The Department of Contemporary Dance Presents: Artist Talk - Valerie Sabbah

WEIGHTED. An improvisational score. A meditation. An imagination. A walk on the Skin of Gravity.

The score invites performers and public alike to inhabit a playground of first encounters, where each gesture and vibration becomes both imprint and interpretation.

Valerie Sabbah has been invited as Artist in Residence at Concordia University’s Department of Contemporary Dance, where she is teaching Improvisation as Choreography to second-year students. As part of this residency, she will give an artist talk on her creative process.

Rather than a traditional lecture, Sabbah has chosen to create an improvised performance titled, WEIGHTED. For this occasion, she has invited artists—musician, Christiane Brun del Re, and dance artists Nathaniel Cancela Edsell, Angel Gabriel Buell, and Dunyia—to join her.

This artist talk-performance embodies the threads of Sabbah’s practice in Contact Improvisation and her ongoing exploration of improvisation as a playground: a space where spontaneous composition unfolds, where performers and audience alike participate in a surrealist, aesthetic landscape. For Sabbah, this is the most authentic way to share how she creates, navigates presence, and builds shared universes of movement, sound, and imagination.

To help the score come alive, the audience is asked to please bring a beach towel and dress as if arriving at the beach: sun hats, sunglasses, Hawaiian shirts, shorts, and other beach accessories, like beach balls welcome. Together, performers and audience will step into the improvisational world that defines her work.