Wheezy Breezy
Co-Choreographers, Performers, and Access Dramaturges: Sarah Wong and jes sachse | Stage Manager: Dylan Tate-Howarth | Audio Describer: Joseph Quezal | ASL Interpreters: Sage Lovell, Gaitrie Persaud, Marcia Adolphe, Ryan Kraft | Access Doulas: Camilo Diaz-Varela, Mandy MacLean, Harmeet Rehal, Rea Sweets | Band: Skye Wallace (Live Vocals & Guitar, Film Score), Jason Jang (Live Guitar), J Strautman (Live Bass) | Videographer: Mick Hutch | Video Editor: Kerr Holden
Premiered at Regent Park in Toronto at the 2024 SummerWorks Performance Festival | Co-produced by Dancemakers with the support of Citadel + Compagnie and selecting curators Arts Assembly
Open audio description, ASL interpretation, access doula support, COVID safety precautions, free food, water and public transit tickets, harm reduction supplies
Wheezy Breezy is an interdisciplinary durational performance that sits in the complexities of navigating our dance practices as disabled artists breathing through the ongoing pandemic. Focusing on the necessary act of breath that bodies unconsciously choreograph is a way to reveal how bodies have been interrupted by eugenics insistence to “return to normal.” Grounding disability at the core of our work, we lean into multiple modalities of accessible translation to interrupt capital procedure and expand the possibilities of performance by nurturing creative adaptation of one moment to the next.
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As we move in step with grief, we dance in relationship with the medical, with aesthetic, with public space, with improvisations of sonic accompaniment, and with global movements for collective liberation. Wheezy Breezy rides along the winds that are already blowing through Regent Park, in recognition of the power of being in community and communion with others. Regent Park has a long and deeply respected reputation of pushing back on gentrification, speaking up for the land and the decades of communities already living here, as forces attempt to claim it away, seeing it more valuable in its proximity to downtown core, which concrete and money has been making unliveable for many.
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Photo documentation by Kendra Epik and Jae Yang