Microphones and loopers, as the body becomes an Echo Chamber in Vanessa Goodman's newest work
The Action at a Distance artistic director has been busy creating while touring North America and the world
Ileanna Cheladyn in Echo Chamber. Photo by David Cooper
Action at a Distance’s Echo Chamber shows in a Dance Double Bill with Radical System Art’s Ghost Scripts, Pg. 1 on November 21 and 22 at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre as part of the Chutzpah! Festival
PROPELLED IN PART by the hit success of Graveyards and Gardens, her heady sound-and-dance show with composer Caroline Shaw, Vanessa Goodman has been caught in a whirlwind over the past year or so.
She’s seen the show travel to places like Calgary, Portland, and Germany, while Tuning, the piece she choreographed for Alexis Fletcher and Ted Littlemore last spring, shared a double bill with Edouard Lock’s ÉCHO in Edmonton. And her CORE/US hit Seattle’s On the Boards. Amid all that she’s been raising a baby, who is now almost one, and who she still often totes along on tours. Oh, and somewhere in there, between Calgary and Germany, she also broke a foot.
“It’s been interesting, with lots of new challenges,” she says with a laugh, her baby burbling in the background. “A lot has been how to figure out how to art and to parent, but it’s also been extremely rewarding.”
Along the way Goodman has been developing a new solo, Echo Chamber, for Vancouver dancer Ileanna Cheladyn, with original sound by Loscil and arresting lighting by James Proudfoot. The hauntingly beautiful new work grew out of Cheladyn’s fascination with Goodman’s own striking solo, Container, and the idea of somehow reimagining its exploration of the body as a holder or archive of our inherited cultural past. (The two had met at Space to Fail, an international residency exchange between New Zealand’s Hyde Productions, Australia’s Critical Path, and Vancouver’s The Dance Centre.)
Container was an intense, powerfully strong, and hyperkinetic piece, with memories and experiences almost literally glitching or channelling through Goodman’s body. But rather than set the deeply personal work on the dancer, Goodman collaborated closely with Cheladyn to make it her own—recognizing their different muscle memory, inherent styles, and personal histories.
“Part of her research in slowness—and slowness is something I really struggle with in my practice,” Goodman points out. “She also has an incredible vulnerability when she performs, so I really wanted to make sure that shone through.”
As she has done with recent work like Tuning, Goodman employs handheld microphones and looping pedals throughout Echo Chamber.
“The piece starts just with her breath for first 10 minutes on microphones,” she reveals. “Because our bodies are acting as echo chambers of all of our experiences and all of the information and the people we interact with, and because it’s an echo of Container, we work with that sonically, too.”
At the end of Echo Chamber, note how the performer goes back to her breath reverberating in the room, and then, in an act of agency, she stops the looper.
“I take a concept and see how far I can take it—this theoretical base and finding the nonlinear narrative in the body,” Goodman observes.
Looking at how this new work differs from her own Container, she reflects: “In some ways, it would be cool to put both on the same program sometime. Where Container has a lot of force and effort, Ileanna works with a ton of release and abandonment. Container is such an intense little nugget; this has a lot more space in it, and a lot more vulnerability inside of its strength. So it kind of feels like the soul of Container–but it’s something entirely new made in collaboration with Ileanna.”
After the opening here, Goodman will tour Graveyards & Gardens again—finally appearing here live, to perform it with Shaw, in Vancouver in the spring (something the pandemic made impossible when it debuted here in 2020). Seattle and Rome also await.
“There’s still lots on the go and still lots to figure out how to juggle administratively,” Goodman says with a laugh. But it appears her work simply can’t be contained.
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