Space Lost and Space Gained

How emerging dance company The Playground Project has found inspiration at the intersection of movement and space within the confines of the pandemic. 

Furniture screeches against the floor as it’s pushed into any available corner in an attempt to make space to dance. For some, they are getting ready to log online for their school ballet classes. Others push their couches up against the stove, finding any way to keep creativity alive at home. While studios and schools remain closed, moving around furniture has become the typical warm up for many dancers as space at home is scarce. Yet, The Playground Project has found a way to create and cherish space in a time when it is lacking. 

Founded by Maria Riano and Dominique Tersigni, The Playground Project is an emerging dance company based in Toronto centered around the mission of creating an umbrella for themselves in the Toronto dance community, while also facilitating opportunities for others. Noticing there was a gap in the Toronto dance community for emerging performers and choreographers, Maria and Dominique decided to take matters into their own hands, saying, “If we can’t get those jobs, let’s create a space for people. Let’s create these opportunities for people if we’re not seeing them.”

The Playground Project was born out of the pursuit to create and interact with space and this pursuit continues to be what drives their creative endeavours today. When asked about the meaning behind their name, The Playground Project said a playground represents a structure in which to explore and collaborate in. They are interested in how our surroundings can inspire movement and how movement can intersect with spaces and the objects within them. To Maria and Dominique, “A playground is a place where there are so many opportunities”, a youthful outlook they both greatly attribute to picking up from the children they work with.

Teaching dance to kids has allowed Maria and Dominique to learn and draw from their  limitless capacities for curiosity and imagination. Children are incredibly curious about themselves and the world around them and have an instinctive inclination for play. They can look around them, seeing and inventing things that are oblivious to the naked eye, a skill many of us can gain insight from.

While the pandemic has been hard on artists, with many struggling to stay inspired, The Playground Project has been embracing this child-like curiosity and unleashing their own instincts for play to stay creative in difficult circumstances. Though much of the physical space and equipment for dancing has been stripped away from them, The Playground Project has continued to question how they can use space - or the lack thereof - to inform movement. Just like children do, they have been thinking up space where it was once imperceptible. 

Discovering space that didn’t seem to be there before has been a common phenomenon over the past year. While on pandemic walks, people have been stumbling upon things and places they didn’t know existed right in their very own cities and towns. For Dominique, this led her to finding a large gazebo by her house, which lent to being the perfect location for The Playground Project to hold a live show this past September. 

In September 2020, The Playground Project premiered their piece “Habitual” at Entwined Together, a live collaborative performance in Woodbine Park that showcased works by various emerging artists. Being forced to hold their show outside showed The Playground Project that there are perks to not being able to use formal spaces for performances. Whereas audience members are often exclusively made up of family and friends of the dancers at shows held in more traditional theatre spaces, using public space allowed The Playground Project to connect with more people. During Entwined Together, people walking by Woodbine Park, who may not have been inclined to see a dance show normally, stopped to watch. The Playground Project reflected on this experience by saying it revealed to them that utilizing public spaces can be an effective way to make dance more accessible to people who may not be familiar with the art form.

Photo from “Habitual” taken by Lianna Turone.

More recently, The Playground Project has been exploring and expanding the limits of movement in space through a series of mini dance films. Their first film, “Neither Shall I”, poses the question of how one can take up space not just literally, but also metaphorically, culturally, and politically in a time where it seems like we’re all fighting for a place in this world. “Neither Shall I” was choreographed by Dominique by building a movement repertoire off of a poem by Becca Lee. In this poem, Becca Lee inspires people to be unapologetic of the space they take up:

The ocean does not

apologize for its depth

and the mountains

do not seek forgiveness

for the space they take

and so, neither shall I.

Their second mini film, “STATE OF PLAY”, was choreographed by Maria as a response to the realities that dancers all across the world are facing. Between having to adjust to dancing in unconventional spaces and taking class through Zoom, many dancers have been feeling drained and uninspired. And so, “State of Play” again pulls from the lighthearted childlike nature to not take things too seriously. Separated from the polished floors they had gotten so used to in their studios and schools, dancers have found themselves dancing at home like little kids again, and it is this rediscovery of how to be playful and come back to what drew them to dance in the first place that Maria captures in the film. A follow-up version to the film, titled “STATE OF PLAY: YELLOW DIMENSION”, will be exhibiting at Art Pop Up in May.

Whether it be by interacting with space on film or reimagining public spaces, The Playground Project continues to prove that space has no bounds. Despite there being a collective sense of feeling trapped over the past year, The Playground Project has found opportunities to break free of these limitations. For The Playground Project, being constrained has opened their eyes to possibilities they may not have considered before. Right now, they’re even collaborating with a dancer from Alberta, taking advantage of how working online can expand space even more by allowing us to create with people from all over. Navigating the art world during Covid-19 hasn’t been easy, but by rethinking their relationships to space as artists, The Playground Project has shown us what we can gain from what has been lost.