July/August 2013
Dance Central A Dance Centre Publication
The Most Together We've Ever Been A conversation with Ame Henderson
Ame Henderson and Matija Ferlin are two choreographers who have been collaborating since 2003, in addition to their solo careers, under the Public Records performance umbrella. This July, they will be presenting their work The Most Together We've Ever Been at Scotiabank Dance Centre as part of the 2013 Dancing on the Edge Festival.
AK: The Most Together We've Ever Been is a work that has reconfigured
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itself with each new presentation and performance venue. What is the strategy, especially in respect to how the audience experiences the space that you and your collaborators create? AH: It is a piece that brings out different values with each presentation, depending on what the interest of a presenter or an audience member is. For example, during a recent presentation at a festival of duet-based works in Ottawa, we discovered a lot about how this piece provided us as collaborators with a way of investigating our relationship, both to each other, and to the act of performing. We noticed how these two things become collapsed in this project, since we had worked together a lot, and
The Most Together We've Ever Been A conversation with Ame Henderson Page 1
A Note from the Executive Director Mirna Zagar
were looking to re-frame that relationship and to find a way of working on something that was co-created and co-performed. For me, the work is is mostly a playful interrogation of the act of meeting an audience, of the stage as a ground to suggest an encounter, but we work on holding off on 'developing' that encounter, so that the question keeps getting raised over and over again. This might seem conceptual and somewhat tedious, but it is actually quite lighthearted and funny, because of our dynamic with each other and the rigour we use in making these aborted attempts.
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Dancing on the Edge Calendar Page 6
AK: The audience is being invited into a space that is usually off limits; it is rare for us to be invited to wander onto the dance floor, especially in the context of large theatrical presentations, with a proscenium stage and moat. The piece breaks these conventions, and creates a deliberate transgression, but in such a way that the encounter is controlled and maintains
Thinking Bodies: Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg Page 10
separation in the frame. AH: I wold say we don't break these conventions but reiterate them, in order to invite the spectator to consider their role in that framing. In general continued on page 2