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The staff of St. Boniface Hospital alongside the artists of Galerie Buhler Gallery have teamed up to send 2025 out in style with a Kitchen Dance. Members of the food services team at the hospital teamed up with dancers and sound designers earlier this month to create an in-person performance in the hospital’s kitchen space. That performance was recorded for a video that will now be shared on television sets all over the hospital into the new year.
“I think it’s a real testament to the hospital to have this kind of vision of how if we support our staff, we celebrate our staff, then we’re also supporting all of the people that we care for here as well,” says hannah_g, the curator of the Galerie Buhler Gallery.
Upon receiving the green light for the project, hannah_g approached Carla Williams, St. Boniface Hospital’s head of food services, to explore what collaboration might look like on this idea. “I loved the idea… but I was trying to figure out how could this possibly work,” she recalls, noting that staff are working in the facility almost round the clock. Ultimately, Williams’ own background in dance was the deciding factor for her and her team.
From that point, the dance began to be created. Dancer and choreographer Alex Elliott observed the day-to-day motions of the kitchen staff, taking detailed notes on how she might use them in Kitchen Dance. “The movements that they’re doing all throughout the day are repetitive, they’re constant, they’re predictable,” says Elliott of the quality of movement that she ultimately used. “That is what inspired me and that is what was the foundation of the movement that we created together with the staff.”
While the performers were the ones guiding the audience members to different areas of the kitchen space for the live performance component of Kitchen Dance, it became filmmaker Kayla Jeanson’s job to guide the viewer’s eye through the performance. She too noticed the repetitive quality of the kitchen staff and wanted to capture those movements. “That repetition is so necessary for the creation of those meals,” she says, “and yet, it’s also so intricate, like it’s always done a little bit differently. There’s the scoop, but it’s done slightly different the second time. I got really interested in those minute details and then tried to connect those with larger movements within the kitchen… in the end, I found myself really thinking about time and how we use our time in the creation of the film.”
Williams notes that her and her team learned a lot from the artists and their approach when it came to making Kitchen Dance. “All of a sudden, twenty of us break from this staff meeting and start doing the dance together,” she recalls. “Sometimes, there would be someone who just started, they were 30 minutes into their first training shift and they started dancing.”
“Working with all of you,” she adds, gesturing at her artistic collaborators, “was like anything is possible.”
