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Art NOW Series: Andrea Spaziani
Inviting Alternative Agencies
12 pm | February 8, 2019
University Recital Hall
Free admission, everyone welcome!

In a time of questioning anthropocentrism, how might artists step outside themselves and glimpse at the elements or context of their work from a different reality – be it that of a paper bag, a balloon, a horse, a germ, an alter ego, an art lecture, a stone, or a pile of compost? Part lecture, part performance, Andrea Spaziani offers a choreographic sharing on creative processes that invite encounters with things, ideas, or points of view that are incompatible with habitual perception or push familiarity to its limits. She will share her process for making shifts in knowing and being from closed, inscribed definitions to a flow of contingencies, tangents, and complexities. She does this to challenge barriers that take hold on processes of thinking. How does the artwork itself think, uncover its own expanded definitions, or produce a dialogue through a multiplicity of relations?

Biography

Andrea Spaziani works with unconscious bias as material and is in a constant state of playful self-discovery. She generates choreographic scores by combining movement, speaking and writing in a stream of improvisation. These scores provide a framework for her improvised performances and collaborations.

She is the 2016-2019 Artist in Residence at the Dancemakers Centre for Creation, and is living between Toronto, New York City, and Marfa, Texas where she co-created the interdisciplinary lecture series ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE FRIVOLOUS with Allen Ferguson. In July 2019 she will curate / choreograph SPACEBODIES III at the Small Arms Inspection Building in Mississauga with a group of five artists working in time-based mediums.

Spaziani is a core collaborator on the social art practice HANDWRITING THE CONSTITUTION founded by Morgan O’Hara in New York City. Other recent projects include AGGRO INFINITUM a film collaboration with Alicia Grant, MANIFEST DENSITY a solo performed for Movement Research at the Judson Church in NYC, and SILVER VENUS an ensemble choreography that premiered at Dancemakers in April 2018.

She is currently finishing a 3-month choreographic mentorship with Maria Jerez in Madrid, Spain. For her new solo THE WEST, Spaziani will collaborate with musician Matt Smith and celebrated Canadian choreographer Danny Grossman, and it will premiere at Dancemakers in April 2019. Locally, she led a workshop at the Lethbridge Society of Independence Dance Artists and was commissioned to create a student work for LCI Arts Academy Dance in March 2018.

Spaziani received an MFA in Creative Practice from the Transart Institute / Plymouth University in 2016.

andreaspaziani.com

Photo credit: Allen Ferguson.