Every episode was an experiment in curated collaborations. Artists were selected to work together on a unique Jump Cut episode, and each ambitious and inspiring teaming resulted in a singular digital artwork. To offer maximum freedom to the artists during such unprecedented and challenging times, Dana Gingras gave minimal input as a curator: She only selected the collaborators. They were given one simple instruction: That the body needed to be central to the creation. Almost all the pieces reference dance or kinaesthetic space as a result. What also emerged was a relationship between the body and space. These responses can be divided into two categories: The body's relation to fictional spaces (episodes 2, 5, 6), or the body's relation to actual environments (episodes 1, 3, 4.) Yet in moments the actual environments become stranger than the fictional.
In her work, Gingras has consistently explored the body and its increasing day to day mediation with technology. In a statement about her experience creating Jump Cut, she says:
»I love to look at how technology distorts the body's relationship with time and physical space. Working in the virtual space of Jump Cut became an exciting new lens on this practice, one that was more intimate and immediate than the large stages I’m used to working on. It has also been fascinating to share this opportunity with artists, to see what artists who are new to each other do with this terrain, and how they engage with this problem of the body in this current and strange digital space. I'm inspired to see and share these dance films that aren't about dance; dance films that aren't directed at the gaze of other dancers. These films walk a strange line between music and digital art, they live outside of the normal language of performance. They are films about bodies that inhabit spaces, and spaces that inhabit bodies. Films that document the creative possibilities inherent in such unprecedented times.«
»Jump Cut« premiered at CTM 2021 and will reach its conclusion at our Contact 2022 edition.
Jump Cut #1: Tot Onyx, Sonya Stefan, Dana Gingras
The inaugural episode features low-fi video artist Sonya Stefan (Montreal), musician/composer Tot Onyx (Berlin), and choreographer/performer Dana Gingras (Montreal) who first collaborated in 2018 on a live performance, titled »anOther.« They have created an eerie offering set in a lost space that leads nowhere, filled with disembodied and embodied presences that roam, haunt, taunt, and multiply each other across planes.
Jump Cut #2: Marie Davidson, Sabrina Ratté, Dana Gingras
Featuring electronic musician Marie Davidson (Montreal), 3D video artist Sabrina Ratté (Paris) and choreographer/performer Dana Gingras (Montreal), this episode is inspired by galaxies of light, and the star beings and oceanic creatures of the earth that we are. The body as a living sculpture expresses itself through its blood, bones, and breath. Employing 3D scanning techniques, the human body is morphed into a virtual one. The organic and virtual engage with each other through a minutiae of synaptic initiations and rhythmic twitches, disrupting our sense of time and space.
Jump Cut #3: Austin Young, Alaska Thunderfuck, Willam Belli, Laganja Estranja, Peaches, and Dana Gingras
Jump Cut #3 (aka »Them«) is created by multimedia artist Austin Young. This short experimental film exploits transformative performance artists and drag stars Willam Belli, Laganja Estranja, and Alaska Thunderfuck in a 21-minute surrealistic fairy tale which digs up backyard issues of identity and morality. The three muses of subculture embody our collective hunger for meaningful relationships within marginalised spaces of mainstream Hollywood in this mini camp masterpiece, featuring music by queer icon, Peaches and performances by Love Connie, Johnny Smith, Siri, and Nadya Ginsburg as »The Worm.«
Jump Cut #4: Lucrecia Dalt, Aina Climent, Judit J. Ferrer, and Miguel Prado
This fourth episode, titled »Pedis Possessio,« is an audiovisual collaborative essay by Lucrecia Dalt, Aina Climent, Judit J. Ferrer, and Miguel Prado. An extraterrestrial lifeform visits the earth and stratifies itself into a geologic formation. When humans come into contact with this formation, their phenomenological time consciousness is altered. The work incorporates formulaic choreographic rituals held in different places around the island of Mallorca.
Jump Cut #5: Charline Dally, Roger Tellier-Craig, and Sarah Williams
Episode 5 is a frenetic, sensorial exploration of space within an environment where the elements of movement, sound, and the body inextricably merge. Images seen from the vantage point of a camera gradually melt into erosion until rendered indistinguishable from each other. Roger Tellier-Craig’s composition for this work takes from algorithmic processes of rhythm that mimic the unpredictable, pulsing shifts of the film.
Jump Cut #6: Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Chloe Alexandra Thompson, and Brenna Murphy
The sixth episode pairs Montreal-based dance artist Hanako Hoshimi-Caines with New York-based sound artist Chloe Alexandra Thompson, and Portland-based artist Brenna Murphy. Their collaboration aims to intuitively find abstract meanings through mutual aesthetic exercises, exploring subtle energy lines as infrastructure, and ritual as a way to extend bodies across time in choreographies of human and non-human interaction. Sitting in the tension of attachment to »objects« as an ownership equation, the artists feel the knotted dynamics of agency between object and subject, or in other words, they sense that all things have a spirit.
Created by: Animals Of Distinction
Artistic Director: Dana Gingras
Producer: Sarah Rogers
Production Manager: Dominique Sarrazin
Administrator: Stephanie Murphy
»Jump Cut« Collaborators: Sonya Stefan, Tot Onyx, Marie Davidson, Sabrina Ratté, Austin Young, Peaches, Alaska, Willam Belli, Laganja Estranja, Lucrecia Dalt, Aina Climent, Judit J. Ferrer, Miguel Prado, Charline Dally, Roger Tellier-Craig, Sarah Williams, Brenna Murphy, Chloe Alexander Thompson, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines.
Commissioned by CTM Festival. Created with support from Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec. Presented at CTM with support from the Embassy of Canada to Germany, in Berlin.