In 2021, I was invited to curate the festival Dance in Vancouver, presented biannually by The Dance Centre. I was in Melbourne Australia, in lockdown after lockdown after lockdown while Vancouver was making a very slow return to a new ‘normal’. Time was slow too, or so it seemed. And it is so that there was time at last to have long and slow conversations with dance artists; artists friends I knew well based in Melbourne and artists I was becoming friendly with, based in Vancouver. These slow conversations out of time, at least out of the normal flow of time, were often about time – about time passing, about what time does to dance and its bodies, about times that needed to change, about all those times when we could come back together, closer so that we can touch, closer to hear each other breathe, for without touch and breath, there can be no movement. I felt so very touched to be the witness of such depth of thought, of imagination, of generosity. I wondered then when and how I could connect one day such beautiful thinkers so far away from one another. And it is so that these podcasts were born.

I invited some of those artists to meet each other in dialogue. They have never met before, they know little of each other. I have unblindly matched them, they have blindly trusted my invitation. You will find here artists in slow and deep conversations, curious of one another, exploring shared grounds, attuned to what matters now. What unfolds here, between Vancouver and Melbourne, are special moments in time born out of unusual times, an invitation to hold on tight to slow times, so as to remember how to connect when the body is far but the thought is in movement, present, profound, precious.

— Angela Conquet, Dancehouse Diary co-editor