What Matters

What Matters - kloetzel&co.
What Matters - kloetzel&co.
What Matters - kloetzel&co.
What Matters - kloetzel&co.
What Matters - kloetzel&co.
What Matters - kloetzel&co.
What Matters - kloetzel&co.
What Matters - kloetzel&co.

What Matters

Through a spectacular joining of dance, voiceover, projection and light design, What Matters offers a dance theatre satire that highlights our economic reality and the cultural obsession with unsustainable growth.

What Matters developed as an artistic investigation into two key areas. One, the piece experiments with the dismembering of movement and sound delivery (as an homage to Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young and to the Japanese form of Bunraku). Two, the work examines how performance can dig into cultural conceptions of the economy. To do so, What Matters embraces the setting of a medical facility to riff on the media’s personification of the economy, in particular, how the ‘economy’ becomes an anthropomorphized figure that we are expected to care for in a deep and abiding manner. 

The work premiered in 2024 at the University of Calgary.

Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy

Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe
Just Breathe

Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy

Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy (Just Breathe, Mother Earth) is a collaborative project led by Cree artist Sandra Lamouche and settler artist Melanie Kloetzel. 

Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy offers intimate groups of 25-30 individuals an immersive journey into and out of climate anxiety. As the audience-participants are physically guided through a crafted landscape, they experience hope, deceit, folly and serenity, while also uncovering alternatives to a shocking fate.

Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy presents audience-participants with the opportunity to engage with the climate crisis as a nexus where economics, ecology, health and Indigenous knowledge meet. Using tactics of disorientation, satire, and state-based tasks for audience-participants, those joining the Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy journey experience both the deep inequalities and inadequate nature of Eurocentric cultural responses to the climate crisis, as well as the cultural possibilities that exist in reconnecting to the land via Indigenous worldviews.

Each Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy journey concludes with a debriefing session with a trained psychologist. These sessions, facilitated by Camille Mori, help the audience examine the feelings that emerged during the immersive journey, as well as connect to others who may be feeling disempowered in the face of the climate emergency.

Just Breathe, Okâwîmâwaskiy premiered as part of the Professional Series at the University of Calgary in January 2023 with additional performances scheduled for 2024 and 2025.

Landscape in Motion

Landscape in Motion
Landscape in Motion
Landscape in Motion
Landscape in Motion
Landscape in Motion
Landscape in Motion

Landscape in Motion

Landscape in Motion (LIM) is an interdisciplinary project that brings together landscape architect Enrica Dall’Ara and site-specific choreographer Melanie Kloetzel/kloetzel&co., with a research team of graduate and undergraduate students from the University of Calgary.

Through a three-year site-specific analysis of the neighbourhoods of Inglewood and Ramsay in Moh’kinsstis/Calgary, the project seeks to create an innovative methodology that informs both design and dance creation processes in urban settings.

Crafted in dialogue with a landscape that is undergoing massive urban redevelopment, the project aims to respect the larger scale of the neighbourhood alongside the smaller scale of the human body.

A key output of the LIM project involves the interdisciplinary production of ‘score-maps’, which offer information regarding a movement’s placement on site, a mover’s positionality and the quality and actions generated on site. A second output involves the creation of a series of dance films that focus on individual ‘microsites’ and, when collected, offer a sense of the ‘life in the landscape’ to inform landscape design processes. 

Vines

Weeds
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Weeds
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Weeds
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Weeds
Weeds
Vines by kloetzel&co.
Vines by kloetzel&co.

Vines

VINES is a site-adaptive work created by Melanie Kloetzel (kloetzel&co.) with dramaturgical support from Brandy Leary (Anandam Dancetheatre). The work explores how the human body can corporeally adapt to urban spaces by rigorously embodying growth patterns from plants.

The VINES process asks dancing bodies to adopt ideas from the more-than-human world to impact a series of cityscapes, just as, perhaps, plants do when enacting a reclamation of abandoned or disused areas. 

The work is currently in research development in both Toronto and Calgary with support from Canada Council for the Arts.

For more about this research process, see:

‘New Directions in Site Performance Practice’

and

‘Climate Art‘

The Coming Silence film

The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence

The Coming Silence (a film)

The Coming Silence is a film based on the live site-adaptive performance installation, The Coming Silence. Released in 2022, the film premiered at the Green Montenegro International Film Festival (Montenegro), and has also been screened at DANCE ONSCREEN (Canada), the Outlet Dance Project (USA), and HECare Film Festival (Canada). The film also won an Honourable Mention for Costume Design at the Exeter Dance International Film Festival (UK).

The Coming Silence is a site-based performance installation that highlights humanity’s ethical dilemmas in the Anthropocene. Created with support from Canada Council for the Arts, The Coming Silence examines the concept of extinction, whether through viral, climatic or ecological means, by focusing on the taxidermied reality of the natural history museum. 

A creation of kloetzel&co., The Coming Silence includes direction/choreography by Melanie Kloetzel with cinematography by Linnea Swan and poetry by A.E. Stallings. Performers for the work include Kaili Che, Shondra Cromwell-Krywulak, Hannah Isbister, Megan Koch, Alyssa Maturino, Meghann Michalsky, Sarah Mitchell, Camille Mori, Maggie Myles, Rufi Oswaldo, Taylor Ritchie, and Reese Wilson.

The Coming Silence (on site)

Photo by @SentientForms
Photo by @SentientForms
Photo by @SentientForms
Photo by @SentientForms
Photo by @SentientForms
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
Photo by @SentientForms

The Coming Silence

The Coming Silence is a site-based performance installation that aims a critical eye at the divisions humans create between themselves and the rest of the biotic world.

The Coming Silence comments on the larger notion of human extinction, whether through viral, climatic or ecological crises, highlighting humanity’s ethical dilemmas in the Anthropocene.

An in-process showing of The Coming Silence occurred as part of TRAction’s ‘Procession for End Times II’ in September 2020 as audiences honoured the loss of the Milne Ice Shelf.

The premiere of the work occurred as a walking tour and performance on Prince’s Island Park on May 1&2, 2021, presented as part of ReLoCate’s The Experiment series. For more information, see https://relocateyyc.wixsite.com/. A film that documents the live performance was released in August 2021, again as part of ReLoCate’s The Experiment series.

The Coming SIlence enjoys support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

The Coming Silence

Lot C

Lot C
Lot C
Lot C
Lot C
Lot C
Lot C
Lot C

Lot C

Lot C is a site-specific performance produced by kloetzel&co. with direction by Melanie Kloetzel and choreography by students in the BFA Dance at the University of Calgary. The work evokes images of cinematic landscapes and children’s perspectives amid the peculiarities of a pandemic. Performed in an abandoned lot next to a Children’s Hospital, the performance offered a free and accessible live viewing experience for those more and less intimately connected to the hospital during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.

MEN in charge

Photo by Kevin Leiver
MEN poster
MEN at Mac Hall
MEN in charge
MEN at Christmas
MEN in charge / Dance of the Puppets

MEN in charge

MEN in charge is a film that explores the creation and presentation of the live performance work, It began with watching. In doc(mock)umentary form, MEN in charge depicts how kloetzel&co. was able to create a brutally humorous take on gender and/in the U.S. political landscape as ‘alternative facts’ and outlandish acts take centre stage. Co-created with the cinematographer and director Linnea Swan, MEN in charge offers an entertaining and honest portrait of a sector enthralled with power. 

Since its release on January 20, 2021 (U.S. Inauguration Day), MEN in charge has received a Best Short Documentary Award from the DC AFTER DARK International Film Festival, a Best Documentary award from the Mabig Film Festival (Germany), a Best Female Short award from the Freedom Festival International (USA), a Best Experimental Film from the GO Independent International Film Festival (USA), as well as an Honorable Mention in the Documentary Short category at the New York IO Film Festival (USA).

MEN in charge has also been selected for presentation through the Toronto International Women Film Festival, Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema (Boulder, CO), the LA Independent Women Film Awards, Film Girl Film Festival (WI), Star City Film Festival (MN), the ARTS x SDGs Festival (NY), the New York City IO Film Festival, Freedom Festival International (SC), the Festival of Genders and Performances (Portugal), dance:made in canada festival (Toronto), Reading Film Fest (Reading, PA), FLOW Festival (FL), and the Moving Parts Film Festival (Los Angeles).

Two sneak previews of the film were presented by Wild Dogs international Screendance Festival and through ReLoCate’s The Experiment #4 series. Subscribe to the kloetzel&co. YouTube channel to see three episodic trailers for the film. 

The film is based on the work It began with watching that toured to over ten theatre spaces and alternative sites in Canada between 2016-20.

The Coming Silence

The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence
The Coming Silence

The Coming Silence

Are we exempt from the diorama? Who will be left to witness our appearance in the museum of the disappeared?

The Coming Silence aims a critical eye at the divisions humans create between themselves and the rest of the biotic world. Through a work that places very still or slow-moving performing bodies on display, The Coming Silence asks us to consider when or how humans might inhabit the display cases of natural history museums currently inhabited by ‘animals of interest’.

The Coming Silence encourages audiences to question humanity’s future in light of climate, ecological, and viral emergencies, thereby highlighting humanity’s ethical dilemmas in the Anthropocene. 

The Coming Silence developed as a work-in-progress in 2020 through Kloetzel’s work with dance majors at the University of Calgary; it is currently in development with the company for an evening-length exhibit.

The Gene Sharp Legacy Project

Gene Sharp Legacy Project
The Gene Sharp Legacy Project
The Gene Sharp Legacy Project
Gene Sharp project

The Gene Sharp Legacy Project

The Gene Sharp Legacy Project is part research project, part training, part temporal collision. Delving into the research by historian Gene Sharp on non-violent protest, this project by Melanie Kloetzel (kloetzel&co.) considers what past bodies can teach present and future bodies who move beyond despair or feigned ignorance and take to the streets in protest.

Premiere presented by ReLoCate, The Experiment #4 series. The work has toured to Vancouver’s Left of Main as part of Left of PuSh (co-produced by plastic orchid factory), to Edmonton’s Spazio Performativo (with co-production by Mile Zero Dance), and to Calgary’s Doolittle Studio Theatre, all with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.