Mammalian Diving Reflex Presents WALK WITH ME WHILE I REMEMBER YOU At Evergreen Brick Works This November

Mammalian Diving Reflex has announced the World Premiere of its newest performance, Walk With Me While I Remember You, presented in collaboration with Evergreen.

In Walk With Me While I Remember You, Mammalian will use their world-renowned methodology of ‘social-acupuncture' to dismantle barriers between audiences and local youth, inviting us to take a walk through the web of love, hope and grief.

Co-devised and directed by Scottish performance artist Craig McCorquodale, alongside Toronto-based co-devisors Isabel Ahat and Marie Lola Minimo, and featuring local youth who have experienced loss, Walk With Me While I Remember You will be presented at Evergreen Brick Works' Good Mourning Festival, Nov 4 to 5, 2023. 

 

Walk With Me While I Remember You invites audiences on an extraordinary excursion with local young people, who all share in their experiences of loss and bereavement. Moving through a nature path, participants follow a series of young people as they celebrate, laugh, reminisce and release. Vast, subtle and gently unfolding, this performance offers profound moments of meaning and glimpses of lives lived and lost. In today's society, grief is ever-present and buried. Through this one-on-one participatory walking performance, patrons will be led through a natural environment and given the space to listen, reflect and share. Walk With Me While I Remember You is a loving tribute to the joys and heartaches of life, family, and finding connections where we least expect.

 

Founded in Toronto in 1993 and celebrating its 30th Anniversary in 2023/24, Mammalian Diving Reflex,  is dedicated to investigating the social sphere. They create site and social-specific performance events, collaborating with non-artists to create work that fosters a dialogue and dismantles barriers between individuals of all ages, cultural, economic and social backgrounds. Mammalian brings people together in new and unusual ways around the world, to create work that is engaging, challenging, and gets people talking, thinking and feeling. They make ideal entertainment for the end of the world. As one of Canada's most prolific touring companies; since 2006, their work has been experienced across 190+ tours in 98 cities in 29 countries.

 

Since 2006, Mammalian Diving Reflex has been collaborating with the same group of BIPOC youth from Parkdale, called the Young Mammals. Starting as children, these youth were instrumental in the development of Mammalian's Toronto and international performances, joining Mammalian on-the-road as teenagers to present works such as Nightwalks with Teenagers and Teentalitarianism at renowned organizations including LIFT (London, UK), Triennale Milano Teatro (Milan, Italy), National Theatre Scotland (Unst, Scotland), Seoul Performing Arts Festival (Seoul, South Korea) and National Theatre & Concert Hall (Taipei, Taiwan). Now in their mid-twenties, these same youth, including Isabel Ahat, Virginia Antonipillai and Ngawang Luding, have taken the reins of Mammalian Diving Reflex as the next generation of artists to lead the company. This hyper-long-term youth engagement is a testament to Mammalian's unique and celebrated socially-engaged artistic practice. 

 

In Walk With Me While I Remember You, Mammalian Diving Reflex will form a new collaboration with local young people who have either: lost a loved one, are currently living with a life-limiting medical diagnosis, or have a loved one experiencing it. Working alongside artists and grief counselors, this collaboration will provide audiences with a space to celebrate and share the joys and precarity of life. 

 

Director Craig McCorquodale is a graduate from the Contemporary Performance Practice Programme at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Working with the knowledge people have of their own life, Craig attempts to build a social sculpture founded on risk, complexity and new empathy. In 2021, Craig was awarded the Jerwood Arts Live Work Fund, and has been supported by Battersea Arts Centre, the British Council, FABRIC, Tramway, the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts and La Teatrería, Mexico. He has previously worked with National Theatre of Scotland, 21Common, Lyra and Quarantine.

 

Producer Isabel Ahat began working with Mammalian Diving Reflex in 2009, when she was just 12 years old, on the communal dining performance series Eat the Street in association with Parkdale Public School. Isabel has since participated in numerous projects and performances including: The Producers of Parkdale, Dare Night: Lockdown, How to Hook Up, AWKS: Dance Series, At the Kids Table presented by Luminato Festival, and Factory Photobooth at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Isabel has toured as a Performer/Producer for Nightwalks with Teenagers in Brooklyn, USA (2022), Basel, Switzerland (2016) and in Riga, Latvia (2015). She is currently Mammalian's Emerging Producer, and is leading the producing on the newest work in development, Everything Has Disappeared.

 

Co-devisor Marie Lola Minimo is a Creative Industries BA graduate from Toronto Metropolitan University. Specializing in fashion and publishing, Marie has worked on creative projects with the Amsterdam Fashion Institute and RMIT University. Through our 17-year relationship with the young people of Parkdale, and joining Mammalian Diving Reflex in 2020, they have since worked on projects such as All The Sex I've Ever Had in Chicago, USA (2022) and Quebec City (2023), Nightwalks with Teenagers in Salisbury, UK (2022) and Castlemaine, Australia (2023) and Walk With Me While I Remember You.

 

Walk With Me While I Remember You is presented in collaboration with Evergreen. Evergreen is a leader in placemaking and urban sustainability and has been facilitating change in communities through connection, innovation and sustainable actions for over 30 years. As a national not-for-profit, Evergreen believes that cities can be powerful levers for change, and that public spaces within our cities can work harder for both people and our planet. Evergreen's headquarters is located at Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto's ravine system and is a year-round destination where the world comes to experience sustainability in action. 

 

Based in Toronto, Mammalian Diving Reflex is dedicated to investigating the social sphere, always on the lookout for contradictions to whip into aesthetically scintillating experiences. They create site and social-specific performance events, theatre productions, participatory gallery installations, videos, film, art objects and theoretical texts, collaborating with non-artists to create work that recognises the social responsibility of art, fosters a dialogue and dismantles barriers between individuals of all ages, cultural, economic and social backgrounds. Mammalian brings people together in new and unusual ways around the world, to create work that is engaging, challenging, and gets people talking, thinking and feeling. They make ideal entertainment for the end of the world.

 

Saturday 4 to Sunday 5 November, 2023. Showtimes between 11AM-5PM. Runtime: 45 minutes. 

Evergreen Brick Works; 550 Bayview Ave, Toronto, ON M4W 3X8

Free. Registration is required. Tickets can be reserved at https://www.evergreen.ca/evergreen-brick-works/the-good-mourning-festival/

To post a comment, you must register and login.