SHALLOW
A Telluric Mythology
Notes on compression, collective intelligence, and the conditions for transformation
The invitation
In July 2026, while I was in New York, I received a message from Sue Seçkin, curator of Parquette Variety, inviting me to create a thirty-minute work for the October 10 event at Parquette, in Montréal.
I had first visited the space almost a year earlier, during a performance night that stayed with me. Artist Joy Boissière presented an intriguing, uncanny, and at times humorous proposition, turning her skin condition into an artistic prompt. The surface of her body became a meeting point between herself and the world around her. She manipulated objects, carried them in unusual ways, and used chalk on the concrete floor to map the shapes and territories of her body and the objects she encountered.
I remember being completely absorbed, following her every move. In the same space, artist Claire Pearl acted as a time referee, holding the performance in suspense. Each of Joy's propositions had to give way to another whenever Claire blew the whistle hanging around her neck. Yet she kept the whistle in her mouth, making it almost impossible to anticipate her next screech.
That evening, I also met Nore. We began imagining a performance at Parquette that would evoke a rave or an after-party, an atmosphere from which a collective performance could emerge. We tried several times to bring the idea to life, but it never quite happened.
Still, something had been set in motion. Those encounters opened up a possibility I kept returning to: creating a work that would grow specifically out of this space, its atmosphere, and the kinds of encounters it could make possible. It became a recurring dream, one I would mention from time to time and quietly revisit before falling asleep.
When Sue's invitation arrived, that dream found an opening.
I knew the space well enough to imagine working with its different rooms, its architecture, its passages, and the relationships that might emerge between bodies and spectators. I wanted to continue exploring immersive performance, not only in the sense of sharing a space with the audience, but through the possibility of moving together through it.
I imagined a collective migration from upstairs to downstairs.
This movement became the backbone of Shallow. The descent was not simply a transition between performance areas. It was a passage beneath the surface, into another world. The audience would physically cross a threshold alongside the performers, while the mythology of the work would give this movement another dimension.
I began imagining a community of humans living on the surface of the Earth. At certain moments, they would receive a signal. Something in the music would tell them it was time to descend. They would leave the surface and return underground, following a rhythm they had learned to recognize.
Why did they have to go down there? What were they looking for?
These questions became the beginning of a mythology.
Compression
The initial invitation was relatively simple: thirty minutes in a variety night. But I was drawn toward something more elemental.
I wanted to explore compression as a physical sensation. Pressure. Density. The experience of being pushed inward, of having space taken away, of being subjected to forces that reorganize the body.
The image that stayed with me was that of a diamond.
A diamond forms through geological processes involving particular conditions of pressure and temperature over immense periods of time. I was fascinated by the idea that something extraordinary could emerge through transformation under constraint.
Not because pressure is inherently good, or because suffering automatically produces beauty, but because transformation is inseparable from the conditions in which it occurs.
What happens to a body when the space around it becomes smaller? What happens when bodies press against one another, when movement becomes constrained, when there is no longer enough room to maintain the shapes we know?
What can emerge from those conditions?
I began thinking of the body as a landscape subjected to geological forces. Instead of treating the dancers as characters performing a narrative, I wanted to invite them into processes of transformation. They could become strata, minerals, geological formations, crawling organisms, or creatures whose physical logic differed from our own.
The work would move through four sensations: compression, tension, softening, and shifting.
These were not simply themes to illustrate. They were physical propositions, ways of organizing attention and movement. Each offered a different relationship to gravity, space, and other bodies.
Compression asks the body to condense. Tension creates relationships between forces. Softening changes how those forces are received and transmitted. Shifting allows the entire configuration to reorganize.
Together, these sensations became a physical vocabulary through which the dancers could explore the mythology of the work.
I began referring to the project as a telluric mythology, drawing on the idea of tellurism: the relationship between the Earth, its geological forces, and the life unfolding upon it.
I was interested in imagining a world in which the ground is not merely the surface on which we stand. The Earth is an active presence. Its pressures, depths, temperatures, and transformations shape the conditions of existence.
In this world, the human body is not separate from geology. It is another form through which the Earth moves.
I am increasingly interested in choreography as the design of conditions under which this intelligence can become visible.
The score is not simply a sequence of movements. It is a relational architecture.
It gives us enough structure to act together and enough openness to discover something we could not have produced individually.
Tensegrity: Rethinking the body
One of the first things I shared with the group was the concept of tensegrity, particularly its relationship to biotensegrity.
Tensegrity, a term associated with architect and systems thinker Buckminster Fuller, describes structures that maintain their integrity through a balance of tension and compression. Biotensegrity applies related principles to living bodies, offering a way to think about the skeleton and connective tissues as an interconnected system through which forces are distributed.
I was interested in what this model might offer our understanding of the dancing body.
What if we stopped imagining the skeleton as a stack of bones held together primarily by gravity? What if we instead imagined the body as an interconnected network, in which bones, fascia, muscles, and other tissues participate in distributing forces throughout the whole?
This shift in perception opened up different possibilities for movement.
Instead of organizing ourselves around rigid verticality, we could explore how tension travels through the body, how one part responds to another, how pressure can be distributed rather than concentrated, and how support can emerge through relationships.
A body could yield without collapsing. It could be destabilized without immediately becoming disorganized. It could receive the weight of another body and redistribute that weight through a network of connections.
These ideas became especially relevant to the physical conditions of the performance.
We were working on concrete floors. The dancers moved up and down, fell, caught one another, and repeatedly encountered the ground. The impact of these actions had to be negotiated through the body, through timing, and through the relationships between performers.
I began wondering whether our investigation into interconnected structures had helped create a greater sense of porosity and adaptability in the group. I cannot know exactly how much it contributed, but I noticed how important it was to cultivate a physical intelligence in which bodies could respond to one another rather than simply execute predetermined actions.
Safety, in this context, was not an abstract principle added to the choreography. It was something we practiced through attention, responsiveness, and the continuous negotiation of forces.
The body became less like a fixed object and more like a living system.
Perhaps this was one of the first places where the physical research and the relational research of Shallow began to converge.
The storm
There is an anecdote from the first rehearsal that has stayed with me.
We were working at Proto Studio, a space on the eleventh floor of a building in Montréal. The studios are surrounded by windows. When we work there, we are suspended above the city, almost literally dancing in the sky.
At some point, the sky began to turn grey. The light changed, the clouds grew darker, and suddenly an intense storm arrived.
We rushed to close the windows.
As I was closing one of them, the window broke in my hands. The wind was pushing against it so forcefully that it shattered right in front of me. Water began leaking into the studio. Soon, there was water everywhere, and we had to respond to the situation, trying to close everything and clean up the mess.
Once the immediate chaos had passed, we started laughing.
While cleaning up the water, I joked that we would probably have to include water in the show.
The joke stayed with me. I returned to it later, and gradually, it opened up another possibility.
What if the underground we were imagining was also underwater?
What if descending into the Earth meant entering the deep sea?
The mythology expanded. The underground was no longer exclusively a world of rock, mineral deposits, and geological strata. It could also be a world of immense aquatic pressure, darkness, and unfamiliar forms of life.
I began researching deep-sea creatures.
What interested me was not simply their appearance, although many seemed to belong to another universe. I was fascinated by how organisms adapt to environments radically different from those at the surface.
Life in the deep ocean exists under enormous pressure. Deep-sea organisms exhibit a wide variety of adaptations to these conditions, including changes in body composition, structure, metabolism, and the ways they move and perceive their surroundings.
Some are gelatinous or remarkably soft. Some have translucent bodies. Others produce their own light through bioluminescence.
I was particularly drawn to this last phenomenon.
In a world where sunlight barely penetrates, some organisms generate light from within themselves. Their bodies become luminous in the darkness.
I found this image extraordinary.
The dancers could descend into the underground and become creatures whose bodies no longer operated according to familiar human logic. They could crawl, swim, hover, pulse, or move like animals whose names we do not know. Their bodies could become translucent, permeable, or luminous.
The image of bioluminescence gave us another way to imagine transformation. Light was no longer something illuminating the body from the outside. It was something the body produced.
The creatures glowed.
This became part of the language surrounding the work, including the description in the program.
The storm had disrupted our rehearsal, broken a window, and flooded the studio. We responded to the situation, cleaned the water, and continued working. But it also gave me an image I could not have planned in advance.
A rupture in the conditions of creation became an opening in the imagination.
I do not believe every accident needs to become art. But I am interested in what becomes possible when we remain attentive to what happens around us, when we allow the world to participate in the work instead of treating our original ideas as untouchable.
Sometimes the conditions interrupt the plan. Sometimes the interruption reveals something the plan could not have anticipated.
The sun goes underground
The mythology of Shallow also developed through conversations about ancient Egyptian cosmology, particularly the Duat, the realm associated with the sun god Ra's nightly passage through the underworld.
In ancient Egyptian religious traditions, the setting sun's journey through the underworld was part of a larger cycle of death, renewal, and rebirth. Night was not simply the absence of the sun. It was a passage through another realm, a necessary movement within a cosmic cycle.
This image resonated with the world I was imagining.
The people living on the surface believed that the sun went underground when it disappeared from view. They descended in search of it, following the signal that told them when it was time to go.
What exactly were they looking for? The sun itself? A source of energy? A form of knowledge? Something they had lost, or something they had never encountered?
I did not need to answer these questions definitively.
I was more interested in what the mythology made possible for the performers. It gave them a shared reason to move, a collective imaginary that could inform their decisions without dictating every action.
As they descended, they could gradually stop behaving like humans on an expedition and begin transforming into the landscape itself.
The descent was a passage across boundaries: from surface to depth, from human to geological, from familiar bodies to unfamiliar forms of existence.
I began to think of the underground as a place where the distinctions between categories could become unstable. A body could be a person, an animal, a mineral formation, a current of water, or several of these things at once.
The performers were not illustrating a story about transformation. They were practicing transformation through the choices they made with their bodies.
The mythology provided a horizon. What happened within it remained alive.
Creating the conditions for dance
The creation of Shallow unfolded across five and a half rehearsals.
We never had everyone in the room at the same time. Some performers joined at different stages, and some stepped away from the project as we approached the performance.
The circumstances were far from ideal if measured against a conventional production model. We had limited time, an evolving score, and a group whose composition changed throughout the process.
But I had made the conditions of participation clear from the beginning.
The dancers were participating on a voluntary basis. They were free to decide how much they could offer, to communicate their needs, and to leave the project if continuing no longer felt right for them.
I did not want participation to become an obligation that people felt compelled to honor at the expense of their bodies, their time, or their other commitments.
I wanted to create a space where people could speak honestly about their capacity and exercise agency over their involvement.
As the process unfolded, some people chose to step away. I respected those decisions, and I felt genuinely happy that they could listen to themselves and act accordingly.
There was no resentment. I was grateful to the people who continued with us, and I made a point of expressing that gratitude. They brought their creativity, generosity, commitment, and individual intelligence to the work. They helped shape the material, and they remained present through the activation.
Their contribution was not simply a matter of showing up and executing my ideas. They helped make the work what it became.
This experience also made me think more carefully about how I structure participation in future projects.
I would like to make different levels of involvement more explicit from the outset. Some performers might participate intensively, attending several rehearsals and carrying significant responsibilities within the score. Others might join for a single rehearsal and participate in a more observational or supportive capacity.
I am interested in the possibility of having performers who enter the work as witnesses.
I imagine something like the background figures in a film. Some characters occupy the centre of the action and carry specific responsibilities. Others inhabit the world around them, helping establish its atmosphere, density, and social reality.
The witnesses would still be inside the work. They would not be lesser participants. Their presence would contribute to the collective image, even if their relationship to the material required less preparation.
This could allow more people to participate according to their circumstances, while making the expectations and responsibilities of each role clearer.
It also challenges an assumption that everyone involved in a performance must contribute in exactly the same way.
Perhaps a collective work can become more porous when participation is understood as something that can take multiple forms.
For me, creating the conditions for dance to emerge includes creating the conditions for people to decide how they want to participate.
That means taking their agency seriously, even when their decisions alter the work I imagined.
From a show to a collective activation
During this project, I noticed myself moving away from the words show and performance.
I began calling Shallow a collective activation.
The distinction matters to me because it describes something about how I understand my work with groups.
My choreographic practice is increasingly concerned with creating situations in which performers can make choices in real time. I establish certain conditions: a shared imaginary, a sequence of events, a musical structure, spatial relationships, and a set of tasks or games.
Within these conditions, the dancers act as intelligent agents.
They are not simply reproducing a sequence of movements that I have decided in advance. They are navigating a structure together, making decisions that respond to the bodies, spaces, sounds, and situations around them.
The work has a score, but the score does not determine every detail of what happens.
There are chapters, or scenes, that follow a particular order. Music provides an anchor, marking transitions and helping us recognize where we are within the larger structure. Certain performers carry responsibilities that allow the group to move from one scene to the next.
Leadership is distributed throughout the work.
At particular moments, one person might initiate a transition, establish a spatial configuration, or become a reference point for the others. At another moment, that responsibility belongs to someone else.
The group shares an understanding of the collective image, but the exact pathway toward that image remains open.
For example, we might agree that the performers will travel from one point in the space to another, moving in close proximity. One person must lead from the front, but we do not necessarily decide beforehand who will occupy that position or in what order the others will follow.
The task is clear. The outcome is not entirely predetermined.
Each performer must remain attentive to what the others are doing. They must recognize when to lead, when to follow, when to shift position, and when to allow someone else to take responsibility.
The choreography emerges through these decisions.
I am interested in this balance between structure and freedom. The score establishes a common ground, allowing the performers to act without needing constant instruction. At the same time, the openness of the tasks creates room for surprise, adaptation, and individual expression.
The music is particularly important because it holds the work together. It remains relatively stable while the relationships between bodies, space, and audience continue to change.
We know the music. We recognize the markers. We understand the general order of things.
Within that structure, we play.
Some games allow for considerable freedom. Others require more precise spatial arrangements. Some establish a particular collective image; others invite performers to explore a physical sensation or relational dynamic.
But across these different tasks, something remains consistent: shared listening.
The games continually return us to the present moment. They ask us to perceive one another, to register changes in the environment, and to make choices in response to what is actually happening.
Listening becomes more than a matter of hearing instructions or following musical cues. It becomes a way of organizing ourselves in relation to one another.
A performer must be able to sense when another body is moving closer, when a formation is changing, when an opportunity to intervene appears, or when the most useful action is to do nothing at all.
This kind of listening generates a particular form of collective intelligence.
It does not require everyone to think alike. It requires everyone to remain available to what is happening.
The dancers, the ambition, and the encounter
There was another reason I wanted to make Shallow.
For approximately a year before the project, I had been teaching dancers from Ballet Jazz Montréal regularly, sometimes once or twice a month. Through those classes, I had begun to recognize a significant creative potential in the group.
I was getting to know the dancers, their physical intelligence, their responsiveness, and the ways they engaged with the material I brought into the studio.
I felt that some of them understood my approach well enough to make an informed decision about whether they wanted to enter a project with me. They already had some experience of my movement language and the kinds of situations I like to create.
I wanted to explore what might happen if we worked together in a more explicitly artistic context.
I also reached out to dancers from Rubberband.
I was curious about bringing together performers from these companies alongside a dancer from Marichuna and two freelance dancers. I wanted to create an encounter between people whose practices, professional circumstances, and artistic experiences were not identical.
The group that ultimately came together included dancers from different horizons. Some were affiliated with established companies; others were working independently.
That mix became one of the things I appreciated most about the process.
The project created a place where people who might not otherwise share a rehearsal room could meet, work together, and discover new artistic relationships. It became a site of encounter, a temporary community organized around a shared experiment.
I had also been carrying a more personal question into this project.
Part of me wanted to find out whether I could work with dancers of this calibre as a choreographer. I wanted to test my own capacity to create something that could engage performers whose technical and artistic experience I deeply respected.
There was an ambition in that desire, and perhaps a need to prove something to myself.
I wanted to see whether the kind of work I was developing, with its emphasis on improvisation, relational intelligence, collective imagination, and real-time decision-making, could hold its own in a room with these dancers.
Could I offer them something worth engaging with? Could I create a structure that would activate their intelligence rather than simply ask them to execute my vision? Could I establish a world compelling enough that they would want to enter it, even with very limited rehearsal time?
These questions were personal, but they were also artistic.
I was testing the relationship between my ambition and my actual practice.
I am not interested in reducing artistic calibre to company affiliation. There are extraordinary dancers working outside established institutions, and there are many forms of expertise that cannot be measured by a résumé.
Still, I recognize that working with these particular dancers carried a certain significance for me. I wanted to bring my choreographic practice into contact with their experience, and I wanted to discover what we could make together.
The experience reminded me that I do not have to wait for a particular institutional context or level of recognition to begin testing the possibilities I imagine for my work.
I can initiate the encounter.
I can create the circumstances.
I can invite people whose intelligence I respect into a process and see what becomes possible between us.
This does not mean that every experiment will produce the same conditions or that ambition alone guarantees the quality of a work. It means that I am becoming more willing to act on the scale of my curiosity, rather than waiting until I feel entirely ready.
Shallow was a small project in terms of its duration and resources. But the questions it allowed me to explore were much larger.
Authority, trust, and the ethics of making work together
I have been thinking about what it means to hold authority as a choreographer while remaining committed to the agency of the people I work with.
These values can appear contradictory.
On one hand, I have a vision. I initiate the project, establish its conditions, select the material, and make decisions about its structure. I want to develop a strong choreographic voice. I want to be responsible for the work and to have the freedom to pursue the questions that matter to me.
On the other hand, I do not want the people participating in my work to become instruments of my vision.
I want them to remain present as people with their own intelligence, needs, limits, and desires. I want their contributions to matter, and I want them to have the freedom to communicate when something is not working for them.
Shallow gave me an opportunity to practice this relationship.
The performers were not required to follow a fixed choreography. They were invited into a score that depended on their capacity to make decisions, to listen, and to participate in shaping what happened.
At the same time, the openness of the process did not mean that I abandoned my responsibility as the person creating the work.
I still had to make choices. I had to organize the material, establish the dramaturgy, hold the larger vision, and help the group understand how the different parts related to one another.
For me, the challenge is to develop an authority that creates space for other forms of intelligence to operate.
I do not want to dissolve my role as a choreographer in the name of collaboration. Nor do I want my role to prevent the performers from exercising their agency.
I want to become more precise about the conditions I establish, more confident in the structures I propose, and more receptive to what emerges through the people who inhabit them.
This requires trust in several directions.
The performers need to trust the score, one another, and their capacity to make decisions without knowing exactly what will happen next.
I need to trust that the work can remain coherent without controlling every detail. I need to trust the intelligence of the people I invite, and I need to accept that their decisions may lead somewhere I had not anticipated.
The group must also be able to trust that participation is not a trap, that their boundaries can be expressed, and that changing their minds will not automatically be treated as a betrayal.
These are not merely values to declare. They have to be practiced through the organization of a project, the distribution of responsibilities, the way information is communicated, and the ways people are allowed to enter or leave.
I am still learning how to do this well.
I can imagine making the different levels of participation clearer next time. I can imagine communicating the expectations of the project more precisely, while preserving the openness that makes the work exciting.
Ethical practice does not mean that every difficulty disappears. It means that I remain willing to examine the conditions that produce those difficulties and to change them when necessary.
I want to make work that asks something of people without demanding that they abandon themselves in order to participate.
I want commitment to emerge from a meaningful encounter, rather than from guilt or obligation.
And I want the artistic structure itself to make room for this possibility.
A gathering of coordinates
Looking back, I am struck by how much of Shallow was about creating a place of encounter.
The performers arrived with different backgrounds, experiences, working relationships, and understandings of dance. We had very little time to build something together, and we never had the luxury of assuming that everyone would be present at every stage.
Yet a shared world emerged.
We had the music. We had the score. We had the mythology of the surface and the underground. We had the physical sensations of compression, tension, softening, and shifting.
We had tasks that required us to listen to one another.
These elements gave us a common reference point without requiring us to become identical.
I think of the project as a temporary constellation of people and ideas. Each person arrived with their own coordinates, and the work created a situation in which those coordinates could come into relation.
The result was not a perfectly unified group in which every difference had disappeared. It was a temporary alignment, held together by attention, curiosity, and the willingness to participate in something that none of us could produce alone.
This is something I want to continue exploring in my choreographic practice: the possibility of creating a shared territory without imposing a single way of inhabiting it.
A score can give people common ground. A mythology can orient their imagination. Music can hold time together. Spatial tasks can organize their relationships.
But the work only becomes alive when people bring their own intelligence to these structures.
The encounter is the point.
Perhaps this is also why I am drawn to the idea of collective activation. The work is not a fixed object that the performers reproduce for an audience. It is a set of conditions that becomes active through the relationships between performers, space, music, and spectators.
Every activation contains the possibility of something different.
The structure remains recognizable, but the particular constellation of bodies, decisions, and circumstances is never exactly the same.
A few days later
I am writing these notes a few days after the performance, while the experience is still close enough for me to remember the questions that accompanied its creation.
I remember the initial invitation in New York. I remember imagining the audience moving through the different spaces at Parquette. I remember the diamond, the pressure, and the desire to explore what happens when bodies are pushed into unfamiliar conditions.
I remember the storm at Proto, the broken window, the water everywhere, and the laughter that followed.
I remember the conversations about the Duat, the sun disappearing beneath the Earth, and the creatures of the deep sea. I remember thinking about bioluminescence, about bodies that generate their own light in the absence of sunlight.
I remember the rehearsals, the changing group, the generosity of the dancers, and the ways the score began to take shape through our collective experiments.
I also remember the personal stakes.
I wanted to see what I could do with these dancers. I wanted to test the strength of my choreographic approach. I wanted to create something that could hold together without being entirely predetermined.
I wanted to trust my vision without closing down the possibilities that other people could bring to it.
And I wanted to create a situation in which people could participate freely, listen to themselves, and make decisions about their involvement without being punished for doing so.
These questions are not resolved.
I do not come away from Shallow with a definitive model for making work. I come away with a better understanding of what I want to keep investigating.
I want to develop scores that are precise enough to support collective action and open enough to allow genuine discovery. I want to work with performers as intelligent agents, giving them responsibilities that allow them to shape the work in real time.
I want to continue exploring how bodies organize themselves through tension, pressure, support, and contact. I want to create environments in which movement can emerge through listening, where the body is understood as a responsive system rather than a fixed structure.
I want to keep making work across differences, bringing people together who might not otherwise meet, and allowing the project to become a place where new artistic relationships can form.
And I want to become more confident in my ability to initiate these encounters, to hold a vision, and to take responsibility for the conditions under which the work unfolds.
Perhaps this is the deeper connection between the geological mythology of Shallow and the way I approached its creation.
The work began with compression: the possibility that pressure could reorganize a body, that constraints could force a system to discover another way of existing.
But the process also taught me something about the limits of that metaphor.
Pressure alone is not enough. A diamond does not emerge simply because something has been subjected to force; particular conditions must coincide. Living bodies, meanwhile, need forms of support, adaptability, and care to respond to pressure without being damaged by it.
I am interested in the moment when a structure becomes capable of changing without losing its integrity.
When tension becomes a relationship rather than a constraint.
When softening becomes a form of intelligence.
When a group discovers that it can move together without everyone having to move in the same way.
When a body becomes something other than what it thought it was.
Perhaps that is what I was looking for when I began making Shallow.
Not a story about people going underground, exactly. Not simply an immersive performance, an exploration of geological imagery, or a choreographic experiment with improvisation.
I was looking for the conditions under which transformation might become possible.
And I wanted to discover what could emerge when we entered those conditions together.