Episode 76 – From the Marrow (WAIL)

Gabrielle Martin: Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I’m Gabrielle Martin, Push’s artistic director, and today’s episode highlights the teachings of flowers, joyous practice, and starting from the bone marrow. I’m speaking with Vanessa Goodman, choreographer and director of Wail, which is being presented at the Push Festival January 26th and 27th, 2026.

Wail is a choreographic poem for our fractured moment. Moving through a shifting landscape of sound, light, and breath, six performers embody the tension between fragility and resilience. Drawing from the natural world’s patterns and distortions, the work becomes a living ecosystem, a multi-sensory meditation on coexistence, where motion and vibration merge in a collective wail of grief and joy.

Vanessa Goodman is a Vancouver-based choreographer and artistic director of Action at a Distance, a company exploring the liminal space between humanity, technology, and the natural world. Her work uses movement and sound to reveal the interconnectedness of bodies and environments, creating performances that are both sensorial and philosophical.

Through collaborative interdisciplinary practice, Goodman and her company investigate how choreography can embody resilience, relation, and transformation in a rapidly shifting world. Here’s my conversation with Vanessa.

Gabrielle Martin: Uh, today we’re gonna be talk- going to be talking about Whale, but I just wanna start by acknowledging, uh, where I’m joining this conversation from, which is on the, uh, unceded ancestral and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. And as we’re gonna speak about Whale, a work that listens to both chaos and resilience, I wanna recognize the enduring presence and stewardship of the Indigenous peoples of this place.

Vanessa Goodman: And I’m joining you today from, uh, Calgary, which is on the traditional territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy on, is also the home to Metis Nation of Alberta in Region 3, and it’s officially acknowledged as Treaty 7 Territory. And this is an area where the Bow and Elbow Rivers meet, and it’s a place of confluence, of sharing of ideas, where opportunities also come together.

Um, but I am originally from Tkaronto, which is Toronto, and I’ve been residing for the last 24 years on the West Coast, on the stolen and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. 

Gabrielle Martin: Thank you. And, and what are you doing there right now? What are you doing on this Treaty 7 Territory Calgary?

Vanessa Goodman: Well, actually, we’ve had the pleasure since being with you at Push to be invited on a kind of West Coast North American journey of Blot. So, um, we had some really wonderful people who came and saw Blot when we were… did Push with you, and those people invited us to, um, come join them in their communities and share Blot.

So it’s always so interesting how these things trickle through time and move through space. And so here we are two years later, and we were on the West Coast in the States in Seattle. We came through MST territory. We’re here in Calgary, then we’ll be going to Edmonton, when then we’ll be finishing in Regina.

Um, so feel very lucky that we’re getting to share Blot again on, on so many levels. Um, and it’s having this nice journey through North America now because it’s toured quite heavily through Europe. And we had the pleasure last night also of doing a secondary work of mine, um, in community here. It’s a co-authored score, and we made it with artists from Ballet Edmonton, local community, um, here in Calgary, and also the two Romanian performers who performed Blot.

So we had 17 artists, uh, performing this co-authored score last night at Contemporary Calgary as well. 

Gabrielle Martin: Wow, super ambitious. Just those things. Just, just a few things, multiple projects, and you’re g- gonna be teaching. Um, that’s really exciting. There is so much we could talk about in terms of all these projects, but, uh, we’re gonna focus a little bit today on Whale.

Whale is, is described as a poem for our present moment, one that weaves systems of sound and movement into a shared emotional ecological terrain. So what was the first impulse or image that sparked this work, and how did you begin translating that sensibility into choreography? 

Vanessa Goodman: Well, I think a huge part of, um, why I’m making this work right now is, is, um, th- the, the residue of humanity that you’re constantly feeling or coming up against and, and globally how social actions are taking place in community, but also through political realms and, and, um, and layers.

And I have to say that becoming a parent, which I’m sure you also have been experiencing the complexity of becoming a parent during this time, both through the pandemic and post-pandemic, but, um, I needed to find joy in my work after becoming a parent. I, I needed to be in community in hopeful ways. I found, um, you know, this idea of, of what we hold for the future and future generations to be something that I, I was, A, struggling with, and then, B, also needed to find a perspective that, um, felt resilient in some way.

And, and so this idea of Whale and where Whale came from really came from this idea of needing to be together in a certain way in process, in politics, and, and in community, and then hopefully that feeling then spreading or sharing and, um, through a porous, maybe osmosis magic that happens within the theater.

Gabrielle Martin: And at its core, Whale explores the dance of navigating joy within community, so you’ve just spoken to that joy element, um, in a time of stark social contrast. So this process of collective making six performers in relation, how is this shaping your understanding of joy as a resistant or regenerative force?

Vanessa Goodman: Yeah, I think the artists that I’ve worked with, some of them I’ve worked with for over a decade, and so we’re very close, and there’s a lot of trust in the room, and there’s a lot of, um, vulnerability in the, the way we approach making together. We start with ideas around what, um, brings us joy or what feels cathartic in some way, and, and also not to ignore the difficulty or also the grief that’s buried in our bodies collectively right now.

We let that surface inside of it, and part of understanding how to experience joy and finding joy is also having the other side of the spectrum or the juxtaposition, and having the complexity and the depth of grief that you know what that feels like in your body. So we kind of tread between these places of, like, um, elation or, like, um, uh, like uplifting and then, like, the depths of the sorrow or the sadness that’s also buried within our psyche right now, and also very present at the surface of everything we’re encountering with what’s going on on the world constantly in, in terms of, uh, you know, the trauma that’s laid out, not just interpersonally in terms of the social fabric of, of, of our reality, but going past that into, into more kind of global perspectives as well.

And I think our process is very open in some ways. We start with this- a concept, and we work either through open score or- and then layer task-based, um, like approach, very, like, uh, performance generative system on top of that, so creating several tasks that layer with a concept or an idea around an emotional depth, and we let it unfold.

And then afterwards we discuss, we talk about what felt resonant, what felt helpful, what felt, um, not relevant to what we were doing, and, and we kind of start to open up these, like, uh, viewpoints that we might then reenter and then rediscover and go back in and refine and find more depth within the emotional complexity.

And I think something that I’m always working with and interested in is that we as a community come together in performance to have an experience and to communally feel something as we witness. And I often ask myself, you know, everybody’s coming from somewhere else in their day when they enter in a theater, so how can we, like…

How can we locate ourselves in the work that we’re about to experience together communally? How do we ask the audience to then, um really ex– like, uh, slow down potentially their train of thought of where they’ve just come from and drop into what we’re proposing. So we use voice a lot in this work to facilitate that, and I think there’s something that happens physiologically when people experience live voice.

And I think it’s actually about… It’s not necessarily even always about sound, but it’s about the vibratory practice of that sound. It’s about feeling those vibrations move through the air and connect with your body that actually changes you physiologically, or at least for me, physiologically. And there’s something that al- allows my system to kind of crack open and become more receptive to what I’m about to experience.

So working with the voice also really helps us in this process kind of tune to each other, to the room, and to the, hopefully to the people who are about to witness it. 

Gabrielle Martin: Yes. I want to just circle back to what you’re saying about process, because I think it’s a rare treat for people to get to hear about what happens in the studio, and then also people not coming from, like, a dance or choreographic background, there might be a little bit more mystery there.

So when you talk about open score and then tasks, can you give, like, one example of what that might mean in the studio? 

Vanessa Goodman: Yeah. Um, I’m really interested in compression. I, I think compression is one of the, like, maybe most dominant parts of my practice for the last five years, and I, I work with compression, um, based off of several reasons.

Uh, my nervous system, like, if you know me as a person, I, like, kind of operate… I vibrate. I got, like, a million ideas going on at one time, and I’m like… I’m not one of those people that are just, like, chill. As much as I would love to be one of those people, I’m just not, and especially when I perform, I get, like, super jacked.

Um, and my adrenaline, like, it’s really hard for me to kinda, like, hold my adrenaline and, like, calm it down. So I found these ways of calming my nervous system down using compression, and it’s physically quite taxing. It’s not easy. It requires quite a bit of effort, but I, I work on compressing certain areas of my body, and it could be as global as, like, thinking about, you know, compressing, like, my lower rib to the top of my hip bone and then holding that compression while I’m navigating another, uh, task on top of that to create a physiological experience in my body.

But what that does is it actually calms down my nervous system, and then even I go farther into that task space, and I, I work on compressing my bone marrow, which I know sounds, like, so out there, but, um, this idea of compression of bone marrow is something that I really love. Like, we are a series in our bodies of con- cave and convex curves, and the fact that we can create linear structures in the…

is an illusion, actually. Like, we’re subverting the natural form of our body as we take these linear structures. So I like to think of our body as these domes that we can actually flatten or compress and then, and then, uh, allow them to inflate or resurface again. So when I work with compressing my bone marrow, I imagine…

and I think dance is magic, so, like, bear with me here, that as I compress these tiny little bubbles inside my bone marrow, and if you’ve ever cracked open the s- inside of an Aero chocolate bar, you see all those little bubbles that’s- quite similar to the s- you know, the image of, of bone marrow. I like to think that I’m actually compressing my bone marrow.

And so when I work with this sense of deep compression, I think it actually, what it does is regulates the people who witness it as well. And this is something that I’ve heard from multiple people as they see my work. They’re not quite sure why they felt a certain way, but they felt like it, like, calmed their body down, or they feel like it does something, it regulates them.

And I think it’s this combination of working with voice and compression specifically in a very particular way that, that creates these environments that then people feel affected by viscerally. They have an experience. I mean, and this is my theory. I, you know, I’m not 100% sure. I 

Gabrielle Martin: can attest to that. Yes.

I’m so glad I asked you that question. Great. It’s great to get inside your brain a bit more. Um, I wanna talk more now about the, uh, audi- mm, auditory and visual design of the work. So, uh, this piece moves through botanical distortions and auditory illusions, merging the natural and the technological, and I would love to hear you talk about how you and your collaborators use sound and environment to blur the line between the organic and the synthetic, between what feels alive and what feels constructed.

Vanessa Goodman: So, um, I’ll, I’ll start with the, like, how we view the space, the performance environment, and how we view actually the work itself. I think, like, I, I am a dance artist, although I, I think dance is, like, almost like, uh, like maybe an eighth or a quarter of what we do when we make a work together because I think the, all of the elements that come together, whether it’s sonography, light, sound, costume, materiality that enters the space, these are all equal components in the composition of the work for me.

So dance is, like, the vehicle that I, I am able to access, um, how my practice interweaves with other folks’ practice, and then also how I’ve weaved other, um, kind of interdisciplinary practices into my work and, and how I navigate other interdisciplinary approaches. So with this particular work, I, I knew I wanted it to merge between the natural and kind of, um, man-made or technological world, and this is something that’s a reoccurring theme in my work.

Uh, if you saw Blot with, that I co-made with Simona De Ionescu, um, this work verges between, like, the technological, organic body and, and how science then takes a deeper look at the microorganisms in our body. If you saw Graveyards and Gardens that I did with Caroline Shaw, it was about regeneration and decomposition of, and the materials in the room, which were lo-fi analog sound, uh, instruments and some more kind of hi-fi vocoders and then also organic plant material.

So this is, like, a reoccurring, uh, thematic inside the work. And for this particular work with Whale, um, for the sonography, um, my partner, Ben Didier, he scanned, uh, flowers, like, uh, super high resolution flowers, and composed this I, I think it’s incredible. Incredible, um, backdrop that’s gonna flood the space basically.

And this idea that the micro world holds so much detail, and often we overlook it, but it also changes us when we’re in nature, we physiologically get affected. Like going into the woods, something happens to my nervous system. It always comes back to like this nervous system kind of, uh, correlation for me.

What happens when we’re around nature? What happens when we detach from technology or, or the rapid-fire information that is constantly bombarding us with, um, you know, how we interface with technology today? So this idea that kind of, uh, botanical distortions can allow us to exit this hyper sense of time that we’re constantly navigating and ask ourselves to slow down is definitely approach, an approach as part of this, as part of the sonography.

And then also there’s, um, we’ll see if we keep it ’cause we’re still in development. There is like, uh, uh, a, uh, I think it’s a grief monster that works with a botanical arrangement inside the work, though I’m still playing with this idea and I’m not quite sure whether it’s a Saturday Night Live skit or if it’s excellent.

To be determined. 

Gabrielle Martin: It’s a fine line. Fine line. 

Vanessa Goodman: So I will… I’m still deciding about it, so you’re talking to me as we’re still in process of making. And so we will actually still have another six weeks of development when I get back from this tour before we premiere. So I still have some major question marks as well.

And then, uh, lighting-wise, we’re working with, um, James Proudfoot, who really, he, he paints the space with light, and he is another performer in the space with us. Like, his design is dancing and moving with us and evokes, and also he is the best editor of my work in the whole entire world, just to say. Like, he, he is such a, an amazing artist.

He really understands, um… He understands my process quite deeply and, but also his process is, is quite beautiful and adds another incredible layer to it. And then we’ll, we are working with also, um- Uh, uh, these auditory, um, devices, uh, several loop pedals, vocoders, um, reverb pedals that also delay pedals that augment how the sound is experienced in the space and distort, uh, the human voice into other realms.

Sometimes the artists sound like a whale underneath the ocean, which is hence the title Whale, uh, W-H-A-L versus the mammal. But, um, that’s really where then the name of the work came from, was that there’s this embodiment of this like, uh, hydrophone at one point that sounds almost like whales singing in the work.

And so this idea that we’re, we’re using, uh, this technology then, then that reverts back into the natural world too, as an, as an interplay between the work as well. 

Gabrielle Martin: Thank you. So clearly articulated. And I also want to talk about ensemble now. Um, so your company, Action at a Distance, often uses choreography to explore liminality and post-human embodiment, asking how identity and agency shift in a rapidly changing world.

And in Whale, uh, how is the body a site of negotiation between individuality and collectivity? Because from the work… Well, I guess Soft Currents would be quite different, the work that you just described that you’re, you know, the, the collaborative project with 17 artists, but the other projects I’ve seen of yours recently, you, you had been working with fewer artists on stage, but maybe I haven’t seen all your work because you’re prolific.

So answer this question as you will, but I am curious about that individuality and collectivity. 

Vanessa Goodman: Yeah. You know, I, I always love, um, the artists that I work with to feel like they can bring their whole self into the process, whether that’s, um… And, and also as little of, like, if they don’t wanna bring their whole self too, that’s okay.

You know, like a– But I like to create a space where people feel comfortable, um, to navigate their own agency inside the work constantly. So, and I feel like, um, you know, working with generative systems and working with task-based work actually really allows for this process to be, um, a part of agency in the work.

Uh, so I feel like working with ensemble is a real gift. Uh, working with people as, as who they are as an artist, both inside their own personal practice and inside a collective practice, is also something I’m super interested in. So when someone comes into a process, I, I, I am– I don’t want them to embody things, um, like a replication of my embodiment.

I’m often interested in what happens when I give people a system and they navigate it, and they find their own interpretation of it. And if it’s not quite what I was expecting, then we work to find the tools for them to, to find the systems that correlate with, with what we’re hoping to find dramaturgically together.

And this is always a dance we do together. It’s never something that I’m, uh, imposing, and it’s why I always say that I create work in collaboration with the artists that I’m… that are performing on the stage, because it is a really collaborative process, and it is a dialogue that goes back and forth between them expressing how they feel inside it, and then me gathering that knowledge, and then, then finding another way to approach it, to e- to better support them inside of it.

And sometimes that could be also taking away layers. Like, if there’s too many layers put onto something and it becomes overwhelming, sometime I have to strip back the system or reapproach the system to meet them where their interests lie. So it’s, it’s really, it’s a dance that we do collectively together, and also it’s a dance that might shift from day to day in terms of better understanding, um, the artists that I work with.

A- And again, like some of these artists I’ve worked with for a decade, so we have a lot of common language that’s already in place. And some of the artists are more recent, I think. You know, uh, there’s one artist who will be joining the team that I’ve only worked with for a, a year in the project. And, and, uh, I’ve worked with in different contexts, but they’re, they’re jumping into this project for us, uh, in this context.

And so, I… it’s always interesting, and I always learn a lot, and I love how much I learn from the collaborators that I’m working with in the room because I… that’s the reason why I keep going and why I keep doing this. I think, um, there’s like a hunger for knowledge and exchange and knowledge sharing and, and, and also regrouping together collectively, constantly to talk about what’s working for us and, and what might be, um, distracting from either the thesis of the work or distracting from the personal experience or the personal journey of each artist and the work.

And even though it is an ensemble work, each artist has its own separate, um, like arc that they’re taking through as they’re navigating. It’s not like one collective, um, uh, journey. It’s the six artists who are performing the work is, are really finding their own personal journeys through each, each of the sections, but then also the arc of the entirety of the work as well.

Gabrielle Martin: Yeah, the philosophy you have around collaboration is really clear in the room as an audience member, in talking to you, and just, like, how you speak about your collaborators. Um, it’s… Yeah, it’s clear that you have built these really deep relationships, um, that feed the work with the composers, the designers, the performers, all of these, um, participants in the process.

And you mentioned that some of these collaborators you’ve been working with for 10 years or, you know, quite a while. So what does collaboration mean to you now, um, after these years of working and also working interdisciplinarily or with, you know, many collaborators from different disciplines? And, and also how do you hold space for so many creative voices?

I mean, you shared that a bit in terms of, like, the arc, the individual, you’ve spoken quite a bit about that, the individual within the collective, but if there’s anything else you want to share about that, like maintaining the integrity of your own choreographic vision- 

Vanessa Goodman: Mm-hmm … 

Gabrielle Martin: Um, while honoring these different creative voices. Yeah. 

Vanessa Goodman: Yeah, I think that’s something that, um, it got clearer and easier for me over time to be really, like, precise with i- i- if we were going… Basically, if we were going off on another path that didn’t support the thesis of the work, how to redirect it back to the s- the thesis of the work. And I’ve gotten…

I think my skill set has improved basically over time of how to, like, redirect or, or then collectively approach, “Hey, I don’t think this is quite supporting what we’re trying to get. Can we, uh, then look at it from a different angle? And if… Does anyone have any thoughts around how we might approach that if, if I’m lost?”

You know? Like, if I don’t have that answer in that moment, ’cause that does happen also when you’re facilitating a room of, uh, and especially a room of a big group of people, sometimes you don’t have the answer. And I love saying actually when I don’t. It’s super empowering because I am working with such an incredibly strong and artistically, um, powerful team that, that there is that support and that groundwork in the room that I can say, “Does anyone have any thoughts?”

You know? Like, or we can just say, “Let’s leave it for now and reapproach it later when something becomes clear.” But I think this has gotten easier for me over time. When I was younger and starting out, that was something that was quite intimidating to say, like, “I don’t know,” you know, “I’m not quite sure,” or how to redirect it when I do know without feeling like maybe, um, I’m compromising somebody else’s experience.

But I, I think, uh, you know, it’s a delicate thing to, to make work, um, always, and it’s a delicate work to make- It’s a delicate thing to make work in the, the context that I’m also making it, in the sense that, um, I, I really do value everybody’s voice in the room, and I want everybody to feel heard and, and also seen in, in their propositions.

So how do we collectively honor each person’s interest, um, is something that I’m still working at and, and learning about, and every process is a bit different. And, and, you know, people… When I say I’ve worked with people over 10 years, and we have this, like, a shared language or collective understanding of, of our, our communal goals inside the work, uh, also, that might be different from project to project as people grow as artists and as people.

And so to meet people where they’re at each time they come into a new work or each day they come in and, and see where they’re at and then, and then honor that or, um, you know, make space for, for that person and their experience on that particular day so that we’re never bulldozing through basically is always the goal, is that we’re, we’re finding a way to collectively navigate the experience together.

Gabrielle Martin: Yes. And then it does relate- the kind of end result does really feel like a collective experience. It does have that kind of visceral transformative quality that I find that your work always has, and I’m really excited to experience this work for the first time with Push audiences. 

Vanessa Goodman: Me too. Thank you. 

Gabrielle Martin: Yes.

Yes. Very excited. Thank you so much for, um, bringing us into your process, into your thought behind this work. 

Vanessa Goodman: Thank you, Gabrielle, and thank you to the Push team and the Music On Main team and to the Dance Center for all their support. Everybody’s been, um, like, really, uh, working hard to make this project happen this year.

And also Canada Council for the Arts, thank you as well.