Canadian performer and choreographer Dana Gingras will bring anOther to Tasmania for it’s Australian premiere at Mona Foma.

“We were at Mona Foma [in January] with Monumental, a piece from the Holy Body Tattoo from 2005. We were performing with Godspeed You! Black Emperor playing live,” Gingras said.

“We’re very excited to be coming back with anOther, which is a very, very different offering to Monumental.

“It’s a piece by four women, so it’s much more intimate and more a hybrid performance piece of live concert, artwork, and performance.”

Performing alongside Gingras will be Japanese radical noise duo group A and media artist Sonya Stefan.

“It’s less dance, and more of kind of an experience that places the female body as the centre of it. It’s still very physical, but it’s much different to what we performed last year with Monumental,” she said.

“What inspires me is usually music or film, so it’s really nice to be part of a great eclectic festival.

Gingras said the inspiration of the performance was the portrayal of women and their bodies in film.

“We started really looking into how women were being portrayed, and how women’s bodies were being used in horror films,” she said.

She said they then got drawn into Andrzej Zulawski’s cult film Possession. 

“Looking at Isabelle Adjani’s body in Possession, there’s this idea of the body as a territory or a vessel that could be possessed or be owned, but at the same time can have a sense of agency,” she said.

Gingras said with the performances completed so far, she found it interesting that men and women read the performance differently.

“Women can see themselves in this. I think there’s a lot of people who have a very intense experience, like it puts them in touch with something unexplainable about their own feeling of otherness,” she said.

“It’s hard to feel whole when your body is being reflected back in ways that create that dissonance that doesn’t necessarily register.

“For men, they see the experience as really psychedelic, it’s very alien.”

“I find that fascinating that there is a different read on the work, and also because the work is all about surveillance and a reflected through media, I think people are able to project whatever is going on, onto the work.”

Gingras said anOther was best suited to mature audiences.