On frozen Lake Winnipeg, CONSTELACIONES embarks on an embodied exploration of collective engagement through artistic process, risk-taking, and vulnerability. Only four of us—Monica, Roewan, Christina and Helene—are able to make this journey. Doris is in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico. Her absence is a challenging presence—one that is at the crux of our work: how do we create constellations of collaboration, care, and struggle across distance and difference, across geographies, under different skies? Is there a substitute for the intimacies of proximity? Questions without answers. Questions that propel.
After our arrival, we unload the van, trek to the lake, and establish a small camp inside the protective cove of wind-sculpted snow and ice boulders. In turn, each of us initiates an environment-based improvisation before inviting others to enter our icy dancescape. Our vocabulary is one of gestures. Gestures of necessity—driving, walking, carrying, dressing, eating. Accidental gestures—slipping, falling. Improvisational gestures—weaving, threading, knitting, wrapping, tugging, walking, digging. Caring gestures—reaching, touching, holding, warming, feeding. Informed by snow, ice, wind, and sky, by presences and absences, by occasional snowmobiles passing in the distance, these are our inter(in)animated dances in and with the landscape.
