What started BOLT?

My work is grassroots, usually in connection with the territory in Saskatchewan where I grew up. For BOLT, I realized I needed to stay local. I also wanted to collaborate with mature artists able to work improvisationally and to bring their own histories to the process. The team is made of amazing, established artists, and the piece is Indigenous-led through what Rachael Swain calls an “Indigenous intercultural approach”. It goes beyond collaborating with Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. It is an offering that says there's a space for everyone, including the public.

How did stamina games shape the piece?

Each of the four sections of BOLT started as a game with parameters that were refined over time. I work from an overarching Indigenous worldview in which dance serves a function (ritual dances, wedding dances). That’s how I was framing these games which were connected to a theme, a function, refined through practice, and then adapted in real time to create the piece’s four sections.

I work a lot with the image of the horse. In the first section, we activate the space and attune to each other and the public. This needs to happen in order for us to collectively tell a story and move together in the second section, eyes closed, holding hands, interconnected like a bolt, a current.

You become a single horse in the third section. Why?

Even though I'm not working with my ancestral landscape, this is land-based and animal-based research. I wanted us to be all the parts of a horse. It introduced an element of fracture, the deterioration of everything harmonious that came before. It's playful but it is also the launching point to expose the heavier elements in the work. It returns to the land and asks: What is our colonial relationship to land? There is desolation in the landscape from years of extraction. This section is a liminal space. When we eventually move through it, and come to the other side, how will we, Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, with all of our colonial baggage and knowing we all share this past, move into the future with what's left of the land, and what's left of our relationship with each other? How do we try to be together, not bypassing this dysfunction, but recognizing it and carrying it forward into something that is hopeful?

That's what I believe as a person. I want to leave this world better than how I or our lineages experienced it. It's like a journey toward joy. I know that I or my work cannot always be joyful. But I am on a journey to find joy and hold space for it.

Sovereignty is central to your work. What is the connection between sovereignty, and the piece’s liveness?

BOLT is a broad expression of sovereignty: each artist is able to bring their own individuality. And I really see it as exposing our humanity, bringing everyone together. In the moments of improvising, we are sharing our discoveries in real time, and those become magical moments of spontaneous choreography. These are acts of sovereignty, because we are owning them in a really vulnerable way. We are exposing the perceived successes and failures within these moments and that both have equal value for the performance.

In terms of liveness, there is the permission to laugh or to vocalize in BOLT. It has to be a natural response coming from within and also in alignment with what emerges; we're attuning to the music and the light, and they are attuning to us. So there's that constant negotiation and interplay, a sense of curiosity that keeps it fresh every time. There is never going to be a performance that happens twice and that leads me to let go of some things. I do get attached to certain feelings or moments. It is hard to recreate those and sometimes if we try, it falls flat. We have to know that everything that's ever happened within the work has the potential to happen, but accept that not everything will happen in every performance.

Interview by Julie Burelle

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