Monumental
2016 | 3 channels HD | Color | Live Music | 60min
Directed by Dana Gingras (Animals of Distinction)
Contribution: Projection Design
Monumental is an elegiac investigation into the physical anxiety of urban culture. In an ever-accelerating climate of greed and ambition, personal relationships are subjected to group identity and human connection becomes increasingly difficult. Even as some individuals are made larger than life, most break and topple under the strain.
Monumental is set to live music by Godspeed You! Black Emperor combined with textual elements from visual artist Jenny Holzer’s series Living, film projections, and a cityscape environment sculpted by light. The nine dancers execute the choreography like a series of stop motion photographs or edits in a film. Structured against the desire for continuity and wholeness is the fragmentation and rupture of images – stopped in mid action, jarring, suddenly stilled. Each character is caught in the machinations of love, war, chaos and death. Separated by the physical barriers of the city and the rigidity of social order, the yearning for shared and abiding values is nurtured like a secret shame: desires, indicative of fragility and need, are silenced. Within this isolation, the need for intimacy remains, furtive and hidden beneath looming towers. In the disjunction between immaculate facades and human fragility, innocence is the first loss.
2016
The Hearn Generating Station, Toronto (Canada) — June 14 and 15