ENTRANCES

Tori Morrison, Lin Snelling, and David Gagnon Walker

a Strange Victory Performance

ENTRANCES is an artistic research project on the relationship between writing and performing.

Dance artist Lin Snelling and writer David Gagnon Walker perform a digital duet from their respective homes, accompanied and live-mixed by multimedia designer Tori Morrison. Fusing techniques from dance, theatre, literary poetry, and digital performance, they work through a suite of poems by David that each begin with the phrase “Sarah walks into a room”. Lin and David “play Sarah” together. They move, speak, and type through and around the poems in a semi-improvised score, simultaneously responding to the existing texts and generating new written and physical material. An investigation of the nature and manifestations of creative thought, the performance – like the texts it starts from – also maps the complex experience of being isolated in a body, a mind, and a room during this strange time in human history. Responding to each other through the shimmering intimacy of digital connection, the artists work to articulate how thinking feels and what feelings do.

ENTRANCES is being developed by Strange Victory Performance, a producing collaboration between David and Tori. SVP makes experimental text-based projects focused on the mystery of creation itself: the movement from an impulse, to an image, to a structured artistic work, and how this movement can teach, heal, and transform the human beings it passes through.

Note: this is an early work-in-progress presentation. Thank you to Edmonton Arts Council and Alberta Foundation for the Arts for supporting the development of this work.