No matter how they enter, audiences at an Alyssa Martin show usually leave wearing a similar expression. It’s the bedazzled grin; a breathless glow that comes from laughing, and sometimes crying, more than you ever thought you could at a dance piece.
Born in Ottawa, Alyssa has become a major figure in the Toronto dance world. With her multi-award-winning company Rock Bottom Movement, she has created a vast repertoire of boundary-breaking performance work, while also collaborating with artists and companies across the country.
Her choreography expresses the messy, ecstatic extremes of human experience with a precise, dynamic language all her own. Combining aspects of dance and theatre, her performances vibrate between zany and poignant, unmasking the emotional acrobats within us all. To dance her work is to become a superhero of yourself.
Sometimes, her movement starts its life as absurd images; haunted snack foods, impossible animals, and other irreverent impulses that can make everyone in the rehearsal room cry with laughter. Until, all of a sudden, with her expert hand and a brilliant company of dancers, these joyful inventions acquire the strange, clear ring of truth.
By now, she could easily move through the world in costume as the reputation she’s earned: inexhaustible, accomplished, fiercely intelligent, with over a decade of acclaimed work to her name. But after ten minutes or ten years in her presence, she remains effusively kind, endlessly supportive, unpretentious and generous to a fault.
In her world, rigour is freedom, hard work is effortless, friends are collaborators and collaborators are friends. Here’s more than you ever thought you could ask for, her work seems to say. And the rest of us can never get enough.
-Written by Playwright and Dramaturg David Bernstein, Alyssa’s close friend and artistic collaborator
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Which neighbourhood are you in?
I live in Leslieville and have been an east ender for over a decade now. Here are my hot tips, Jimmy Simpson Park is an underrated gem and Mercury Espresso is a perfect morning stop. My favourite place in the city is at The Citadel in Regent Park, where I’m usually rehearsing or watching a show!
What do you do?
I’m a choreographer! I make absurd contemporary dance theatre. I create dances and spectacles that invite audiences to laugh, scream and cry. I do most of my work with my company Rock Bottom Movement. I started Rock Bottom as a busking company at 19 years old and used it as a vessel to practice choreographing long-form dance work for my friends. 13 years later, we’re still going, and we get to travel around the country making and sharing our work. I’ve also gotten to collaborate with other dance companies, independent artists and theatre and musical theatre productions. It’s all glorious, my wildest dreams come true. I’m on a glittering quest to de-alienate the theatre-going experience and make dance-watching the IT weekend activity.
As a hobby, I rhinestone clothes!
What are you currently working on?
I’m currently putting the final touches (read: battling ongoing artistic existential crises) on my newest dance work, Big Time Miss! It’s a surreal, poetic dance epic about grief, love and ambition. We’re deep in the thick of rehearsals right now, and the collaborators I’m working with are absolutely beyond. I watch them dance, and they make me believe in magic.
Where can we find your work?
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