Aimée Dawn Robinson

Vehicle Dance #1: After Work Dances, After Haystacks

Words from the artist:

This is a dance in video form, created by filming myself improvising dances inside my work vehicle, a 2006 Ford Econoline E-350 XLT Super Duty (I'm a gardener), for ten consecutive weekdays immediately after work.

Each segment of the dance is between thirty seconds and three minutes long and accumulate chronologically, without editing, to comprise the entire dance. The final piece will be projected at the parking garage, either onto the outer surface of a vehicle, or onto a wall.

This piece is inspired in part by Monet's 1890-1891 Haystacks series.

Different days, different light, different weather, different bodies.

Bio:

Aimée Dawn Robinson is an improvising dancer, musician, writer and visual artist. She has performed and taught dance in Canada, the United States and Malaysia. Aimée is the co-artistic director of Up Darling and the director of multi-disciplinary performance series, A Month of Sundays.

She has performed with improvising musicians, songwriters and composers including Martin Arnold, Jennifer Castle, Eric Chenaux, Ryan Driver, Nick Fraser, Alex Lukashevsky, Kurt Newman, The Reveries and Doug Tielli. While she has danced with artists such as Terrill Maguire, Viv Moore, Ame Henderson, Motaz Kabbani and Seika Boye, Aimée most often improvises solo as mother drift. She has been performing installments of her ongoing dance series, mother drift dances to the songs in her head, since 2003.

Some of her music projects include playing whammied Echo harps with Eric Chenaux, various instruments and vocals with The Thorpe, singing jazz, country and torch tunes with Nick Fraser (drums) and sometimes sings songs with Jennifer Castle in the duo Together at Last.

Aimée holds her Masters of Arts (Dance) from York University and begins her PhD candidacy at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department in September 2008. Her current research explores the radical political potentials of memory (body memory, cultural memory, personal memory) and forgetting in dance, specifically experimental improvising, butoh and Canadian Aboriginal dance.

Aimée has participated in butoh workshops with artists such as Yoshito Ohno, Yukio Waguri, Denise Fuijiwara, Joan Laage and SU-EN. Aimee is thrilled to be traveling to Japan later this summer to study dance with the formidable Min Tanaka.