The mysterious presence of absence: Kristi Hansen’s Phantom Limbs at Expanse Fest 2026, a preview

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

There’s a great mystery at the heart of Kristi Hansen’s Phantom Limbs, opening Saturday at the Expanse Festival.

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It’s the uncanny way the past haunts the present. It has to do with the resonating presence in our lives of things, people, images, moments in time — and limbs — we’ve lost.

Amputees, Hansen included, have often reported physical sensations — “a sort of Charley Horse, an ache, a pulsing” as she describes — where limbs and appendages are missing. But when Moment Discovery’s ultra-sophisticated body-sensing technology actually mapped a right leg and foot that aren’t physically present — and haven’t been since Hansen was a pre-teen — she knew she had a poetic metaphor, rich and magical, to take onto the stage. Theatre artists know these things, and this year’s Expanse, dubbed “Intersections,” seems a perfect place to unveil it.

Hansen traces the synapse of theatre and technology back a couple of years to a partnership with Moment Discovery’s director of research Pamela Anthony. And X-Box sensors meant, as Hansen describes, “in the space I can trigger light, sound, projections with my body. I’m in control.” Phantom Limbs is “me cue-ing myself,” Hansen says of her “theatre/ dance/ technology/ art experiment…. my co-star onstage is a Dot Box, thousands of LED (lights) in a square.”

“Such poetic resonance!” Hansen says of the metaphor that underscores the show, an exploration of an interior garden of intertwined memories, selves, “inside the moment and reflecting on the world now….” Gaza, for example, the site of “the most child amputations in history,” and the privilege of access to prosthetics, these are thoughts that haunt Hansen’s dreams.

In fact she calls the show “a fever dream, — and it takes me down different paths and memories, an exploration of me, my leg, growing up in a different body, experiences in the hospital….” And there’s a universal resonance too to the experience of phantom loss: “texting friends even when they’re gone, miscarriages, when you lose a pet.” We are all haunted beings. And, in Phantom Limbs, Hansen (who, incidentally, is the director of Expanse’s most physical show Cycle) is “haunted by my own body,” as she puts it.

It started as a 10-minute trial excerpt. And now it’s about an hour — “the tech is my scene partner” — with live sound design and the addition of “some manual cue-ing” fired by stage manager Tessa Stamp.

The new iteration combines “the physicality of dance (performed without prosthetic), and voice-overs, other voices that I’ve imagined, calling to me,” says Hansen. “It’s taking me, but I’m in control…. A grand experiment!”

Phantom Limbs runs Saturday through March 29 as part of Expanse Festival 2026 at Moment Discovery, 122-10025 102 Ave. Tickets (all pay-what-you-can) and full schedule: azimuththeatre.com.