The 38th Annual Performance Mix Festival brings together 35 experimental dance and film artists with deeply personal and expansive approaches to art-making. This season’s highlights include Mystic-Informatic, a collaboration between Audrée Juteau, Ellen Furey, N. Zoey Gauld, and Catherine Lavoie-Marcus produced by L’Annexe-A (Quebec).
Mystic-Informatic is an unexpected meeting place of dance, mycology and digital technologies. The work is concerned with questions around the meaning of dance in the context of the digital turn, a fascination with the enigmatic world of mushrooms, and a concern for the environment and the waste produced in the constant renewal of technology. In a recent book by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom of the End of the World, we learn that the matsutake mushroom only grows in the ruins of capitalism, in clear cut forests, landscapes devastated by exploitation where no life was thought possible, and with its growth brings a glimmer of optimism.
Mystic-Informatic takes the mushroom as a metaphor and proposes dance as a force of resistance capable of breathing new life into technological waste: outdated technological objects. Here, technology is diverted from its primary function. Through dance and through their bodies, the artists connect to technology in a sensory, corporal, and imaginative way. In a punk, apocalyptic and feminist spirit, they give power to dance and exorcise their ecological despair.
