Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre, Medicine Hat
in partnership with
New Dance Horizons / Rouge-gorge
PRESENT
Rouge-gorge ON TOUR featuring live contemporary dance works including:
QUADRIGA
THIS
Re-Tangled

Performance date and times:
Wednesday September 27, 2023 
10:00 am - Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre (full program)
11:00 am - Artist Talk with Edward Poitras & Robin Poitras 

Collaboratively created by Edward Poitras & Robin Poitras C.M.,
 these performance works are presented in conjunction with Edward Poitras’ exhibition, Revolution in the Rock Garden,
Opening at the Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre (401 1st Street SE Medicine Hat, AB) June 21, 2023,
the exhibition runs through September 30, 2023.
 
NDH/Rouge-gorge gratefully acknowledges support from the following: 
Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre, Co-Op Place,
SK Arts, and Dance Saskatchewan Inc. 

In The Media: 

• Medicine Hat News Article

---

QUADRIGA
This live dance-based performance work began in a shared studio on Regina’s Scarth Street Mall in 1983, where Edward Poitras was creating an installation work, entitled Big Iron Sky, and simultaneously, Robin Poitras was creating solo dance works. These processes resulted in Das Cheval Dance (1984), one of the first collaborative performance-based works by Robin Poitras and Edward Poitras. 

This new edition of the horse dance draws from a body of horse dance works that Edward Poitras and Robin Poitras have developed over the past 4 decades. 

QUADRIGA is created in conjunction with Edward Poitras’ 4-part exhibition entitled Revolution in the Rock Garden.

QUADRIGA in the Rock Garden, is inspired by historical and mythical resonances from ancient to contemporary images, ideas and stories of human and horse relationships. From the triumphant quadriga originally of the Hippodrome of Constantinople and the film, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010) along with other horse tales, seeking the rhythms of Saskatchewan’s ancient sea and possibly forgotten dances. 

QUADRIGA features a group of dance and theatre artists, including: Johanna Bundon, Marcus Merasty, Krista Solheim, Anna Protsiou, Brooke Hess, Caitlin Sarna, Tessa Rae Kuz, Brooke Hess and Anne Neudorf

QUADRIGA
BY EDWARD POITRAS AND ROBIN POITRAS
PERFORMER: JOHANNA BUNDON
PHOTO CREDIT:  EDWARD POITRAS

THIS 
emerged out of the 2nd staging of a group work entitled 
END OF WINTER 2017.

Exploring the tip of an iceberg, a side story to the End of Winter,
​asking what happened in the details between the cracks in the ice when the interconnections were lost.

​Alone adrift, afloat on a carpet of ice, Krista and her fur bundle are separated. THIS, explores edges of loss and recovery, in the perpetual slip stream of a changing landscape.

Photo by Chris Randle

Re-Tangled
Choreography: Edward Poitras and Robin Poitras, C.M.
Dancers: Anastasia Evsigneeva and Anna Protsiou
Music: Chiyoko Szlavnics

Over the past 3 years, Edward Poitras and I have greatly enjoyed working with Anastasia and Anna. Through an ongoing mentorship process and their commissioning of new work from us, we determined to create Re-Tangled, in response to and as a remixing of their duet dance and dance on film creation entitled TANGLED.

Our process has been intermittent and realized through the intensity and lockdowns of COVID. There have been many sources of research and inspiration and we have worked through every season from the deep freeze of prairie winter to the blazing heat of prairie summer and with the wonderful seasonal transformations between.

Travel between our respective homes has been a part of the process and through this back and forth like the mysterious tumbleweed, with uncertain origins and unknown destinations we began one day with Anna and Anastasia entangled on the floor of New Dance Horizons studio to Théâtre Cercle Molière, in Winnipeg where this version of Re-Tangled ends with a complete separation of their bodies moving in concentric circles to opposite directions.

We are grateful for the rich research we’ve shared and to collaborators: Chiyoko Szlavnics for her brilliant composition Gradients Of Detail, to Derek Tomilin for making the set pieces, to Hugh Conacher for Lighting Design and to Farley Chatto for costumes. And to Anastasia and Anna for their curious, persistent, generous and creative movement.

“Imagine a human body rebuilt in the alchemy of something which is not from the body, but is from the landscape, from the world.”
​-Brazilian artist known simply and sonorously as Tunga.

Photo by Daniel Paquet