Boreal Breaths and Steps part 2

with Marlene Creates, Susanna Hood, and Scott Thomson

for the Festival of New Dance

Sunday October 12 at 2 pm

(rain date: Monday October 13 at 1 pm)

Join Marlene Creates (poetry), Susanna Hood (dance), and Scott Thomson (trombone) as they lead a walk in The Boreal Poetry Garden — six acres of boreal forest in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland.

Come and hear site-specific poems that refer to the immediate environment where you're standing, see dance/movement and hear trombone responses to the Blast Hole Pond River and the site's other natural features. After the walk, we will gather around a small bonfire for some refreshments.

SUSANNA HOOD is a compelling and virtuosic performer in dance and music. She began her career with Toronto Dance Theatre, 1991-95. Independently, she has performed the works of various Toronto choreographers; created singing/dancing roles with Autumn Leaf Productions; acted on film for filmmaker Philip Barker; created music for the dance works of Louis Laberge Coté, Rebecca Todd, and Eryn Dace Trudell; collaborated extensively with composers John Oswald and Nilan Perera; and performed widely as an improviser in dance and music. Her collaborative projects as well as her own choreography and music compositions have been presented throughout Toronto, nationally, and internationally on stage and film since 1991. She has won the K.M. Hunter Emerging Artist Award and the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance.

SCOTT THOMSON is a trombonist and composer who lives in Montréal, having moved from Toronto in 2010. He plays in established groups in many styles, and prizes ad hoc improvising as a way to meet many creative people. He has studied with Roswell Rudd, Jean Derome, Eddie Prévost, and John Oswald. Scott is one of the founders of the Association of Improvising Musicians in Toronto (AIMToronto), and co-directs the AIMToronto Orchestra, which was formed for a project with Anthony Braxton in September 2007. While in Toronto, Scott was the artistic director of Somewhere There, a venue for live creative music that he founded in 2007. Scott has composed a series of site-specific pieces that he calls ‘cartographic compositions’ for mobile musicians and audiences in unconventional performance contexts, including works for the galleries and corridors of the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The Boreal Poetry Garden was featured on Bravo! TV in 2008 and on the CBC Documentary Channel in 2012.

"Marlene Creates Makes Art in Tune with the Times" blog by Gloria Hickey, July 22, 2013

http://gloriahickeycraftwriter.blogspot.ca/2013/07/marlene-creates-makes-art-in-tune-with_22.html

"Marlene Creates: Of Words and Woods" by Robert Finley, Canadian Art online, September 15, 2011

http://www.canadianart.ca/online/reviews/2011/09/15/marlene_creates/

"Garden poem," by Tara Bradbury, The Telegram, St. John's, July 15, 2011
http://www.thetelegram.com/Arts---Life/2011-07-15/article-2654619/Garden-poem/1