VIDF web series spotlights dance artist Josh Martin, whose solo livestreams April 29 to May 1
The Company 605 cofounder welcomed the chance to create his first solo since 2013
Josh Martin in Brimming. Photo by David Cooper
The 2021 Vancouver International Dance Festival has just released a new installment of its Web Series, a talk with Company 605 artistic codirector Josh Martin about Brimming. (See below.)
The solo livestreams from April 29 to May 1 as part of the 2021 Vancouver International Dance Festival.
For choreographer and performer Josh Martin, the piece began in May 2019 while in residency at Boombox—located in the back of a nine-foot-by-15-foot container truck.
The Company 605 artistic codirector hadn’t worked on a solo for himself since 2013, when he created Leftovers, a piece that the VIDF presented in 2014 and that he still performs to this day.
Martin says making a solo for yourself is a completely different, very personal process that is a change of pace from how he, and artistic codirector Lisa Gelley, have been working in recent years. “It offers something to me that I don’t get in other projects”, explains Martin.
With Brimming, Martin still has collaborators but doesn’t have to organize people inside the work, something he has been “craving” for its simplicity.
Working inside a contained space during the Boombox residency elicited an exploration of the body itself as a container and the concept of a container within a container within a container. In Martin’s words: “I was asking questions about what it [the body] contains, how it contains us, how the container shapes the content within. How do we move internally versus externally? What’s being held back, behind the surface, physically, emotionally, psychologically? ‘Brimming’ is the idea of something on the edge of overflowing….Pressurized, compressed.”
After Boombox, Martin created a filmed version of the work with long-time dance photographer David Cooper as director of photography and premiered it as part of the Dancing on the Edge festival last summer.
For the upcoming livestream version, he has been working with lighting designer James Proudfoot to develop the idea of the box and how lighting effects movement within it. As for the choreography itself, Martin shares, “I don’t really work with a lot of movement that’s set in a traditional dance way that can be taught to someone. I work with movement practices or states that I’m in tune with and slide between.”
When asked what he hopes people will see or feel after seeing Brimming, he acknowledges how everything is now seen through the lens of COVID-19, and that, despite starting this project before the pandemic, audiences may view it as a commentary on the isolation particular to this past year.
While it wasn’t clear whether or not he will lean into this interpretation, he did clarify his intentions: “What I’m hoping is that it’s more than just ‘Here’s this guy in anguish in a box,’ but that there’s an inner world, a hidden place, and behind that, a psychological journey. It’s the tension between who you are on the inside and the outer perception of self.”
For the upcoming performances, Martin is keen on using the VIDF’s four-camera set-up to invite the audience to get closer and catch his subtle emotional changes, and the body movements and isolations happening on micro-planes.
Tickets to the livestream performances of Brimming are free/by-donation with advanced registration at www.vidf.ca/company605.
This post was sponsored by VIDF