Live sound, walls of light, and pummelling dance mix in Animals of Distinction's multimedia Frontera

Choreographer Dana Gingras’s previous work at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival featured frantic urbanites convulsing atop stark-white pedestals. Part of the rush of watching the Holy Body Tattoo’s monumental in 2016 came from seeing what the performers could pull off on their precarious perches. Now, in Frontera, another massively scaled multimedia show at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre by Gingras’s more recent company Animals of Distinction, 10 performers will dart and dodge between columns of light.

Right from the early days of the Holy Body Tattoo, the seismic company she cofounded in 1993 here with Noam Gagnon, the now-Montreal-based artist has thrived under scenic constraints—this despite her dance being known for its hair-flailing, pummelling abandon.

“I like limitations early on in the process,” the former Vancouverite tells the Straight from home in la belle province, where she says she’s enjoying one of the most fertile periods of her career. “Right away there’s tension. There are edges that create a kind of pressure on the work. We need to feel those edges, and the movement needs to be restricted at times. And then there’s the free space where these lines of desire open for the dancer—where we’re really exploring where our freedom lies.”

Source: Georgia Straight