In partnership with Ballet BC and The Polygon Gallery, the Contemporary Art Gallery presents the world premiere performance of Very Clear Instructions.

Following the exhibition I DIDN'T KNOW I DIDN'T KNOW IT, presented at the CAG at the beginning of 2016, John Wood and Paul Harrison embarked on an intensive sequence of improvisatory workshops with the dancers of Ballet BC. What emerged is an ambitious commission developed between two of Vancouver’s most important cultural organizations, a new dance work that brings together the ongoing concerns present in the artist’s practice, combined with new, adventurous choreography.

As seen in their complex video works, Wood and Harrison have long been concerned with the body, characteristically employing a vocabulary that connects into the spatial and material world of contemporary dance. They engage with attributes such as trust, cause and effect, action and reaction, and the physical arena and dimensions in which movement and gesture occurs with distinctive observations surrounding the human condition.

This new performance is structured as ten episodes such as “Falling”, “Right angles” or “Lean”, and combines much of their ongoing preoccupations with a keen delight, humour and reflection on human endeavor. Rooted in a distillation of everyday gestures and routine, a true conversation between the visual art world of John Wood and Paul Harrison and that of the dance corps of Ballet BC emerges. The familiar is made charmingly and compellingly strange, altering our perceptions of those moments encountered as we move through the world.

Image: John Wood and Paul Harrison, Clear instruction drawing 7, 2017. Courtesy the artists