Dance and Improvisation

"Vicki Tansey is one of the most audacious and important artists I have encountered. Her performances, seemingly suspended in time, containing elements of the present and the distant past, can transport us to inner worlds through moments of sublime beauty. Do not miss her work."

Anne-Marie Lavigne,
Founder and director,
The Sutton School of Art,
Sutton, Quebec

"I am still deeply moved by Syncopation, Vicki Tansey's recent performance at the Lac Brome theatre in Knowlton. When a star shines in full luminescence, who dare extinguish it? Such is the dancing soul that travels with this woman. Her art is not about steps, text, music, wave, stream, wind. Rather it's the assembly through deep understanding of all these elements to create a symbiosis that becomes one on stage. It takes us to the heart of an extraordinary truth, that of being entirely oneself while making us believe that everything is planned. This is an art mastered by only a few improvisational dancers. In her interpretations and gestures, Vicki Tansey allows her vulnerability to be her guide. Sensitivity and generosity shine through. This is an artist whose path I crossed eight years ago and who remains for me a burning fire."

                                    Jean-Jacques Pillet
                                    former artistic director & choreographer
                                    Cirque du Soleil

"A work by Vicki Tansey permits our vulnerability to surface, bringing us back to ourselves, with our fears, our insecurities and our struggles. In an individualistic society such as ours, this artist imposes on us a reflection, a healthy questioning about the present moment."

                                    Éliane Michèle Crématy
                                    Responsable à l'accueil
         Théâtre de Lac-Brome
                                   Knowlton, Québec

Tansey trained for many years, first in classical dance and then in modern dance technique. At age twenty-four, she took a long leap into improvisation – an art form that demands both technical preparedness and open-mindedness.

"It was a leap I’ll never regret, though I remain grateful for that earlier discipline and experience, and I retain the greatest respect for the traditions that laid the foundation of my creative adventuring."

In the years since that leap, the dancer's work evolved to become highly personal and expressive as she used every opportunity to deepen her practice through the teaching and performing of dance, both solo and in collaboration with musicians and actors. During those years, she was to become a dancer who also makes visual art, these forms of expression, so seemingly unalike, each feeding the other and providing the inspiration, energy and creative challenge that every artist aspires to. Through it all, improvisation remains at the heart of what she does.

Carpe Diem was a dance and sound collaboration improvised by Tansey and musicians Michael Hynes (piano), Andre Lafleur (double bass). and Jean René (viola de gamba) and staged as a once-only evening event.

In August 2020, during a brief lull in the COVID-19 pandemic, she staged Carpe Diem inside the yawning interior of a former dairy facility, now the home of La Crémèrie performance and exhibition centre in Sutton, Quebec. She lit this rough, emphatically industrial space with a scattered collection of table lamps that created a contrasting air of quiet and comfort. The headlamps of an antique car shone eerily from the far end of a dim corridor while the socially-distanced audience entered and the crew greeted each while wearing masks based on the chilling paraphernalia of seventeenth-century plague doctors.

A wide circle of on-lookers formed in the dark as night fell. The musicians and dancer emerged from the gloomy recesses of the building and improvised the first act.

Tansey had decided in advance to migrate the event at a half-way point to a large adjoining space, but as she approached the closed double doors, keyboardist Michael Hines, stationed for technical reasons on the far side, improvised a firm resistance. They continued their struggle until Tansey broke through at last into a high, white-painted expanse hung with industrial chains supported from overhead trolleys that rumbled like thunder as the performers dragged them along their tracks.

The audience followed and from moment to moment, all was spontaneity, the atmosphere palpable, as though performers and audience were breathing together. Tansey hung from the thick black chains and danced over the grey cement floor below.

The musicians supported her with their instruments and Jean René with his viola de gamba joined in a duet of shadows as the dancer seized on a mop and pail of water to paint sweeping shapes on the concrete floor.

"For improvisational artists, things sometimes simply come together — and when they do they can create heartfelt smiles and tears. We had used the night — and seized the day."

Le Tour des Arts is an annual showcase of works by artists in their own studios in and around Sutton, Quebec. In July of 2023, Tansey participated in the Tour by presenting Impulsi, an evening of improvised music and movement featuring herself and two favourite collaborators, violist Jean Rene and cellist Emilie Girard-Charet.

During the discussion that followed the performance, someone expressed his wish that the "stage" had been surrounded by the audience members rather than separated from them. Jean, Emilie and the dancer responded by staging a second improvision arranged in just this way.

Both pieces were recorded by a person attending. Click on the still below for a link to the YouTube video.

"The audience was spellbound from the moment of entry to the hall where the dancer sat motionless on a stark wooden chair on stage with a backdrop of one of her huge abstract paintings. The effect was breathtaking as were the following 60 minutes which passed without a single hesitation – silence, virtuosity, tonality, discord, frenzy, laughter, beauty, intimacy, reciprocity – You sensed that when it ended the audience, so moved by the extraordinary event they had witnessed, were loathe to leave the building and step out into the ordinary world."

                                        ~ Susan Scott,
                                                Graphic Design
                                                            Stanbridge East, Quebec

In November 2023, as she entered her 80th year, Tansey and a group of professional musicians presented Syncopation, an evening of entirely improvised sound and movement. Accompanying the dancer were Michael Hynes on piano, Andre Lafleur on double bass, Adrianne Munden-Dixon on violin, and Tevet Sela on saxophone.

The venue was the Théâtre de Lac-Brome in Lac-Brome/Knowlton, Quebec.

If you love the unique art of improvisational dance, click on the image below to watch Maurice Singfield's single-camera archival video of the entire unrehearsed performance.

And click on this image below to watch Maurice Singfield's video documentary, which includes multi-camera excerpts of the performance and his interview with the dancer.

As in 2023's SYNCOPATION, 2024's VAPORI production was staged against the background of a Vicki Tansey canvas, in this case the ten-foot Alive Together.

(a detail from Alive Together)

From the moment Michael Hynes struck his first chord on the grand piano, he and his fellow musicians and Tansey shaped an hour-long performance without rehearsal or preparation. Jerome Lipani, videographer for the Bread and Puppet Theatre, was there to record the event. Click on the image below to see how the evening looked from one of his cameras.