Mourning Dances: Un-nevering by Thea Patterson and concerto by Charlie Khalil Prince and Olivia Tapiero

This long form review essay examines two works from the most recent edition of Montreal’s Festival TransAmériques, in order to assess how contemporary choreographers are imagining their medium’s affordances for mourning. As public grief proliferates in the face of global atrocities and ecological collapse, dance artists appear increasingly to ask what role their work can play in mediating, negotiating, and representing, if not resolving, collectively held pain. Viewed together, Un-nevering by Thea Patterson and concerto by Charlie Khalil Prince and Olivia Tapiero reveal that a thorough engagement with materiality is central to such an aesthetic inquiry. Onstage objects give the dancing body something tangible to reckon with: surrogates, in a sense, for the heaving volumes of suffering that so often stay intangible.