Sunrise Commitment
🗓️ Thursday, 25 June — 4:25am
- 5:55am
(90 mins)
Presenters
Image
Abstract
The workshop will take place in a location close to the campus and conference accommodations. Please email Erin Hill to sign up for the workshop and receive information on where to meet for our sunrise practice. Email : erin.lamontagne@pm.me
From April 17 2017 to April 16 2018 I told myself I would watch the sun rise every day; I called this decision Sunrise Commitment. For one year I woke up an hour before the sun was set to cross the horizon. During this hour I recorded my heart beat, photographed the horizon's shifting light and wrote on the state of my body and the state of the sky. Out of this practice came the book O and the performance Sunrise Commitment (aka Promesse à l’aube).*
'O' is a self-published book that brings together the daily sunrise texts I wrote between 2017 and 2018, alongside lists of what I came to call Real Life Magic. Real Life Magic is a way of looking at the world and noticing those things that strike awe. Whether that awe appears out of a gap of understanding, from a moment of incomprehensibility, or a feeling of awe despite fully understanding what you're seeing. Sunrise is Real Life Magic, in so many ways. Such as the way we tend to say the sun rises, when in fact the world is turning, spinning her into view.
For the International Forum I will share my sunrise writing practice:
We gather one hour before the sun is set to rise over the Galway horizon.
Gazing into the gradient sky, we will witness ourselves and the changing hues through a writing practice that oscillates between feeling your inside and feeling what’s outside. A sleepy ecological practice of attunement.
After the hour of writing, gazing and dozing together, we will join our texts into a collective chapbook archiving the state of our bodies and of the Galway sky on June 25th 2026.
Sunrise Commitment is a practice of looking and looking again at the same horizon--looking again at the same to notice transitions, gradients and slippage. What comes through is a sensuous indeterminacy, through sleepy yet granular attention to ones internal sensations and external experience.
* Both of these works were presented in the context of my Masters at DAS Theatre (formerly DasArts, NL). Since then, Sunrise Commitment has danced upon horizons across Québec (CA), in The Netherlands and Germany.
From April 17 2017 to April 16 2018 I told myself I would watch the sun rise every day; I called this decision Sunrise Commitment. For one year I woke up an hour before the sun was set to cross the horizon. During this hour I recorded my heart beat, photographed the horizon's shifting light and wrote on the state of my body and the state of the sky. Out of this practice came the book O and the performance Sunrise Commitment (aka Promesse à l’aube).*
'O' is a self-published book that brings together the daily sunrise texts I wrote between 2017 and 2018, alongside lists of what I came to call Real Life Magic. Real Life Magic is a way of looking at the world and noticing those things that strike awe. Whether that awe appears out of a gap of understanding, from a moment of incomprehensibility, or a feeling of awe despite fully understanding what you're seeing. Sunrise is Real Life Magic, in so many ways. Such as the way we tend to say the sun rises, when in fact the world is turning, spinning her into view.
For the International Forum I will share my sunrise writing practice:
We gather one hour before the sun is set to rise over the Galway horizon.
Gazing into the gradient sky, we will witness ourselves and the changing hues through a writing practice that oscillates between feeling your inside and feeling what’s outside. A sleepy ecological practice of attunement.
After the hour of writing, gazing and dozing together, we will join our texts into a collective chapbook archiving the state of our bodies and of the Galway sky on June 25th 2026.
Sunrise Commitment is a practice of looking and looking again at the same horizon--looking again at the same to notice transitions, gradients and slippage. What comes through is a sensuous indeterminacy, through sleepy yet granular attention to ones internal sensations and external experience.
* Both of these works were presented in the context of my Masters at DAS Theatre (formerly DasArts, NL). Since then, Sunrise Commitment has danced upon horizons across Québec (CA), in The Netherlands and Germany.
Biography
Erin Hill is a dance artist, writer, and birth support practitioner. Hill’s work is rooted in daily practice, building relations with ecological protagonists such as the sun (Sunrise Commitment, 2018) and the weather (Deep Gazing, ongoing). Erin is one half of The Sisters of the Celestial Order of Nephology, co-created with lifelong collaborator Nina Vroemen under the name Horizon Factory. More recently, Erin’s practice is engaged by the nuances of beyond verbal communication in interspecies relationships, for which she is pursuing a PhD in Humanities at Concordia University. Erin holds a Master’s degree from DAS Theatre (formerly DasArts) in Amsterdam and makes home as a settler in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal.