GRIEF DANCES

Claudia Edwards

PERFORMANCE TO CAMERA

Access: V (Visual, no spoken text)

Positing a future where colonial structures are dead and no longer hold power, dance and somatic tools carve a space to grieve and release them. Exploring the futurist potential of grief, these experimental scores also function by inverse, acknowledging that both grieving and decolonization are never-ending processes.

Locating, listening to, and moving with pain / pleasure / land, the event score is performed simultaneously by two performers, across ocean and time. The lands on which the scores take place are Toronto, traditionally known as Tkaronto, “where there are trees standing in the water” in the Mohawk language, under the Dish With One Spoon Treaty, and Glasgow, also known as Glaschu, or “green hollow” in Gaelic.

Claudia Edwards is a performance artist based in Toronto, Canada. Of Indo-Guyanese and British descent, their work explores issues of identity, memory, queerness, power, and decolonization. Their approach is conceptually driven, and formally determined by operation and circulation, spanning relational performance, persona, dance, photography, video, text, and objects. In somatic works, their use of scores allows for an interdisciplinary approach, integrating ritual, voice, rhythm, and dance to achieve specific states of being and consciousness.

https://claudiaedwards.info/

Concept/Direction/Performance: Claudia Edwards
Co-Performer: Jess Paris
Videographers: Tram Nghiem and Tiu Makkonen
Colourist: Tram Nghiem

This project is part of an artistic exchange project BUZZCUT are undertaking with The Rhubarb Festival in Toronto. It is part of New Conversations, a programme funded and delivered by the British Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Farnham Maltings, and the High Commission of Canada in the UK.