The Department of Contemporary Dance Presents: Thea Patterson - Artist Talk

THEA PATTERSON

Originally from the west coast of Canada, Thea Patterson is a Tiohti:áke/ Mooniyang/Montreal based choreographer, performer, and dance dramaturg who explores expanded choreographic methods often through solo performances including the dance that i cannot do (2013) presented at, amongst others, Movement Research-The Judson Church and the DANCE: Munich

Dance Festival. Her latest trio Un-nevering was presented at the Festival Transamerique in 2025. Her new solo work SLAB (in development) will premiere in 2027. She completed her Masters at DAS Choreography (2016 Amsterdam) and she is a SSHRC funded PhD candidate in Performance Studies at the University of Alberta.

The Talk:

I wasn't sure how to approach this invitation to talk, so I waited. As I do. Wait, pause, listen… and then follow. This waiting—this deliberate suspension—is central to how I work, both as a dramaturgical practice and as a methodology for making. So, in this pause, I allowed IT to approach me…rather than go chasing it.

What arrived was an invitation to look back…, and suddenly understanding in a more profound way how my practice continues to rotate around certain questions and curiosities… and how these things to return in mysterious, differing and evolving ways. I start to see the threads of connection in new ways- where something I forgot that I had done- picks up, in a way, from exactly where I am.

My path in dance has not been a straight one… so neither will this presentation be. Always slightly a ‘kilter- moving from, and in the margins- my intention will be to emergently share some of the key research questions, and aesthetic and dramaturgical preoccupations of roughly the last decade of my artistic practice

In this retracing of steps, I may encounter:

Something about the practices and work that have sustained me

Something about objects agency and how they wink.

Something about glimmer

Something about a relationship to time

Something about collaborations

Something about finding the dance that I CAN indeed do

Something about failure as a function, as a strategy, as an imperative

something about listening, a listening body

Something about waiting, and following as practices and as dramaturgies

Something about grief and art practices as a metabolizing force

Something about ….

The dramaturgy of the presentation will follow these threads, as I meander across modes of address from reading, reflecting, sharing, to questioning, moving and conversing.