Heather Mah, photo credit Angelo Barsetti
MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels)
announces new dates for the following performances, which were cancelled after the closing of art venues in Québec on October 1, 2020 due to COVID-19
HEATHER MAH: Pomegranate
NOV. 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 2020 ⏤ 7:30PM
DIANA LEÓN: Sur ce chemin, tu es sûre de te perdre
DEC. 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 2020 ⏤ 7:30PM
KAMA LA MACKEREL: ZOM-FAM
DEC. 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 2020 ⏤ 7:30PM
We are waiting, waiting for winter, waiting for spring, waiting for the US elections to be over, waiting for this pandemic to end, waiting for magic, for pay day, for the water to boil, for the movie to start…
We are waiting for Heather Mah, Diana León & Kama La Mackerel to take the stage.
…waiting, waiting, just waiting.
Wait with us will you not?
We think you will share with us in thinking ‘it was well worth the wait’.
Pomegranate, by the Montreal choreographer and performer Heather Mah, will finally have its premiere at MAI from November 24 to 28, 2020, after two postponements due to the pandemic. Dance aficionados will definitely not want to miss this!
For Pomegranate, Heather Mah has taken her inspiration primarily from her family history and specifically the story of her grandmother, who was born in China at the end of the nineteenth century and brought to Canada at the age of 15. She married, becoming a second wife, and then returned to China after her husband’s death, just before the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937. This piece delicately sketches the imagined journey of this woman, who sought to escape her war-torn country but ultimately died there at the age of 60, despite all the efforts made to rescue her.
Pomegranate, Heather Mah’s first major solo, draws a fragmented portrait of migration. By probing deep into the memory of her forebear, she brings life to the dance and the trajectory of her performance, tapping into springs of energy and images. The underlying themes emerge: isolation, solitude, suffering, opening up to others, the search for new meaning – and the choreographer bears witness to these universal preoccupations that resonate with current great migrations and global upheavals. The artist’s purpose is not to recreate the story of a life, but to reveal its scope by linking it to the present through movement and poetic form.
Pomegranate is a performance and a tribute, a duty of memory, an intimate and introspective journey between the past and the present. The piece also marks the year the artist turns 60, the very age of her grandmother when she died. At this age, the body is no longer merely beautiful, but also experienced. The title refers to the fruit and to the fertility and femininity it symbolizes, particularly in China. It also calls up rejuvenation and resurrection after great loss. With its seeds tightly held inside its hard skin, it evokes the difficulty of entering easily into cohesion with the world.
SUR CE CHEMIN, TU ES SÛRE DE TE PERDRE
A multidisciplinary solo that plunges into a process of self-knowledge
Sur ce chemin, tu es sûre de te perdre is a powerful evocation of the pleasure of finding your own rhythm, echoing those around you and inspiring you.
Sur ce chemin, tu es sûre de te perdre is a multidisciplinary solo, somewhere between dance, theatre and music, is the fruit of three collaborations between Diana León and emerging creators Parco Ziel, Jeremy Galdeano and Vera Kvarcakova. Their guiding theme is knowledge of the self and the work necessary – amidst social pressures, inner demons and aspirations – to find one’s own voice. With compositions by Alejandro Loredo, Tom Jarvis and Diana León, Sur ce chemin, tu es sûre de te perdre is a powerful evocation of the pleasure in finding one’s own rhythm, in response to those who surround and inspire us. Based on Charles Eisenstein’s text Letter to my younger self, the work explores the decisive moment that encourages us to take the personal journey that will allow us to know who we really are. During this journey, we face our demons and, if we succeed, we free ourselves from social pressures to find our voice and follow our own rhythm: compose our life song.
This work is the result of three successive collaborations between Diana Leónand emerging creators (Parco Ziel, Jeremy Galdeano, Vera Kvarcakova)
ZOM-FAM
By Kama La Mackerel
ZOM-FAM interweaves narratives that bring together ancestral voices, femme tongues, broken colonial languages and a tender queer subjectivity, all of which are grappling with the legacy of plantation servitude.
The piece deploys the family home as a literary and scenographic space onto which is mapped the plantation island, making of the home-(is)land a performative and political trope that exposes the leakages of the colonial condition into the intimacy of the home. Emerging from a creative process in poetry, storytelling, song, ritual, dramaturgy and dance (Kathak, contemporary dance and Mauritian sega), the work invites its audience onto an intimate journey into the literary, spatial, choreographic and scenographic vocabularies of a subjectivity that is rich, multiple and hybrid— a voice that is at once queer and decolonial, African and South-Asian, masculine and feminine, contemporary and ancestral.
ZOM-FAM is composed of coming-of-age stories of a gender-creative child growing up in the 80s and 90s on a plantation island. Multiply-voiced and imbued with complex storytelling, ZOM-FAM enunciates a multiplicity of movements.
ZOM-FAM was also published a collection of lyric poetry by Metonymy Press in September 2020.
INFO
WHERE?
MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels)
3680 Jeanne-Mance
HOW MUCH?$10 Single rate season 20.21* $0 — Accompanying person for spectators with a disability
m-a-i.qc.ca/en/boxoffice/
514-982-3386
MAI & COVID-19
HEALTH / SAFETY PROTOCOL
To ensure the safety of everyone, MAI has implemented a set of preventive measures recommended and required by the health authorities of Quebec, Canada and the World Health Organization in terms of personal hygiene and the use of enclosed public spaces, including daily disinfection of frequently touched public surfaces in our spaces.
| In keeping with this spirit, MAI is favouring intimism. The theatre is transfigured with an installation by Paul Chambers, a Montreal-based lighting specialist and visual artist, reconfigured in such a way that only 22 audience members can attend each showing. |
For full information about the venue’s COVID protocol and updates head to:
m-a-i.qc.ca/en/covid-19/
