The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency gives Manitoban artists time to focus on their work in the beautiful natural setting of Riding Mountain National Park.
The next artists-in-residence for 2024 are Zorya Arrow and Emma Beech. Ahead of their time in the historic Deep Bay Cabin, Zorya and Emma answered a few of our questions about their work and how they’ll be spending their residency.
MAC: Tell us a little about yourselves as artists and your practices.
Zorya Arrow & Emma Beech: We have been steadily working together in dance since 2010. For fourteen years we have grown as friends and colleagues. Emma has participated in six of Zorya’s creation processes. Together we have experience as Contact Improvisation partners, and dancing in work by other choreographers, including The Mariachi Ghost’s rock opera Rencor Vivo in 2018, and Natasha Torres Garner’s choreography in From the Seat of a Canoe in 2016. As co-creators, we are both compelled towards collaborative processes, which we find generative and enriching.
Tell us about your project — what will you be working on in the Deep Bay Cabin?
Our two-week residency at the Deep Bay cabin will act as a creative incubator as we launch our co-creation project: a new dance work. Our research aims to develop a choreographic relationship between bodies, landscapes, and the play of weight sharing between two bodies. We will build off of Zorya’s curiosity around partner work and Emma’s interest in processes of translating visual art into movement.
What are your relationships with the park, and what are you most looking forward to exploring?
Zorya: I spent a few seasons hanging out in the Riding Mountain area helping with an arborist business, a friend’s market garden, and a building project for a RAW:almond dining experience in the park. Through my time there, I formed friendships with folks living in the area that I still have today!
Emma: I have been to the park a few times as a kid on family trips, and a few times more recently. I love to see the water and the forests.
How do you hope the park will influence or inspire your project or practices?
Park landscapes will play a key role in our project, as inspiration for relationships between our two bodies.
We will begin our residency making contour drawings from our surroundings; working with tracing paper we will layer our drawings over top of each other. These layered line drawings will contain intersecting lines, which we will translate into movement. Wax crayon rubbings of various surfaces will reveal textures. We will ask, “How can this texture be a source for physical qualities?”.
Research will also involve physical puzzling and problem solving, asking, “What are different ways to use the weight of the body and the stacking of bones to create lifts and balances that mimic the landscape?”
What would you like the public and park staff to know about you and your work?
We are so thrilled to be taking part in the Deep Bay artist residency program and look forward to sharing our work with park goers, and the surrounding community.
The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency is offered in partnership by the Manitoba Arts Council and Riding Mountain National Park.
Interested in the staying in the Deep Bay cabin? Find out how to apply to the Riding Mountain Artists Residency through the Learn – Residencies grant stream. Apply by January 15, 2025 for a residency in the summer of 2025.
