Featured
created and performed by: Mardon + Mitsuhashi
Videography and editing: Alysha Seriani
Composer: Sasha J. Langford
Costume design: Jae Woo Kang
Additional props and costumes: Natalie Purschwitz
Lighting design: Nien-Tzu Weng
Technical managers: Jack Chipman, Ben Wilson
Artistic mentors: Justine A. Chambers, Xwechtaal Dennis Joseph, Mala Kline
Dramaturgy support: Joanna Garfinkel
Accessibility consultation: Cara Eastcott, Amy Amantea
Audio description: Andrea Cownden
whereverever, a new work by Mardon + Mitsuhashi—the collaborative entity of Alexa Mardon and Erika Mitsuhashi—made with media artist Alysha Seriani and composer Sasha J. Langford. Across a sixteen-minute video and forty-minute dance performance without intermission, whereverever playfully traces possible beginnings and belonging by following the question “how did we get here?”
Recorded on location in Mardon + Mitsuhashi’s respective ancestral homelands, Finland and Japan, the video intertwines visits with relatives, folk and contemporary dancing, and observational images of the built and natural environments with a focus on gesture, movement, and impulse. As the video cuts rhythmically between each place, it oscillates between a sense of distance and presence, past and present, as Mardon + Mitsuhashi orientate themselves as visitors to their hereditary homes and construct a postcard for their future kin. A sampled glitch in the soundtrack, anaglyph effect on images, and a doubling in framing across the two places, disrupts a sense of linear time to unfold a vastness of relations.
In the dance performance that follows, Mardon + Mitsuhashi present a movement practice of “blurring” to a musical score performed live by Langford. Through a score of improvisational tasks, they perform a duet of imperfect unison in which dance becomes a devotional technology to understand their bodies differently, both in relation to each other and the histories they hold.
Premiere: Western Front, Vancouver, Canada May 2023
Hold On Let Go, Vancouver, Canada January 2024
Spring Roll Festival, Turku, Finland April 2024
by Erika Mitsuhashi
Sound: Loose Truth and Aloe Vera by Jack Jutson
Projection Design by Irfan Brkovic
commission for the Simon Fraser University SCA Fall dance repertory class
Something started loosely and with loose truth.
An exquisite corpse, a relay, a recursive string of emergent moments.
Action and idling, ways to keep going and ways of being together.
Impossibilities asking, how can we enter different planes of ourselves?
Dedicated to my friends and special dedication to my dear friend Mikey. Special thank you to Jack Jutson and Irfan Brkovic.
November 17 – 19, 2022, FEI AND MILTON WONG EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE – SFU GOLDCORP CENTRE FOR THE ARTS
current research for group presentation glint
in collaboration with Daniel O’Shea (new media)
peer mentorship Francesca Frewer and Alexa Mardon
performers: Alexa Mardon, Allie Shiff, Bynh Ho, Francesca Frewer, Lexi Vajda, Mia Pelayo
sound: Adam Asnan
Erika Mitsuhashi will present a work-in-progress sharing of on the cosmic shore, a performance and installation that explores relational practices of drifting movement and attention between living and non-living performers. The installation includes sonic and scenographic partners that encourage intimacy with the materiality of the present. Erika’s horizontal approach to who or what can be a performer, allows for movement to surface in unexpected places including in the light refracted off reflective materials, in the bodies of the performers and in the attention/spatial discoveries of the audience.
Premiere: July 14-16, 2022 at The Scotiabank Dance Centre
Mardon + Mitsuhashi experimental livestream from Left Of Main, NYE 2020
A tribute to SF Ho’s work George The Parasite
created and performed by: Francesca Frewer & Erika Mitsuhashi
sound by: Pender Street Steppers (Jack Jutson and Liam Butler)
projections by: Erika Mitsuhashi & Jack Chipman
text by: Francesca Frewer
costume by: Jae Woo Kang
technical direction: Jack Chipman
When faced with questions beyond our understanding, how do we make sense of ourselves, our perceptions, and one another? Erika and Francesca explore these questions of fundamental uncertainty through several different modalities, seeking to discover different ways that they can be resolved in practice, in the body, in movement, and in being together.
Working with improvised text and speaking, they generate fictional narratives on the spot, weaving a continually shifting landscape of truth and fiction that emerges organically through the challenge of maintaining a difficult task. Through choreographed movement they explore subtleties of being present with another person within a complex structure. Durational movement scores provide a doorway into a more patient, contemplative questioning of the themes in the work.
They seek complexity, simultaneously embracing and subverting the meaning-making that happens in performance.
Excerpt 1: “The Array: The Shape of the Galaxy” presented by Upintheair Theatre, The Cultch Greenhouse, November 2019
Excerpt 2: Left of Push #3 presented by plastic orchid factory, Left of Main, February 2020
Premiere: presented by plastic orchid factory, Left of Main, May 2022
photo credit: Victor Tran
Created by Mardon + Mitsuhashi (Alexa Mardon, Erika Mitsuhashi)
In this work, performers act as tour guides, leading an audience through the space and making short stops on the way to share their “instantaneous expertise” on the history of objects, their surroundings as well as their own bodies and personal histories. TOUR brings attention to the discomfort that comes along with witnessing facts and reality treated with irreverence. How do the institutions we inhabit every day impose their realities and histories upon us? How might we gesture towards other ways of inhabiting them?
Performers: Roberto Soria & Devon Snell (Toronto), Andrea Cownden & Byhn Ho (Vancouver)
Platforms for TOUR’s research and development:
Toronto Dance Theatre’s Emerging Voices, December 2017, mentors: Ame Henderson and Christopher House
Premiere at OFFTA Montreal, May 2019 with performers: Roberto Soria and Devon Snell Recipient of the OFFTA 2019’s Hybridity Grant, an award granted “to an individual artist or group for the outstanding hybridity of their artistic practice”.
Presentation at Dance In Vancouver, November 20, 2019 with performers: Andrea Cownden and Bynh Ho.
Created by Erika Mitsuhashi and Francesca Frewer
A thought-provoking solo contemporary dance piece which incorporates sound, new media, and striking designs to investigate themes of volatility, change, decay, and the unbound. The audience is made witness to the progressive undoing of the performance space and the performer herself. A backdrop of paper, installed by the artists, alludes to a history beginning prior to the audience's arrival, and organic materials in progressive states of decay emphasize the passing of time.
Performance: Francesca Frewer
New Media Design: Daniel O’Shea
Sound Design: Adam Asnan
Costume/textiles: Nellie Gossen
Set design and materials: Erika Mitsuhashi & Francesca Frewer
Platforms for Dust’s research and development:
Artistic residency and work in progress showing at PAUL Studios Berlin, September 2018.
Artistic residency and work in progress showing at Left of Main Vancouver, hosted by plastic orchid factory , October 2018.
Artistic and technical residency at the Scotiabank Dance Centre, April 2019.
Premiere as part of the Scotiabank Dance Centre’s International Dance Day programming, April 2019.
Created with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.
Created by Mardon + Mitsuhashi (Alexa Mardon + Erika Mitsuhashi)
Tender Engine was created in collaboration between choreographer Alexa Mardon, choreographer/set designer Erika Mitsuhashi, programmer Brynn McNab, a recursive neural network named UXIE, sound designer Paul Paroczai and performers Elissa Hanson and Zahra Shahab. Tender Engine is a contemporary dance/installation piece, with highly integrated new media elements (algorithms, projection design). An RNN which has learned to speak from the language the performers have spoken to it underscores the work. The work plays the line between intimate storytelling and highly performative false expertise, examining our relationship to language, technology, and meaning making.
Programmer: Brynn McNab
Sound designer: Paul Paroczai
Performers: Elissa Hanson and Zahra Shahab
Platforms for Tender Engine’s research and development:
Shadbolt Centre for the Arts Artists in Residence, January 2018
In-progress showing at Kinetic Dance Studios Halifax Open Studios Series, January 2018
Boca Del Lupo Artist in Residence, March 2018
Artistic residency at Left of Main Studios, hosted by plastic orchid factory, March 2019
Premiere, co-productions with VIVO Media Arts, June 2019
This work was developed with the support of Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council and VIVO Media Arts Centre.