MEET YOUR PARTY HOST MARISA GOLD

Marisa Gold

is an empathetic multidisciplinary artist with a passion for all things soulful, holds a BFA in dance (SFU), certificate of completion from The Ailey school Independent Study program (NYC), and graduated from The Graham School 2017/18 Intensive(NYC). She has trained in a wide variety of Modern and Contemporary dance styles. Her professional experience ranges from concert dance to experimental street style performance, musical theatre productions to film/TV work. Alongside her experience as dancer/actor, she has worked professionally as a stylist, spoken word poet and storyteller. Marisa's artistic influences are deeply rooted in the heart space of her ancestors. As a multidisciplinary artist, Marisa continues her poetic wandering; delving with love into the mystery of our collective humanity. She is a frequent MascallDance collaborator, most recently in travelling dance delivery service Privilege At Home, and both New Zealand and Canadian tours of The Impossible has Already Happened. This month she joins our choreographic mini-residency.

Marisa is a co-host of the Dance Party happening Friday October 18th. Don’t miss joining her and all of us for a night of dancing together.

Doors open 6PM at Left of Main ! Please get your tickets at the link below, and enjoy the following conversation with Marisa.

Photo Credit:  Lily Towers

what have you been up to?

At Morrow this summer I did Piece Lily with Ziyian Kwan and Peggy Lee. Ziyian and I discovered we both deeply loved improvisation and loved improvising together, and we built the work through improvisation…discovery on discovery… connections with plants, mandalas, light. We worked hands-on exploring our own lighting, with Jessica Han, (lighting designer).  Our encounters were fun, very rich.  Then I worked with Arash Khakpour and The Biting School on Empty Handed, which just finished a run at the Firehall. It was a very different process of dark themes and transformative characters - but each was an experience of the collaborative and evolving nature of work I’m increasingly drawn to and involved with.

what’s up next? 

Starr Muranko and I have done some research, starting as a solo and now we’re building it into a duet with Ysadora Dias.  Ysa has just started learning the choreography. We’ll expand on it, then bring it to final form through a tech residency at The Dance Centre. We’ll be sharing it at Dance In Vancouver.

now, a mascalldance residency.  You bring your backpack to a quiet open space, unpack it and follow something.  What’s in your backpack?

I’ve had one day so far. I'll be going today as well, right after this call.  The first day, I brought my ukulele, and no, it did not fit in my backpack, but it has its own little backpack! I use my uke to help turn poetry into songs.    I’m really exploring with sound -with my voice and then also the instrument itself.  I play the ukelele for fun –  I’ve never performed or recorded with it-  I'm curious about doing that.  The simplicity of the instrument pulls at the heartstrings, I find it a very nostalgic sound generally.

the Dance Party is coming up - what’re you thinking?  

I’m thinking that when I create my dance to share with folks at the party, the focus is on fun and simplicity, something with a feel that really flows, easy for people to get into and really just enjoy.  I think that’s the goal, to be able to engage with it and join in. I think of simplicity and repetition - when your body starts to know something, then it invites change.  The simplicity is key - it allows space for something to become fun because it's not super challenging.   And that’s important, that people have fun doing it - because then those little inspirations can come through.  Maybe you see someone else, say, adding a flourish - that’s also an inspiration. You could join in on that easily, without feeling hesitant.  Dancing together involves mirroring, hanging off embellishment, connection and feeling, where sharing is natural, a flow and vibe.  

Recently I experienced a line dancing event for the first time. SO fun, really cool.  They had really simple dances everybody joined in on. It was so great to feel such a large group of people all moving together. The repetition just let the dance get more and more grounded and enjoyable.   At one point they also demonstrated dances so hard only the experts could do them.  It didn’t feel disheartening or like you were excluded.  It was inspiring to see, and you felt you’d like to be able to advance to that.  And there were lots of dances with a range of difficulty, so you could already do some and felt you could pick up more in time.

after that, what’s next? 

Starr Muranko and I have done some research that started as a solo. We’re building it into a duet with Ysadora Dias, (another artist in the MascallDance residency). Now Ysa has just started learning the choreography, then we’ll expand on it. We’ll bringing it to final form through a tech residency at The Dance Centre.  We’ll be sharing it at Dance In Vancouver.

can you talk a little about your spoken word practice?

I’d performed text before and been interested in dancing to text, and done a little bit of writing, but I hadn't really put my voice on anything yet or performed when I started doing spoken word poetry performing, in 2018/19. I played with it in Zoom performances, but this year I just did a short (one-day) performance in a series at Progress Lab.

What’s becoming interesting about my voice practice is that now it comes up in every process I enter into. Not only as a way of sounding, which is frequently brought into dance pieces now, but as actual spoken word. Those two things feel very connected - just two different ways of expressing imagery.  I'm a pretty abstract writer at times (depending on if I'm writing for a different project or expressing what I'm feeling or seeing in my mind) and I love how dance, too, can be an abstraction of a story and a sense, or a feeling, or a thought. I also really love musicality and rhythm and that's connected with the spoken word practice. 

In two or three projects I'm working on, I’ve been invited to speak, to perform as a spoken word artist. Not make sound, and not even speak while dancing, but just to stand on stage and to speak. That's been really cool. I think speaking and moving is also an incredible practice. It’s interesting for me to be seen as both a dance performer and a spoken word performer, which feels like a separate sort of storyteller role. Where is it going? I'm not sure, but I’m currently learning a lot from that.  I’m interested in officially releasing a book or two of poetry. I self-published, made some handmade, cardboard-cover books, which was really fun, but a lot of work, and I sold a good number of them, but it's not necessarily sustainable. I’d like people to be able to order my book and for it to have a wider reach, but I haven't given it the focus it needs yet.

Photo Credit:  Lily Towers

what inspires you recently?

Watching friends and colleagues in leadership bring their unique ideas into being and allowing them to be born; lately I’m inspired by the bravery of that.  It’s kind of what we do, in all sorts of big and small ways.

Lately I'm glimpsing what's necessary on the performance and production side to be able to bring a group of people together and create a world. I love the process, love being a part of it, love observing it, but I've been really extra inspired by that:  the work ethic - of writing, writing grants, writing about your work to be,  and the risks -  so much time and energy, and the prospect of refusal, not being funded, an area that’s feeling more tumultuous these days. 

My admiration comes from a place of gratitude. Right now my work is being a part of the projects of others and bringing the worlds that they're creating into being with them.  I'm really grateful for these opportunities, which only exist through the strength of their efforts and feelings.

It can be a very challenging path, this path that we've chosen. I’m in awe of the work that it takes. Being a performer and collaborator takes a lot of work, but I’m in awe of the added work - organizing so much behind the scenes - which allows the work , which I hold so dear, to exist This same work helps develop me as a person. Some of my admiration is wanting to develop those qualities more in myself. 

do ingredients in particular resonate with you? 

Honesty. Non-violent communication. A certain humbleness. Humility in a leader is a part of holding a strong container for a group. There’s this important contrast between the fortification of that container and the softness needed to see each participant as someone you're taking care of in the space.  I don’t mean that the leader is always malleable, flexible – leadership also demands confronting situations.  But these days I’m thinking a lot about leadership as a way of tasking oneself with taking care of this group of people; placing that at the forefront of the creative process. I think it can elicit more from the collaborators because of that feeling of safety, camaraderie.  For me, I hold that way of thinking in deep reverence and respect. 

Working with The Biting School recently, I found something about Arash's process really stabilizing and beautiful.  It’s in part a testament to the group he put together. We did check-ins (something I've done in many different processes) every day. There was something in the way that he invited us to share and held space and a certain amount of time for us, but also space to go a little bit over that time, or not use all of the time, and to describe in any sort of way what was going on within, during that day, that we wanted to share.  Over time, that practice helped us to actually get to know each other much better. And the practice of presence with each other gave us connection points and connection when we were working together later that day.  

There's something about allowing the space for just anything that needed to be put in the room. He really gave us the space with such compassion. I admire that, and I did better work because of it. Not just because of that, but it's just a very tangible example of the value system that there was. Not every process requires the same amount of the same thing.  This was the sort of connection we needed to have to attempt the particular sort of work we were doing.  

It definately takes guts to invest the time and risk that the work requires, when you think of how much money it costs to assemble a group of people in a room.

Totally. Yeah, it's very brave. Very.