Sebastian Kann is a queer performance-maker and dramaturge based in Tiohtiá:ke | Mooniyang | Montréal. Originally trained as an acrobat, his interdisciplinary choreographic work mixes dance, text, and theatrical media. Sebastian is particularly fascinated by the pressures and possibilities of the theatre space, and by movement improvisation as a strategy for revealing them. Through a collaborative practice, he aims at the production of performances that open space for ambivalence. 

With Topical Dance, everything starts with an allegory : 

‘A grand building of pinkish stone, curtains half-drawn in the tall windows. A balcony, like the biggest mouth, empty of anyone, awaits the speaker and the speaker’s speech. Taking his place between the pale flags, he’ll turn his face to the sun and unleash words like arrows pointing back towards something solid and vital: a conjuring more real than language. But the shadows are lengthening, a chill is in the air, and no-body has come. Absent our hero, in the shifting light, the façade seems to be clearing its throat, and then the balcony itself yawns wide open …’ 

Topical Dance is a conceptual dance concert which works with the scene of public speech as a maybe-allegory for one thing that dance does. Accompanied live by experimental musician Simone Provencher, Sebastian Kann dances in a space dense with images, sounds, and words, taking us on a felt journey in which our perceptual apparatus is the star of show. How and when does dance come to feel like speaking? And what gets lost, approximated, or disowned in the process? 

In Topical Dance, what’s trippy about the unknown is given free rein. Words bend and spin like dancers, while dance hardens and glows like an inscription, only to fade into memory. 

Danse-Cité is excited to offer a platform for works, like Sebastian's, that push at the edge of experimental and conceptual forms of dance creation.