Alexa Solveig Mardon

port of everywhere is the spillage, the excess of the archive, an unruly host: a speculative fictional book, a dance and a hosting practice.

port of everywhere invites its audience to experience the work while in a sleep or not-yet sleeping state: privileging many senses, and inviting thresholds as spaces for re-storying known and unknown mythical histories.

The story port of everywhere is a steep and queer departure from the national Finnish epic the Kalevala, Alexa’s matrilineal histories, and messages from the dream realm.

media + sceneography design: Erika Mitsuhashi

costume: Jae Woo Kang

sound design: Fernanda Libman

A crisis/A party is a 1x1 audience experience for 7 audience members at a time.

During the perfomance, each audience member is hosted by 1 performer in an intimate ‘reading:’ a collaborative study of a question or a curiosity. The reading uses the tools of carromancy (the throwing of candlewax into water), and a rolodex of the group’s collectively documented dream-images. At the end of each reading, the group collectively move the experiences through their bodies, closing the gap between their own dance, and the dances of the other performers. At once an invented divination practice, a conversation and a dance, A Crisis/A Party is an invitation to images from the dream realm to speak to us, and for us to listen.

The work is experienced in 25 minute intervals, by 7 people at time, and is best suited to an outdoor or semi-outdoor area.

The work has been hosted both online, and in person.

Gathered and facilitated by Alexa Solveig Mardon, with textiles by Nellie Gossen, booklet design by Brynn Catherine McNab, and peer mentorship from Francesca Frewer and Erika Mitsuhashi.

The dream readers is composed of dance artists:

Aisha Sasha John

Rianne Svelnis

Andrea Cownden

Francesca Frewer

Erika Mitsuhashi

Justine A. Chambers

with past contributions from

Zahra Shahab

Su Seçkin Çınar

Forough Fami

Across a sixteen-minute video and forty-minute dance performance without intermission, whereverever playfully traces possible beginnings and belonging by following the question “how did we get here?”

Recorded on location in Mardon + Mitsuhashi’s respective ancestral homelands, Finland and Japan, the video intertwines visits with relatives, folk and contemporary dancing, and observational images of the built and natural environments with a focus on gesture, movement, and impulse. As the video cuts rhythmically between each place, it oscillates between a sense of distance and presence, past and present, as Mardon + Mitsuhashi orientate themselves as visitors to their hereditary homes and construct a postcard for their future kin. A sampled glitch in the soundtrack, anaglyph effect on images, and a doubling in framing across the two places, disrupts a sense of linear time to unfold a vastness of relations.

In the dance performance that follows, Mardon + Mitsuhashi present a movement practice of “blurring” to a musical score performed live by Langford. Through a score of improvisational tasks, they perform a duet of imperfect unison in which dance becomes a devotional technology to understand their bodies differently, both in relation to each other and the histories they hold.

(text Susan Gibb)

premiere May 2023, Western Front

link to technical rider and documentation:

Every Single Thing by Mardon + Mitsuhashi is a game show and a mockumentary about a game show about capitalism, value and language.

Created by Mardon + Mitsuhashi with support from Summerworks Festival

Camera: Jaewoo Kang and Alysha Seriani

Editing: Mardon + Mitsuhashi, Alysha Seriani

Music: Sasha J. Langford

Graphics: Mona Fani

Premiere: OFFTA 2019

Dance In Vancouver 2019

Summerworks 2022

45 minute score for 2-4 performers

In this improvised structure, two performers act as tour guides, leading an audience through the space and making short stops on the way to share their "instantaneous expertise" on the history of objects, their surroundings as well as their own bodies and personal histories. How do the institutions we inhabit every day impose their realities and histories on us? How might we gesture towards other ways of inhabiting them?

TOUR was the recipient of the OFFTA 2019’s Hybridity Grant, an award granted “to an individual artist or group for the outstanding hybridity of their artistic practice.”

Performed by: Bynh Ho, Andrea Cownden, Roberto Soria, Devon Snell

in collaboration with Adrian Ho

vplvplvpl was a short performance at the Vancouver Public Library for World Poetry Day 2019. Recently, the VPL provided space for an event hosted by a well known TERF/SWERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) despite the fact that gender identity and expression is basic human right. We used criticism of the library’s decision taken from twitter as the starting point for our performance.

The work was presented as a part of New Works’ Pop-Up Dances series.

Pocket Dial was a series of a pop-up resource centres, gatherings against ongoing colonial violence, and a starting point for a more closely knit network of resistance. At Pocket Dial, a collective of dance artists (Alexa Mardon, Andrea Cownden, Zahra Shahab, Rianne Svelnis) welcomed guests into the space and support them in making calls to politicians to demand systemic change. We provide dbooks and articles to read and share as well as scripts and talking points to directly facilitate conversations with political representatives. We facilitated real-time information-sharing based on other guests’ experiences during their phone calls. We also collected donations for a charity relevant to the specific issue being addressed.

Pocket Dial attempted to be a timely and direct engagement with current injustices in our community. We are not experts in decolonization nor in dismantling settler colonial privilege. Our work at Pocket Dial includes researching and defining concrete actions, disseminating information, and sharing findings and resources with others who are looking for ways to support political and behavioural change, working towards more understanding, responsibility and accountability as settlers in “Canada”.

Dance In Vancouver 2017

weeklong spontaneous gesture scores in unknown locations

video and sound installation

hanging installation by Natalie Purschwitz

30-150 participants

Our Present Dance Histories was a collaboration between Alexa Mardon, Justine A. Chambers and Peter Dickinson. A project which complicates the rift between fact and personal fiction, using recorded personal accounts by Canadian dance artists as a starting point for a community-wide choreographic score, an accumulating map installation, and the production of printed dance ephemera which leave its readers space for questions around historicity, the importance of the archive, and the personal agency of artists in the legacy of their works.

Premiere: VIVO Media Arts Centre, Vancouver, June 2019

tickets!

1 hour multimedia performance, 4 performers

Tender Engine is a collaboration between choreographer Alexa Mardon, choreographer/set designer Erika Mitsuhashi, programmer Brynn McNab, a recursive neural network named UXIE, and performers Elissa Hanson and Zahra Shahab. Tender Engine is a group of female and nonbinary performers collaborating with An RNN which has learned to speak from the language the performers have spoken to it over two years of dances, stories, and conversations about where we are, and how we got here.

Tender Engine is a game show in which the rules are continually changing, a reality made and unmade in each moment, an invitation into a world both alienating and intimate.

This work was developed with the support of VIVO Media Arts Centre, Boca Del Lupo, Kinetic Studios, Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, and Plastic Orchid Factory.

PS: We are All Here, Toronto, 2016

Excerpts: VIVO Media Arts Centre, spring 2017

Created and Performed by Mardon + Mitshuashi

25 mins

New Beginnings is a collaboration between Erika Mitsuhashi and Alexa Mardon. Part sales pitch, part bad TedTalk and part personal archive, the piece is inspired by string theory, the infinite possibilities of the self in the multiverse, the repetitive performance of female affective labour, and the traces left in our bodies by the women who came before us. Using psuedo-­science and hospitality as foolproof methods for time travel, we invite the audience to join us in sifting through the wreckage of the future and preparing for the detritus of the past.

Performance Studies International, Hamburg 2017

A choreography across a colonial border, time, and geography, For Elsewhere is a Skype collaboration between Alexa Mardon and Raha Behnam.