Elissa Hanson

Artist in Residence, October 2022

Elissa Hanson is a multidisciplinary dance artist who lives and works on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

She completed post-secondary training with Modus Operandi and has since performed and collaborated with Justine A.Chambers, EDAM Dance, Fight With a Stick, Kelly McInnes, The Biting School, Kinesis Somatheatro, Mascall Dance, Pressed Paradise, Company 605, Out Innerspace Dance Theatre, Deanna Peters, and MOVE: the company.

She has assisted Jennifer Mascall in Experiential Anatomy workshops, and joined Josh Beamish as a mentor in the Telus Choreographic Mentorship Program for talented Canadian youth. Elissa also has training in Fitzmaurice Voicework, Alba Method, Bartenieff Fundamentals and Laban Movement Analysis.

Elissa's personal work investigates somatic awareness as a potentially subversive political gesture and the many ways that art and therapy productively conflict and coexist. Her movement practice explores the process of deepening, through raw intuition, a felt experience of the body and a sense of social connection.

ZEITGEBER

ZEITGEBER is a research project that explores the phenomenon of entrainment. In this research, Elissa Hanson and Matthew Tomkinson focus on the way that external rhythmic time-cues, including social interaction, can affect one's biological rhythms. This research and performance is imagined as both a metaphor for, and a material example of, emotional self-regulation and co-regulation.

Drawing inspiration from Elissa's studies in trauma theory, ZEITGEBER is also envisioned as a practice in what some movement theorists call "kinaesthetic empathy," an interdisciplinary concept that refers to the cultivation of fellow feeling through movement. Some key areas of interest during their residency include entrainment, co-regulation, biological rhythms, participatory performance, and experimental electronic music.