Event

Kemi Winter GALA - Toronto

Kemi Winter GALA
January 19th
Winchester Street Theatre 80 Winchester St Toronto
600pm Doors Refreshments
700pm Performance Passage/Idiom
815pm Raffle

Artistic director Jennifer Dallas' work takes an intimate look at human interactions and offers insights into widely divergent ideas of what the self is. Extended travel informs and compels much of her work and affects many of her collaborations. Kmi has presented work throughout Canada; Lagos, Nigeria; Johannesburg, South Africa; Kazan, Russia and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Idiom
Choreographer/Performers Jennifer Dallas (Canada) and Bienvenue Bazié (Burkina Faso)
Music by John MacLean
Artistic Advisor Andrea Roberts
Lighting design Oz Weaver

The two culturally apposing artists, Bazié and Dallas have been working together off and on for four years. Coming from Toronto and Ouagadougou, their lingua franca is choreography. And so, the linguistic and cultural idioms of Idiom are made through musical and physical interplay. They ask: what are the effects of borderlessness? Idiom proposes a dialogic exploration of the threads that connect divergent cultures.

Passage
Choreographer/Performers Jennifer Dallas and Joanie Audet
Music Elizabeth Shepherd and Liam Smith with recorded voices from Engagement Féminin 2012
Dramaturge Fiona Griffiths
Musical Advisor John MacLean

Passage is a co-creation by artistic director Jennifer Dallas and company dancer Joanie Audet. Their collaborative work began at Engagement Féminin 2012 in Ouagadougou Burkina Faso. This latest work from Kmi plays with the porousness of the human mind and the mutability of the performer so that the dance which, like thought or inspiration, cannot be frozen in time or captured, and is forever living.

Not unlike listening to an opera or maybe seeing Shakespeare, I had to be lulled into another world of expression, and that transition transported me to a world where movement and tension were how people communicated to each other. - Mooney on Theatre for Passage