Jacinte Armstrong
ABOUT JACINTE:
Jacinte Armstrong is an Acadian artist based in K’jipuktuk/Halifax, NS. Her work explores embodied practice through performance, choreography, collaboration, and curation, communicating the experience of the body in relation to objects, materials, environment, and people. Her choreography ranges from intimate and imagistic to large-scale collaborations with dancers, architects, visual artists, radio producers, filmmakers, theatre-makers, and musicians. Jacinte is Artistic Director and co-founder of SiNS (Sometimes in Nova Scotia) dance, Artistic Producer at suddenlyLISTEN, and from 2014-18 was Artistic Director of Kinetic Studio, presenting an annual season of contemporary dance workshops and performances in Nova Scotia. She also performs regularly with Mocean Dance. In 2016, she was awarded an Established Artist Recognition Award by the Nova Scotia Arts and Culture Partnership Council, and a Masterworks Award for her work in Mocean Dance’s “Canvas 5x5” choreographed by Tedd Robinson. Jacinte has worked extensively with choreographers Sarah Chase, Tedd Robinson, Cory Bowles, Sara Coffin, Susanne Chui, Veronique MacKenzie, Lisa Phinney Langley, Liliona Quarmyne, Serge Bennathan, Danièle Desnoyers, Denise Fujiwara, Liz Kinoshita, Sarah Joy Stoker, Katie Ward, Dustin Harvey/Secret Theatre, and more. She was commissioned by Mocean Dance to create an interdisciplinary, audience-inclusive piece called PLAY, which premiered in fall 2023. Along with Architect James Forren and Dance Artist Gillian Seaward-Boone, she is also working on VERSION 2.0, a new work combining dance and Augmented Reality technology. Jacinte holds an MFA in Performance from NSCAD University and is a certified Laban Movement Analyst (CMA).
THE BACK SPACE
THE BACK SPACE is a solo synaesthetic adventure into the body and imagination that builds on Jacinte Armstrong’s knowledge as a choreographer and dance artist to bring together Virtual Reality, movement, and the senses. Multidimensional, intimate, colourful and imagistic, the piece explores what may be possible to feel within and around our physical bodies when our imaginations are expanded. It asks how we are choreographed by virtual objects, and conversely how we choreograph them, and seeks to create both a bodywork and VR experience at the same time.
Immersed in this piece, what we see before us is counterbalanced by the things we can only feel in the space behind us. THE BACK SPACE places light, colour, and vision in paradoxical relationships with darkness, sightlessness, and touch. At once dense and expansive, familiar and fantastic, known and unknown, this experience moves us through a range of emotional territories in a playful engagement between a mover, spaces, and images both familiar and strange.
JACINTE’S PITCHDECK
click on the photo to view Jacinte’s pitchdeck