A rolling hitch
A rolling hitch is a knot, an attachment. Stable in some directions and easily undone in others. But a hitch is also a hiccup or a kick – a step, as in the case of Elizabeth Ward one across dance history. In her piece for the TQW dance group PARASOL, consisting of Helena Araújo, Elda Gallo, Yoh Morishita, Jennie-love Navoret and Viltė Švarplytė, Ward searches for the dances running like threads through their individual pasts. Like the proto-queer Les Biches and Les Noces, a constructivist ballet with feminist undertones, both created by Bronislava Nijinska in 1924 for the Ballets Russes: one of Ward’s first teachers in Atlanta in the 1980s was in turn taught by Nijinska herself in her dance studio in Hollywood in the 1940s. A rolling hitch will draw and tug on lines like these, examine their attachment, and let go to pull the strings in a new choreography.
is a dancer/choreographer currently living in Vienna. Previously, she has lived and worked in New York City, Athens, Brussels, and Portland. Her work explores the collective histories of dance lineages accumulated in a dancer’s muscle memory as a living archaeology. In 2022, she showed the group piece Hedera helix at TQW. Some of the performance festivals and venues she has been presented by include the Kitchen (New York), Movement Research at the Judson Church (New York), Disjecta (Portland), Tanzquartier Wien (Vienna), Pieter PASD (Los Angeles), ImPulsTanz (Vienna), steirischer herbst (Graz), and Wiener Festwochen (Vienna). As a performer, she has collaborated and participated in the works of DD Dorvillier, Miguel Gutierrez, Jennifer Lacey, Michikazu Matsune, Manuel Pelmuș, Philipp Gehmacher, Veza Fernández, and Antonjia Livingstone, amongst others. Ward received her BA from Bennington College in Vermont, where she studied Choreography and Improvisation as a Performance Practice.
Starting in 2022, two choreographers will continuously work with a select group of five young dancers on a TQW Halle G production for three months each year. A hybrid artistic training project for the dance scene in Vienna and beyond, but also a mobile network of relations, an experimental setting focusing on the vital needs of ensemble productions: solidarity, collective experience, and conviviality. The 2024 participants are Helena Araújo, Elda Gallo, Yoh Morishita, Jennie-love Navoret and Viltė Švarplytė.
Credits
Concept Elizabeth Ward By and with PARASOL – Helena Araújo, Elda Gallo, Yoh Morishita, Jennie-love Navoret, Viltė Švarplytė Sound design Özgür Sevinç Light design Thomas Zamolo Co-produced by Elizabeth Ward / vitus and Tanzquartier Wien. Elizabeth Ward holds a 2024 research grant from the city of Vienna.