Dances with Strangers, 2010

Kianga Ford - New York, USA / Los Angeles, USA
Isabelle Noel - Toronto, Canada

Performance Art

Toronto, with its rich history of migrations, integrations, and redefinitions, provides an ideal setting for Dances with Strangers.  At its simplest, it is an invitation to dance with the artist in a temporary space created especially for the night. In a moment in which one can be taught salsa by a Kenyan in Istanbul or dance the Bachata in Oslo, the social dances that once marked discrete cultural boundaries are moved as much by the irreverent flows of popular culture as by tradition. It becomes difficult to predict what bodily language a new partner will bring—the dancer becomes a vessel for the remix, while culture slides, and each dance proposes a new intimacy and a new order of things.

Kianga Ford works primarily with sound and environment. Her immersive projects query the relationship between physical and cultural proximity. Her work has been shown at venues including The Studio Museum in Harlem; USF Verftet (Bergen, Norway); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore; and the California Biennial. She is currently Director of BFA Fine Arts and Assistant Professor of New Genres in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York.

Suitable for all ages