Bodies drape softly over metal ladders in Lurch, at Dancing on the Edge
The MascallDance production uses a large set piece to unite three distinct pieces by different choreographers
Aerial view of Lurch. Photo by Tobias Macfarlane
Lurch. Photo by Tobias Macfarlane
Dancing on the Edge presents MascallDance’s Lurch on June 18, 20, and 21 in Studio T at the SFU Woodward’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
IT’S ADMITTEDLY DIFFICULT to picture the full magnitude of Lurch, the central set piece in MascallDance’s new production of the same name, by reading words on a screen. (If you can call to mind Khan Lee’s free-standing sculpture 108 STEPS, the “ladder to nowhere” on a Kingsway meridian, you’re halfway there.)
Lurch is a large metal object welded by artist Alan Storey. It’s effectively two triangular ladders connected at the top by a pipe and held together at their bases by a platform. Two tanks on that platform can be filled with 700 pounds of water to give the structure stability, and the angles of the ladders can be changed on a whim simply by pushing them—plus, the whole thing is on wheels.
Jennifer Mascall, founding artistic director of MascallDance, commissioned choreographers Justine A. Chambers, Sarah Chase, and Ame Henderson to each create a 30-minute work that revolves around Storey’s set piece. Speaking to Stir by Zoom, Chambers notes that a theme of inertia has emerged in her choreography.
“At the onset, it was really about working with a kind of softness in the body, a kind of gentle asymmetry,” she says. “So we were working with this notion of draping our bodies—draping our flesh over our bones, draping our bones over our bones, draping our whole body over the ground. But then also, because Lurch is metal and hard, I was like, ‘How can this be something that can receive softness, and how can it elicit softness in our body?’”
The production will premiere at the SFU Woodward’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts as part of this year’s Dancing on the Edge festival, which runs from June 12 to 21. Though the three distinct choreographic works in Lurch all star dancers Nick Miami Benz, Ralph Escamillan, Chris Wright, and Benjamin Kamino, they’re not interwoven in any way.
Chambers was already familiar with Storey’s set piece when she began working on Lurch in 2020. Mascall had commissioned the object for her 2010 production The White Spider, which was inspired by climbers who braved the Eiger mountain in Switzerland. Chambers and Wright happened to be among the performers in The White Spider.
This time around, Chambers chose to work with Storey’s piece in a more straightforward way. Rather than having it constantly shifting positions, she chose not to “lurch” Lurch. Instead, the dancers meet the object where it is, honouring its history while giving it new meaning.
“I like to think about counter-archives—these sort of mutable things,” Chambers explains. “Instead of an archive being fixed, what is it to allow an archive to be changeable and contingent and provisional? And I feel like this as a proposal is really amazing. So it’s not about making the object live as it had, but instead allowing the object to live again in multiple permutations.”
Lurch. Photo by Tobias Macfarlane
Despite Lurch being stationary in Chambers’s segment, the dancers climb up and over the piece, often sliding down it head-first while contending with the sheer height of it. They repeat all these motions with what the choreographer calls “unrelenting momentum”. Though she acknowledges there’s some inherent risk to that, she wasn’t interested in the “heroic dance prowess” of gymnastics or acrobatics this time around.
“I rarely work on big moments,” Chambers clarifies. “I think it’s always the accumulation of moments, and we make it to the end and we understand something.”
Although Chase and Henderson are incorporating excerpts of Jeff Corness’s original score for The White Spider into their segments, Chambers chose not to because of her past choreographic association with that music. Instead, she’s using four pop love songs—an unexpected choice for the artist—stitched together with white noise, or what she calls “sounds that we learn to not listen to”, like the hum of an HVAC system. Emerging interdisciplinary artist Liam Murley is assembling the score, which includes their own track “Forgive Me”.
The love songs allow Chambers to tap into an emotional side of her artistic practice. She often works with intellectual queries; take her duet with Laurie Young, One hundred more, for example, which drew on the concept of using bodies as resistance in light of the Black Lives Matter movement. But Lurch is rooted in pure feeling.
“All of my choreographic questions always come from my grandmother and this phrase she would always say, which is ‘Do you feel me?’” says Chambers. “She wouldn’t say ‘Do you see me?’ or ‘Do you hear me?’ but ‘Do you feel me?’ And so I guess that’s still the question, right—do we feel this? And how do we feel it?”
That train of thought aligns with the artist’s broader philosophy. “I don’t choreograph movement. If you know me, you know that,” she says with a laugh. “I choreograph a way of being inside of things.”
On top of having a connection to Lurch, Chambers also has personal history with the other commissioned choreographers. Her very first professional gig in the contemporary-dance world, a duet she performed in Toronto at age 18, shared a program with a work that featured Chase. (Chambers recalls being “star-struck” while watching the more experienced dancer perform.) Henderson, meanwhile, is a dear friend of Chambers’s, and has been a close collaborator in more recent years.
With 700 pounds of water holding the fort down, Lurch draws on all those tangents, reinvigorating relationships while carving new paths forward. The three pieces ultimately capture a feeling of kinship.
“I think it’s pretty special to have shared so much history with people and then all be sharing these, like, love letters, you know?” she muses. “I feel like there’s a real component of love in how this project was formed, and also in how we’ve met the project with Jennifer. And I think we’ve all talked about that. These works feel like little love letters to these interconnected or entangled lives and dance we’ve had in Canada in this moment—beautiful sweet nothings, or missives.
“It’s not a normal commission, right?” she continues. “Of course, we made something, there’s a product, but that never felt like the point. The point was about what happens when we put all of these things together—and not as some rogue experiment, but something that felt very intentional from the get-go.” 
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