(Reader advisory: Sexual content)
It all started with a local hockey rink, and an awkward conversation.
In 2022, Kate Stashko performed her contemporary dance show, basin, at an iceless Tipton arena, near Whyte Avenue. A couple of months later, fellow dancer Molly McDermott asked Stashko if she’d consider doing the show again in a more conventional space, like a theatre.
“I didn’t even miss a beat — I was just like, ‘No, I don’t think so,'” Stashko says. “And then I realized that Molly was angling at maybe collaborating together. So then I was just red in the face and back pedalled furiously. And I was like, ‘Well, maybe! It depends where it is.'”
The now double-bill show is basin/Urge, and the pair will perform it at Mile Zero Dance on January 17 and 18. “It’s not a traditional theatre, and we have it stripped down so it doesn’t feel as formal. It’s exciting to see my solo in a new way, in a new space. And I think that [the two solos] complement each other and contrast in ways that will make for a nice evening of dance,” McDermott says.
The two solos are actually duets — but not with other people. Stashko uses an actual basin in her performance, the inspiration for which came from her time in Montreal, where she learned that the French word for basin and pelvis are the same (bassin).
“I just loved that image, to think about the pelvis as this bowl or this container that’s supporting all of your insides, and your reproductive organs are there,” she says, adding that further inspiration came from her time as a dance student. “I was getting the same critical feedback over and over again: You don’t know how to use your core. You don’t know where your centre is. It really stuck with me, because it’s not the same as saying you don’t know how to point your feet — it felt very personal, like you don’t know who you are. So at the same time as the basin wordplay was playing around in my head, I was also thinking about moving from my centre. So I thought, you know what, I’m gonna make a dance from my pelvis.”
For music, Stashko cold called sound artist Raylene Campbell, who conveniently had been working on music that wasn’t exactly pelvis based, but certainly pelvis adjacent.
“I was just coming out of period of sexual exploration, and had some samples of sex toys that I collected, and was really eager for a project to use them in. As soon as [Stashko] proposed the idea, I was like, this is perfect!” Campbell says. “I have a couple of vibrators, a Hitachi, and I had a partner for a while who had a fuck machine and a Sybian — the sounds that they make are industrial sounding, really intense, like a plane is taking off. And we have a very good sounds system so the audience will feel it in their whole body.”
The idea for Urge, which McDermott had also performed in 2022, came from a jacket passed down to her from her great Baba, “but it fell apart. So now I’m using my dad’s jacket, but I think of it as my Baba’s jacket. Early in the process, it felt a little bit like a duet with her memory, and that’s still there. But the piece has changed and grown so I don’t think she’s the driving force behind the solo anymore, but the jacket is pretty key.”
For music, McDermott samples Ukrainian folk band DakhaBrakha, and tapped multi-talented music man Will Scott, from Edmonton, who mixed them with original sounds he made without the use of sex toys (as far as we know).
It all results in an intense, two-act show with a structure that leaves room for improvisation and, ideally, leaves an impression on the audience.
“I hope people have a visceral reaction” McDermott says. “I hope people feel something — and not necessarily something they can name. Maybe they can, maybe they can’t, but I think that’s what’s most exciting to me about live performance in general. It’s not really important to me if everyone comes away with the same feeling or the same images or the same thoughts. It would actually be more exciting to me if people feel a variety of things.”
Get out and feel something, January 17 and 18 at Mile Zero Dance.
