Thinking Spaces: Lucy Rupert, Lisa Hirmer, and Christina Kingsbury “Interdisciplinary Improvisation & Ultrasonic Moth Songs”

This presentation will take place in person at ImprovLab, MCKN 108 at the University of Guelph. As always, our Thinking Spaces events are free and open to all!

More About this Workshop:

In August 2024, dancer Lucy Rupert and musician Ben Finley, along with artists Christina Kingsbury and Lisa Hirmer, collaborated on the interdisciplinary performance Ultra-sonic Moth Songs. Audiences present on that magical summer evening experienced improvised music and movement among the moths at the Moth Garden! Join us as Lucy, Christina, and Lisa reflect on the environmentally inspired multi-disciplinary performance, and the role of improvisation in creating their evocative work. 

More About the Presenters:

Lucy Rupert is a dancer, choreographer, art-science researcher, and artistic director of Blue Ceiling dance (founded 2004), through which she has created and produced over three dozen works of contemporary dance and multidisciplinary performance. For the last decade, Lucy has researched and explored the intimate connection between scientific and artistic processes through interviews, artistic creations, and collaborations with scientists.

“heartless”, Lucy’s most recent solo production delving into the moral philosophy of robots, was honoured with three Dora Mavor Moore Award nominations, including Outstanding performance by an individual and Outstanding original choreogprahy.

Lucy’s work has been presented by dance: made in Canada/fait au Canada festival, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Dusk Dances, Guelph Dance Festival, the Stuttgart International Solo Tanz-Theatre Festival and in unconventional spaces throughout Ontario.

Lucy has performed with noted companies such as Fujiwara Dance Inventions (2010-present), Theatre Rusticle (2001-2017), Nova Dance, Theatre Passe Muraille, Puppetmongers Theatre, Circus Orange, Chartier Danse, Anandam Dance, Sashar Zarif Dance, Free Flow Dance Theatre Company (1995-1999), and many other independent choreographers and creators.

With a Joint Honours BA in Dance and Music from the University of Waterloo, an MA in History from the University of Toronto, Lucy is a lifelong learner, currently studying philosophy through Oxford University’s Continuing Education Department.

Lucy is a mom, a birdwatcher, a citizen scientist, a singer-songwriter and a writer on creative process and dance history. She lives in Toronto with her husband, her son, and a feral cat, in a neighbourhood full of coyotes and old trees.

Lisa Hirmer is an interdisciplinary artist who works in visual media, especially photography; social practice; community collaboration, and sometimes writing. Her work is focussed on collective relationships both in human communities and in human relationships with the more-than-human world. A lot of her recent work wrestles with what it means to be living inside the climate emergency and on the edge of planetary collapse. Her work finds home both in traditional gallery contexts and an expanded field of other public and semi-public spaces and is always created with a keen awareness that multiple realities exist alongside one another.

She has shown her work across Canada and internationally including at Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Guelph, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Cambridge Art Galleries, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Tom Thomson Gallery, Art Windsor-Essex, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Peninsula Arts, CAFKA, Queens Museum, and Flux Factory, among others. She has done artist residencies with Arts House Melbourne, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, KIAC and Camargo Foundation, and was the 2022 Waterfront Toronto Artist in Residence. She has received numerous grants including from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts and has a Master of Architecture from the University of Waterloo.

Christina Kingsbury’s (she/her) interdisciplinary art practice is inspired by histories of care and explores themes of place, ecology and inter-species relationships. Her work takes the form of performance, installation and social practice. Christina collaborates regularly with poets, ecologists, artists, choreographers and the public-including ecological public – to create relational works that offer a quiet and radical challenge to the commodification of life. Her work is rooted (often literally) in the Grand River watershed and treaty lands of the Mississauga’s of the Credit and part of her practice works through relationships with land as a settler person. Her solo and collaborative work has been shown as public interventions and in curated exhibitions both locally and internationally.