Laura Taler

Laura Taler was born on December 21, 1969, in Brașov, Romania. Her desire to explore body-centered knowledge emerged from her childhood experiences — by the age of nine she spoke six languages: Romanian, German, Italian, Hebrew, English, and French. This movement through language led her to rely on gesture, facial expression, and mimicry as the primary connectors to her surroundings. As early as elementary school, she organized and taught extra-curricular dance classes.

Taler’s early career focused on creating experimental performances that blurred the line between dance, theatre, and performance art. Her exploration of movement with different media and in unusual places — in a cemetery, a barroom and a variety of other unconventional places across Canada — led to performances intertwined with photography, text, and film footage. In 1991, concurrent with her performance career, she created the wildly successful Dances for a Small Stage (DFSS), a semi-annual series of experimental dance that ran for five years at Toronto's Rivoli, quickly becoming a Toronto legend due to its propensity for cutting-edge performances. The show's concept was taken over by a team of DFSS alumni in Vancouver and runs to this day.

In 1992, Taler was the youngest choreographer invited to participate in the Banff Centre’s Dance for Camera residency, where she worked alongside Le Groupe de la Place Royale’s Peter Boneham and the BBC’s Bob Lockyer. Attracted by the camera’s ability to magnify gesture and facial expression, Taler quickly took to creating and directing movement for film.

In 1995, she made her directorial debut with the village trilogy, a moving and poetic portrayal of the search for home and roots. The 24-minute film alludes to the millions of lives uprooted through emigration in the past century while reinterpreting the physical characteristics of early cinema. According to Gaby Aldor, “…it is as if the old language is no longer adequate, as if a new way of being, and therefore of dancing, has to be invented.” The film was shown in dozens of international locations, was broadcast worldwide, and won three significant awards: the Cinedance Award for Best Canadian Dancefilm at the Moving Pictures Festival of Dance on Film and Video (1995), the Best Experimental Short Film Award at the Worldwide Short Film Festival (1996), and a Gold Hugo for Short Subject Experimental at the Chicago International Film Festival (1996). In 2002, Los Angeles Times critic Lewis Segal wrote: "For depth of feeling, photographic sensitivity and movement invention, the central (duet) portion of Laura Taler's 1995 'A Village Trilogy' may be the most memorable footage in the festival. ...[H]er mastery of choreography and direction is unquestioned." Over the next few years, while continuing to create performances for alternative venues, she established herself as a leading director in independent Canadian dancefilm.

In 1997, Taler created the film Heartland, an imaginative portrayal of the elusive dancer/choreographer Bill Coleman. This documentary received the Best Experimental Short Documentary Award from Hot Docs (1998) and the Cinedance Award for Best Canadian Dancefilm from the Moving Pictures Festival (1997). Taler remains the only director to have won this award twice. In 1998, her Dances for a Small Screen, a collaboration between directors and choreographers from across Canada, premiered at the Canada Dance Festival. The film was nominated for five Gemini Awards, including a best director nomination for Taler, and went on to win the Gemini Award for best editing. Deirdre Kelly, dance critic at The Globe and Mail wrote, "Dance has a reputation for being precious and esoteric, but Laura Taler wants to change all that." Kelly described Taler's contribution to Dancers on a Small Screen as "an idea distilled to its bare essentials, a choreographed poem that would have made the symbolists proud."

The following year, Taler was commissioned by the Canada Dance Festival to create the amusing and educational A Very Dangerous Pastime: A Devastatingly Simple Dance Guide, a film that has helped dispel the myth that contemporary experimental dance is difficult to understand. The film was screened in 2000 at the Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater as part of the Dance on Camera Festival and won the Best of Festival Award. It also garnered two Gemini Award nominations and a Special Jury Mention for humour and innovation from IMZ's dancescreen.

Exploration of narrative structures

In the next stage of her career, Taler explored the relationship of movement and music to long- and short-form experimental narrative structures. Her full-length documentary Perpetual Motion tells the story of a complex collaboration between choreographer Jose Navas and cellist Walter Haman — Navas and Haman were artists-in-residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity during the creation process. Perpetual Motion was broadcast nationally and screened internationally, and was nominated for a 2002 Gemini Award for Best Direction.

In 2003, Taler created DEATH and THE MAIDEN, a contemporary silent film set to Franz Schubert's string quartet. Following the score's cues to write the story, Taler collaborated with the world-renowned Brodsky Quartet for the film's soundtrack.

Three short films followed. From 2005 to 2008, Taler worked with soprano Tracy Smith Bessette to create Forsaken, The Sorcerer, and Love Song. These films explored the German Lied and revealed the intricate narrative structures through movement, image, and sound. IMZ's dancescreen nominated Foresaken for Best Short Dance Film in 2007.

Research and creation

Taler's later works emerged from a desire to explore how stillness plays into movement. Her work in video installation, sound, performance, and sculpture allowed her to consider how the body experiences and interprets processes and forms that contain seemingly contradictory forces. This work was initiated during a creation period supported by a Chalmers Arts Fellowship (2003–2005). In 2008–2009, she was invited to become a Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) Berlin; during this fellowship, she created a video installation that confronted viewers with questions about how to share an experience with another body. The work was adapted to an installation on paper and published in Tension/Spannung (Turia+Kant, 2010).

The strongly theoretical environment at ICI inspired Taler to pursue her MFA at the University of Ottawa, where she was awarded the 2011 prize for Best MFA Thesis Paper. Directly following her MFA, Taler was named artist-in-residence at the Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) at Carleton University's Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism in Ottawa. This residency allowed her to continue work on large-scale video installations and to consider how sculpture, performance, and video can play into the exploration of stillness in movement.

Collaborations

Recent collaborations include a large-scale sculptural assemblage set for the performance company Public Recordings, presented in 2013 by the National Arts Centre (Ottawa), and three large-scale projections with Jeremy Mimnagh for choreographer Yvonne Coutts, entitled eternity floated a blossoming and presented by the Canada Dance Festival. Both works emphasized the affective nature of geometry when paired with colour and texture and explored how these operate in dialogue with moving bodies to manifest sensation.

Also in 2013, Taler was invited by curator Ming Tiampo to create multiples for the Gutai Card Box, featured in the exhibition Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York). Each multiple contained a series of frames from a 16mm filmstrip that contained one poem written by Yevgeny Vinokurov and one poem by Taler as a female echo to Vinokurov's poem. To engage with the work, the viewer had to either find a way to magnify the film or search out a magnification on Taler's website.

Since 1995, Laura Taler's experimental movement films have been broadcast on CBC, Bravo, TFO, ici ARTV (Canada); Channel 4 (UK); Koonstkanal NPS (Netherlands); ABC (Australia); IBA (Israel); and SVT (Sweden). Screenings of her films have taken place in such notable venues as the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; Festival international du film sur l'art (Montreal); Yerba Buena Center (San Francisco); Dancehouse (Melbourne); Ultima Film (Oslo); Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires); Danish Film Institute (Copenhagen); Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki); Opernhouse Graz (Graz); Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center (New York); and the Vancouver 2009 Cultural Olympiad.

Exhibition venues include Donald Browne Gallery (Montreal); AXENÉO7 (Gatineau); Blink Gallery (Ottawa); Ottawa Art Gallery; Gladstone Hotel (Toronto); Gallery 918 (Toronto); Artlab Gallery (London); Art Gallery of Mississauga; and Nuit Blanche Ottawa.

Major publications include Tension/Spannung (Turia+Kant, 2010); Revisiting Ephemera (Blue Medium Press, 2011); and Embodied Fantasies (Peter Lang Publishing, 2013).

Laura Taler has received numerous grants, awards, and funding from such agencies as the Toronto Arts Council, the City of Ottawa, the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Laidlaw Foundation, the Canadian Television Fund, Telefilm Canada, Department of Canadian Heritage, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, and Canada's National Arts Centre. For the past 20 years, she has been a regular jury member for the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. She has also participated in juries at EMPAC (Rensselaer University, Troy, NY), SAW Video (Ottawa), Instituto Itau Cultural (São Paulo), the Gemini Awards, and Dance on Screen (London).

She has presented her work in artist talks and conferences and has conducted master classes internationally at institutions such as the University of Utah; the Festival Internacional del Cuerpo, la imagen y el movimiento (Montevideo); Itau Cultural (São Paulo): Centro Cultural Recoleta/International Dancefilm Festival (Buenos Aires); University of Wisconsin; The Place (London); Riccione TTV (Riccione); the University of Regina; Yukon Arts Centre (Whitehorse); and Embodied Fantasies, School of Visual Arts (New York). She teaches performance art and time-based media at the University of Ottawa on a part-time basis.

Throughout her career, Taler has continued to explore how the body is able to carry and transmit knowledge. Her sculptures poetically transfer a sense of movement in animate objects, while her time-based performance works aim to use generosity as a unit of measure. In a recent review of a group show that features Taler's sculpture and performance work, Anna Khimasia of C Magazine noted that "Taler's performance explores a certain vulnerability in both the performer and audience.... [T]hese works speak to a certain temporality of time undone, and to the materiality of sound, the body, and objects — made, unmade, and made again."

2017 Carry Tiger to the Mountain (short)

2014 elsewhere (short)

2012 Tango Contact Candy (short)

2010 stillmovingstillmovingstillmovingstill (short)

2008 Love Song (short)

2006 The Sorcerer (short)

2005 Forsaken (short)

2003 DEATH and THE MAIDEN

2002 Perpetual Motion (documentary)

2000 A Very Dangerous Pastime (documentary short)

1998 Silo (short)

1998 Dances For A Small Screen

1997 Heartland (documentary short)

1995 the village trilogy

Forsaken

• IMZ dancescreen nomination for best short dance film

DEATH and THE MAIDEN

• Gemini Award nomination for best cinematography

Perpetual Motion (documentary)

• Gemini Award nomination for Best Direction in A Performing Arts Program

A Very Dangerous Pastime

• Best of the Festival, Dance on Camera Festival, New York
• 2 Gemini Award nominations
• Special Jury mention for humour and innovation, IMZ dancescreen

Dances For A Small Screen

• 5 Gemini Award nominations, including Best Director
• Gemini Award for Best Editing of a Performing Arts/Variety Program

Heartland (documentary short)

• Best Experimental Short Documentary, Hot Docs
• Cinedance Award for Best Canadian Dancefilm, Moving Pictures Festival

the village trilogy

• Best Experimental Film, Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival
• Gold Hugo, Short Subject Experimental, Chicago International Film Festival
• Cinedance Award for Best Canadian Dancefilm, Moving Pictures Festival