Points de vue at SFU Woodward's

As bipeds in an ableist society, most of us take ambulation for granted. We rarely think of the thousands of movements we daily improvise to make our way in and through this world: from the reach of an arm to clasp a coffee cup or the swivel of a head to see who is calling our name, to the spontaneous leap over the puddle on the street or the full-throttle run to catch the bus. We think even less about what, in our bodies, allows us to execute such movements in the first place--until, that is, we hurt ourselves. Yesterday evening, for example, as part of Yves Candau's MFA performance Points de vue, I learned that the simple rotation inward of one's lower arm is enabled by two pivot points--one at the elbow, the other at the wrist--that are connected along a radial axis. As Candau shows us with his physical repetition of and verbal commentary on this twisting of the arms, what dance gives us is the means--technically and linguistically--for isolating, breaking down, and understanding this movement. In classical ballet, after all, the proper "carriage of the arms"--otherwise known as the port de bras--is meant to serve as a graceful and harmonious accent to the movement of a dancer's legs.

Candau's performance takes the form of a staged field study, one where the dance studio intersects with a magical research forest both real and imagined through a combination of movement, text (Candau's voice alternating with that of Barbara Adler's), and sound (both live, courtesy of Nur Intan Murtadza, and recorded, Candau having used his own computer software program to create an eight channel electroacoustic composition based on his outdoor recordings). Kyla Gardiner's lighting design completes the immersive effect, one in which we become increasingly mindful of our own kinaesthetic responses to what we are experiencing as much because of as in spite of our sedentariness. Indeed, as Candau moved and spoke about how and why he was moving, it was hard not to take notice of how one was floating one's own head, or tilting it to the side, or what shifts in weight and energy were occurring when one crossed or uncrossed one's leg. Dance scholars have become fond of talking about the concept of "kinaesthetic empathy"--the experience of moving along with or in response to dancers on stage. But those same scholars rarely discuss the ideal set of conditions to best enable such an experience. Candau seems to have found the right mix, one in which moving and talking and listening and feeling combine to produce a true embodied mindfulness (and vice-versa).

Points de vue has one more performance this evening at 6:30 pm in the Hastings Street dance studio (room 4750) on the fourth floor of SFU Woodward's.

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Nostos at SFU Woodward's

As it's that time of year (end of semester), and I need to budget my time accordingly, this is less a formal review post per se, than an enthusiastic endorsement of the School for the Contemporary Arts' Fall Mainstage Dance show, Nostos, on at the Fei and Milton Wong Theatre at SFU Woodward's through this Saturday. Overseen by my colleague Rob Kitsos, and showcasing the choreography of Peter Bingham, Lesley Telford, Shauna Elton, and Kitsos, the evening is structured around the theme of nostalgia, and also features live musical and spoken word accompaniment by SFU MFA Candidate Barbara Adler and the Pugs and Crows (Meredith Bates, Cole Schmidt, Russell Sholberg, and Ben Brown).

A repertory company of 30+ dancers (including three of my students from FPA 228W, Dance Aesthetics), divided into two overlapping groups, seamlessly segues between each choreographer's individual contributions, which are so well integrated in terms of transitions (no blackouts!) and so complementary in terms of movement vocabulary that it is hard to determine where one section leaves off and another begins. With such a large ensemble, and building on the theme of nostalgia, it's no surprise that canon and retrograde movement features prominently; but what's so pleasurable about the incorporation of these techniques in this program is how they coalesce around simple patterns that accrue depth and emotional intensity by virtue of their repetition within and across each choreographer's work: the sidelong glance backwards, fall to the knees, and swaying lean of Bingham; the inner calf clasp and directional planting of a foot of Telford (a move that slayed me with its beauty); the supported arching of torsos and hands over the crawling backs of partners of Elton; and the rat-a-tat chopping and segmenting and boxing of visual space by so many industrious hands of Kitsos.

Repetition was a theme that came up in Adler's spoken word accompaniment to Telford's section, a riff on the spaces and sensory traces of memory (the taste of chocolate that lingers despite the absence of candy wrappers in purses and pockets) that came back in the evening's finale, which became both a constellation of and elaboration on the movement patterns we had been primed to respond to in each of the preceding sections. But this section also added new patterns and formations, including a group circle that like a collective sigh or exhalation of breath (or, indeed, the bellows of Adler's accordion) expanded and contracted to embrace both the parts and the whole of this remarkable group collaboration.

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Dance in Vancouver: Marta Marta Productions' Speaking in Ligeti

The tenth edition of Dance in Vancouver ended yesterday with a late afternoon presentation of Marta Marta Productions' Speaking in Ligeti, a collaboration between MMP choreographer and AD Martha Carter and the Microcosmos Quartet, and set to the 1956 String Quartet #1 by post-classical Hungarian composer György Ligeti. As Carter noted in the talkback following the performance (which I was privileged to lead), she had wanted to find a way to collaborate with Microcosmos' musicians (Marc Destrubé and Andrea Siradze on violin, Becky Wenham on cello, and Tawnya Popoff on viola) in a way that reproduced the intimacy of the salon-style concerts for which they are famous, but that also made both the dancers (which include Delphine Leroux, Nicholas Lydiate, Thoenn Glover, and Tyler Olson) and the musicians equal kinetic participants in the performance.

Her solution is to take some of the improvisational energy of the rehearsal studio and frontload that onto the finished piece. With the house lights still up and only a stack of eight chairs and a ticking metronome on the otherwise bare stage, the dancers and the musicians enter together from the rear and begin warming up, casually conversing with each other as the dancers stretch and the musicians tune their instruments, all while a pre-recorded score of talking and music plays in the background. Eventually members of the two quartets start responding more directly to one another, with Lydiate moving to Wenham's cello, for example, in a version of popping and locking, and Destrubé leading (or is it being chased by?) both his fellow musicians and the occasional dancer around the stage at a steadily increasing pace, all the while playing his violin like some crazed pied piper.

At a certain point, the musicians sit down and Destrubé explains to the audience the basics of Ligeti's music, noting in particular that for all the Bartok-inspired disdain his first string quartet caused the communist authorities in Hungary, its use of the chromatic scale and its approach to harmony and tempo are actually deceptively simple. Still, in her own artistic response to that music, Carter keeps deferring the actual playing of the quartet; instead, as she again noted in the talkback, the musicians play snippets of Ligeti's post-1956 oeuvre while the dancers respond--at times collaboratively, at times more combatively, and with both chairs and metronomes (a second one having appeared earlier) becoming integral to the twinned musical and movement scores.

All of this allows Carter to prime her audience in reverse for both the sound and movement themes we eventually witness once the full string quartet is played. This happens with the musicians seated centre stage, the dancers then colouring in the conjured acoustic space with their bodies over the course of the piece's seventeen contrasting sections, which range in tone and tempo from the jovially energetic to the slowly mournful. Indeed, the final lento section sees the four dancers moving towards a thin band of light at the downstage lip of the stage, each removing one sock as their movements become ever smaller and more contained; the musicians eventually join them, inserting their own bodies--and the bodies of their instruments--between the dancers in a closing tableau that aptly sums up the compositional aesthetic of call and response that is at the heart of this unique collaboration.

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Dance in Vancouver: Justine A. Chambers, Vanessa Goodman, and Delia Brett

It's been such a busy week that I only got to my first Dance in Vancouver events yesterday. The biennial showcase and presenting platform for local dance artists is guest curated this year by Pirjetta Mulari, of Dance Info Finland. I've always wondered about the reasoning behind DIV's outside curatorial invitations. Presumably programming choices depend a lot on knowing who has presentation-ready work, which necessarily means liaising with local folks. And, to be sure, staff at The Dance Centre are heavily involved in the entire organization of the event, including various studio showings and presenter meetings and parallel performances.

Thus it was that I got to tag along yesterday afternoon on the second of two "Choreographic Walks" programmed by Dance Centre Artist-in-Residence Justine A. Chambers. Modelled on the soundwalks of Vancouver pioneered by R. Murray Schafer and Hildegard Westerkamp, Chambers' curated two-hour stroll through the city's downtown core invites audiences to silently observe several works of site-specific dance created by local artists, including: a lesson in directional (and accessible) navigation by Naomi Brand at the southwest plaza of the VPL's Central Branch; a spatially dispersed but acoustically proximate clapping fugue by Alexa Mardon at Victory Square; and a game of pick-up basketball underneath the Cambie Street bridge by Deanna Peters (in which there wasn't much scoring, but a lot of running and passing with elan). But the walk also invites us to place these works into larger choreographic frameworks and patterns that are part of the social infrastructure of the city, be it pedestrians crossing an intersection, kids playing in a park, or the often anonymous workers who maintain the various invisible grids and networks that buttress our daily navigation of the city in the first place. Then, too, there are the ways in which we, as a group (numbering 20+), effect and change different movement flows, from holding up traffic at an intersection to absorbing and spitting out groups of people we just happen to collect accidentally along our route. This kind of shadow choreography in which we daily and reflexively participate as urban dwellers, but which we tend to relegate to background "movement noise" (the dance with and around others we do on the bus or in line at the supermarket), is here uncamouflaged and brought to the foreground by the "openings" in our walk that Chambers and her partner Josh Hite programmed with the help of students in the Modus Operandi Training Program: that is, at moments along our route, and ably cued by our pace-setting guide Kate Franklin, all we had to do was cast a sideline glance across an alley to catch a glimpse of tandem selves matching our steps, moving us forward.

In the evening, it was back to The Dance Centre for Saturday night's mainstage presentation of Vanessa Goodman/action at a distance's Wells Hill and Delia Brett/MACHiNENOiSY's plaything. I've blogged about the original presentation of Wells Hill, as part of the 2015 Chutzpah! Festival, here. The movement is as gorgeous as ever, at once languid and sinewy and robustly energetic in a way that is equally responsive to Gould playing Bach and to Gabriel Saloman's original immersive sound score. It was also interesting to see the piece in the more intimate setting of The Dance Centre (which I gather partly inspired the new costumes designed by Ziyian Kwan), and to witness the individual embodied contributions of new cast members Karissa Barry, Dario Dinuzzi, and Alexa Mardon. I look forward to the premiere of the full piece in 2017 at SFU Woodward's.

MACHiNENOiSY's plaything is what I'll call a "collaborative solo" for co-artistic director Brett. First presented in 2011, the work is a surreal dream/nightmare based on the childhood drawings of Brett's son, Beckett. Part shadow play, part puppet show, and part experiment in live projection action painting, the work's immersive visuals are at times jaw-droppingly gorgeous and at other times queasiness-inducing. But all of this is anchored by the moving performance of Brett, who whether growing an extra set of limbs from behind a scrim or unzipping a body suit to reveal another layer of synthetic skin underneath reveals--like Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, or Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror--that motherhood is as much about the abject as the object of one's love.

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Hofesh Shechter Company's barbarians at The Playhouse

Hofesh Shechter is my kind of choreographer: an extremely talented dance-maker who doesn't take himself too seriously. The Israeli-born, Batsheva-trained and UK-based artist, whose eponymous company first came to Vancouver in 2009 with Uprising and In Your Rooms (and about which I blogged here), was back at the Playhouse this weekend, once again at the invitation of DanceHouse. This time Shechter has brought his newest work, barbarians, a trilogy that might be said to be about the imaginative challenge--and also the necessary futility--of imposing order onto chaos.

That principle extends to the connections between the three sections, which were created separately and which, according to Shechter, unspool in reverse, with the still quiet core of the piece, a duet, only coming at the end. However, what we get at the start, in "the barbarians in love," is a riot of flood lights and follow spots, that sweep across the stage and out into the audience, momentarily blinding us before picking out and arresting in their white hot glow of surveillance six dancers. The dancers are also clad head to toe in white, like they have just escaped from a sanatorium, or a cult. And, indeed, over the course of this first section's thirty minutes, the four men and two women do seem to be moving in response to the computer-generated female voice-over, which intones god-like platitudes ("I am you, and you are me") before entering into a dialogue with the choreographer himself--who is, after all, another kind of unseen overlord in terms of dictating how his dancers should be moving. In this respect, the first section's concluding tableau, which sees the dancers, now completely naked, lined up downstage and slowly turning before us like specimens at an auction, certainly evokes ideas of a coldly clinical outside eye. Except in this case Shechter is at a loss as to how to explain his concept, beyond the fact that he is a 40 year-old man who had this idea to make something...

Which may be why, in the evening's second section, "tHE bAD," Shechter puts his dancers (now reduced by one man) in gold lame body suits. If the dancers in the first part looked like pod people just escaped from a sci-fi film, here they appear to have stepped out of an Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway musical--not so far-fetched given that Shechter is currently in New York choreographing the revival of Fiddler on the Roof. What is consistent over both sections, however, is Shechter's distinctive mix of unison choreography with classical and vernacular dance vocabularies. At any given moment we have the dancers giving us different baroque formations and noble steps, or else breaking into Israeli folk dancing circles, and even throwing in the odd bit of krumping. What is consistent throughout is the amazing footwork of the dancers, who when shuffling across the stage in a riot of club grooves or descending into and rising from a plie in demi-point are nothing short of mesmerizing.

Finally, in the last section, "two completely different angles of the same fucking thing," we see a couple--the woman dressed in simple slacks and a blouse, the man, somewhat incongruously, in lederhosen--engaged in a simple two step. Eventually they come together in an awkward attempt at partnering that begins gently and playfully, but that gradually becomes more physical and even violent. If, extrapolating from Shechter's comments about the centrality of this section to the work as a whole, we take the duet to be one of the base-line structures of Western concert dance, then such juxtapositions are appropriate. For, as Walter Benjamin has written, "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."

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The Amish Project at Pacific Theatre

Jessica Dickey’s play The Amish Project is based on the 2006 Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania shooting, in which gunman Charles Roberts entered an Amish school, killing five young girls and injuring five others before turning the gun on himself.  The events garnered additional national attention as a result of the Amish community extending forgiveness to the gunman and his family.

Although her title contains within it an echo of Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie Project, the award-winning work assembled from interviews with townsfolk from the Wyoming community where Matthew Shepard was murdered, Dickey’s play does not purport to be documentary theatre. Indeed, she states explicitly in her Playwright’s Note to the published text (which I happen to be teaching in my Introduction to Drama class at SFU) that she deliberately chose not to interview any of the survivors or members of the wider Nickel Mines community. Instead, she has fashioned a completely imaginative work of empathetic drama, in which she draws on the basic outlines of the shooting and its aftermath to trace the connections between seven different characters. These include Velda and her sister Anna, two victims of the shooting; Carol Stuckey, the widow of the gunman; Bill North, a religious studies professor with special expertise in the Amish; Sherry Local, a cranky woman from the town who confronts Carol in the supermarket; Eddie Stuckey, the gunman; and America, a pregnant Hispanic teenager who works at the supermarket.

The play’s added conceit is that all of these characters are played by a single actress, who wears a “traditional, Old Order Amish girl” costume throughout (blue cotton knee-length dress, white apron and bonnet), and who thus must transition between each character—sometimes multiple times in the space of a page of dialogue—simply by shifting the way she holds her body, or through her tone of voice. In the play’s original production, at Rattlestick Theater in New York in 2009, Dickey herself undertook this task, and by all accounts gave a virtuoso performance. In Pacific Theatre’s current production of the play, which runs through next Saturday at their West 12th Avenue space, the performer is Susie Coodin, who with assistance from director Evan Frayne and movement consultant Wendy Gorling, opts for subtle rather than jarringly sharp vocal and gestural distinctions between each character. Velda is restlessly kinetic and speaks with a higher vocal pitch, whereas Anna remains still and speaks more slowly, though always, despite the events that have happened, with a guileless sense of wonder about what she is witnessing. Carol draws her arms tightly around her upper body, as if trying to retreat from the world, or else protect herself from what additional bad news it might deliver. Interestingly, Coodin likewise keeps her arms mostly close to her body when playing Carol’s nemesis, Sherry, the nervous fluttering of the latter’s hands over her stomach indicative perhaps of the nauseous bile she can barely keep down. Bill, at first a largely expositional character, remains professorially erect, whereas Eddie slouches and shoves his hands in his pockets. The sassy America, who calls us out from the start on our wont to read her as a cliché, predictably spends a lot of time examining her fingernails.

Though I would have liked Coodin to take a bit more time with some of the dialogue, and in certain places to stretch out the moments of physical transition between the characters (the show clocks in at a very economical 65 minutes), I did appreciate how these dramaturgical choices emphasized continuity in addition to difference. James Coomber’s evocative sound design and Jonathan Kim’s mixing of warm and cool tones in his lighting also contributed to this prismatic effect. And the metaphor of the prism—a refractive surface, like a stained glass window, that separates light into a spectrum of colours—is an apt one here because when used figuratively the word refers to the clarification or the distortion offered by a particular viewpoint. In a play that is about the difficult work of reciprocal empathy, and that suggests receiving forgiveness is often as challenging and painful as extending it, materializing the idea of a shared feeling body and many voices thus makes absolute sense.

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Guest Post on Ballet BC's Program 1 at the Queen E

I was in Portland last weekend for a conference and so did not get to see the opening program to Ballet BC's 30th anniversary season. Needless to say, I was pretty bummed. However, a posse of my SFU Dance Aesthetics students attended and as an adjunct to our blog writing related to that course (see the course website here), I encouraged anyone who might be so inclined to contribute a guest post on what I missed.

Andrea Valentine-Lewis took me up on the offer, and what follows are her observations on the evening's three works:

Overall remarks/notes:

- The dancers are very athletic-looking.

- All acts were performed in socks.

- The company is mixed-raced.

- There are more male dancers than female dancers.

- All dancers are quite classically trained.

- The lighting was very interesting in all three movements.

- ... By interesting I mean very specific to the action. I loved it.

- The ballet was divided into three acts/movements, with two intermissions.

- The three movements were presented in a different order than the program indicated.

- The company was presented as gender-neutral. There weren't specific female/male roles. Both genders were strong and similarly dressed.

1.) The first movement was called Twenty Eight Thousand Waves. It was choreographed by Cayetano Soto (Ballet BC's new resident choreographer). Surprisingly, it was my favourite movement, because the music, lighting, and costuming was very satisfying to me. I prefer fluid, graceful movements that are strong, and that is what I saw. I had expectations that Crystal Pite's work would be my favourite.

2.) The second movement was called New Work, by Stijn Celis. The piece was accompanied by 40 male singers. Both female and male dancers wore the same clothing (button down work shirts and slacks). The women had their hair in buns to hide the appearance of long hair. This piece seemed repetitive and not dynamic enough. The choir was beautiful, but I felt the dancers were washed out by the music. There were obvious themes of religion and the life cycle, which I was thankful of; otherwise I would have gotten bored.

3.) The third movement (a crowd favourite), by Crystal Pite, was called Solo Echo. Pite's piece had a beautiful, simple set of snow falling from the backdrop, with lights that moved to either frame sections of the backdrop, or expose the entirety of it. The dancers were all dressed in black vests and black slacks... again, a gender-neutral choice. The movements were very dynamic and strong compared to the silky cello music of Johannes Brahms (played by Yo Yo Ma). It was a nice juxtaposition. Pite's choreography has changed since I've seen it last, so in that regard my expectations weren't met. But I did appreciate some sections of strong, intelligent choreography.

So there you have it. My thanks to Andrea. And more from me soon.

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air india [REDACTED] at SFU Woodward's

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the worst act of terror in Canadian history, the bombing of Air India Flight 182, which exploded off the coast of Ireland on June 23, 1985, killing all 329 persons on board. The criminal trial, one of the longest in Canadian history, resulted in the acquittal of the accused. A subsequent inquiry revealed, among other things, that the RCMP knew about the planned attack--and yet did nothing to prevent it. A national public trauma whose legacy of grief has yet to be fully processed or exorcised, this "act of historical violence" exists, in the words of poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, "more on the margins of collective consciousness than at the centre of [Canada's] imagination."

Thank goodness, then, for artists, whose task it is to poke at our amnesiac cocooning. Saklikar's book of poems, Children of Air India: un/authorized exhibits and interjections (2013), serves as the basis for a remarkable new chamber opera commissioned by Vancouver's Turning Point Ensemble, which is currently receiving its world premiere at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre. The last performance is tonight, on Remembrance Day, and it is not to be missed. Wedding Saklikar's words to composer Jürgen Simpson's richly layered and haunting score, this Irish-Canadian co-production strips opera down to the essential relationship between music and voice, substituting spareness for spectacle, and editing out all traces of sentimentality.

To this end, director Tom Creed has his three singers--soprano Zorana Sadiq, countertenor Daniel Cabena, and baritone Alexander Dobson--deliver their respective arias while seated at a long table. Channeling, via Saklikar's poetry, the voices of friends and family of the victims, investigating officers and court reporters, the trio does not parse out for us any harmonically resolvable explanation of narrative events. Rather, in dissonant counterpoint and textured tonal engagement, they stretch out for us "one unending song" of grief. Above the singers John Galvin's remarkable video projections unspool as an inky overlay of fathomless ocean waters, blacked-out evidentiary documents, and the scrambled lines of voicebox data recorders, the search for meaning in all of this--about sanctioned state violence, or a life ended prematurely--necessarily redacted.

This principle of obscured or selective remembering is also captured acoustically within the score. Behind the singers air india musical director and TPE artistic director Owen Underhill works with his remarkable group of musicians to find and hold the silences between Simpson's notes (the plucked minor keys of Kinza Tyrell's piano standing out early in the program), and also--at key moments--to interpolate pre-recorded bits of white noise. These moments are jarring, but also completely appropriate, jolting us out of passive spectatorship and into active witnessing. For in trying to represent sonically all that is contained within the story of Air India 182, I can think of no better metaphor than playing at equal intensity every frequency within the spectrum of human hearing.

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Cock at Performance Works

Mike Bartlett's play, Cock, on at Performance Works in a Rumble Theatre production through this Sunday, centres on John (Nadeem Phillip, in an affecting though somewhat physically mannered performance). A hugely ambivalent character, John is torn between sticking it out with his long-time boyfriend, M (Shawn Macdonald, with trademark smirk), and taking a risky leap into the unknown with W (Donna Soares, giving as good as she gets), a woman John has started seeing while on a break from M. So far so melodramatic. However, what makes the play so absorbing to watch is its unique structure and rapid-fire dialogue (like Aaron Sorkin without the pontificating), along with director Stephen Drover's tense and kinetic staging of the action in the round. The characters circle and spar with each other, as if at a boxing match, and scene breaks are punctuated with quick semi-blackouts.

Those initial scenes concern John and M, with John first talking himself into leaving M and then explaining why he has returned. When M learns through their verbal jousting that part of the reason John has come back is to sort out how he feels about W, the stakes are raised considerably, and what John has both relied on and resented about M--his possessiveness--turns into an all-out war to keep him. We then shift abruptly to scenes between John and W, witnessing how they met and first come to have sex--in an hilariously choreographed scene of John's fumbling exploration and W's not unpleasant reactions made all the more remarkable for the fact that Phillip and Soares are on opposite sides of the stage floor's bullseye. The final panel in Bartlett's dramatic triptych brings all three characters together for a dinner party at which John is meant to decide between M and W--having previously hedged his bets by telling each of them that he is leaving the other. However, in true deus ex machina fashion, Bartlett introduces a fourth character, M having invited his father, F (Duncan Fraser, somewhat low energy), for moral support.

And, indeed, F does succeed in provoking one of the more impassioned speeches from John, who in response to F's statement that he has to decide "what he is," asks why can't it just be about "who" he wants to be with, regardless of gender? To be sure, Bartlett has in some senses written a true post-identity politics play. My only concern is why, among the reasons John lists to be with W, he cites a future that involves having children and growing old together? That, in the end, John opts for "what he knows" rather than "who he desires" perhaps says something about Bartlett's cynical take on the continuing problem of categorical fit in our society: the boxes are too small, but we continue shoving people--and ourselves--in them anyway.

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