The Threshing Floor
January 17 – 30, 2022 | GCA Lobby Screens | Free
Presented on the screen array in the lobby of SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, please join us for a free re-screening of The Threshing Floor, a dance film created by the SCA's Rob Kitsos and SCA alumnus Beau Han Bridge, inspired by and featuring the eponymous composition by the SCA's Mauricio Pauly, and performed by SCA alumnus dancer Anya Saugstad and dancer Ryan Jackson.
The Threshing Floor is a performance work that animates the vibrations of sound through a fusion of movement, light and projected reflections. Set to a score by Mauricio Pauly (The Threshing Floor), multiple microphones are used on different surfaces and instruments and manipulated performatively by the musicians. Through choreographic sequences and scores, projected images and light, the work attempts to envelop us in a multimodal experience within the textures and surfaces of the bodies and space.
Choreographer | Creator: Rob Kitsos and Performers
Composer: Mauricio Pauly
Performers: Ryan Jackson and Anya Saugstad
Film Artist: Beau Han Bridge
Biographies
Dance artist Rob Kitsos lives and works on the unceded territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səlí̓lwətaʔ/ Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xwməθkwəyə̓ m (Musqueam) First Nations. He has performed across the United States, Lisbon, Barcelona, Paris, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Netherlands, Venezuela and Hong Kong. As a choreographer, Rob has created over 100 original works, many of which include collaborations with artists from a range of disciplines. He has studied movement theatre in New York and Ecole Jacques Lacoq, performed as a drummer in a rock band in New York City and worked with many dance companies and artists internationally. In addition to making new work, Rob has been teaching dance in universities for twenty-five years including Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Washington, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and Simon Fraser University. He teaches contemporary dance, composition, repertory, dance aesthetics, improvisation in performance and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Beau Han Bridge is a Chinese Canadian director and producer of film and theatre. In 2017, he created Midtwenties Theatre Society, a non-profit theatre company based in Vancouver, BC, to produce original plays that focus on contemporary-millennial stories and coming-of-age themes. Since then, Beau has produced several plays, micro-budget short films, dance films, and has been attending SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts as a film student since 2019. As of 2021, he was most recently awarded a Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada graduate scholarship and an Ontario graduate scholarship to develop an original Chinese Canadian thesis film, to which he will serve as writer and director for, when he begins his MFA at York University in Toronto, ON, for Fall 2021.
Mauricio Pauly makes music for mixed ensembles, working with expressive amplification and electronics as an integrated performance element. He also makes music for theatre; most notably Athina Rachel Tsangari’s production of Lulu at the 2017 Salzburg Festival. He is currently developing a new theatrical project in collaboration with Vancouver-based Theatre Replacement that will premiere at PUSH 2022. Mauricio was a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria, Italy, as well as composer in residence at Villa Romana in Florence, Italy. His most recent release, Charred Edifice Shining is the fruit of a 10-year collaboration with UK-based ensemble, Distractfold. Mauricio is an assistant professor at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts in Vancouver.
Anya Saugstad is a dancer and choreographer living and working on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səlí̓lwətaʔ/ Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xwməθkwəyə̓ m (Musqueam) First Nations, colonially known as Vancouver BC. Anya trained at ArtsUmbrella in the pre professional training program, and also holds a BFA with honours in Dance from Simon Fraser University. Anya has danced with Inverso Productions under the direction of Lesley Telford. She has interned with Action At a Distance under Vanessa Goodman, and with Amber Funk Barton and her company the response. Anya also creates her own live and digital performance works that foster space for women to tell their stories through movement. She has been able to grow her choreographic work through mentorships with the Performance Research Program, The San Fransisco Conservatory of Dance, and Made in BC. Anya has choreographed works for Simon Fraser University, Vines Art Festival, SplitScreen (Boombox), F-O-R-M, and Mt Pleasant Collective, among others.
Ryan Jackson is a multidisciplinary artist based on unceded, ancestral, and occupied xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ lands. The primary modalities he explores in his practice are dance and theatre, interested in the emergent possibilities of blurring and converging forms. Recent and recurring lines of inquiry in his work include the body as/part of ecosystem, the stickiness of memory, and improvisation as decomposition. Ryan is intrigued by the ways in which movement work can also be movement work: how dance/embodiment help us to feel liberated within our own bodies and extend to the visioning and building of liberated worlds. He’s had the pleasure of performing works by Niuboi and Mary Grace McNally and learning from artists such as Jermaine Spivey, Spencer Theberge, Erica Sobol, Tilman O’Donnell, Adi Salant, David Harvey, and Medhi Walerski. His work has been showcased through Nextfest, F**k It, and DANSOX. Ryan is incredibly grateful to be part of Dancing on the Edge for the first time and hopes to continue to grow in community here.