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Deviner


Deviner was a research project between 2022 and 2023, with residencies at Centre de Création O Vertigo 
and Third Floor Projects at Usine C in Montreal.


video still: Camille Lacelle-Wilsey



Deviner is a music and movement contemplation amidst the grooves of a labyrinthine path; a dance-concert meets procession, for an audience to move through.

Labyrinths are a type of unicursal spiral. Different to a maze whose purpose is to make you lost, a labyrinth has but one single path to follow in and out. Groove in the literal sense, “a long and narrow indentation”, can support something or someone. A crevice in a rock can pool water, while a gutter on a house ushers rain towards the ground. When these supportive structures appear in music, giving the feeling of progression without forwardness, I can't help but slip into them. The labyrinthine path is a literal and figurative “groove”, to get to the centre I must continue walking forward even when the path seems to be sending me back to the beginning.
A fountain becomes an instrument, internal visions are made palpable, the performers sing songs in stolen time, we translate away from meaning centering sound and feeling. Through the path we are laying a landscape for the inbetween and spectral, where arrival and certainty can be the illusions that they are.


caption: Frédérique Roy (composition & performance), Maude Arès (water instrument), Camille Lacelle-Wilsey (interprète), Zoey Gauld (interprète). Documentation of our residency at Usine C for Third Floor Projects, curated by Yves Sheriff, 2022-2023
caption: Frédérique Roy (composition & performance), Maude Arès (water instrument), Lucy M. May (interprète), Zoey Gauld (interprète), Camille Lacelle-Wilsey (outside eye). Rehearsal footage in preparation for presentation at SPARK series, curated by Studio 303, May 2023


Telepathic Landscapes is a two-person visualization, intuition and fabulation score. Rendering haptic the invisible fields that connect the performers to each other, intentionally situating their bodies in the space where memory, audience, time and environment co-create. The score goes like this:

1. With a partner, choose who will send and who will receive the landscape

2. The sender visualizes a landscape, they imagine themselves in the centre of the landscape, the landscape stretching 360 degrees all around them (this can be a familiar place, a made-up place and anything in between). The sender tries to spread the feeling of this landscape in their body and open themselves up to be read by the receiver. (Though I differentiate the roles by the names sender and receiver, in this practice, the idea of opening oneself to be read is the act of sending).
3. The receiver waits until certain images or sensations start to appear, and when they do, the receiver speaks them out loud in the first person. For example, “I am in a cold landscape. There is something flickering red to my right, maybe a bird or the sun. The cold feels wet, I sense there is water nearby...”

4. The sender listens to the receiver and continues to send their visualization. The sender tries to stay in their landscape, and not change or alter it according to what the receiver is narrating.

5. After a certain amount of time one of the partners, usually the sender, will decide it’s the end.

All video documentation and montage by Camille Lacelle-Wilsey, 2022/23

caption:  Nate Yaffe and Nien Tzu Wang (interprètes). Documentation of the practice "Telepathic Landscapes" during residency at Centre de Création O Vertigo, 2022. 
caption: Kim-Sanh Châu and Zoey Gauld (interprètes). Documentation of the practice "Telepathic Landscapes" during residency at Third Floor Projects, Usine C, 2022.
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