Anna Malla and Kori Gulotta
CREATORS JOURNEYS - CM 2024
Driving themes
The crucible
Patriarchy
Socio-political controversies
Pressures-traumas of women as limits and empowering functions
Female instincts
Goals
Create a work that exposes transformations
Adjust an out-door site-specific solo exploration to indoor duet performance
Develop movement material
Beginning with
Concepts
Previous performance work
Objects – yarn, fabric, pole
Text
Music (sound recording from personal journey to India)
Body going around, pole static vertical
Desires
for release clarity freedom through tension and release
to develop the movement aspect of the work
Questions
what textures (fabric) fit into their world?
What is the story if there is one?
Challenges
tension and juxtaposition dynamic development – e.g. the pole and the web have inherent dynamic ranges that determines time, energies and textures
Strategies used at the CM to develop material
ask creators?
Discoveries
Practicalities of working with objects- particularly the material of the pole, the stretchiness of the yarn, movements possible
Development and Skill-building
Anna developed stamina and movement skills on the pole
Duet discoveries- working with contrast, sameness, call-response
Self-Challenging
How to work with narrative and movement
How to work with from personal trauma and translate it into public performance
Determining the dynamics of time, energy, texture
Working without the external support of music/sound environments that can pre-determine time and dynamic aspects.
Questions from mentors
Regarding symbolic nature of set and prop elements:
What is the pole? for instance: is it patriarchy? phallic ? it turns but doesn’t change its nature. Is it a positive or neutral support? what is personas’ physical-person relationship with the pole?
What is the web? for instance: is it the confusion of trauma? or female? or prison? or social web? or ?? “tied to system?”
Is this a time-based-durational installation?
How is the audience placed – from one side, all around? how does placement of audience change relationship of details ?
Discussion points
Bringing bias into the room - stating it? letting it go? and/or admitting that the bias had no foundation to start with not letting it (early mentor conversation about pole being sexualized – turned out to be nothing about that…)
can see possible evolution about patriarchy and trauma)
What is activated first – words or movement?
Non-human and human presences in the work – co-existing and different energies.
To practice
Skill-sets on pole as solo and duet
Subtleties of interaction with objects
Integrating technique with symbolism/meaning
Next goals
Developing the piece as either a solo or duet
How to move the piece from studio and pole to natural environment and trees?
Incorporating text and music
Using and extending the obvious possibilities and restrictions of movement on the pole
Clarifying narrative in context with the actual people performing
Key Words
tension, release, pressure, female-body, instincts, trauma, crucible, transformation, texture
Biographies
Anna Malla (aka Annapurna)
I’m a movement and sound artist working with dance, live and pre-recorded soundscape, installation, and projected image. I’m a co-founding member of The Switch Project, a collective of political interdisciplinary Queer, Trans & Two Spirit performers co-creating new methodologies and political performance materials for the public sphere. I'm interested in bodies as sites of knowledge, ruin, disaster, pleasure, and possibility, and my experience with queerness, racialization, violence and long-term chronic pain and illness, as well as my commitment to anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist, migrant and environmental justice organizing inform my creation process. I think a lot about the bodily genius we develop because of the intricate violences of the systems we live under. Movement and soundscape creation are, for me, the most natural places for these explorations; movement is immediate, but also echoes into the past and future, a lot like violence --- we come up against the ripples of it in our bodies well outside of the physical bounds and moment of the experiences themselves. Dance and sound-scaping also feel like two places where we can find moments of liberation within it all, carve out spaces for feeling free.
Kori Gulotta
Lady Kori received a multidisciplinary education in both the visual and performing arts including formal training in theatre, Classical and Jazz Ballet, and West African, Modern and Contemporary dance. Her professional training has also included flexibility, barre, conditioning for dance, and lyra. Kori has worked as an administrator and manager within the Toronto pole community for many years and is currently a proud member of staff at Vitality Pole Dance and Fitness Studio, teaching beginner to intermediate pole dance, choreography, flexibility, burlesque, and erotic floor and chair dance.
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