Dancing in the City

Terrance Houle’s screendance work, Landscape, treats Indigenous aesthetics as a site of the social in Canadian society, and explores the practice of civic consciousness in the domains of dance and new media art. This involves the social geography of Calgary as a Canadian city, the relationship of Indigenous peoples and their powwows to colonial settlers in Calgary, screendance practices, and what Mohawk scholar Taiaike Alfred calls “regeneration” of Indigenous identity. Indigenous media and dance aesthetics, meanwhile, function as practices of cultural resurgence in creative contention with the settler city—what Bernard Stiegler calls geotechnics, which produce spaces "geo-graphically," where “perception and cognition fuse with the writing (graph) of the land (geo).” Technical apparatuses—such as screendance—differentially mediate civic life to produce such sociocultural ecologies. Houle approaches decolonization across spatial and psychosocial realms in the city through creative contention, using screendance to create resurgent Indigenous ecology, and staging and transforming relations of civic consciousness in Calgary.