Looping

Add Poster
Image

‘Looping’ is the title of an improvised movement practice developed by Vancouver’s Company 605, a continuous transformation and rigorous negotiation held between dancers as they weave and warp their repeated actions, and cope with the embedded impossibility to remain the same. In an evolving realtime physical conversation, each mistake and failure generates change, and drives this dance of emergence. It is a simultaneous doing and undoing, with each repetition of movement loop becoming a slight revision, erasing pieces of what has come before while successively building new ways forward.

Film director Aryo Khakpour captures seven of Company 605’s performers in a Looping score already underway, playfully guiding attention towards and away from these sites of shifting connection and relationship, and into their dizzying experience of endurance and persistence. Instead of capturing every action in full, the cameras embrace fragments of the ongoing flow, serving as a reminder that any one view of the dynamic work is partial. Looping is, all at once, a creation, rehearsal, and performance of people continually and purposefully relearning how to be/dance together through a shared practice of embracing instability.

Aryo Khakpour

Director
Josh Martin

Creators and Producers
Lisa Mariko Gelley

Creators and Producers
Matthew Tomkinson

Music
Laural K. Brown

Director of Photography

Project Type:

Experimental
Genres:

Dance, Contemporary, Performance, Improvisation
Runtime:

37 minutes
Completion Date:

November 1, 2024
Country of Origin:

Canada
Country of Filming:

Canada
Language:

English
Shooting Format:

RED
Aspect Ratio:

16:9
Film Color:

Color
First-time Filmmaker:

No
Student Project:

No

Director Biography - Aryo Khakpour

Aryo Khakpour (he/him) is an interdisciplinary performer, director and dramaturg. Born and raised in Tehran, Aryo has been involved in multiple theatre, dance, and film productions in Vancouver, Canada, on the unceded stolen traditional territories of the x?m??k??y??m (Musqueam), S?wx?wú7mesh (Squamish), and s?lilw?ta? (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations since 2006. He co-founded The Biting School in 2013 and was company-in-residence at the PuSh Festival and The Dance Centre from 2018-2019.

In his practice he explores dynamics of power, implications of ideologies, repetition of mythologies, and cultural adaptation. An intersectional feminist, Aryo interrogates the patriarchy and its harmful effects on people. His practice is heavily physical and surrealistic; it moves from theatre to performance art to dance to film and back to theatre; it deals with pain and pleasure; it is sex-positive; and aims to queer the status quo. Aryo was trained in devised practices of non-hierarchical collective creation — this is his favourite way of creating work. Aryo is the recipient of the 2024 Theatre Replacement Accelerator Lab Fellowship, which focuses on international touring within the context of experimental theatre and interdisciplinary performance, and building relations with the international arts network.

Add Director Biography

Still Photos

Project Links

Private Project

Looping