Esmé Boyce
As a member of the first workshop I gave myself a utilitarian project. I set out to write the perfect artist statement, looking to the wisdom of the group, Cori and of my lovely partner, Julie. What I found was a group of truly beautiful people exploring creativity and opening new windows in what art making and connection could be in a very new world of physical distance. In my own process I found five or six different iterations of statements, each with its own qualities and truths and a process that extended far beyond the structure of the workshop. This statement is a permanent work-in-progress. Though the act of trying to understand what makes a person make dances and what makes those dances yours is a delicious and impossible task, one learns a lot along the way. This artist statement reflects this particular moment when I find myself sending a snapshot to Cori for inclusion in this showcase; it will likely be different a few months from now. An enormous thank you to my brilliant and patient partner, Julie Lemberger. She is an incredible artist, editor and friend who held my hand as we turned chaos into order on the page.
—Esmé
Artistic Statement
Making dances from your gut, means wandering into the unknown. From these ventures I make dances that shimmer with playful mischief. Like a dream, bits of memory, images, muscular sensations are abstracted and reimagined. The thread that runs through my work is a desire to reframe the familiar, people, nature and objects, to create an emotionally transcendent experience.
Growing up with parents who are visual artists has shaped who I am. Painting, sculpture, photography, and experimental films were among my earliest impressions and machinations. Beginning with my childhood infatuation with the surreal dance film, The Red Shoes, I was drawn to movement as my artistic endeavor. Over the years, I trained extensively in ballet and later modern and post-modern dance traditions. My work jumps off the conceptual play of post- modernism but utilizes the ornate subtly of ballet. Now, I have a dynamic relationship to these forms; I render a kinetic world with painterly detail.
Over the last twelve years my family organically became my collaborators. My brother, Cody Boyce, creates the original music, my father, Kit Boyce, designs the sets, my mother, Sue Julien creates the costumes. Working in tandem, our shared sensibility has facilitated instinct driven, ambitious, interdisciplinary pieces. Along with my family I have built strong relationships with the fours dancers I am currently working with Gentry Isaiah George, Pierre Guilbault, Cori Kresge and Matilda Sakamoto. The dancers march alongside me into the unknown without hesitation. Their commitment and sensitive sophistication provide a powerful laboratory for movement invention and conversation. Together we express that thing that has no other form other than a dance.
My current choreographic inspirations are moss growing in hostile conditions, mating calls of birds, siren filled nights, formal court dances of ancestors, birds preening and squirrels running. I am working on a new piece in which the themes and methodology have been shaped by the pandemic. What has not changed is the twinkle in the eye of the dance. The work has moments of taught curves that surge forward with sudden sweeps. Pawing of air around me like a creature digging a tunnel unravels into a sloshing pas de Basque. This dance is fully committed to paradox as a tactic to prod at the unknowable. I use myself as source material, my dancing body holding the reins. Four brilliant dancers draw new poetry out; their precision and ferocity of form etch ideas in space. With laughter and a sense of freedom we find together, the dance announces itself.
I want the audience to relate to contradictory states made physical, offering a meditation on rage, play, the mundane, the dream-like and the spectacular all coexisting. This is the history of this moment, many profound states of humanness bunched up on top of one another; a celebration of life in all its strangeness.
