Two Chairs, a Wet Canvas project by Pauline Jennings and Joshua Lacourse
“Two Chairs” is a contemporary dance duet seeking to spark the fire of connection and blaze the trail of shared humanity between pairs of sentient beings. As their two bodies quake, cry, clutch and console, viewers will be invited to witness co-choreographers Jennings and Lacourse diligently working to understand each other in a formidable act of endurance and benevolence. Moored in a realm between bliss, outrage, curiosity and trust, the duet will voyage through a necessary ritual of human trial and perseverance.
The 20-minute duet is intended to be performed hourly between noon-8pm outside Burlington City Hall, surrounded by the bustling Church Street pedestrian-way; a public space where people typically gather and undertake the often tedious and clumsy effort required to connect. The recurring form serves two purposes: (1) to make the work accessible to community members who would otherwise struggle to experience art in their daily routine, including those who work multiple jobs, have young children, or may be traveling from rural areas outside Burlington, and (2) to demonstrate the essential, ritual nature of endeavoring to further one’s understanding of self and other. Viewers may watch “Two Chairs” in one sitting or catch glimpses throughout their day. Though the duet will be rigorously rehearsed, we will design a responsive choreographic structure that enables us to alter our interactions and evolve in our individual and shared movement experiences.
“Two Chairs” will communicate the urgency with which we seek to understand self and other through earnest and recurring choreography relying upon movement to blur the boundaries between performance and reality and disrupt expectations of dance and public space. We set out to surprise and welcome all involved as we demonstrate, unquestionably, the importance of adapting, persisting and resisting comfort. We perform in order to galvanize community empathy and curiosity into acts of compassion. By embodying our ideas, we hope to catapult personal dreams into community impact; embolding all who come within view of “Two Chairs” with a similar desire to approach each other with compassion and recognize in each other reflections of self.
Community Engagement
We choreograph duets fueled by a desire to unite individuals and eliminate barriers to experiencing contemporary dance. We celebrate diverse histories, identities, and perspectives by calmly, compassionately, and methodically attempting to deepen our understanding of self, each other, and all whom we cross paths with. We do so by presenting duets that are accessible, free and inclusive through content and presentation. “Two Chairs” will engage rural communities and build our network of site designers, photographers, and video artists through free, public performances and work-in-progress showings.
Grounded in earnest pragmatism and patient endurance, our work echoes the vast and bucolic Vermont landscape and a community that cherishes autonomy, neighborly trust and acceptance. Our choreographic structure is devised to candidly model these attributes and emphasize the effort required to attain them. Gestural repetition is layered upon responsive frameworks enabling us to spontaneously alter our actions, spawning new outcomes with each recurrence and creating a transformative experience as viewers imagine themselves in our stead. Our movement style is startling in its familiarity, echoing fundamental human experiences as they often are – frustrating, awkward, delicate and alluring. Unembellished and sacred, each idea is distilled into the most potent physical form possible to spark revelation and dialog.
Our ambition is to introduce non-traditional audiences to free, public, and accessible performances created with the knowledge that they, the viewers, are at the heart and soul of the work’s mission. We wish to captivate community members who don’t often attend dance, don’t think they can understand dance, or don’t see themselves as our target audience, because they are. We aim to remain responsive to our communities, allowing feedback to further challenge our personal assumptions so that our work becomes more capable of connecting strangers and neighbors, alike. Our purposeful plan to create an 8-hour performance event, revolving around the brief, but intense, 20-minute duet, is designed to give audiences a casual glimpse into what it’s like to experience contemporary dance without overwhelming or inconveniencing hesitant viewers. Whether viewers stay for part of an hour, multiple hours, or drop in throughout the day, we will welcome all into our world of contemporary dance.
Previous Work
We have been co-creating and performing in duets that are rooted in joy and fueled by a desire to unite individuals since 2018. Anchored in love and compelled by a deep desire for acceptance and trust, we confront our own vulnerabilities and fears head-on as we aspire to share moments of unabashed beauty and wonder. “Two Chairs” is a direct step in our artistic evolution. Since 2018, we have been creating duets rooted in joy and fueled by a desire to unite individuals. We have coaxed the best out of one another through slow, delicate movement aimed at building trust and familiarity. “Two Chairs” will demand this strong foundation as moments of stillness and delicacy struggle to manifest in a significantly more confrontational and urgent work. While we have patiently explored the space between our bodies in past works, “Two Chairs” will accentuate the definitive lines between self and other while attempting to rebuke them.
“Sea Inside Our Skin” (50 min., 2018, Burlington City Hall), provided an opportunity to experiment with responsive form, close audience proximity, and a method for co-choreographing and building trust through minimalistic movement dotted with spontaneity. “neighboring|towns: Skiers,” (9 min., 2019, Hamiltonian Gallery, Washington DC) prompted us to find unadulterated joy in genuinely attempting to understand how and why the other moves, despite extreme public conditions: the U.S.-Canada border separating us, border patrol scrutinizing us and a snowstorm raging around us. In “13 Minutes of Nothing (Give or Take)” (2019, Lake Studios Berlin, Germany) we scrutinized the difficulty of observing the world through another’s eyes, while stripping away all nonessential performance elements to identify key movements needed to enrapture audiences and convey meaning. Performed without lighting cues or musical accompaniment, the duet sought to oppose the trappings of theatrical dance, striving instead toward simplicity, familiarity and fundamental human expression. As our duets continue to evolve, our reason for choreographing together and offering our work to the scrutiny of others remains unwavering: the process of seeking to understand another human being is one we could pursue for the rest of our lives; we are delighted to do so through highly public contemporary dances.
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