Left of PuSh RELAY

Left of PuSh is Plastic Orchid Factory’s platform intended for dance makers working in the margins to share “experiments-in-process” with a public.

This year POF has partnered with Mile Zero Dance, Studio 303, and the CanDance Network to facilitate RELAY, a tri-city handoff where three artists will carry their works from Montreal, to Vancouver and then Edmonton; Moving from seedling ideas, to full production — developing, and refining their propositions at each stop.

Kait Ramsden’s (Vancouver) Do You Love Me? is an interdisciplinary performance that explores the intersection of female desire and its censorship – particularly how the female body and its sexual agency are controlled, fragmented, and repressed by digital and societal forces. Do You Love Me? wonders: which fantasies serve to enliven a sense of self and which dismantle it? Through live video mixing, contemporary dance, datamoshing, poetry, and sound, DYLM interrogates how desire itself becomes a source of censorship, not only through the overt objectification of women in media but also through the insidious ways in which the female form is kept from its wholeness, its full visibility, and autonomy.

Camille Huang from Montreal presents Puncture and Pull, which is an inquiry on contact between the body and the ‘puncture and pull’ of the sewing machine. Objects, sound and dance converge to explore gendered attributions surrounding repetition, touch, machinery and its parts. The performer works with gestures haunted by a physical intimacy and industry. Describing the motion of a sewing needle, Puncture and Pull also has an unlikely convergence with a chewing mechanism of predatory animals. The body becomes charged with pattern, pull, insistence, and a fleshy intertwining with machine histories.

And, Edmonton’s Stephanie Cumming and Chris Bullough’s fort. is a meeting of old friends who connected as teenagers over a love of musical theatre in the remoteness of northern Alberta in the early 90’s. They revisit their past and attempt to process the ambivalence they share about where they grew up and the confrontation that exists with their present realities of living as artists.

This is a two day on the 28th at 4pm pst, followed by a casual industry mixer, and Jan 31 at 6pm