by Jacinte Armstrong with support from SiNS (Sometimes in Nova Scotia) Dance, suddenlyLISTEN, Jackson Fairfax-Perry & Gillian Seaward-Boone
Festival of BodyWork transforms Parade Square into an open-air environment for movement, play, and collective encounter. Oversized hand-built sculptures become shared partners for exploration as dancers, musicians, and the public animate the site together. Visitors are invited to move with, around, and through the sculptural forms, discovering how simple interactions can become choreography. Blurring the boundaries between sculpture, performance, and participation, the project reimagines the city as a place where bodies gather, improvise, and create experience together. Live sound and lighting shape an evolving atmosphere that unfolds throughout the evening.
Festival of BodyWork is a large-scale participatory installation and performance created for Nocturne 2026: Embodied City. The project transforms Parade Square into an evolving landscape of oversized sculptural forms that invite movement, play, and collective encounter. Part installation, part performance, and part public gathering, the work proposes the city as a place where bodies think in movement and discover through doing.
The installation features a collection of oversized "Dance Constructions" built from bundled pool noodles. Each sculpture is unique yet comparable in scale. Hand-built and visibly improvised, the forms emphasize process over finish, allowing them to feel at once architectural, bodily, and provisional. Inspired by Simone Forti's Dance Constructions (1960–61), the work explores how objects can function as companions, supports, and choreographic partners.
Throughout the evening, dancer-performers activate the sculptures through improvisation and simple scores, inviting audience members to participate as well. The constructions can be lifted, carried, leaned against, moved within, balanced, and navigated, continually shifting the relationship between body and object. Rather than presenting fixed choreography, the performers reveal possibilities for interaction, allowing movement to emerge through contact, weight, rhythm, and play.
The public is invited to engage throughout the event by moving inside and alongside the sculptures, joining the performers in shared movement, resting against the forms, carrying them with others, or simply observing. No experience is required; the sculptures themselves offer intuitive invitations to engage. Live sound and lighting shape the atmosphere of the event, amplifying the evolving relationships between bodies, sculptures, and public space as day turns to night.
Festival of BodyWork imagines Nocturne as a contemporary public happening, where sculpture, dance, and urban space come together into a shared, embodied experience.
