Nanaimo's Infringing Dance Festival will feature all kinds of movement and creativity for a week and a half this summer.
Crimson Coast Dance's 27th annual dance festival is planning a packed schedule of performances and activities from July 3-13.
"Bring your culture, ability, identity and age … the festival welcomes participants to both engage in and witness movement, sound, storytelling, and creative exploration," noted a press release from the dance society.
One of the attractions that will be set up as part of Infringing this year is a video dance installation at Bowen Park called 'Quantum Conversation II Traces The Other Within.' Audiences are invited to walk through the woods at the park, scanning QR codes linking to dance videos filmed at the park. Local dancers Samantha Letourneau and Geneviève Johnson will present a live performance at the map's last stop on July 9 at 6:30 p.m. at the Bowen Park amphitheatre.
Letourneau said she and Johnson have both done residencies with Crimson Coast Dance and have been collaborating for a few years after finding similarities in their style and explorations.
"I was exploring more in a micro level our relation to the environment, down right into the forest floor … and she was doing a much more macro view of the larger landscapes of the forest," Letourneau said. "So we found that that micro-macro lens was very interesting to bring together."
Quantum Conversation audiences follow a map to eight locations in the park where they can view, on their devices, videos of dancing set to soundscapes and music. Letourneau said certain places in the park immediately came to mind as the right settings for the project.
"I think it was fairly well planned out where we were going to go through the park and building that imagery in our mind of how we were going to guide people through, really focusing on presenting a digital outdoor experience of movement and nature interaction…" she said. "It's a very embodied experience for [audiences] of memories and nature and space and how the human body follows these traces through."
Maps will be available at the Crimson Coast Dance office, the Port Theatre, and online, and audiences are reminded to bring mobile devices and earbuds.
Letourneau said there's always "a lot to take in" during Infringing festival and she's looking forward to it both as a performer and a festival-goer.
"Crimson Coast Dance Society does an incredible job bringing really cutting-edge and intriguing programming to Nanaimo," she said.
Also this year, Infringing will have an artist in residence for the week, Toronto's Sid Ryan Eilers, who will give an interdisciplinary solo performance 'Kiss the Stormy Sky' at the Port Theatre on July 10 at 7:30 p.m. and will also lead a queer-conscious dance class.
A press release describes Kiss the Stormy Sky as a "compelling visual masterpiece of dance theatre and emotionally raw performance" spanning four generations of family and "interrogating inherited trauma, queer existence, and the gender binary."
On July 11 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at Maffeo Sutton Park is a free dance party with DJ All Good and drummer Mike Cooper, featuring a tug-of-war showdown.
Montreal’s Alexandra (Spicey) Landé will fuse hip-hop and dance in her solo performance ‘Monad’ on July 12 at 7:30 p.m. at the Port Theatre.
Infringing is traditionally timed to coincide with the Nanaimo Dragonboat Festival, and that's the case again on July 12-13, as Tsatassaya White will present 'qwu ‘u lush ‘utl swy a lana' on the first day of the festival at Maffeo Sutton Park featuring "dynamic" Indigenous family dancing from 10:30 a.m.-4 p.m., and the second day will include an all-day hip-hop battle from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. organized in partnership with Vibe Dance, and a Splashmob flash mob dance at 4 p.m. at Sway' A' Lana Lagoon. Also on those two final days of Infringing, there will be a Playbriola kids' zone set up at the park.
For a full schedule of events or links to purchase tickets, visit http://crimsoncoastdance.com.
