We Will Take The Canoe wades deep into fantastical realities, American myths of pioneering and conquest, personal and imagined history and anecdotes to construct a self within the America in which I live. We Will Take The Canoe is dance, stories, songs and a prayer. The threads of humor, candidness and pathos tie these overlapping forms together into 35 minutes of full throttle dance-theater. The self I build is at once bound by my own skin as well as spills into other bodies, times and places, both factual and imagined. I time travel to 1690, 1989 and 2024, I split into multiple people to be whole: from 10th grader me listening to Depeche Mode with her dead forefather from Holland, a mother in the delivery room with a baby pushing her way out, an old lady in ice skates under a frozen pond, fictitious pioneer woman, and more. The people and animals in the interweaving stories and songs collide and overlap; separating and merging, for as we are ourselves, we are also each other. As we are here and now, we are also our past and futures.
