Under pressure New dance work explores life’s tensions By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 6:04 PM CDT Wednesday, Apr. 15, 2026

The pressures of modern life have a way of piling up.

Piles of work. Piles of debt. Piles of laundry. Piles of information and memes and media to parse. Piles of expectations. Piles of physical stuff added to cart during late-night shopping binges because we think it’ll make the piles of stress and worry (about the cost of groceries, about war, about aging parents) easier to manage, lighter to carry.

We become surrounded by these metaphorical and literal piles until, one day, it all becomes too much.

Accumulation, a new work choreographed by artistic director Jolene Bailie that will close Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers’ 2025/26 season, lives in the tension before the breaking point.

“When you’re cooking and the water is just about to break the surface, that’s the most exciting part of the water boiling, not when the pot boils over,” she says.

Bailie knows she’s not alone in thinking about how life’s competing pressures and expectations affect us.

“I always trust when I have a theme of a work that if I’m feeling something really deeply, millions of other people are feeling the same thing,” she says.

“I see the toll (that pressure) is taking on people and on relationships, on how people connect and don’t connect, and it’s something that I think we need to think about. To see where our boundaries are, what serves us to move forward and have positive growth, and what we might need to just step back from.”

Accumulation features dancers Carol-Ann Bohrn, Reymark Capacete, Sienna Denys-Peters, Julious Gambalan, Margaux Labossière, Thomas Oberlin and Sontje Skabo, the largest ensemble Bailie has choreographed since taking over the artistic helm of WCD.

The choreography — set to an original score by composer Emma Hendrix that was created in real time alongside the movement — communicates pressure in its explosive, almost calisthenic quality, giving the sensation of needing to perform until you can’t. But there are also moments of stillness.

“Standing on the side is, maybe surprising to some, the more physically difficult part,” dancer Bohrn says.

“Dancing feels easy compared to standing with a sense of being in view. We’re not on the side, like, picking our crotches and our noses; we’re still very much in the piece. Something about that is psychologically and physically demanding.”

That hits on another uncomfortable truism of our always-on-the-go, pressure-packed lives: many people feel a lot more comfortable constantly doing than simply being.

“Then the universal experience of, you do and you do and you do, and you add and you add and you add until inevitably, we all reach our limits — and what do you do with that?” Bohrn says.

“We are finite, in terms of our time and our energy. When we are confronted with our limits and we live in a world that doesn’t want to admit that, then we treat death like a problem to solve rather than a reality to face. I feel like that’s actually present in the piece, too.”

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