new roots festival | i relate to that
In collaboration with the South Granville Seniors Centre, our long-time neighbours in our building at 12th and Hemlock, PT has commissioned dancer Joanna Anderson, and sound designer Mary Jane Coomber to create a new dance piece. The artists met and connected with participating seniors over zoom to explore themes of isolation, friendship, embodiment, and spirituality. These conversations and connections are serving as the source material for Joanna’s choreography and MJ’s sound design.
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- Joanna Anderson | Dancer
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- Mary Jane Coomber | Sound Design
Joanna Anderson graduated from the Mirror Dance Program in 2016 and has created and performed in such works as Look. See. (2017) at the Scotiabank Dance Centre, and Accelerate 2.0 (2019) at The Cultch. She recently choreographed for Jordan Klassen’s music video, Identivacation, and co-created alongside Kezia Rosen for Jenny Banai’s music video, Couch Walker. She also co-created, Hoover Dance: Nobody Does It Like You, with Scout Heckel and Tamar Tabori for the Shooting Gallery Performance Series #9. She is passionate about training and inspiring other dancers and teaches pre-professional Contemporary at Bez Arts Hub. She believes that creativity holds extensive room for thought, motivation, emotion, and deeper understanding. She is exploring connections between emotions, speech, and bodily response through movement and voice work.
MJ Coomber is a composer, sound designer, musician, conductor, and educator based in Vancouver. Recently they have collaborated as a composer and sound designer with Alley Theatre, Touchstone Theatre, Pacific Theatre, The Only Animal, The Arts Club Theatre Company, Frank Theatre, Itsazoo Productions, Savage Society, Vision Impure, The Belfry Theatre, Neworld Theatre, Sugarworks Theatre, Caravan Stage Company, Move: The Company, Rice and Beans Theatre, and Theatre Terrific. They are a co-founder of the CITT award-winning Flip The Switch Collective. They have presented design work at the 2015 Prague Quadrennial and the 2017 World Stage Design festival in Taipei. They are a 6 time Jessie Award nominee, as well as a recipient of the BC Arts Council Early Career Development Program. They are a member of ADC and graduate of the School of Contemporary Arts at SFU.
Artist’s Notes
This has truly been a wonderful process from beginning to end. There has been so much ease for me as a human and creator throughout the creation of this project and I am very grateful to have been given this opportunity. I spent six weeks partaking in conversation with three beautiful individuals who I was connected to through the South Granville Senior Centre. Over six weeks, we found openness, humour and understanding amongst each other and I truly soaked up the stories and experiences they so generously shared with me. What an honour it is to have been given the opportunity to interpret through my body some of the things they chose to offer within our conversations together. I would often offer up questions connected to things such as self-comfort, anxiety, relationship to self and to others, and physical expressions of emotional states. Each individual within the group would offer up what their personal experiences were in connection to these things with such authenticity. What has become even more true and apparent to me through this process, is that we all share a connection as human beings despite having very different experiences when it comes to journeying through the complexity of life and the emotions that go along with that. We all have bodies and spirits and minds that speak volumes and offer us so much insight if we are willing to listen.
– Joanna Anderson
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