When Ame Henderson and Matija Ferlin began collaborating in dance spaces in the mid-2000s, neither would know that their friendship would span decades, reaching across time and borders.  Ame and Matija’s latest dance piece, Show Gone, tells the same story of love and loss, beginnings and endings, and asking ones’ self, “Who are we now? What do we still need to say to each other? How do we continue?”

The first piece from the pair was conceptualized in 2008 and performed in 2009, titled The Most Together We’ve Ever Been, and represented a series of beginnings. “We’d never co-authored and co-performed,” Ame told me on a Zoom call, dialing in from Toronto. “Our meeting in the studio is very much a beginning, and that theme continued in the work that we made.” 

In The Most Together We’ve Ever Been, the pair would perform for moments at a time before disappearing off stage over and over, leaving the audience in waiting and suspense for long periods of the performance. “I think that also sets up a relationship to the audience that’s really persisted through these pieces,” Ame explains, which induces a sense of autonomy in the audience without the two dancers present. 

The second piece, Out of Season, debuted in 2015 and represented those questions of continuation, in creative partnership, collaboration, and friendship. The majority of their second piece relied on over 600 mimed and recognizable gestures that seam into each other, “almost like a human animation.” The near-unison in which Matija and Ame perform these gestures represent something “that is both shared and individualized as we move through it.” 

As the latest and last piece in this puzzle of three, Show Gone is a production years in the making. “It was very clear by the time we were in the midst of making the second one that it was a triptych,” Ame explains, “We worked on continuity or survival, persistence in this second work. And then in the third, it became so clear that we needed to look at endings.” 

Despite this jumping off point, the show’s conception was stalled by the worldwide pandemic in 2020. Ame, based in Canada, was separated from Matija, who is based in Croatia. This disconnect in time and the stifling of movement led to the pair asking questions about what it means to be an artist, what it means to work, meet, connect. “What happens when there’s a kind of death of movement or an ending in that way?” Ame asks. “What does it mean to really sit with loss?” 

Matija was able to join Ame and myself in the Zoom call at this point, dialing in from his workplace in Croatia. He explains that, despite the nearly seven-year separation between the two during the pandemic’s aftershocks, the two felt strongly about the dialogue they were creating and the conversations they were sparking amongst themselves and their audiences. “I feel like when Ame and I, when we meet, the work kind of goes beyond the work in the studio.” 

The development for the latest piece was largely over Zoom, as was the rehearsal process. “Given that our lives have changed– the world has changed– circumstances are quite different than the last time that we were in process,” Ame explains, highlighting that these major changes to the world and themselves would go on to become the basis for Show Gone. Much like how 2009’s The Most Together We’ve Ever Been is a series of stilted beginnings, Show Gone is a series of endings. “Each ending is a kind of encapsulation of a moment of loss or grief, transformation, learning, appearance, which we’ve shared with each other already in the process.”

Show Gone is set to be performed at Scotiabank Dance Centre on March 13ᵗʰ and 14ᵗʰ.

By: Olivia Sherman