Ryan Clayton & Emilie Morin

Pas de deux 

Essay by Amelia Wong-Mersereau

In an instant, a tapping foot and bobbing head become flailing arms and jumping jacks. These “kitchen dances” are brief and depend on several conditions being just right; what am I cooking, what song is playing, am I alone. I have no trace of any of my kitchen dances, and I definitely couldn’t recreate them if I tried, not even for myself. The Spectre Animates our Bones captures this universal yet supernatural moment of the “kitchen” or “domestic dance,” where the body and brain are one, free of all constraint. 

    Together, artists Emilie Morin and Ryan Clayton choreographed a domestic dance that Clayton interpreted first and that Morin subsequently performed, repeating the mistakes and miscounts from his version. They documented these performances using a motion capture suit during a residency at Hexagram in 2021. The resulting three-channel animation, The Spectre Animates our Bones, takes both Morin and Clayton’s dancing mo-cap skeletons and maps them together onto a kind of Howl’s Moving Castle-like entity to form what they call a work of “braided dance.” 

    The entity is a two-floor trailer home with giant pigeon legs wearing golden trousers, one metal arm, one gloved cartoon arm, and another set of legs suspended above it from an exhaust pipe. We witness it swaying, spinning, and shimmying alone in a vast dark space filled with glistening, mostly white orbs. The dancing entity is projected onto one of the Black Box’s walls, and on the opposing wall is the view from directly behind that camera. These perspectives are swapped at a few points in the video; a person may be watching the mesmerizing undulation of orbs, merging in and out of clusters, when the camera suddenly jolts or spins, and the entity comes into view. A pulsing synth-pop beat by musician Pier-Luc Lussier completes this plastic-bubble-gum aesthetic and creates an atmosphere for the entity to exist in. Lussier’s composition is in fact a variation on a song by the Scottish band CHVRCHES to which Morin and Clayton originally danced. 

    From the entity’s awkward movements to the seemingly nonsensical accumulation of objects that make up its body, The Spectre Animates our Bones is undoubtedly funny. Viewers may even be compelled to laugh at the swarm of flying books or the flurry of eyeballs that descend onto the trailer. All of these objects are metaphors for the body. In their previous collaborations, Morin and Clayton used consumer telecommunication technologies like Skype, Twitch, and Zoom to think about our relationships to one another as they are affected by these tools. The artists continue their exploration here using motion capture technology and animation to consider how the body is a communally mediated experience. 

Together, Morin and Clayton are the ghosts that possess the entity. They, along with the music’s tight tempo, are what I imagine prompted the entity to begin moving in the first place, or breathe its first breath for that matter. The Spectre Animates our Bones is a compelling argument against the dualism of mind and body, and an important reminder that we are our bodies.

About the writer: 

Born and raised in Montréal, Amelia Wong-Mersereau is an emerging arts writer and cultural critic. Her master’s thesis examined the work of Chinese performance artist Kong Ning through the lenses of gender, sexuality, and ecofeminism. In 2021, she was awarded the Winter Editorial Mentorship at Canadian Art. She presently works as the Coordinator of Print Projects and Digital Content at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art and has been a member of the editorial board at esse arts + opinionssince 2018.