Surrey Art Gallery gets moving with dance/visual art mix this fall

Visual art and dance intersect at Surrey Art Gallery this fall in Kinesthesia: Body as Form, an eclectic gathering of artists and groups whose practices “acknowledge and celebrate the human body’s many ways of being in movement.”

Live performances are part of the new exhibit including a Halloween-themed Play Your Cards Right Street Dance Battle hosted by Funk’N’Sole Street Dance Society on Thursday, Oct. 30.

Fall events at SAG kick off Saturday, Oct. 25 with a free-admission WTM/What’s the Move? art party, 6 to 9 p.m., starting at the Bear Creek Park gallery and ending at UrbanScreen, located at Surrey Civic Plaza.

“This exhibition presented an opportunity for me to bring together all kinds of different voices,” curator Rhys Edwards explained. “As well as visual artists who incorporate dance into their work, there are choreographers, dancers and filmmakers from across the country that you might not typically find inside of a visual arts space.”

Expect to see performance art, street dance, contemporary dance, contact improvisation and more.

“I wanted to create a dialogue between practitioners from different regions, backgrounds, and at different places in their career.”

Kinesthesia, named for the process where a body comes into awareness of itself in space, features sculpture, painting, textile, photography, film and virtual reality, until Dec. 14.

Tickets are $20 for the Street Dance Battle on Oct. 30, to transform Surrey Arts Centre’s Studio Theatre into “a haunted house of hip-hop,” 7 p.m. start. “Expect ghoulish grooves, creepy cyphers, and wicked prizes in a high-energy night of battles, beats, and eerie creativity,” says an event post on surrey.ca. “Costumes encouraged — whether you’re dancing or spectating.”

Showcased at the digital UrbanScreen this fall, These hands are still at work is a “large-scale movement-based work” by Nancy Lee and Simran Sachar, with “wh/aacking (a style of street dance) infused with gestural elements performed by cyborg-like characters portrayed by choreographer, dance artist and actor Sachar,” says an event post. “Set within a site-specific projection user interface design by media artist Lee, the project is inspired by Corporate HR, Gen Z social media reels and early 2000s computer-generated characters. The artwork portrays the power of movement, migration, and labour in a more-than-human world.”

On Nov. 22, Surrey Art Gallery will host Ancestral Echoes Dance Symposium, advertised as “an afternoon of dance and dialogue, exploring embodied memory and intergenerational knowledge.” Admission is free at the event, held in collaboration with Indian Summer Festival and ĀNANDAM dance theatre, and as part of Kinesthesia.

Drawn from across Canada, Kinesthesia artists include All Bodies Dance, ĀNANDAM dance theatre, Justine A. Chambers, Fran Chudnoff, Brendan Fernandes, Ronald Li, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Lucy M. May, Dana Michel, Maisie O’Brien, Evann Siebens and Sarah Nash Wong.