, the two were already close friends; so Dow, Borrego, and Spinelli decided to meet up and combine their various talents into an art film using Borrego’s ram mask.
Fast-forward almost half a year, and one of Spinelli’s friends—Reznek—was in need of a music video for a new song. The trio gave her the art-film footage, and a few months later when Reznek needed a place to stay while she was visiting Toronto, Dow offered up her space. The pair became instant friends. While Reznek was there, Dow’s elder and craniosacral practitioner Linda Rose came by to drop off some agrimony for her concussion symptoms. Reznek remarked that, similarly to the agrimony plant, her album-in-process was about dissolving masks—and a seed of fruitful collaboration was born.
In Agrimony, dance artists Amanda Testini, Tavia Christina, and Mohammed Rashead will also be wearing animal masks while performing what Dow calls “free-flowing” movement. There’s the rabbit, which represents energy, fertility, and cycles; the owl, capable of cutting silently through darkness as a signifier of wisdom and death; and the coyote, a trickster of sorts who prompts folks to witness different layers of truth.
“As dancers, we have such a gift and such an opportunity to transform and shapeshift,” Dow says, “and to take what we’re experiencing in real-time and to put it in our bodies, or to pull it out of our bodies and throw it out into the space and really manipulate and work with that. So I feel like a lot of the choreography and a lot of the stories that emerge as far as what our bodies are saying throughout the show have been stepping stones for all of us to process a lot of what we’ve gone through over the last six years and our lives in general.” 
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