Publication - Kristen Lewis
Published Articles
Kristen Lewis, “A Message for International Dance Day” Dance Centre, Vancouver, April 2023
“Life, even when it is good, is hard. And, our world being what it is, full of injustice and both necessary and un-necessary suffering, life is often pretty far from good. Dance makes the hardness easier to bear, provides a place where it is possible to drop the tired old modes of being we accumulate by force of habit, in order, often, to get along in a world that condones only the narrowest range of expressive possibility.”
Quote: “From the vast chambers of our solitude, we listen for the next invitation, arising from ourselves or from each other or from the space itself—we listen beneath the tone to find “what is already happening,” the dance that is there under and beyond our wills, our habits, our ideas of what a dance should or could be. We dance with sensitive feet open to the smell of the possible impossibility. In this way, we learn, slowly, carefully, but also with wild abandon at times— how to dance together.”
“He [Rachev] makes dances on the margins, out of the rubble, in conditions that acknowledge that we are never not living on the edge—because that is where all of life lives now. To pretend otherwise is to betray the reality of the conditions all bodies find themselves in, though some are far more marked by the burden than others.”
“This observation that “nothing remained unchanged but the clouds above” could be a commentary about the era of COVID-19 and all the changes, affective and practical, it has wrought. ‘These times’ have been nothing if not profoundly disorienting— a truism so obvious it feels embarrassing to mention. This is true for just about every human on earth, but the brand of disorientation for those of us who work in live performance has been its own strange, strange animal.”
Hybrid Performance/Articles
Quote: “And we returned and kept returning. Other things did too—people and animals and everything else that makes and unmakes a world. But this is our story; a patch of time and space told from our shifting perspectives. Yes, we returned and kept returning. That was our research and our method. The rocks taught our feet a new kind of knowing—intelligent, flexible, strong, intuiting—more and more—where to step without looking. Through our soles we learned the language of these sun-warmed, salt-licked rocks—barnacled, many of them, when low tide exposed more of who they were. Barefoot rock-walking, you see, was a primary activity, there. By summer’s end my feet were as cracked and hard as this rocky landscape, whose wisdom fed me unannounced, from the ground up, as we chatted, as friends do, soaking up the sun.”
Editorial Work
THESIS - LLM (Master’s of Laws)
Quote: “Any definition of Indigenous religion that aspires to work in decolonizing ways must account for the centrality of love in Indigenous lifeways and worldviews. Love reminds us to pay attention to ourselves and to each other; it acts as the force capable of bridging the differences that seem to separate us.”