March 9, 2010 Fringe Arts

Move it

Visual art asks for the first dance at Visceral Reactions

by R. Brian Hastie

Work by student Jessica Watchorn, on display at Visceral Reactions.

“Movement is transformation,” said Dylan Parks. Visceral Reactions, the one-night Art Matters event she co-curated with Emily Leblanc, shows that those three simple words are much more complex when one considers the implications of the transformation.

Visceral Reactions includes seven performance pieces, four visual artists and three video submissions. But the focus, Leblanc explained, is on “drawing a link between visual art and dance.”

“They’re so seldom put together, and they influence each other so much,” added Parks, a dance student at Concordia along with Leblanc.

“We wanted to provide a different environment to view dance,” Leblanc said. “Usually you sit quietly and the show begins, and I thought it would be interesting to have a vernissage before and people can talk about the show, create more of a social environment before viewing [the performance].”

The curatorial statement Leblanc and Parks originally submitted to the festival summarized their goals to reveal how visual art affects dance and vice versa—and how both transform the human body.

“Our visual artists, especially the photography and the paintings, convey a sense of movement,” Parks said. One photographer, Maxime Brouillet, will show a set of photos of himself dancing, a narrative told through stills. “It’s incredible how they’ve transformed one art form into another—at least that’s how we’re relating the two.”

Visceral Reactions is on for one night only at Studio 303 in the Belgo Building (372 Ste-Catherine St. W., room 303) on March 13 at 6 p.m. Performances are at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.