Meet the artist: Alexa Mardon
BLOOM 2021 presents:
7PM, December 16, 17, 18 2021 at Left of Main, 211 Keefer Street, 2nd Floor. Tickets are limited. To reserve yours, please email: operations@mascalldance.ca
Introducing choreographer Alexa Mardon:
(they/them/theirs)
“Bloom allows for time in studio to work both big picture and minutely. To play with expansive ideas and the choreographic container of 5 minutes is a fun experiment. Having a platform to play and experiment in front of audiences feels like a precious thing at this time!
Over the last 5 years, I have had the opportunity to expand my skills and learn from Jennifer Mascall in a number of different capacities. My work with Mascalldance as an interpreter, artistic associate, and workshop coordinator has allowed for a lively intergenerational exchange that I continue to be nourished by as a choreographer, dancer, and community member.”
Alexa Mardon
Alexa's practice includes making dances, writing about dances, dancing, teaching, and community actions, often overlapping and blurring together. Dance is the practice through which they sense and engage with the world around them, build nervous-system resilience, and gather in creative resistance and joy with existing and emergent community.
@movement_study is devoted to practices of gathering, collaborations with the dream realm, and collective sensing. Alexa studies movement through dancing, bodywork, support work and poetry. Alexa is a queer second-generation settler of Finnish/Karelian/British Isles descent living as an uninvited guest on the illegally occupied, unceded Coast Salish territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples. In Alexa’s work with Mardon + Mitsuhashi, Alexa trips out on the feeling of not quite knowing where they end and Erika begins. They are excited for this opportunity to deep dive further with their life partner Erika, and to weave closer with Sasha's artistry.
With Erika Mitsuhashi, they make interdisciplinary performances as Mardon + Mitsuhashi. As a dancer, they have performed for companies and artists including Sasha Kleinplatz (MTL), Benjamin Kamino (MTL), dumb instrument dance (Vancouver), MascallDance (Vancouver), battery opera performance (Vancouver/Toronto), and Justine A. Chambers (Vancouver).
Alexa's writing and choreography have been presented across time and space, including with Summerworks Festival, OFFTA, The Dance Centre, Charcuterie Magazine, ISSUE Magazine, VIVO Media Arts Centre, and Made In BC.
Their BLOOM Piece Title is: All at Once
Alexa and Erika (Mardon + Mitsuhashi) are excited to have this Bloom residency time to play and experiment with their sound/music collaborator, Sasha J. Langford in research for a new work, All at Once. All at Once is an augury, a celebration, and an unravelling. In All at Once, we implement the technology of blurring to channel angler fish, sexy ancestors, parties, and ghosts.
Photo Credit: Cara Tench