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Rokuro (The Wheel)
Collaboration with choreographers/performers Takako Segawa and Suzanne Liska, and composer/performer Heidi Chan. We draw on various aesthetic forms, including East Asian musical traditions and instrumentation, Taiko (drumming), ceramic arts, dance/theatre, and relationships to material objects and artifacts. The live dance/music performance coexists with the staged Japanese-inspired garden created by Jennie Vallis, tea ceremony for the audience by Momo tea featuring John Ikeda’s pottery, and video by Yves Soglo. Other collaborators: Tedd Robinson/Maxine Heppner Choreographic mentor, Gabriel Cropley Lighting designer, Mayumi Lashbrook Stage Manager, Eray Guler Videographer, Jae Yang Photographer, Emiko Nagato Costume Designer, Momo Tea Artists, RAW Taiko Drummers. | ||
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Thread Bound
Created and performed by dancers Suzanne Liska and Kathleen Rea with dramaturgy by Tristan Whiston and movement-coaching by Maxine Heppner. Thread Bound premiered October, 2019 at the Intergalactic Arts Collective studio theatre in Toronto, Canada. This dance-theatre work explores inherited ancestral traumas. Suzanne explores the impact of the forced internment of her Japanese Canadian family and Kathleen explores her family’s Eastern European experience in the Gulag concentration camps through movement, words and objects. Both artists are bound together in the search for these thin yet intertwining threads. Reviewed as “elegant and evocative...relentless energy and beautifully executed choreography” (Bateman Review). | ||||
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Yume-Iro (Dream Colour) Co-choreographed/performed with Takako Segawa and composer Heidi Chan and choreographic mentor Tedd Robinson. The piece is a dance interpretation of the audible, visual, historical and emotional components of Taiko (Japanese drumming). Performed for CanAsian Kickstart, Theatre Centre, Toronto, 2018. The work interchangeably reveals the roles of the body of the drum and the rhythm of the drummer in a dream-like world. “Yume-Iro” fuses dance and music to offer a contemporary interpretation of the dance of Taiko. |
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Momentary
Videography and Choreography by Suzanne Liska with co-camera operator Farviash Babanorouzi. Dance co-creators Louis Barbier, Madison Burgess, Mika Lillit Lior, and Zita Nyarady, presented at the CIFM (Contact International Film Festival 2017) Contours of distance and intimacy, constriction and ease take shape through gestures that flow from, and influence, one another. Organic, elemental, and charged with the raw power of bodies connecting in movement at once determined and innate, the piece itself shows intransigence morphing into expressions, both literal and figurative, of lifting up. |
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Written Publications
Funded by a SSHRC award, she received her MFA in Choreography at York University. Investigating Contact Improvisation and the Alexander Technique within the choreographic process, she conducted her research in Tokyo and Toronto. Suzanne presented her research at the Dance Science and Somatics Conference and published an article in Choreographic Practices. |
"Somatic ethnographic research: A choreographic process informed by Alexander Technique", peer-reviewed journal Choreographic Practices, Volume 11, Number 1, 1 July 2020, pp. 75-99(25)
https://link.growkudos.com/1hry8dkz8xs https://doi.org/10.1386/chor_00013_1 |
Dance/theatre Performer
Kathleen Rea of Reason d’etre Dance Productions
Dancing with the Universe, CanStage, Harbourfront Centre
Vivid 4, Winchester Theatre
Long Live, Betty Oliphant Theatre
Maxine Heppner
KRIMA, Barrie, featuring duet with Mateo Galindo Torres, Barrie.
KRIMA, Youngplace Centre
Karen Kaeja, commission
“Centennial Motel and Rest” in Half Life Motel, Co-produced by Flightworks (Suzanne Liska and Ajna Samadhi) and Lucy Rupert, DanceWorks CoWorks Series presentation, Dance Makers Theatre.
Pam Johnson
Brother, Can you Spare a Dime?, Winchester Theatre.
Kathleen Rea of Reason d’etre Dance Productions
Dancing with the Universe, CanStage, Harbourfront Centre
Vivid 4, Winchester Theatre
Long Live, Betty Oliphant Theatre
Maxine Heppner
KRIMA, Barrie, featuring duet with Mateo Galindo Torres, Barrie.
KRIMA, Youngplace Centre
Karen Kaeja, commission
“Centennial Motel and Rest” in Half Life Motel, Co-produced by Flightworks (Suzanne Liska and Ajna Samadhi) and Lucy Rupert, DanceWorks CoWorks Series presentation, Dance Makers Theatre.
Pam Johnson
Brother, Can you Spare a Dime?, Winchester Theatre.
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