Future Past x Slow Social

Meet the artists of Catching Up to the Future of Our Past through The Only Animal’s Slow Social, a temporary slow zone for conversation, connection and handcraft. As the unmoderated artist talk unfolds, we’ll share materials and methods to create simple textile pieces—continuing the creative energy of the performance and opening portals to something new.

Set in a soft, natural-dyed textile installation, Slow Socials are improvised and co-created with the public using materials we grow and gather close to home. Each iteration leaves traces that are gradually patchworked into the installation, setting the stage for future events.

No experience required and all materials provided.

Future Past x Slow Social Artists

• James Gnam, Natalie LeFebvre Gnam (Plastic Orchid Factory)
• Kevin Legere (Sound Design)
• Barbara Adler (The Only Animal)

Invitation

We imagine the conversation unfolding organically between everyone who attends. Here are a few things we’ve been thinking about:

• creating work from a slow, gentle place
• creating work from the materiality of life
• creating work in midlife (in a form traditionally known to privilege youth and physical virtuosity)
• interdisciplinary collaboration
• carrying past into a hopeful future; generational responsibility
• dancing future dances
• the body as an archive and portal for manifesting better, different futures

A note from Plastic Orchid Factory

Catching Up to the Future of Our Past invites audiences into the strange terrain of midlife—where time gathers, stretches, and folds back on itself. Inside a Mary Quant–inspired, retro-futurist astral bubble, their movements trace the pull of time: measurable yet fluid, finite yet elastic.

Through intimacy, repetition, and reflection, the dancers chart midlife not as a pause or checkpoint, but as a living exchange between memory and possibility. The work unfolds as a meditation on the place where nostalgia and anticipation coexist, where every choice carries echoes of what was and what could be. This work summons us to witness not only the passage of time, but its elastic potential—to feel how memory propels possibility, and how possibility reshapes what we remember.

Watch the trailer

Find out more at plasticorchidfactory.ca