Bio

Lara Kramer is a performer, choreographer, and multidisciplinary artist of mixed Oji-cree and settler heritage, raised in London, Ontario. She lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Her choreographic work, research and field work over the last thirteen years has been grounded in intergenerational relations, intergenerational knowledge, and the impacts of the Indian Residential Schools of Canada. She is the first generation in her family to not attend the Residential schools. Her creations in the form of dance, performance and installation have been presented across Canada and Australia, New Zealand, Martinique, the US and the UK.

She has received multiple awards, acknowledgments, and prizes for her work both as an emerging and established artist. Lara was appointed a Human Rights Advocate through the Holocaust Memorial Centre of Montreal in 2012, following the national tour of her work Fragments, a performance piece informed by her mother’s stories and lived experience as a survivor of the Indian Residential Schools of Canada. In 2014, Lara was awarded the Scholarship of Audacity – Caisse de la culture from the OFFTA, Montreal, as well as commissioned by The Canada Dance Festival for her work “Native Girl Syndrome”. In 2017-18 Lara was presented with the prestigious Ashley Fellowship with Trent University, as well as appointed the CanDance creation fund for her work Windigo. In 2018, Lara received the Jacqueline-Lemieux Prize for recognition of artistic excellence and distinguished career achievement in dance.

Her works are noted for the use of decelerating time to further enter an embodied pacing, sensing, and awareness on part of both performer and audience. Often blunt and raw, playing with the strength and vulnerability of the body, her pieces stand out for their engagement, sensitivity, close and instinctive listening to the body, and her attention to the invisible. Her practice is in Performance, Choreography, Multidisciplinary Art-sound, video, and Visual Art.

In 2017 Lara curated Welcome to Indian Country for MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) as part of Eclectik where she premiered This Time Will be Different, created with Emilie Monnet. The installation and performance piece denounced the status quo of the Canadian government’s discourse regarding Indigenous relations and criticized the “national reconciliation industry”.

In 2020, Lara was commissioned to create two new public billboard works, located on the façades of Café Cherrier and the Bonsecours Market in Montreal. In Blankets, Herds and Ghosts is a new work by multidisciplinary artist and choreographer Lara Kramer, Dazibao satellite is the result of a special partnership between Dazibao and the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels).

She has been on the faculty of the Indigenous Dance Residency at The Banff Centre and has taught workshops across Canada and in Australia and New Zealand. In 2016 Lara initiated The Cradleboard Project, a multi-generational community project fostering the reclaiming of traditional practices developed in collaboration with her mother, artist, and knowledge keeper Ida Baptiste offered at the Native Women’s Shelter and Native Montreal. She was the guest teacher at Nunatta Isiginnaartitsisarfia – The National Theatre of Greenland in 2018. She also landed her debut role in François Delisle film Cash Nexus in 2019 as supporting character Angie. Lara has participated in several residencies including Indian Residential School Museum of Canada in Portage la Prairie in 2008 and Dancemakers Artist in Residency from 2018-2021. In 2021, Lara joined the MAI as an associate artist and programming curator for the MAI’s 25th anniversary season. Lara Kramer is aCenter de Création O Vertigo – CCOV Associate Artist since 2021.

Artist Statement

I work with my gut, a hollowing feeling in my gut, I fill what has been empty, I fill it with sound. Raw sound of movement, breath, sweat, and warmth.

My practice has been anchored in relation to my mother and children, deepening the connective tissues that are tied to intergenerational relations, intergenerational knowledge, and embodied experiences such as memories, dreams, loss, and reclamation.

I am connected to histories, to the colonial impacts of the Indian Residential School that have been embodied through the generations of my family. I am carrying the weight of this legacy. I work with storytelling within my creative process as a way of exploring how the mapping of stories from my family’s history resonates in the body and how it can be transferred symbolically in my work connecting to the past, present, and future. My family’s legacy has been explored in the living landscape of my works in the form of dance, installation, visual art, photography, and performance.

Moving from my instincts and discovering and rediscovering what is around me is a strong mechanism in my practice and live work. And this is what gives me full agency. To create and have agency within my legacy, I need to stare and gaze as much and as long as possible into the present moment we are in, where I am from and where I am going. To deepen my sensorial awareness of what is not visible.

I am interested in the intimacy of memory and imagination, and how it is transformative. And the realization that we must stare deeper into what we have right now and find nuance. How sharing my memories, connections to dreams open me to be vulnerable and available. And this is a part of the mobilization and transformation that occurs, that offers a deep understanding of place beyond the visible. The realization of finding a greater sense of strength and struggle for the continuation of our introspective reflection, with regard for new discoveries to unfold. My work is always tied to temporality, to a sense of duration that extends to this future and past lineage that never ends, that is infinite.

I wish to reach further into my family’s migrations, while remaining grounded with future voices, those of my children, to see what exists beyond my grandchildren’s bodies, and even further away in the distant future.

Website:

https://larakramer.ca/

Other Websites

https://bodiesintranslation.ca/lara-kramer-phantom-stills-vibrations/
http://artintranslation.ca/larakramer/