Readymade Dance

In Readymade Dance, choreographer Andre Gingras continues to work with his longtime collaborator, the dramaturge/associate director Sue Jane Stoker. The new piece, a response to Duchamp’s famous readymades, will use found movements from boxing matches as the basis of its choreographic language. Gingras and Stoker consider the sport a “readymade” performance language with the essence of theater spectacle: extreme physicality, pathos, and Brechtian commentary.

The work will be a duet/duel between two performers and a powerful link between the arena sensibility of professional fighting sports and theater, situating the former in a theater context. The dancers will be trained in boxing and kickboxing and will actually fight. The audience will be invited to choose one of the “fighters” to support and will be seated in the section that corresponds to their fighter-dancer. Readymade Dance is being developed at Watermill for a premiere at Rabozaal in Amsterdam.

In his award-winning work, Andre Gingras strives to push dance to the limits of extreme physicality, working with other physical forms, such as breakdancing (in the Bessie-winning CYP17), capoiera (in The Lindenmeyer System), and freerunning (in The Autopsy Project). He has always sought to work in an interdisciplinary fashion, working with text and theatrical situations, video, animation, and installation as important components of his choreographic vision.

Gingras and Stoker have worked together on a number of pieces, beginning in 2000 with CYP17. Both have been collaborators of Robert Wilson since 1993. Gingras was recently appointed Artistic Director of DanceWorks in Rotterdam.