photo Emily Gan
Nate Yaffe is an experimental dance, theatre and video artist, based in Tiohtà:ke (Montreal) who researches queer strategies to create relational choreographic structures, placing performance as fundamentally a social exchange. His tactile dances emanate bodily permission by dismantling movement shame and un-correcting the self-censored body.
His neurodivergent body is a fountain of physical urges, tics and stimming, making its needs/desires known through movement. Nate sees this divergent body as a technology to tune into the subtle logic that connects all beings on Earth. He recognizes the somatic impact of our thought patterns, and crafts willful meditations as scores for unruly, vulnerable performances. These scores draw from Feldenkrais and self-hypnosis techniques to carve new neural pathways, to help shift out of the anthropocentric worldview.
His ‘Un-self-correcting’ choreographic practice is a reaction to the pressure of conservatory training and heteronormative social codes. This physical and social conditioning to strive for an ideal body created an increasing physical anguish until 2017, when he gave up; he began to untether himself from the quest for ‘self-improvement’, and rediscover his innate and unpoliced movements. This shift towards bodily permission unleashed a torrent of movement and became a new performance practice which centres unedited, non-normative gestures that are personal and political, touching and authentic.
As a curator, Nate initiated the residency series, This is actively built, which brings together queer artists to envelop the question ‘what is queer dance?’ challenging the classic residency structure by radically centering the artist’s autonomy as a way to foster cross-pollination of knowledge and practices. From 2020-23, he was co-curator at Centre de Création O Vertigo (CCOV) alongside Hanako Hoshimi-Caines where he developed many programs to respond to current landscape, including Penpals - co-mentorship correspondences, and Signal Vibrant: a ceremony for the dead.
As co-artistic director of Le Radeau, Nate seeks community-centred alternatives for being a dance artist in face of the uncertain future due to colonial capitalism and ecological collapse.
