Van Grimde Corps Secrets is launching a residency program that offers artists the opportunity to explore, in the context of their own practice, the interactions between bodies and digital technologies. Artists-in-residence will be able to choose the technological devices they would like to experiment with, in relation to their artistic objectives. The goal is to provide a space for research and free creation, along with equipment and mentoring if needed.
Two 2-week residencies will be offered between February 2021 and December 2022.
After our call to projects, two artists were chosen for the residencies:
Audrey Rochette, Diorama
Choreographer and performer, Audrey Rochette is interested, among other things, in the dialogical relationship between the body and technologies. Her works have been shown at Tangente, La Chapelle – Scènes Contemporaines, Dance Matters in Toronto and Festivaleke in Charleroi (BE). As a performer and assistant choreographer, she worked for 6 years with the company Kondition Pluriel, whose works are at the crossroads of media arts and performance. Audrey is currently a research associate for an Austrian machine learning project (Machine Movement Lab) led by Petra Gemeinboeck, Rob Saunders and Marie-Claude Poulin, as well as a research assistant to Nicole Harbonnier and Geneviève Dussault in Observation-Analysis of Movement. She is currently working on the creation of her new piece Diorama, an interactive and performative installation focusing on the ethics of the relationships between the living and the non-living in an ecosystem made up and composed of individual materials, technologies and organic.
Diorama is an interactive and performative installation, a reflection in practice on the place of humans in the fragile balances of the environments they occupy. A small ecosystem made under a giant modular mobile, the interactivity of a system of motion sensors reproduces the interdependence between human and environmental phenomena. The performers, matter, sound and light respond to each other and thus influence each other in this complex web of relationships between living and non-living.
Artistic team: Alice Sanz, Élise Bergeron, Rosie Contant, Audrée Juteau, Maude Arès, Karine Gauthier, Alexandre St-Onge, Stéphane Gladyszewski, Audrey Rochette
Gerard X Reyes, NC2022
Gerard X Reyes is a Uruguayan-Canadian dancer, choreographer, Somatic Sex Educator and Intimacy Coordinator. For the past twenty years, Reyes’s artistic practice has addressed the sensual and sexual body. As a dancer, Reyes spent seven years as a member of the Compagnie Marie Chouinard (2006-07; 2009-13). He is the recipient of a Gemini Award from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television for Best Performance in Chouinard’s bODY_rEMIX. Reyes has performed extensively for many other choreographers including Jérôme Bel, Benoît Lachambre, Bill T. Jones, Luther Brown and Amazon Leiomy Maldonado. His first solo work, “The Principle of Pleasure”, explores the themes of desire, seduction and control by melding together voguing, stripping, eccentricity and glamour. Set to original remixes of songs by pop icon Janet Jackson, the solo premiered in 2015 at La Chapelle (Montreal) and has since toured across Canada and Europe including Festival TransAmériques (Montréal), SummerWorks (Toronto), P*rny Days (Zurich) and Tanzfabrik (Berlin). In 2017 Reyes pioneered Montreal’s Kiki Ballroom Scene by leading weekly practices for local LGBTQ+ youth as well as producing and hosting regular Kiki Balls including balls for Canada Pride (2017) and Fierté Montréal (2018). Recently, Reyes completed a certification in Sexological Bodywork via the Institute of Somatic Sexology. This certificate allows him to teach somatic sex education privately, and assist in projects as an Intimacy Coordinator for stage and film. Through this practice, he guides people towards deeper embodiment and connection with their sensual self.
NC2022 : “In the current hyper information era, humans are collectively obsessed with inventing new technologies that claim to facilitate the human experience by offering greater choice and less physical work. To counter this, I raise the questions: As humans what do we already have in our underlying, collective experience that we are not using to its full potential? Does our rational, mammalian paradigm distract us from our ancient, latent reptilian wisdom of how to survive and connect? To respond to these questions, I am curious to step outside of the human-made world (cities) and move into nature.”