​JOHN HENRY GERENA
DANCE ARTIST
COLLABORATIONS
Grado Cero Collective - Montreal
https://gradocerote.wixsite.com/collectif
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Created in Colombia in 2011, the Grado Cero collective was born from the meeting between Eduardo Ruiz and John Henry Gerena, interdisciplinary artists, and managers, with the purpose of creating spaces for theoretical reflection, scenic creation, dissemination, and circulation of the living arts and new theatricalities. In 2019 and with an artistic work in constant movement, Diana Catalina Cardenas, artist, and cultural manager joins the collective putting together efforts in the qualification of knowledge and the development of artistic proposals.
Since its inception, the interest of the group revolves around the research on the movement and performance of the body in relation to physical resistance, interpretation, the incorporation of emotional states, and the alteration of states of consciousness. This is in order to establish a dialogue between the subjective experience of the performer in real-time and the objective deconstruction of the movement.
The collective's horizons have broadened, focusing more and more on the construction of interdisciplinary proposals that allow them to expand their expressive horizons, working on the construction of facilities with physical interventions in unconventional spaces and taking advantage of the use of technology to generate more projects. robust and comprehensive.
The group is constantly questioning and exploring the scenic and relational strategies, it accounts for its work thanks to the need to maintain fluid and horizontal communication in the creative and administrative processes that it carries out. Likewise, it is strengthened due to the commitment in the search for technical, plastic, and poetic solutions for each of its performative actions. The investigation of what it means to investigate with the body, to investigate in the body positions it as a reference in the universe of the living arts.
At this time the group is working on researching their new artistic production "Marginalia" in its first version "The stranger" by Albert Camus, supported by the Conseil des Arts de Montreal and The Canada Council for the Arts.
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Marginalia:
Marginalia is a research/creation project that draws on the richness and power of handwritten notes found in printed books. Notes at the margins travel through time, speak, share, and convey information about the effect the books have had on readers. The marginal notes allow us to listen to the echoes of the stories and provide us with other points of view, a kind of intimate psychology recorded anonymously offering us tools for researching and constructing a bodily dramaturgy.
Reading aloud the full text of the previously mentioned novel will be the creative inspiration for this production. Chapter by Chapter, the artists will intervene in the space by proposing transformations, changes, and manipulations which will establish the relations between the linear reading of the text and the timeless creation of body and sound images. A play of superimposed images that would activate the scene and highlight the creative means and languages.
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Del otro Lado:
The project - Del Otro Lado - Mémoire du confinement - is a three-voice video-art, a cyclical performance and a constantly evolving creation carried out by three artists of the performing arts, in different geographical locations, in Montreal - Quebec and in Bogotá - Colombia. By exploring loneliness, distancing, virtual encounter,s and the effects of the pandemic in the psyche and the body, each artist, reclusive inside his own home, explores, generates, and experiences the changing physical actions bestowed upon him by various emotions and sensations.
From the same sound score, the performers explore the sensations experienced and construct the timeline of the project. Each week the artists record a video of the exploration carried out by developing the body score that will serve as the basis for the live performance.
Supported by Canada Council for the Arts
Sector N Collective - Hamilton - ON
"Sector N Collective" came together in the summer of 2015 with the aim of exploring how three artistic disciplines, dance, music, and film, might come together and interact.
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John Henry: Choreographer and Performer.
Edgardo Moreno: Sound Designer
Peter Riddihough: Videographer
Sector N developed a very successful work based on the Hamilton city history, this project was called "Memory project" also developed in to faces Memory Project 1 and Memory Project 2.
Sector N is not interested in taking extrapolated positions or making judgments about facts and events, the intent of The Memory Project(s) is to create an artistic reflection on images and characters from the past and evoke an emotional connection in the present.
The overall purpose of The Memory Project(s) is to rework images of the past that are linked to the collective identity of the city. The result is not a historical document but an artistic interpretation of events or characters that have been part of the construction of a society. There is no single kind of memory; individuals and groups represent the past in ways that best suit their values and interests; so too we research and collect materials that allow us to build our own image of the events.
Memory Project: site-specific, multi-disciplinary performance installation in Hamilton, Ontario, that explores local history through the interaction of movement, sound, and image.
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(Click on title to watch the video)
password: memory
The Memory Project which Sector N Collective presented at Frost Bites Site-Specific Performance Festival in Hamilton, in February 2016. In that piece, we used historical research, archive documentary recordings, original field recordings, original music, original film footage, projection, lighting and interpretive movement to create a 20-minute performance piece on three levels of a 100-year-old former cotton factory. In essence, The Memory Project sought to express the daily life of an industrial worker in early 20th Century Hamilton. Live movement expressed an abstract interpretation of the experiences of a fictionalized character while moving projections juxtaposed that character as a “ghost” in a real contemporary industrial landscape and multi-channel, spacial audio delivered archive & contemporary documentary audio, manipulated sound and music. In an intimate and immersive experience, a small audience of 15 people moved with the performer through the 3 floors of the installation. The piece was performed for the public 20 times over 4 nights and received remarkable public and professional feedback.
