contextualization
Refection Notes One
Reflection Notes Two
Reflection Notes Three
Essay
Lauren Runions (she/they) is a dance artist, choreographer, urbaner and educator based in Tkaronto/Toronto + Oslo. They are founder and artistic director of dance project I/O Movement and currently work with the Toronto Dance Community Love-In as Co-Artistic Director (aka Lover).
Their work investigates the role of choreography as a reciprocal spatial practice between self + other. Through deliberate movement experiments and staged interventions they begin to expand this notion; turning to shores, rivers, parks, highways, fences, construction, and desire paths as information. Their processes can result in scores, improvisation, sounding, dancing, observing, walking and routine dailiness as they question how our own embodied awareness shapes our relationship, and responsibility, to living with urban and natural ecologies.
Their project I/O Movement offers performances, community workshops and residencies with the intention to consider our partnership with place. Through this project, Lauren has installed site-specific work across the city in parks, closets, elevators, living rooms, ice cream shops and under stairways. I/O Movement has facilitated their own public space dance residency This is Our Place. In 2018, this residency was supported by The Bentway’s Community Incubation Program. As community development increasingly drives their practice, Lauren has hosted public workshops including Movement at the Mall (Art Starts), Dancing + Drawing (I/O Movement), Mapping Inside/Outside (Gallery 1265), and Field Guide for Performance in Public Space (Maximum City). To mark the opening and closing of MOCA’s 2020 winter exhibitions, Lauren choreographed and performed Intervening “A Sudden Beginning” taking place within and alongside Carlos Bunga’s large-scale cardboard installations. In 2022, they will present Stories, a durational dance performance, for Nuit Blanche Toronto.
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We fall into actions everyday: folding and unfolding, flowing through ephemeral borders, unconsciously performing place-based choreographies, reciting memory maps to self or to other. I approach these intimate experiences with the shared knowledge of having a body; where inner and outer meet.
It is here where my practice begins: engaging in place-based practice that is rooted in spontaneous partnership, intentionally navigating landscapes collectively and practically, and seeing dance and movement as a method of care and patience with our surroundings and all participants involved—a reciprocal spatial practice.
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As I situate myself between two places these years, I would like to acknowledge where I am based is on the Indigenous land and waters systems of Tkaronto. This is the territory of many Nations including Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee and the Wyandot peoples. I will also acknowledge the Sámi peoples and their Sápmi region. I am beyond grateful to be here, working and listening daily on their lands and all her beautifully complex ecologies.
[1] Clip can be found at 5minutes 13seconds. dancetechtv, “Dance as a Way of Knowing: Interview with Alva Noë” YouTube video.
[2] Solnit, Wanderlust: a history of walking, 77.
[3] Parviainen, Choreographing Resistances: Spatial–Kinaesthetic, 315.
[4] This quote is from Manning’s section Choreography as Mobile Architecture. Manning and Massumi, Always More than One: Individuation's Dance, 122.
[5] The full quote sums this affect further: “Co-worlding is always a collaborative process, and always emergent.” Neimanis, Bodies of Water, 34.
[6] Cvejic, “Chapter 9 How Does Choreography Think 'through' Society,” 270.
[7] Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 125.
[8] Klien, What Do You Choreograph at the End of the World?, 220-221.
[9] Cvejić Bojana and Vujanović Ana, Public Sphere by Performance (Berlin: b_books, 2015), 29.
[10] Cvejić and Vujanović, Public Sphere by Performance, 29.
[11] Caycedo and Acevedo-Yates, Carolina Caycedo, 70.
[12] Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 163.
[13] Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 163.
[14] CLEAR, https://civiclaboratory.nl/.
[15] “Open Science Hardware and Wetware for Plastic Pollution Monitoring,” CLEAR, https://civiclaboratory.nl/methodological-projects/open-science-hardware-and-wetware-for-plastic-pollution-monitoring/.
[16] Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” 587.
[17] Quote by William Forsythe speaking to his concept of a choreographic object on a broader sense, but we do also see it live in his repetoire. Spier, William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography: It Starts from Any Point, 91.
[18] “Langøyene,” Oslo kommune, February 9, 2017, https://www.oslo.kommune.no/slik-bygger-vi-oslo/langoyene/#gref.
[19] Beer, Ecoscenography: An Introduction to Ecological Design for Performance (S.l.: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2022), 49.
[20] “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity,” accessed May 1, 2022, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291329096_Material_Ecocriticism_Materiality_Agency_and_Models_of_Narrativity, 83.
[21] Cohen and Duckert 2013, 4
references ➝
Barad, Karen. “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Qui ParleVol. 19, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2011), pp. 121-158. Durham: Buke University Press: 2011.
Beer, Tanja. Ecoscenography: An Introduction to Ecological Design for Performance. S.l.: Palgrave MacMillan, 2022.
Caycedo, Carolina and Acevedo-Yates, Carla. Carolina Caycedo. Chicago: Delmonico Books, 2021.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Univ. of California Press, 2011.
“Clear.” CLEAR. Accessed March 19, 2022.
https://civiclaboratory.nl/.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, and Lowell Duckert. 2013. Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Eart, Air, Water, and Fire. Minnesota, USA: University of Minnesota Press.
Cvejic, Bojana. Choreographing Problems - Expressive Concepts in Contemporary Dance and Per. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Cvejic, Bojana. “Chapter 9 How Does Choreography Think 'through' Society.” Thinking through theatre and performance / edited by Maaike Bleeker, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher and Heike Roms., October 21, 2019. https://www.academia.edu/40690499/Chapter_9_How_Does_Choreography_Think_Through_Society.
Cvejić, Bojana, and Vujanović, Ana. Public Sphere by Performance. Berlin: b_books, 2015.
dancetechtv. “Dance as a Way of Knowing: Interview with Alva Noë.” YouTube, July 25, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbWVERm5bsM.
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, Autumn, 1988, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988): 575-599.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066.
Hewitt, Andrew. Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. 2012. Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity. Ecozon European Journal of Literature Culture and Environment 3: 75-91.
Kellokumpu, Simo. “Choreography as Reading Practice.” University of the Arts Helsinki. University of the Arts Helsinki, September 3, 2019. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/437088/456117.
Klien, Michael. “'What Do You Choreograph at the End of the World?', M.Klien & S.Valk.” Unden Taussin Taehen, Zodiak, Like, Finland. Like, Zodiak, May 26, 2014. https://www.academia.edu/es/3598591/_What_Do_You_Choreograph_At_The_End_Of_The_World_M_Klien_and_S_Valk.
“Langøyene.” Oslo kommune, February 9, 2017. https://www.oslo.kommune.no/slik-bygger-vi-oslo/langoyene/#gref.
Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. Always More than One: Individuation's Dance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
Neimanis, Astrida, Pia van Gelder, Sue Reid, and Jennifer Mae Hamilton. Feminist, Queer, Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene. Open Humanities Press, 2019.
“Open Science Hardware and Wetware for Plastic Pollution Monitoring.” CLEAR, January 8, 2021. https://civiclaboratory.nl/methodological-projects/open-science-hardware-and-wetware-for-plastic-pollution-monitoring/.
Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin. Chichester: Wiley, n.d.
Parviainen, Jaana. Choreographing Resistances: Spatial–Kinaesthetic. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2010.
Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism a Manifesto. Brooklyn, N.Y: Verso, 2020.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Routledge, 2009.
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: a history of walking. New York: Viking, 2000.
Sparrow, Tom, and Catherine Malabou. Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation after Phenomenology. London: Open Humanities Press, 2015.
Spier, Steven. William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography: It Starts from Any Point. London: Routledge, 2011.
Suderburg, Erika. Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
image notes + descriptions ➝
Clay Labyrinth
filmed and performed by Lauren Runions
2022
Sifting Process one
photo by Sarah Sekles
2022
tending with
filmed by Colin Medley
performed by Lauren Runions
2022
Sifting Process two
filmed by Colin Medley
2022
The Wearable one - three
photography by Colin Medley
2022
Water Quilt
video by Lauren Runions
2022
Performing Langøyene
video still by Sarah Sekles
2022
tending with, clip
filmed by Colin Medley
2022