>>PREVIEW
DANCING IN TONGUES
Opens May 25
MoMo Mixed Ability Dance Theatre
Vertigo Studio Theatre (Tower Centre)
MoMo Dance Theatre doesn’t see challenges as obstacles to be overcome and left in the dust of progress. Instead, co-founder and current artistic director Pamela Boyd uses her cast’s unique characteristics, considered by others to be limitations, as catalysts for art. Rather than masking or assimilating impediments, whether physical, mental or professional, Boyd uses them as guiding incentives to create her company’s pieces.
As Calgary’s first integrated dance company, MoMo offers workshop collaboration between amateur performers and professional teachers from the artistic community, extending an equal invitation to those with and without disabilities. Although anyone can participate in the workshops, only those who have been with the company a year or more may join the MoMo ensemble. The ensemble, along with four guest dancers, performs its latest piece, Dancing in Tongues, at the Vertigo Studio Theatre on May 25 and 26.
Founded in 2003, MoMo was created from a collision between Boyd’s day job in front-line support for people with disabilities and her 40-year career in theatre. Though the two other co-founders, yoga and movement instructor George McFaul and choreographer and dance teacher Laurie Montemurro, have since moved on, Boyd continues as the company’s artistic director and member of the core MoMo ensemble. Boyd uses her connections in the artistic community to invite artists to work with her cast, including Anita Miotti, Val Campbell, Naomi Brand and Trina Rasmuson, as the four guests contributing to Dancing in Tongues.
"MoMo’s mandate is to bring professional performance artists together with people with disabilities and potential artists with disabilities," Boyd says. "Almost each piece is directed and led by a different artist in the community. They take workshops with us and get to know the company, and I support the teachers in getting around difficulties that they encounter."
Instead of looking for a way to minimize the difficulties in teaching those with attention disorders to focus, or those with memory problems to recall lines and actions, Boyd incorporates these differences and uses them to inspire her work.
"Some people are artists that create simply out of what’s going on in their heads or their hearts or souls. Some people are artists by designing a set around a script. We as a company are artists by using and exploring the differences in order to create," explains Boyd. "So we’re not teaching one group of people to perform like they don’t have a disability, that’s not the point."
Choreography at MoMo focuses on celebration, not exclusion. Boyd stresses that MoMo is not a disability dance company, but a mixed ability company open to anyone who wants to explore their physicality in a dramatic setting. While she and her co-founders focused on movement-based pieces, they have since moved to a more inclusive mandate. Their latest creation collects six distinct pieces under a theme of vocalization. In one, an ensemble member worked with a mentor to compose a tuba solo for himself, using the horn as another type of vocal communication. Boyd incorporates other types of vocalization, using the simplicity of speech as a soundtrack, while simultaneously dealing with the cast’s attention and memory issues.
"As we worked into the piece, the support people, the professionals within the piece talked through it," she says. "So we were saying, ‘Now we reach up, and we reach up, reach up, and then we crawl down, and then we reach up…’ There was this murmur that ran through the whole piece that became part of the creative expression of that piece."
MoMo Dance bills itself as a mixed ability company, fully integrating those with and without disabilities, with and without professional training, and now, with and without sound. Without defining people based on their ability, she celebrates the uniqueness of her cast by emphasizing their creativity over their perceived disability. "It stimulates me as an artist and allows us to go in completely new directions," Boyd says, "to explore whatever we want to express through those different abilities." |
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