Young Lungs dance residency lives and breathes

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This article was published 18/04/2024 (540 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Four emerging movers and shakers will take the stage Saturday, following the marching orders of their imaginations in the province’s only paid residency for dance and movement-based artists.

Since February, Maura García, Anaïs Bossé, Odéah Roy and Elena Basford have been supported by the Young Lungs Dance Exchange research residency to explore various styles of movement.

Young Lungs’ interim artistic director Alex Elliott, who started participating with the not-for-profit arts organization shortly after its founding in 2004, says the ongoing development of its paid residency has been rewarding.

“About 20 years ago when we started, this was a collective of dancers who really wanted to be choreographing on each other and presenting their work, because it was a challenge to self-present,” says Elliott, whose dances have been produced as far afield as New York and Halifax.

“That’s where I started to learn.”

Throughout its first decade, poets, dancers and musicians would get together to improvise, and one or two times per year, would perform live at the Gas Station Theatre, bartending every show in order to pay their way onto the stage for about 10 minutes each.

The dynamic began to formalize when the organization registered as a not-for-profit in 2006, but Young Lungs’ reputation solidified over the last decade when that initial crop of emerging artists became more established in their chosen fields, Elliott says.

“At that point, they were seeing the need in the community for the first stages of research (to be supported). They also started to see all the resources needed to make that possible,” she says.

In the late 2010s, the research residency started; Elliott says interest has been growing since the pandemic, when Young Lungs expanded its digital programming under previous artistic director Jillian Groening.

This year, Young Lungs received 20 applications to the research residency, a high number Elliott attributes to key elements including the lack of submission fees and the promise, upon acceptance, of paid work, with at least 40 hours of studio time. The artists accepted into the residency work individually and collaboratively.

This year, three of the four residents come from Manitoba. Bossé and Roy, who are collaborating on their piece, are both in the senior professional program at the School of Contemporary Dancers. Basford, a multidisciplinary artist with a background in film history and in the film industry, spent years studying in Montreal and now lives in her hometown of Winnipeg. García comes from North Carolina, identifying as non-enrolled Cherokee/Mattamuskeet.

On Saturday at 7 p.m., the four artists will share their work in a pay-what-you-can performance at Aceartinc., an artist-run centre at 206 Princess St.

In attendance will be two “essayists” who will develop responses to the work as it’s shared. Doing the writing will be Gislina Patterson of We Quit Theatre, while Azka Ahmed will respond in a visual format; the two will share this work with an audience Sunday at 2 p.m. at Aceartinc.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com