Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery, Moose Jaw Cultural Centre, and Wakamow Aboriginal Community Association
in partnership with
New Dance Horizons / Rouge-gorge
PRESENT
Rouge-gorge ON TOUR featuring live contemporary dance works including:
THIS
RE-Tangled 
QUADRIGA in the Rock Garden 

Performance date and times (free admission):
October 1, 2022
10:00 am - Kinsmen Park, WACA Powwow & Gathering (with a glimpse of QUADRIGA in the Rock Garden)
7:30 pm – Mae Wilson Theatre (full program)

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 Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery, September 30, 2022,
the exhibition runs through December 31, 2022.
Opening Reception – October 1st, 3:00 – 5:00 pm
Artist Talk at 3:00 pm
 
NDH/Rouge-gorge gratefully acknowledges support from the following: 
Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery, Moose Jaw Community Centre,
SK Arts, City of Regina, Canada Council for the Arts, Dance Saskatchewan Inc, Sask Lotteries,
City of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority, Grant Hall Hotel, Gemmell's Shoes,
Wakamow Aboriginal Community Association, and Sole Connection Neighbourhood Wellness.

QUADRIGA in the Rock Garden
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 in the Rock Garden, is created in conjunction with
Edward Poitras’ 4-part exhibition entitled Revolution in the Rock Garden curated by Jennifer McRorie. 

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 in Constantinople and 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 in the Rock Garden features a group of dance and theatre artists, including: Johanna Bundon, Krista Solheim, Vuyo Ginindza and
I-Ying Wu (Regina- based), Bongani Musa (Saskatoon- based), Anastasia Evsigneeva, Anna Protsiou, Sophie Milord, Jace Hodges (Winnipeg- based), Mistaya Hemingway (Montreal-based), and
​Eloi Homier (Vancouver-based).

Photo by 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 Daniel Paquet

RE-Tangled
“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 ended with a complete separation of their bodies moving in concentric circles to opposite directions.”

- Robin Poitras, C.M.

Photo by Leif Norman

eclipse 
Featured in Edward Poitras' exhibition, Revolution in the Rock Garden, is a film work entitled, eclipse.  A collaborative creation                         by Robin Poitras C.M., Edward Poitras and filmmaker Larry Bauman, eclipse features the late Lhasa de Sela’s extraordinary song,              ‘Soon this space will be too small.’  

Echoing the themes of birth and death in Lhasa’s song, eclipse captures a moment in time: a dance on a rock in a field with the wild winds of Mongolia lit by a remarkable sunrise August 1st, 2008 on the day of a full solar eclipse.
​
Originally captured on video by Edward Poitras, eclipse is expanded to screen by filmmaker Larry Bauman.