lossy hauntings / Part 1 - lossy

beat)

your own,

like a gesture

something

briefly or for a

the room, but it was Lisa who would notice and track what was occurring for the collaborators, and insist that this be incorporated in the form. 

We just needed to be with what was actually occurring.  

the company devised a rule. If a dancer, in the middle of the exhausting, sometimes exhilarating labour of executing the stream choreography, felt, for real, that they didn’t want to continue, they could and should stop. They called it a “drop out.” The dancer would stop dancing and simply be on stage, in relationship to those continuing to enact the stream, and watch them, or the audience, until they felt like joining it again. If they didn’t, they could remain out for as long as they wished. 

I remember a conversation with Marcus, where we spoke about the very concept of “dropping out” - a refusal or inability to participate - and how this affects anyone around it.

“...What happens when someone drops out? What does that do to us? What does this mean to a group?...”

but also how it can describe a type of depression. We spoke about this notion of “future” as a general direction we seem to collectively be headed in. What if the work is asking about what it feels like to want to “drop out” of that? Not do that anymore. What does it mean to refuse to partake in the idea of “future”? What if you know you don’t want to be where you think we’re going? What if you can’t imagine something else?

These “drop outs” became an improvised, shifting part of the stream’s score. It became our job to think through how they would affect the work as a whole, and what it might become within the dance. 

we had to come to terms with two very different works happening (colliding) in this singular dance piece: a work that lived on the surface (the stream), and the work that was happening much deeper underneath, in the interior of that container. Tonally, one is bright and one was dark, one is action and the other is paralysis. One is made-up distraction and the other is painfully true - but they needed each other to move through what was happening in the room. They couldn’t exist on their own. It would either be too fake or too hard. They were each needed to subvert and blur the other. 

‘lossy’ became the term used inside the vocabulary of the choreographic process to describe a state of being performers would drop out into, or fall out of, back into the dance. A reference to a digital process transposed onto real bodies - ‘lossy’ becoming a state of feeling partial or fragmented, blurry somehow, or just used as an adjective by the group to be sitting inside of grief / feeling at a loss, etc. An acknowledgement of something missing, things being “not okay”. Something slowly being stripped away.

*

Someone said “...you looked like a bunch of aged-out Rave-kids gathering after a funeral…” and I felt seen. 

Lights up on an empty living room, populated with quasi futuristic see-through furniture of the sort you might order cheaply on the internet. Josh and Lisa enter this room in a “lossy” state. 

You don’t grieve the past, you grieve the loss of the future you had anticipated.

We worked on defining the parameters of this state a lot. It is as if part of you is gone, but your body remains. You have the sense of a tragedy that took place, and grief, but you don’t remember what it was. You are hyper aware of others, and want to take care of them, but because you are so uncertain about the circumstances you are in, you are also hyper aware

of not causing anyone else harm. In this space, the dancers gather, as if coming together for the first time since something important - now forgotten - was lost. The movement is small, improvisational, and reactive – the space is so charged that any movement by one is felt by all. I find it riveting to watch. Upsetting, but also physical - the tiny, responsive micromovement feels like a relief, in my body.

We started making a living room set at Progress Lab. In the days after receiving the news of Zahra’s death, we were unfortunately in rehearsals. in that liminal space where we didn’t know what to do or why, we had to, or chose to, do something. Constructing a comforting space to be in, that would break up our painfully empty and somewhat daunting dance
floor   

where a dance was supposed to be being made but wasn’t felt both doable and necessary. 

set pieces from past processes, like benches.  Josh dragged in a carpet he had from another work. a few meaningful items, and so a collection of objects became our first early attempts at an altar, a place to gather ourselves that would honour the work we could no longer imagine making, and the person who couldn’t continue to make it with us. 

the living room in my family space, my grandmother’s living room, echoed some of what we were constructing. we had a family altar, a butsudan, and it was integrated into our living room interactions. It felt like a huge source of comfort to me to have that possibility alive in
this project’s living room, too.

The living room changes the dancers find a tiny synchronous back and forth weight shift (they call it the wobble.) It is imperceptible at first,

– just wiggle your big toe. 

one foot in front of the other.

grows and - eventually - as though willing themselves out of stasis, becomes large enough that the ensemble’s back and forth movement incrementally slides the carpet in a pulse across the floor, releasing them into the stream. It’s so weird. And so joyous and silly and fun. 

The piece can’t just be fun. I don’t want it to just be sad. But it can’t just be construed as levity. 

items and pieces of the dancers’ wardrobe, 

placed on an empty chair

during “dropouts” from the stream, formed a small altar. 

It wasn’t super clear visually. 

The first 30 minute iteration of ‘lossy’, coincidentally, was performed at Vancouver’s Dancing on the Edge Festival on the one year anniversary of their learning of Zahra Shahab’s passing. A sold out audience at The Firehall. The reception was very enthusiastic. Josh and Lisa also expressed frustration. A lot of the audience members felt exhilarated and energized by the “after hours dance party” vibe and the thrilling, kinetic, dopamine-eliciting virtuosic scrolling of the stream.

But I didn’ton’t want it to just look fun. Or “strong”. It’s not triumphant to perform. It’s not about overcoming something. We don’tidn’t know what we’re doing or why. I feelelt blurry. I did noon’tt want it to feel clear.

the piece had to reflect more than just the wild, energetic chaos and fantasy of the stream. It’s also about being stuck, about grief, giving up, dropping out, about real corporeal loss. the next phase of the work would try to find a framing that could hold more of this. 

puncture more holes into it, or disturb the container in some way in order for both sides of the work we were doing together to be seen or felt. I wanted to trouble the work in the

ways I knew it already was

There was so much complication

The narrative inside both our process and the content of the work was never really about a singular loss or tragedy. Something larger was being wrestled with,
twisted up with a dissociation I felt / feel - maybe about an inability to perceive or orient where we are in relation to ‘forward’, about a momentum i couldn’t feel anymore, that was maybe never really there. 

It was a moment where I really felt humanity just bouncing around the echos of a previous eras' imaginings of a bright shiny future, but we had been creating none of our own, I was feeling the lossiness in our ability to keep rebuilding those images. Details start to go missing. The distortion starts to show. soon I don’t know what I’m looking at anymore.

After this excerpt showing, Dancing on the Edge and SFU/Woodwards offered to premiere the as-of-yet unmade full-length work, a year later, at the Fei and Milton Wong Theatre in downtown Vancouver. I loved the excerpt and - like many others - told them that. I also knew that whatever work they and we would do next would have to begin with Josh and Lisa’s feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration about what wasn’t yet being captured in the piece, seeking out the spaces for more legibility of the history and complexity still  feelings we would soon begin to describe as the haunting this work. 

END OF PART 1

*

lossy is about an inability to take it all with us.

these are bodies at a loss, gathering together in a stream of movement. a state of recovery. seeking and sifting, grasping for an anchor. these are the bodies that were left behind,

haunted by the ghostly traces of lost futures. a nostalgia for a world that never happened. it is at once real and science fiction, digital and embodied.

this liminal space holds a confrontation with the promise of future, and ever-present absences. a collision between our inexorable, ecstatic draw towards the limitless new, and a continuous loss — a perpetual state of mourning for what we are leaving behind. these are bodies compressed and incomplete. there is no answer. there is only the stream, and the blurring fragments of what we attempt to bring with us.

lossy is a warped ritual of transcendence. it is a carefree conjuring of a shiny new future “us”, and a collective grieving for what the future may no longer hold, once we finally arrive.

- Company 605

*

Josh and Lisa didn’t know if or how they should continue. They asked me to join the project, as a dramaturge, and also as a friend and collaborator who might be able to help navigate the unique, and overwhelming circumstance they found themselves in. 

After I said yes, Josh shared tons of written and video material with me: theses, rants, quotes, films they had made for the CBC, whole sections of original choreography on video. Ironically, maybe, for a project whose primary metaphor is data compression, I was awash in research material.

I’m considering if it’s worth describing one particular problem I faced, in that we already had so much stuff to work from, but Zahra’s face and body, her voice, was scattered across ALL of this footage we had collected along our past processes. She had inhabited most of our previous ideas. I couldn't now ask dancers to watch it to re-learn what we had been working on previously, or reference the things she had made with me. It was too much

This makes total sense to me - depending, as/how we negotiate what we are sharing/not sharing. This kind of detail is resonant, so alive to the theme/problem/revelation in the work.

I can’t recall all of the details of the material they had generated. What I remember most vividly is the first workshop rehearsal I attended. I also remember that this is when I began to talk to Lisa directly about the project, more or less for the first time.

We had not touched the work as a group since August 2022, directly after the loss of our collaborator. After shelving the project for over 6 months, Josh and I had very reluctantly forced ourselves to make the decision to keep working. Maybe not on the work that we had started, but to keep working with those that were willing to return to the process. (Kate, Sophia, Avery, Shana, Jade, and Matt).

and not all were. I think we didn’t want to take anything away from anyone who still wanted to be there, but also, I felt like I didn’t know how I would feel if we chose to stop. I don’t know that I’d be able to start again.

We were relieved that Marcus was willing to be there, believing in the work enough to try and help pull it along through this very tender, charged, and stuck place. We could have him care for the work when we weren’t sure we would feel able to ourselves.

Josh and Lisa, the dancer-collaborators and I sat in a circle. They introduced me, and then openly and somewhat hesitatingly talked about the stuckness they felt. Then, as is typical in a 605 room, each dancer-collaborator had a chance to say whatever they wished, in response to Josh and Lisa, or about the project, and their own relationship to it. 

Just wanted to flag my thought: this memory of the first workshop rehearsal could or should be shared in a public realm, but with less word for word, just to respect the intimate space that we hold in the room for each other. I would be fine with some writing around it, but also not sure if it feels right to share in the recounted style.

Something about the directness of what I wrote, its transparency, it being a report of what occurred (as opposed to more explaining what it meant) feels like it helps me understand something fundamental about the project.

In the circle, some collaborators voiced determination and deep commitment to finishing what the company had started. Others expressed skepticism that it would be possible – or desireable – to continue to work on it. One or two expressed doubt, in the face of their own grief and the world’s uncertainty, that they wanted to make any kind of dance at all. Whatever their perspective, every single collaborator also alluded obliquely to the specific tragedy that had occurred to their fellow ensemble member. None spoke to it directly. 

“... Nobody is speaking about the tragedy, but it feels really important. Not that what you make has to be about that, but to openly acknowledge its importance, right now, in this room…” 

everyone in a different relationship to it, everyone is trying to protect each other, no one knows exactly how fragile or delicate to be at any given moment, this fear of inadvertently sending someone else into a spiral

(that wasn’t exactly what I said, but it was something like this, but maybe less sure of itself, more sensitive to the intense emotion in the room)

so much had already been cried and spoken out loud in the months prior. But also, the “stuckness” wasn’t just about that. it was a catalyst for a lot surfacing, yes, but there was a lot of loss and lostness happening in many ways all around us. 

and, like us, Marcus cried in the studio too. He spoke about how he made the commitment to cry at work. That seemed to really help everyone along.

*

the stuckness in our bodies 

that held us in place for that first rehearsal was eventually moved with, through, and around, by way of a warm-up score we began to develop, which. later became central to our practice during the creation of ‘lossy’. Marcus was invited to join this warm-up score, too, and did. 

This warm-up score became titled: ‘the piece we never talk about’

We thought that if, through the process, we never arrived at any good ideas, or a piece that was worth sharing, we could just perform this score. It could be performed for 5 minutes, or last well over 30 minutes. It was our group warm-up, but also our back-up plan in case everything else fell apart.

A score that made itself, and evolved throughout the process but, most importantly, remained the buffer/transition between entering the studio as ourselves (who we needed to be in life), and us entering the process as ourselves (who we could be to do the work).

- a song(often with a

-move together or on

something repeatable

or a groove

-join, flock,

-or resist, start

new

-stay with the movement

long duration

Company 605s ‘lossy’ premiered at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre / SFU Woodwards in downtown Vancouver, as part of the Dancing on the Edge Festival in June, 2024.

From an email co-choreographer Josh sent the company after its premiere:

“...'lossy' is not a straight-forward work. It's confused, filled with many little failures, gaps and loose-ends, undefined movement vocabularies, a tired collection of partial ideas that were never fully fleshed out, and an awkward soup of material that was never meant to exist side-by-side. It is in fact, 'the work that we couldn't manage to make', or at least a tribute to it. It is a piece that, for us, holds our genuine desire/need to give up, to stop, and sit with a painful not knowing of what else to do or how to fix what's broken. Simultaneously, it is also a work about our urge to persist, and holds our middle fingers up to the sky to say "we're doing this, because it's all we can do". And in that ugly, frustrating persistence, that starts to feel like enough…”

Josh and I first met about lossy in Montreal, in March, 2023, while seeing a show at Montreal performance venue, Usine C. There, Josh told me three things that I remember as essential:

1. The definition of ‘Lossy’:

   a mode of digital file compression, which reduces file size by permanently removing some of the original data deemed unnecessary or redundant. Lossy compression formats lead to generation loss -- repeatedly compressing and decompressing the file causes them to progressively lose information, quality and detail. This compared with ‘lossless’, which allows for perfect reconstruction without degradation.

2. The initial idea behind the piece they had begun working towards years back was rooted in a question that had obsessed Josh and his 605 co-artistic director Lisa Gelley, for a while: in the human species’ seemingly predetermined migration into the digital, what is the future of our bodies? What are our corporeal bodies to become in that future? How do they move? What is our relationship to them? Do they become ‘lossy’ versions of a compressed recording from the past that we watch and reproduce over and over again?

3. After two or more years into on-again off-again research, Josh and Lisa felt creatively paralysed, and unable to imagine how to continue developing the work.

We were stuck because of the pandemic exhaustion, the wind was out of our sails, and there was a questioning of it all – maybe about what was worth making -- and then, to make it all the much worse, we suddenly lost someone directly tied to our work and process underway.

The loss was one of their primary collaborators. For everyone, them personally, the company of artists and Vancouver’s dance community as a whole, it was an almost unbearable tragedy.

Do we not name her here? It feels odd not to. Though I’m worried we’re going to make this writing feel like that’s what this is all going to be about.

I think that may be true. I also think in a way that the navigation of how this show was and wasn't about her death is actually what we were working on - in part - the whole time. And so maybe just acknowledging this is the thing to do?

Our collaborator and friend, an incredible artist and beautiful human, 

Zahra Shahab.

-change / transform incrementally

-or cut suddenly without transition

-the whole room is the space

-proximity and togetherness aren’t the same thing

it became clear to me that the tone of the original work and process had changed - from when we were playfully imagining all the wild things that might happen in the future, to now instead feeling and acknowledging everything that wouldn’t - and now just drifting in these lost bodies. I started imagining a work where “the future” had been cancelled, despite all of our preparation for it. 

I imagined these people all dressed up for an event they now knew would never come.

“... just wiggle your big toe…” 

As a means to work simply, and as a coping mechanism for feeling overwhelmed, Josh and Lisa focused on one singular task.  they made a few counts of movement toward one idea, then allowed that trajectory to immediately be dropped in order to begin making another short set of movements toward another idea, never allowing it to feel continuous or “complete”. They kept doing this over and over. One foot in front of the other, the initial work was built as a 25 minute sequence of well over 100 bite-sized movement excerpts cut together, like a mash-up video, which the ensemble referred to as the stream.

Just bits and pieces, really. Momentary fragments of ideas, or a vibe, constructed out of a foggy recollection of various bits of popular dance, music videos, clips from old TV, tik-tok trends, or long departed youtube memes forever archived on the internet. it is an aesthetically chaotic, jumbled grab-bag of seemingly random scenes. Replayed remnants from a past future. With no transitions between “clips”, the real-time physicality of attempting to essentially doom-scroll peripatetically in our own real-life bodies created a type of virtuosity - a relentlessness, a high-speed skimming, all the effort never really landing us anywhere.        

We had to allow

ourselves to make something, anything. 

The stream was thrilling to watch - kinetic, satisfying, and very 605 in its physical intensity and almost impossibility. both an ever-shifting archive of physical movement and a metaphor for bodies in digital migration. or a state of recall, a recovery of something. A distraction or escape maybe, a way out of where we were.

*

“...What if I don’t want to do it? What if, in the middle of the dance, I decide it’s too much?...”

Lisa insisted that this impulse from a collaborator must be responded to, within the formal construction of the piece itself; that somehow, no matter how intricate, demanding (and synchronous) the choreography was, this need to stop must be not only accommodated, but folded into the action of the dance. Josh may have been frustrated by this – or I suspected he was, but I don’t know. I got a sense of a kind of dialectic in Josh and Lisa’s creative collaboration – in which Josh often felt primary responsibility for driving the choreography in