HEAVEN to Return for 20th Anniversary Remount at The Theatre Centre
Choreographer Sasha Ivanochko's nude, music-free work features performers Jessie Garon, Scott McCabe, and Sully Malaeb Proulx.
Virtuosic dancer and award-winning choreographer Sasha Ivanochko revisits one of her most ground-breaking works this fall at The Theatre Centre. The gasp of breath, the startling slap of flesh on flesh, the stamp of foot to floor-these are the sounds of vulnerability and power that score Heaven, performed naked and without music. Rooted in the idea of heaven as a site of union, the choreography invites audiences into an intimate encounter with the body-its limits, its desires, and its need for connection-offering a viewing experience that is direct, unmediated, and deeply human. Heaven, a seminal Canadian, contemporary dance work, toured for six years after its critically acclaimed 2006 premiere at the Harbourfront Centre.
On the heels of Ivanochko's appointment to 100th Class of Guggenheim Fellows, the 20th anniversary remount of Heaven celebrates legacy by bringing together a new cast and design in dialogue with this seminal work and the dancers who originally performed it: the remount features performers Jessie Garon, Scott McCabe, and Sully Malaeb Proulx, with lighting design by James Proudfoot. Original Heaven dancer Louis Laberge-Côté returns as the work's remount consultant, and Anisa Tejpar joins as intimacy coordinator. Heaven, in association with The Theatre Centre, runs for six performances only from September 29 to October 3.
For over 30 years, Ivanochko has developed a rigorous and distinctive choreographic practice as an award-winning artist working across performance, creation, and pedagogy within Canadian contemporary dance. Grounded in the body as a site of primary knowledge, her work engages questions of embodied codes, perception, and transformation through movement research and interdisciplinary approaches. The run of Heaven will be accompanied by professional-level workshops, artist talks, and facilitated conversations exploring pedagogical lineage and the history of nudity in dance.
Says Ivanochko: 'Human beings are bound by our bodies. No matter how closely we press into or empathize with another, we remain fundamentally alone in our experience. Heaven explores that tension between connection and isolation through the most immediate choreographic material I have: the body itself. By removing music, costume and theatrical spectacle, the dancers' breath, weight, rhythm and physical relationships become the architecture of the work. The nudity was never intended as provocation, but as a way of bringing attention to the body as a site of vulnerability, agency and human complexity. Twenty years later, I am interested in how a new generation of dancers reveals different dimensions of the choreography, and how audiences encounter the work through a changed cultural lens.'
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