ANATOMALIA:
anatomy + anomaly + femalia
Sunday, November 9 | 2:00pm-2:45pm
Black Box Studio
ANATOMALIA is an 80 minute, site-adaptive, interdisciplinary performance experience. Through contemporary dance choreography, performance installations, guided experience set to an original score, dancers embody and transform shame, fear and repulsion into desire, curiosity and trust to (re)claim joy. ANATOMALIA draws on new architype and ritual in a collective healing of the damage done to femalia* and a celebration of queer joy.
*’femalia’ inclusive of all female-ness
Audience follows a chorus to encounter immersive choreographies and secret performances set in mysterious spaces. Leading transitions, the chorus embodies ancestors and future selves.
ANATOMALIA seeks to change inner landscape and outer world through an immersive, sensual and surreal performance adventure.
ANATOMALIA Trailer
Director
Meagan O’Shea
Award-winning, queer, contemporary dance+ artist, Meagan O’Shea (she|they), creates “Uplifting, energetic and totally out of the ordinary” performances using an array of creation techniques and performance strategies including her signature dance-theatre mash-up, audience interaction and Oblique/Switch as a research method. Examining ideas from unexpected angles, she creates content-driven, problem-finding, contemporary work, treating the process like a science experiment, she uses body and the interaction with audience as test site, she jumps between forms seeking to unite disparate ideas.
“I am influenced by what I see and experience in the world and the relationship between ideas and action. I work with Oblique/Switch as a generative research method: The desire to reach beyond the Obvious/1st Impulse and Opposite/2nd Impulse to discover The Oblique/3rd Impulse; the potential to disrupt dominant paradigms, and offer an alternative to binary systems. In all my work there is a sense of play and a pursuit of truth.”
Meagan has created site-responsive work in public space, interactive installations and performances, interdisciplinary solos, and ensemble work. Her ensemble improv project, dance like no one is watching, which animates/disrupts public space and has reached 30,000 incidental audience across Canada. Her dance for youth, The Love Project, has been seen by more than 10,000 teenagers in Canada. Meagan’s work has been presented across Canada, in New York City, Mexico, Morocco, Spain, Ireland, Finland, Austria, Greece and Germany.
Meagan teaches Ensemble Improv and Interdisciplinary Solo Creation internationally. She is co-founder and was co-Artistic Director (04-13) of hub14 in Toronto. She has been International Associate Artist at Dance Ireland, Artistic Collaborator of BIDE/ES, Associate Artist at Theatre Direct/CA, and created much work in residencies: Dance Atelier/IS, Fabra I Coats, Faber/ES, Dance Ireland, Firkin Crane/IE, Earthdance, New Dance Alliance/US and The Banff Centre, TDT, Dance Victoria, Le Groupe Dance Lab, GoodWomen, Ottawa Dance Directive/CA. She is a recipient of the KM Hunter Award in Dance, was was shortlisted for the Guggenheim Fellowship.