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Robert Abubo, centre, in Jordan Tannahill's theatrical performance Declarations at Canada Stage in TorontoAlejandro Santiago/The Globe and Mail

Two years ago, Jordan Tannahill's mother was told she had two years to live – and since then Tannahill, a Dora- and Governor-General's Award-winning interdisciplinary artist, has channeled whatever is going on inside of him into an astonishing amount of art around the world.

The Ottawa native premiered a virtual-reality performance at the 2017 Venice Biennale, his play Late Company transferred to the West End in London this summer, and he's been working with the international superstar Akram Khan on a dance piece called Xenos that will premiere in Athens in February.

Now, two works that explicitly deal with Tannahill's mother's dying are being unveiled at once in Toronto. Liminal, a novel, is being published this month by House of Anansi – and Declarations, a performance for five actor-dancers that he has written and directed, opened at Canadian Stage on Thursday evening.

If you're looking for a label for it, Declarations might be what you call "live art" or "postdramatic theatre," an experimental performance, a mix of text and gesture. The words are set and performed with the help of a teleprompter – which the five performers consult as a musician would a score. The gestures are improvised, made up by the performers on the spot.

The written part of the first section is entirely declarative statements. "This is the point." "This is feminism." "This is a condo gym." "This is the Cuban Missile Crisis."

There is a certain rhythm to the text, but the references seem almost randomly generated.

On opening night, Liz Peterson, a captivatingly mischievous local performer who has always worked in the grey zone between dance and theatre, was the first out on stage and remained our primary focus throughout. She turned some of the statements into one-sentence plays with her body. "This is a hipster dad pushing his son on a swing," she said – and in a few seconds brought to life this scene through mime in ways both humanistic and humorous.

At other times, Peterson was more abstract in the gestures she matched to words – swinging an arm out at a sharp angle, falling to the floor suddenly, pulling long, invisible objects out of her mouth or chest. You can see Peterson's mind churning away and her body responding to her thoughts – and her performance is an interesting study in disciplined impulse, chaos and order.

Eventually Peterson was joined on stage by four other performers, all striking in appearance but casually dressed – three better known as dancers (Robert Abubo, Danielle Baskerville, Jennifer Dahl) and one better known as an actor (Philip Nozuka).

The declarative sentences continued but, even if you hadn't read Tannahill's playwright's note about his mother, you would sense a certain theme recurring. "This is my mother's cough," each of the performers said at one point, illustrating a variety of delicate hacks and splutters and all, politely, covering their mouths.

Declarations eventually stops circling around its subject with images and sounds – and starts engaging with it more directly. A broken poetic text is spoken by the five performers, painting some sort of picture of a son and a mother and death. Then, there is a section where the five performers speak the same rhythmic text in unison ("shake shake, mama, shake shake") and co-ordinate a series of intense gestures.

This made me think of the hand-clapping or jump-rope games accompanied by chants you might see children play in a schoolyard – and I thought of what playwright R.M. Vaughan wrote in The Globe and Mail two years ago about what to expect when a parent is dying: "You will regress to the small child screaming inside you."

The section ends with Peterson saying, "This is what grief looks like," however – and it was the one declaration in the show that rang entirely false. There's a large body of art out there in many forms about grief in all its stages, and people losing parents specifically, artists trying to find ways to channel those feelings, that process, into art.

What's makes Declarations unusual is that it is not fuelled by grief – but the heightened awareness of mortality that comes when a loved one is given a terminal diagnosis. It felt like someone trying to process something pre-emptively – and the distanced, distracted result suggests the impossibility of preparing for the loss of a parent.

Again, however, this is what makes Declarations original – a constructive failure of performance. The gestures, improvised, eventually develop a sameness lacking in choreographed work. It turns out there are not a million movements a performer can pull out of their head at a moment's notice. And maybe here is life, rather than death: At first everything seems a new discovery – and then even joys become repetitive, and then maybe a new joy is there to be found in repetition, like the chorus of a song.

Declarations continues to Feb. 11 (canstage.com).

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