Third Canvas Dance
Artistic Director: Kathy Lang
Launched in 2015, this young company creates new works, offers outreach, and engages many levels of the artistic community. Third Canvas Dance offers professional and engaging works and employs amazing local dancers with some guest artists.
To the dancer, dance is vital. Creativity and exploration of our world through contemporary dance is how we breathe. Third Canvas seeks to challenge or bodies, our opinions, our expression, creating innovative dance to share and translate for our audiences.
Third Canvas Dance is the resident company at Seda Dance, Victoria’s premier contemporary dance hub, which houses classes, creation, mentorships and a wide spectrum of dance opportunities for adult dancers from beginner to professional.
CROWD CREATURE
CHOREOGRAPHER, KATHY LANG
Photo: SeaSalt Photography
CARBON
CHOREOGRAPHER, KATHY LANG
Looking at the End of Days Trilogy, choreographer Kathy Lang confronts responsibility and the relationship between the moon, the golden bird and the woman. While we watch the earth’s demise, ice melts into our oceans, we return to the water, challenged to examine where the responsibility for survival lies. We are all carbon, yet carbon cannot, will not, be destroyed.
In Carbon, a 20-minute trio, we explore environmental commentary and confront culpability and the relationship between three characters of the End of Days Trilogy. Moon, Golden Bird and Woman exchange freedom and fears as they push the cycles that exist between them: flight (escape), connectivity (reliance) and fatigue (death) We experience earth’s demise, examining where the culpability lies.
The moon, removed, watching down from her cold lonely stance, affects our tides, the water which erodes us, nourishes us and cleanses us. The woman, our nurturer Mother Earth, births us and bleeds for us. She cares for the natural, embodies mankind and weeps for our mistakes.
Where is the golden bird’s alliance? To the earth or the skies? Where is his shelter? Whom shall he save?
Dancers succumb to tide and current, cyclical phrasing challenged by conflicting roles and responsibility leading to compassionate partnering, tossing lifts and intimate characterization.
Photography: Aengus MacIntosh
IN EXTERO
CHOREOGRAPHER, KATHY LANG
The Lady and the Unicorn is the modern title given to a series of six medieval tapestries woven in Flanders from wool and silk. The set is on display in the Musée National du Moyen Âge in Paris, and is often considered one of the greatest works of European art from the Middle Ages. Five of the tapestries are commonly interpreted as depicting the five senses — taste, hearing, sight, smell, and touch. The sixth displays the words À mon seul désir. Its meaning is obscure, but has been interpreted as representing love or understanding.
An exploration of exteroceptors (sensory receptors that receive stimuli from within the body) leads six contemporary dancers deep into the awareness of finding balance, hunger, and intuition, challenging them to face dependancies, cravings and triggers. Memories, instincts and desires lay in wait there. The vulnerability within the piece is engaging and complex, and the piece holds detailed, intricate work and presents its viewers with a haunting environment.
The TASTE section of the work makes use of vibrant red strings to attach dancers to one another, offering both the necessary connectivity and the struggle that comes with a lack of independence.
The artists dance an aggressive section of choreography, including partnering fully blindfolded in the SIGHT section, leading us to heightened alternate senses to achieve movements beyond our fear.
The tenderness that evolves after sight is returned, through a riveting duet, leads us to the warmth and the ferocity of TOUCH.
Large silk panels hung upstage offer texture and contour in space throughout the work. Dancers move through the panels at the beginning and end of the work.
In Extero premiered in May 2017.
Photography: Aengus MacIntosh
BRAMBLE’S CHILD
CHOREOGRAPHER, KATHY LANG
Kathy’s latest work, Bramble’s Child is a poignant and challenging look into childhood trauma and neglect. The 13-dancer cast explores various personal relationships from a child’s place of dependance. It looks at ease of conformity that permits the bystander effect. This evocative piece premiered in Victoria in May, 2019.
Photography: Aengus MacIntosh
Recent Works:
Journey Tree 2023
Tumble 2023
Crowd Creature 2022
Solstice 2022
Dream 2022
The Coat 2020
Bramble’s Child 2019
Carbon 2018
One Tree 2018
In Extero 2017
Shoes Behind 2017
Strings Attached 2016
Framed 2015
A Grace of Sense 2013
Echoes and Old Words 2000
My Eyes 1999
Current Works in Progress:
Shadow Who