ON STAGE
Aeriosa at Romp! in the
Square
When: Tuesday and Wednesday at 6 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.
Where: Centennial Square
Admission: Free
The line between art and sport is a tightrope that Julia Taffe walks daily, as the artistic director of vertical dance group Aeriosa Dance Society.
The contemporarydancer-turned-certifiedmountain-climbing-guide combined both of her passions when she began harnessing up and boogying down (OK, more gracefully than that), more than 10 years ago.
"I started off as a contemporary dancer in Winnipeg and, on my time off, I took up rock climbing," she said.
"I was really drawn to it because of the similarities in terms of specific movement and the performance quality of rock climbing.
It's a totally different arena but uses a very similar body intelligence."
Since then, Aeriosa has brought dance out of the theatre and into the sky, dangling off Vancouver's Scotiabank Dance Centre Building, Colorado's Wheeler Opera House and Taipei's City Hall Building.
Taffe - who moved to Victoria in June - will play with gravity in Centennial Square, when members of Aeriosa harness themselves to the CRD building for a new work, as the featured performance group at this summer's Romp! in the Square.
Aeriosa also teaches a Learn to Fly Vertical Dance Workshop at Boulders Climbing Gym in Saanich Saturday and Sunday for teens and Aug. 25 and 26 for adults.
Taffe trained at the Winnipeg School of Contemporary Dance, as well as the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Toronto Dance Theatre, before she took up climbing and found a new dance floor on the rock face - a love that prompted her move west.
"I just have a really strong affinity for wilderness locations, so it was really great for me to put everything I'd learned into practice and apply it in a different way in the wilderness," she said.
She began dancing solo on mountains such as the Stawamus Chief, and produced two vertical dance films: Stone Soup and Granite Ocean.
She prefers group work, however, and so formed Aeriosa, which performed its first building-site-specific piece in 2001.
She said that she contacted choreographers working in the same field when she wanted to develop her hybrid discipline, and worked closely with Amelia Rudolph of San Francisco's Project Bandaloop.
Why move from wilderness to urban spaces? Taffe says being airbound in public squares redefines the traditional relationship between audience and performer.
"It gives power back to the audience," she said.
"The show is brought to them, into their world, into their space. So as an artist, you have an opportunity to connect with people in a surprising way."
It erases the wellestablished social rules associated with theatre performances - that audiences should sit, be quiet and clap when it's appropriate.
"There's a role that the performer plays and the audience plays when we purchase a ticket for theatre," said Taffe.
"All those lines are redrawn when the work is created in public."
While it's still less common in sa国际传媒, artists are crossing over between climbing and dance in pockets all over the world, including Argentina, Britain, Italy and France, she said.
"In places where art and sport are less clearly defined along cultural lines, like France and Italy, there is more interchange back and forth," she said.
"In sa国际传媒, I think maybe we're a little more traditional that way and the blurring of the boundaries is happening a bit more slowly."
