Produced by battery opera performance

Co-producer: Festival Trans-Amériques

Conceived and developed by Lee Su-Feh

Designed by Jesse Garlick

Assisted by Justine Chambers

Guest artists: TBA according to site and context.

INSTALLATION

Dance Machine is a kinetic sculpture that can be transformed into multiple configurations by the actions and movement of the bodies within it.

The public is invited to enter: share tasks, play, rest and converse with one or more artists who act as hosts, guides and facilitators. An embodied experience that has the potential to inspire deep rest as well as mindful play, the Dance Machine can also simply, be a beautiful dynamic object to witness from multiple perspectives. Both artists and public are guided by a simple set of “instructions” that open up to many possibilities

Dance Machine began in 2009 as an inquiry into the energetic relationship between the body and objects; and has since, evolved into an exploration on ceremony and what that might entail. It is also part of a larger consideration on place and belonging. I was born in Malaysia, a former British colony with a multi-cultural and complicated set of socio-political realities. When I immigrated to Canada in 1988, these complexities were then transported to the complexity of the Canadian settler-colonial state, its history of displacement of indigenous peoples from their land and culture. As an immigrant, I confront and grapple with my role in the settler-colonial machine. In my recent works, my focus has simply been: how to acknowledge who we are and where we are - how to embed this acknowledgement in all the works in a way that is unique and coherent to each work, so that this acknowledgement becomes part of the protocol of making work here in the Americas. This continues to be my concern with Dance Machine, and I am interested in inviting others - artists and the public - into a dialogue about how the history in our bodies encounter the history of where we are.

Dance Machine posits dance-making as a communal process: dancing as an act of being together - woven into the fabric of labour, rest and play. It also puts into question the notion of authorship and creative territory: asking when a work stops being mine and becomes another’s. It invites others into a conversation about what dance is, what dance can be and what dance can speak to. It invites them into a conversation around issues that concern me - philosophically, politically and aesthetically - Lee Su-Feh