Featured Artists
Gerry Morita ·
Gerry Morita (BA Dance/ MFA Theatre) is from the rolling hills of Rex, Saskatchewan, and has lived and worked in Vancouver, Montréal, and Tokyo as a dancer, choreographer, performance artist and teacher before arriving in Edmonton in 2001. Her performances and workshops have toured Poland, Turkey, Estonia, Canada, and Japan.
Morita’s body of work involves continuous inquiry into new ways of seeing movement, the body, and the spaces between us. She studies and teaches contact improvisation, Noguchi Taiso and other somatic-based and improving techniques, working with artists from all disciplines in a vast array of both conventional and site-specific venues.
She has received the Mayor’s Award for Innovation in Artistic Direction, the Edmonton Salute for Excellence, Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund and was recognized provincially as one of Alberta’s 25 Influential Artists. She brings to the company a collaborative, site-specific, and interdisciplinary perspective.
The Disaster Show
In The Disaster Show, MZD Artistic Director Gerry Morita and team explore the notion of the body facing climate change, pitting humans against fire, hurricane, and melting ice in a series of vignettes providing both a lament and a warning.
This immersive, 60 min performance is constructed with three distinct dance zones, and another for the live musicians. Video projection is used to further integrate and layer the environment. The work asks audience to navigate their own viewpoints, approaching the work more like a gallery installation than a live theatre setup, creating very personal impressions of the overall work.
This site specific piece works well in an open, non-theatrical venue which allows for audience movement within and around the performers. It is well-suited to presenters or festivals wanting to find creative connections to their local environmentalists.