Life After Life After Life
A short film screened at the KIAC Ballroom and Dawson City Music Festival office during the festival weekend.
A pre-animate being awakens in an unknown environment. She dances her way through different physical realities including stony tailings, muddy creeks and boreal forests, to discover intimate relationships with new materialities. She contemplates whether transformation is exciting, threatening, or neutral.
Meg (Dawson City) and Blackbird (Lasqueti Island) have been looking for an opportunity to synthesize Meg’s field recordings of Yukon sounds and Blackbird’s dance and movement practice. In July, they initiated the creative process by listening to Meg’s field recordings, exploring for wild locations, and improvising movement in those various places. The “story” of this film emerged from those investigations.
A structural improvisation, this short film is a collaboration between Blackbird as movement artist and Meg as soundscaper. All editing was also done by the artists.
About the Artists
Blackbird L’Hirondelle
Blackbird L’Hirondelle is a dance and movement educator and instructor of Metis, Cree, and English background. She recently completed a PhD in Arts Education (SFU), focusing on butoh dance as pedagogy for the outsider. Her first draw to Dawson was a dance contract with Raven Spirit Dance at Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre, in 2007. Blackbird regularly performs in both dance and theatre.
Meg Walker
Meg Walker is an interdisciplinary artist who has been working creatively to combine sound and 2D images since 2006. She is passionate about audio art because sound is part of what helps us connect to a place, whether it’s forest, river, wilderness, or urban space. The more we can connect with a place, the more we can live harmoniously with it. Meg has shown sound-and-drawing mixed media exhibitions at Arts Underground and the Confluence Gallery.