Dancemakers is pleased to announce that Resident Artist Lara Kramer’s Eating bones and Licking bread will make its première at Dancemakers Centre for Creation from Thursday, January 30, 2020 to Saturday, February 1, 2020, at 8 pm each evening.

Now in her second year of a three-year Dancemakers residency, Lara’s solo work Eating bones and Licking bread was presented as a work-in-progress at Dancemakers in November 2019. Working with the body, texture and sound, it plays with sustained images that fluctuate in meaning, Eating bones and Licking bread questions the colonial system of preserving hunger and consuming land, and body anchors the artist inside of the work. A minimal soundtrack of field recordings, live dialogue, voice and textures all stir and provoke the physically marked landscape, like an apocalyptic ballad piercing the fabrics of newly laid soil.

Said Lara Kramer, “I work with my gut, a hollowing feeling in my gut, I fill what has been empty, I fill it with sound. Raw sound of movement, breath, sweat and warmth. It is within my artistic process that I have further connected to my Aboriginal roots. I work with storytelling within my creative process as a way of exploring how the mapping of stories from my family’s history resonates in the body and how it can be transferred symbolically in my work connecting to the past, present and future.”

ABOUT LARA KRAMER

“The subjugation of her people, Canadian Cree and Ojibwe tribes, provides the impetus for
Lara Kramer…  This process includes cultural genocide carried out in residential schools whose missionwas to “stamp out the Indian” in First Nations children. Kramer is the first of four  generations not subject to this desecration.. [the] work explores her reconnection to her ancestors’ country, including places of family significance.”  The Sydney Morning Herald, May 2019

Lara Kramer is a performer, choreographer and multidisciplinary artist of mixed Oji-Cree and settler heritage, based in Montreal. Her critically acclaimed works portray the contrast of the brutal relations between Indigenous peoples and colonial society and have been presented across Canada and in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.

She has been on the faculty of the Indigenous Dance Residency at The Banff Centre and has taught workshops across Canada and in Melbourne, Australia. Lara was the guest teacher at Nunatta Isiginnaartitsisarfia – The National Theatre of Greenland in 2018. She also landed her film debut role of Angie in François Delisle’s Cash Nexus (2018).

Lara has received multiple awards, acknowledgements and prizes for her work. She was recognized and appointed as a Human Rights Advocate through the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre in 2012. In 2014, Lara was awarded the Scholarship of Audacity – Caisse de la culture from the OFFTA, Montreal, and was commissioned by The Canada Dance Festival for her work Native Girl Syndrome. In 2017-18, she was presented with the prestigious Ashley Fellowship at Trent University, and was awarded the CanDance creation fund for her work Windigo. In 2018, Lara received the Jacqueline-Lemieux Prize for recognition of artistic excellence and distinguished career achievement in dance.

AT-A-GLANCE

Eating Bones and Licking Bread Creative Team

• Conceived, Created & Performed by Lara Kramer       
• Gabriel Cropley  | Lighting Design
• Ida Baptiste & Peter James | Outside Eyes
• James Oscar  | Documentation
• Shania Bailey-Edmonds | Performance Intern from Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School, Wellington, New Zealand 

When:

Thursday, January 30 at 8 pm

Friday, January 31 at 8 pm

Saturday, February 1 at 8 pm

Where:

Dancemakers Centre for Creation

9 Trinity Street, Theatre Studio 313, 3rd Floor

Toronto's Distillery Historic District

Tickets:

$20 | Arts workers, Seniors & Students

$25 | General

On sale on-line at dancemakers.org until 12 Noon day of performance and then at the Door - box office opens at 7:15 pm. No ticket service charges!

Photo: Lara Kramer.