Ep. #73: Ame Henderson + Jennifer Castle

Ame Henderson is a world-renowned Toronto-based dance artist and Jennifer Castle is a very compelling, gifted singer, songwriter, and musician who also calls Toronto home. Together they’ve created a new work for the Toronto Dance Theatre called Henderson/Castle Voyager, which explores continuous movement, as a state of being. Voyager performances take place Feb. 20-22 & Feb. 26-March 1 at 8 PM and Feb. 23 at 2 PM at the Winchester Street Theatre (80 Winchester St.). After a rehearsal at the Toronto Dance Theatre, Ame, Jennifer, and I discussed rehearsing versus practicing and Mike Watt, how practice differs within dance and music, the conception of the Voyager piece, how dancing is related to general thoughts and feelings about moving, how Jen is participating in this project by writing an hour-long song for the piece, playing piano, and singing the aforementioned song that never repeats itself from performance to performance, the art of stream of consciousness, talking about outer space, how Jen’s earnest, edited persona might be impacted by this unguarded, humourous method of writing, how improvisation in music and dance demonstrates how ridiculous, funny, and surprising the human body is, restraint and instantaneous decision-making, the way heightened awareness in practice impacts one’s daily life, the efficacy of grassroots movements and how this relates to success, what keeps a world-renowned artist like Ame working in Canada where she’s relatively underappreciated, how Toronto enables things to happen and yet is a difficult place to galvanize people around contemporary art, livelihood versus art-making, Canada’s financial support system for the arts compared to other places, learning to live in the moment, work versus jobs, Ame’s plans to remount a project called Relay in Europe and Jen’s plans to release a new record tentatively called Pink City, the song “Sliced Bread,” and more.