Gull Cry Dance Co.
Cutting Edge Contemporary Performance.
Lucas Wilson-Bilbro in our April 29, 2021 Online Show, for International Dance Day.
Gull Cry Dance (formerly K. Lewis Performance) creates and disseminates inter-disciplinary, movement-based performance works.
We value: courage, rigour, risk taking, emotional vulnerability, critical thinking, a certain unflinching rawness as it relates to the exposure of reality.
Our work is dedicated to the future: we make performances whose goal is to open possibility, smoothing the path for the generations-yet-to-come.
To that end, our work interrogates normalization: the damaging, deeply disturbing mass habits of being and perceiving that pertain in our current era, masquerading as the natural given.
We are on the hunt, via rigorously developed performance-creations, for new modes of being together.
We dance outside the frame of the degraded values and sloppy workmanship that characterize too much of modern life.
We remember the best of the old, the forgotten fragments history overlooked—we source the hidden archive of what went before for threads that lead us through the labyrinth, home.
In December 2022, we began a performance cycle titled “Bounded Freedom,” which has been elaborated through 2023, via the support of residencies at What Lab in Vancouver with Co. Erasga (April 2023) and at White Wall studio in Montreal (December 2023-February 2024). The work began as an extremely difficult, nearly impossible solo created for Kristen Lewis, by Kristen Lewis. It is expanding in 2024 to include other performers; a first iteration of the work as a group piece occurred on January 13th, 2024, at White Wall studio in Montreal, with Valerie Sabbah—the first to dare to learn the piece. An opening of the group work is scheduled for a group performance on June 21st, 2024, with dancer Eloise Meredith.
Select 2023 Performances
December
December 16
“Bounded Freedom”: performance at White Wall Studio, Montreal
(solo performance, Kristen Lewis)
April 27-30
“Bounded Freedom”: residency with Co, Erasga at What Lab, Vancouver (solo performance, Kristen Lewis).
April 2nd
Gull Cry Dance Theatre Student Show
Camosun College Movement Studio, Victoria, B.C.
April 9th
Contact Improvisation Performance, Stu Phillips Dance
Church of Truth, Victoria, B.C. (Kristen Lewis, solo 30 minute improvisation)
April 15th
Contact Improvisation Performance, Gull Cry Dance & Stu Phillips Dance. All Saint’s Church, salt Spring Island, B.C.
(Kristen Lewis, 30 minute solo dance theatre work, “Becoming Elizabeth”)
Select 2022 Performances
December 11, 2022, “Bounded Freedom I”
Solo performance in conjunction with Gull Cry Dance Theatre’s 2022 Holiday show @ Camosun College, with Gull Cry Dance Theatre’s students, performers Arunima MacNeish, Steven Piazza, and Eloise Meredith.
October 27, 2022, “Birth: Problemata”
Solo performance as part of Gull Cry Dance Theatre’s presentation at the University of Victoria’s Cultural, Social, and Political Thought graduate committee’s Colloquium.
September 1, 2022: “Hydra: Law and Improvisation”
Join presentation with Dr Sara Ramshaw at the 2023 Canadian Law and Humanities Conference, Allard School of Law, UBC.
Select 2021 Performances
November 24-28: Chora: Graphia (Reverberations) @ Dance in Vancouver 13th Biennial. “Chora: Graphia” was a commissioned installation and audience engagement project for the 13th Biennial of Dance-in-Vancouver, funded by the Dance Centre. In connection with “Chora: Graphia (Reverberations)”, Kristen Lewis worked with assistant, Vancouver-based dance artist Avery Smith in conjunction Leisa Shelton Campbell and the other Melbourne-based artists to bring the work “Scribe” to the festival.
August 26, 2021 “Dad Songs” a live performance (sound art and dance) created over the course of a residency and collaboration we hosted with Vancouver-based dance artist Lucas Wilson-Bilbro on August 26, 2021 at Cadboro United Church in Victoria, B.C. the product of a 4-day residency with Gull Cry Dance. This was an extension of work begun in 2019 under the rubric of the “Animal and the Agon” project, about which more here: https://www.averymsmith.com/kristen-lewis-animal-and-the-agnon
July 9 2021 and August 5, 2021 “Who is This: Bodies, Fields, and Strangers: A Meeting” Two presentations, one online (July 2021), and one in person at the University of Victoria Cultural, social, and Political Thought Graduate Committee Summer of Theory conference, featuring an experimental work created by Kristen Lewis with dance artists Avery Smith (Vancouver), Jamie Robinson (Vancouver), Mairi Greig (Toronto), Benjamin Kamino (Montreal), Jacinte Armstrong (Halifax) and with the Vancouver-based philosopher and performance artist Jelena Markovic. Kristen Lewis paired each artist with a “non-dancer” and asked them to engage in the intimate task of speaking together (most are strangers) for 4 lengthy conversations over the phone. Dance artists are then tasked with the job of creating sketches of their subjects. This work delves into the loaded question of “who is this,” troubling the usual ways we form identity in social space, looking for the ways that bodies form themselves in relationship to the fields (work and social) they occupy.
July 2021 & August 2021. “Dancing the Shoreline: Gull Cry Dance Intensives. 4 days of dancing at dawn and at evening, for community and professional dance artists, on the shoreline at Sitchanalth (Willows Beach), Songhees Territory and at St. Matthias Anglican Church, Lekwungen territory.
Towards the Animal: Work-in-Progress. June 16, 2021. On Zoom. Performances by Avery Smith (wombscore, continued), Kristen Lewis (Turtle-Island), and the Thursday Group (Ancient Heart & others); created in part through the generous support of a grant from the Scotiabank Dance Centre.
“When tracing the space between umbilicus and vestibular, I became overly aware of my tongue and the potential for articulation (spatially and vocally) that the tongue has inside the mouth. This awareness of my tongue connected me to my own sense of authority. An authority and ability to speak and articulate my own experience.”–Avery Smith, text generated from practicing the wombscore.
“I now feel a level of familiarity when carving out wombs and diving into those spaces. This task pretty reliably evokes a thick movement quality. It is bound and constantly humming. It feels as if all body parts are existing at a low idle and are obediently waiting to be called to action.” –Avery Smith, text generated from wombscore.
April 2021. International Dance Day Show 2021: Into the Unknown (Walking Backwards). A zoom show for International Dance Day 2021 with Avery Smith and Lucas Wilson-Bilbro, created in part through the assistance of a grant from the Scotiabank Dance Centre.
Select 2020 Creations
November 2020. Falling. Film. Loumille Metros & Nell & The Voice & Kristen.
August 2020. The Trauma and Justice of Improvisation. Film. With Sara Ramshaw (conception) & Kristen Lewis (performance). International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation Global ImprovFest
https://vimeo.com/446988530/e59ce0d8f2
May-August 2020. “The Cove.” Durational Performance research and film series with Dr. Emile Fromet de Rosnay and/at The Cove.
August 2020. Love. Choreographic Film. Lucas Wilson-Bilbro, Olivia Fauland (performers, filmographers, creation) & Kristen (facilitation).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3tf7ntjTe4&feature=emb_logo
August 2020. Entangled, Undone, Air. Poem and Film. Jelena Markovich (text) & Kristen Lewis (performance).
Select 2019 Creations
June 22, 2019. “Attuning to Precarity: Crisis, Collaboration and the Possibility of Improvisation”
Vancouver B.C. @ Western Front, as part of Agile Futures: Approaching Improvisation (International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation & the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival). Collaboration with Dr. Sara Ramshaw. https://front.bc.ca/events/colloquium-international-institute-for-critical-studies-in-improvisation/
June 08, 2019. “The Justice and Trauma of Improvisation”
Victoria, B.C. @ “Summer of Theory”: Experimental Theory Symposium @ the University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C. Hosted by Dr. Emile Fromet de Rosnay
This performance uses spoken word and dance improvisation to explore the justice and trauma of improvisation. On the one hand, improvisation self-consciously engages with tradition and convention, enabling resistance to past oppression and injustice. Justice as improvisation, thereby, opens up possibilities for new ways of being together in society, both locally and at the global level. However, any first appearance of the ‘not yet recognised’ unsettles and destabalises our current knowledge and understanding of the world. Nothing can prepare us for the arrival of the wholly new. Here, we attempt to unpack this dual nature of improvisation through embodied arts-based practice.
Collaboration with Dr. Sara Ramshaw.
June 05, 2019,“Improvisation in Precarious Times: Crisis, Collaboration, and Creating Ethical Communities”
Vancouver, B.C. @ Canadian Law and Society Association Annual Conference, Peter A. Allard School of Law. Collaboration with Dr. Sara Ramshaw and Julie Lassonde. https://www.congress2019.ca/associations/229
This collaboration between a legal academic, performance artist, and dance artist interrogates how responsive arts-based improvisatory practices can produce and nurture legal spaces that are truly welcoming of and attentive to the voices of individuals and communities experiencing difficulties in the present precarity of contemporary Canadian society
June 03, 2019, Engaging Community: Critical Studies in Improvisation, Congress of the Humanities 2019
Vancouver, B.C. Co-presentation and performance with Dr. Sara Ramshaw on law, justice, dance, and improvisation, as part of the Critical Studies in Improvisation showcase.
http://improvisationinstitute.ca/event/congress-2019/
March 7-30, 2019. “Body & Law: A Genealogy” Micro-performances for Directed Research project at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law, supervised by Dr. Gillian Calder. University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C. By invitation. Please contact to be added to list. Victoria and Vancouver performances available. klewis4440@gmail.com
March 04, 2019. “Reimagining justice: Art, law and social change,” at Ideafest, University of Victoria, B.C.; dance improvisation; co-presentation with Dr. Sara Ramshaw and other faculty and community members of the University of Victoria Faculty of Law https://www.uvic.ca/ideafest/events/events/law.html
https://twitter.com/gilliancalder/status/1103403237598785536
–Feb. 23rd, 2019, “(Can I live) With or Without You: The Dancing Body as Other”, Cultural, Social, and Political Thought Graduate Student Conference, “World Without Us,” at the University of Victoria, Hybrid Paper Presentation/Dance Class/Performance https://www.uvic.ca/interdisciplinary/cspt/home/conference/index.php
Select 2018 Performances
“Three Experiments in Developing Written and Unwritten Laws”, co-presentation/dance improvisation with Dr. Sara Ramshaw Julie Lassonde: Sept. 20, 2018. Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto. Sept. 22, Performing the WorldConference, New York City
http://www.performingtheworld.org/ptw-2018/presentations
November 2018, “Marine Venus II” Dance Improvisation with Halifax-based dance artist Jacinte Armstrong, , Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S.
October 30, 2018. “A lost Gestural History of Family Law,” Solo Lecture/Dance Performance. University of Victoria Faculty of Law, Victoria, B.C. In partial fulfilment of requirements for Dr. Ramshaw’s Family Law class. With guest appearance by the Bikers Against Child Abuse.
