my battery is pure love

THE SPACE BETWEEN US/HOLOBIONT  at the Heliconian Club 35 Hazelton Ave, Yorkville 730pm Friday November 14, 2025 Opening remarks by Lucy Rupert (Blue Ceiling dance) THE SPACE BETWEEN US  Choreography: Martha Hart  Featuring: Tyler Gledhill, Martha Hart, Chelly Li and Sophie Willett  Music:  Suite no. 4 in G Major, Op. 61 (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky)  Nocturne No.2 in C Minor (John Field) Nocturne No. 12 in E Major (John Field) Vesperae solennes de confessore (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) Thank you to the National Ballet of Canada for supporting this work through an Open Space Residency.   Brief Pause HOLOBIONT Choreography: Lucy Rupert with Juan Villegas Performed by: Juan Villegas and Lucy Rupert Original music created by: Lainie Fefferman and Jascha Narveson HOLOBIONT is an ever-changing piece, rewoven for each unique performance situation. The full material for this project includes choreography by Yvonne Ng and Lucy Rupert with contributions from da...

 TECH RIDER INFO FOR BLUE CEILING DANCE TOURING PROJECTS: heat death AND heartless Technical Specs: All of my touring projects are made to be flexible for theatre and non-theatre spaces. General requirements are a non-concrete floor, ideally a sprung or wood flooring. Some works are suitable/negotiable for outdoors on grass or asphalt. Current touring projects: heat death: made for theatre and non-theatre-spaces (galleries, science institutes, other site-specific settings)  TECH RIDER: audio playback; performance space minimum or 20 x 20  and ideally a non-concrete floor (negotiable depending on the setting) heartless: Premiered at the Citadel Ross Centre for Dance (Citadel + Cie) in Toronto; suitable for black box or similar theatre setting. TECH RIDER: (based on premiere – negotiable depending on space) -the show uses audio playback only, no microphones except potentially for opening remarks if applicable -the show used no masking, and the background was a red brick wal...

 DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE NOISE  (written by Lucy Rupert) This is an essay in 9 parts for the 9 episodes that make up my solo dance ‘heartless’ which premiered in October 2024. The choreography for this piece started as a meditation on the history and mythology of robots, but burrowed its way into many other personal and cosmic places. (See my first two essays on the project “my battery is pure love” and “babelfish”).  What follows is an account of my experience inside the 9 sections of ‘heartless’ during its opening night performance, tangled noisily with memories and sensations, past and future. 1. My ears grow rabbit-shaped, listening for the sound of rain, the audio cue that begins ‘heartless’. I realize that the audience, even in stillness, emanates a gentle rumble-buzz. I can’t hear my cue to start. But I part the black curtain at stage left and walk on with all the composure I can muster at opening night. I’ve missed the sound cue, but that’s ok. The beginning is an i...

 OGRES OF LIFE: Serge Bennathan and the original cast of “Chronicles of Simple Life” written and compiled by Lucy Rupert FIRST STEPS “Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal.” Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy of the Flesh, p. 6) Meaning is embodied. This is true for the meanings found by the dancer and by the audience member. Dance strives to reveal something to the audience, perhaps something they didn’t realize they needed to know. In the best situations, this audience experience happens viscerally and invisibly. On November 5, 1993, as a second-year student pursuing a Joint Honours bachelor’s degree in dance and music at the University of Waterloo, I had my first visceral and invisible experience as a dance audience member: Chronicles of a Simple Life, choreographed by Serge Bennathan and performed by the Dancemakers company at the Hu...

  photo by Zahra Saleki day in the life  The best days begin the morning after a busy day when the body is too exhausted to be self-aware and the exhaustion feels hard-earned in a very satisfying way. Most days begin with a mental journey, like putting your body through the x-ray machine at the airport. Parts of you go in the bin that travels on the conveyer belt through the machine, the rest of you walks hesitantly through the stand-alone arch. You wait to hear the beeping and then take stock: what caused the alarm? It might seem like it’s your foot but your pelvis is actually cause the source of the alarm. The root of the pain. Feet unfurl and uncurl by the time you get to the bottom of the stairs. You make coffee and feed the feral cats and then check the agenda. What is happening today? Are you in charge of directing yourself all day, organizing your training, yourself, your plans? Or are you reporting to someone else? (It’...

 Blue Ceiling dance is at Montgomery's Inn! I'm dancing "ice age" -- a 20 minute solo work 18 times inside this historic site and museum as part of Toronto Arts Council's Animating Historic Sites program. "ice age" runs Sat/Sun August 10, 11, 17, 18 and 24, 25 at 1230pm, 2pm and 330pm. The first two performances each day are in the Assembly Room and the third is in the fully accessible Tea Room. Entrance to the museum and the performance is free! More performances at Montgomery's Inn are coming in November -- including a creek hike led by Museum staff! "Ice age" was  made for specifically for Montgomery's Inn, and to celebrate the natural history of the area rather than its colonial history. The piece is about the geological, hydrological history of the rivers and creeks in this area stretching back to the last local ice, approximately 12000 years ago. Here I'm sharing some of the public images I found showing how water worked its w...