Place of the Body

choreographer and dancer

Katie Ward is a choreographer who is based in Montreal. Her performance scores are works that index reality, setting conditions for disrupting the way we see it so that our relationship to it may be re-imagined.

Katie is working on a co-danced project with Taru Miettinen called The Place of the Body and a group piece called Imagination Reality. Both works highlight performer’s subjectivities by accessing their own body archives. These works are minimalist – maximalist pieces in which Katie makes a place for things of all kinds: whole things,  parts of things, anythings…

Past works include Infinity Doughnut and Rock Steady , two ensemble works that treat interconnection. These pieces toured in France and England they were performed at Nottdance festival – hosted by Dance4, Festival Exit at Maison Des Arts de Creteil and Festival Via at Maubeuge. Katie created Matière Grise , a relational solo piece presented at Festival Trans Amériques in Montreal; and Human Synthesizer a solo with two additional performers about reanimating objects from the Theatre.

Taru Miettinen is a dancer and performance artist based in Helsinki. Currently Taru works in a collective formed by 10 artists called PRECARIOUS PRACTICES that organizes a performance- and artistic-research platform in Helsinki area. PRECARIOUS PRACTICES fosters the development of different bodily performative art practices and creates conditions for dancer artists to further their artistic thinking and expertise as something other than (only) hired bodies. Taru has also organized an open reading group/lecture practice, where current philosophers, artists and bodily thinkers lead conversations on topics such as post-humanism, gender, power and different choreographic practices.

Taru’s own artistic work can be described as the appearance of primordial shapes and forms emerging out of a physical research around fluidity, repetition and dark and lighter bodies densities. Taru works with how things come to be through weight, direction and human voice.