In what has quickly become a Music on Main tradition, Artistic Director David Pay once again programmed a year-end evening of music to celebrate the winter solstice at Heritage Hall. Back to lead the audience through the chorus of her haunting Winter Carol, the final piece on the program, was former MoM composer-in-residence Caroline Shaw. Joining Shaw on stage were local singer-songwriter Veda Hille, pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, and guitarist Adrian Verdejo.
The quartet, in different configurations, took the audience through an eclectic line-up of music, including two additional carols: Alfredo Santa Ana's spare and spine-tingly A Short Song for the Longest Night of the Year; and new MoM composer-in-residence Nicole Lizée's cheeky jingle Solstice Noir. Iwaasa rained down liquid sunshine in a stirring rendition of Denis Gougeon's Piano-soleil and later joined Shaw, on violin, for a beautiful rendition of Arvo Pärt's classic Spiegel im Spiegel (the Little Chamber Music Series That Could's Diane Park was in the room and I couldn't help thinking of our own danced performance to the same piece for the summer solstice of 2015). Verdejo performed two solos: John Mark Sherlock's Musiquita; and the world premiere of Rodney Sharman's for Guitar. And the incomparable Hille took her own turn at the piano, reprising two recent favourites: Let Me Die, from Onegin, her recent musical hit with Amiel Gladstone; and Eurydice, an adaptation of a Rilke sonnet that she wrote for Pay's Orpheus Project at the Cultch a couple of years back.
All of this flew by in a compact 90 minutes and was a great way to warm both the body and the soul on an unusually cold solstitial night in Vancouver. As Pay noted in his comments at the top of the evening, some rituals deserve to be repeated.
P.
Saturday, December 17, 2016
Thursday, December 15, 2016
After the Fall at EDAM
Last night I dashed from a board meeting to make it to EDAM's latest choreographic series presentation, After the Fall. Am I ever glad I made the extra effort to be there. Not only was the Western Front teeming with people I knew, but the program was excellent (albeit with minor caveats about one piece). It was just the restorative re-immersion I needed into the amazing performance work of this community after so many weeks with my head up my butt working on my own show.
First up was Julianne Chapple's Self Portrait, a work created and performed in collaboration with Maxine Chadburn and Francesca Frewer. With the windows on the western wall of the first-floor EDAM studios left uncovered, and thus admitting a degree of extra sparkle from the streetlights outside, a dancer enters from the open upstage left door. She is wearing black shorts and a white push-up bra; her long mane of hair tumbles down in front of her face. As she begins a slow journey across the width of the upstage wall, we gradually become aware of another figure seated downstage in shadow watching her progress along with us. And what fascinates about the upstage woman's slow and sinuous movement is that it is as much vertical as it is horizontal. That is, more than once she dips her torso downward and first raises one leg in a gorgeous arabesque, before resting it against the wall and then raising the other leg to join it and pausing there in a pose that put me in mind of all those surrealist photos of disembodied, upside-down mannequin legs by the likes of Man Ray and others (and the fact that all the dancers were clad in a similar underwear model-like manner and rarely showed their faces only reinforced this image). But the first dancer does not remain in this position; she continues her curious walk on/along the wall, exiting through the open door upstage left. Soon another dancer emerges from the opposite door and begins to traverse a similar gymnastic journey along the upstage wall, also observed by the downstage figure in repose. And so the pattern continues, with, on the third go round, the downstage dancer walking upstage to take her turn at the wall, and the other two dancers remaining on stage--one observing downstage, the other repeating a version of the wall dance along the floor upstage, and with all three dancers aligning themselves in a vertical centre column whenever the wall dancer reaches a resting point in the middle of her journey. This trio, so compelling in its spatial geometry when the dancers are apart, becomes even more watchable when the dancers swap each other's bodies for the surface of the wall, coming together in a series of fluidly intertwined configurations that combine the strength and balance and flexibility of gymnastics with the weight-sharing of contact. Every now and then during this sequencing the dancers will hold a shape, usually with one of them perched atop or supported by the other two, at which point the dancer being posed will sweep her hair away from her face and gaze out distractedly and maybe also with a touch of disdain at the audience: the one who is looked at looks back and, unimpressed by what she sees, continues on with the work at hand. Which culminates in one final walk on walls, this time begun horizontally along the stage left studio wall, before ending where we began, back on the upstage wall. This time, however, the dancer doing the walking is supported by the other two: so she can go even higher. And because all three women are working together we know she will not fall.
For the second piece on the program, Peter Bingham's Engage the Feeling Arms, the blinds had been lowered on the windows, though the slats remained open, which produced a nice constellation of light pinpricks along the upstage wall. The audience was treated to another trio, this one featuring EDAM stalwarts Farley Johansson, Walter Kubanek and Olivia Shaffer. In terms of Bingham's trademark contact choreography, the piece begins somewhat unusually. All three dancers are in a horizontal line upstage and remain vertical for far longer than we might expect: Johansson and Shaffer are engaged in a vigorous duet, but there is no offering of backs or legs to tumble over or slide down, just a complex intertwining of arms and cupping of heads that put me in mind of ice dancing or tango. Meanwhile Kubanek is off to the side, stage left, improvising a solo, his arms also extending with abandon about his head as he does a series of pirouettes on his feet and knees (the Indian-themed music made it seem at times that all the dancers were multi-limbed Hindu gods). Soon enough Kubanek bumps Johansson and begins his own duet with Shaffer, and then Johannson does the same with Shaffer, the two men partnering while Shaffer performs a solo beside them. Eventually the three dancers break out of this pattern, and their line, beginning a run downstage which serves as the initiation of a series of repeated lifts, contact with other parts of their bodies and, of course, those at once supremely athletic and graceful leaps and tumbles and rolls to/along the floor for which EDAM performers are known. It always takes my breath away to watch dancers trained by Bingham fall: there is a suspension and yet simultaneous giving into gravity that seems to defy the rules of physics, but as satisfyingly there is always such a beautifully soft landing. Such is the case here with these three expert fallers and the image that will stay with me longest from last night's performance is the sequence (repeated twice) in which each dancer falls successively into the outstretched arms of another who lies prone on the floor. Feeling arms indeed.
The final piece, The Way, was choreographed by Shay Kuebler and by this point in the program the stage blacks had been pulled entirely across the windows on the western wall. The lights come up slowly on dancer Nicholas Lydiate, who starts twitching centre stage. Dancer Lexi Vajda soon appears in the upstage right doorway, walks toward Lydiate with purpose, and begins pushing him about the stage. It was great to see the diminutive Vajda be the controlling force at the start of the duet that ensues, which gradually gets more and more physical, and ends up with the two dancers collapsed on the floor upstage. This is the cue for Kuebler to enter, stepping gingerly between the bodies of the other dancers, slowly lowering himself to his knees, and finally initiating a gestural sequence with his arms that the other dancers join in. The unison becomes more and more captivating as it picks up speed, but also because in so doing it begins to break down. Lydiate's twitches from the top of the piece are hear reintroduced as glitches, with first Kuebler and then Vajda and Lydiate splaying one leg jarringly to the side, or else knocking themselves over with a miscued arm. Extremity has always been part of Kuebler's aesthetic, which draws as much from martial arts as from hip hop and contemporary dance. Nowhere is this more evident in this work than the solo Kuebler gives himself in the middle of the piece: it begins as a pantomime of boxing moves and ends with Kuebler thrashing back and forth violently on the floor. There is a suggestion of self-parody in the "dudeness" of this scene as, at its end, Vajda begins a slow clap, as if to say "Good for you, what next?" But, in fact, rather then ending things there, Kuebler takes up the bait, rolling back and forth along the floor as the rhythm of Vajda's clapping--now joined by Lydiate--picks up speed. Wait, there's more! The piece ends with this final trio throwing their bodies against the upstage wall, each reverberating slap of skin registering as a wince in my own body. I so appreciate what Kuebler and his dancers can do physically; but because I worry about how much it hurts, I'm just not sure I support the philosophy of doing it. To that end, I left longing for a return to the silent tableau that concluded Chapple's piece.
P.
First up was Julianne Chapple's Self Portrait, a work created and performed in collaboration with Maxine Chadburn and Francesca Frewer. With the windows on the western wall of the first-floor EDAM studios left uncovered, and thus admitting a degree of extra sparkle from the streetlights outside, a dancer enters from the open upstage left door. She is wearing black shorts and a white push-up bra; her long mane of hair tumbles down in front of her face. As she begins a slow journey across the width of the upstage wall, we gradually become aware of another figure seated downstage in shadow watching her progress along with us. And what fascinates about the upstage woman's slow and sinuous movement is that it is as much vertical as it is horizontal. That is, more than once she dips her torso downward and first raises one leg in a gorgeous arabesque, before resting it against the wall and then raising the other leg to join it and pausing there in a pose that put me in mind of all those surrealist photos of disembodied, upside-down mannequin legs by the likes of Man Ray and others (and the fact that all the dancers were clad in a similar underwear model-like manner and rarely showed their faces only reinforced this image). But the first dancer does not remain in this position; she continues her curious walk on/along the wall, exiting through the open door upstage left. Soon another dancer emerges from the opposite door and begins to traverse a similar gymnastic journey along the upstage wall, also observed by the downstage figure in repose. And so the pattern continues, with, on the third go round, the downstage dancer walking upstage to take her turn at the wall, and the other two dancers remaining on stage--one observing downstage, the other repeating a version of the wall dance along the floor upstage, and with all three dancers aligning themselves in a vertical centre column whenever the wall dancer reaches a resting point in the middle of her journey. This trio, so compelling in its spatial geometry when the dancers are apart, becomes even more watchable when the dancers swap each other's bodies for the surface of the wall, coming together in a series of fluidly intertwined configurations that combine the strength and balance and flexibility of gymnastics with the weight-sharing of contact. Every now and then during this sequencing the dancers will hold a shape, usually with one of them perched atop or supported by the other two, at which point the dancer being posed will sweep her hair away from her face and gaze out distractedly and maybe also with a touch of disdain at the audience: the one who is looked at looks back and, unimpressed by what she sees, continues on with the work at hand. Which culminates in one final walk on walls, this time begun horizontally along the stage left studio wall, before ending where we began, back on the upstage wall. This time, however, the dancer doing the walking is supported by the other two: so she can go even higher. And because all three women are working together we know she will not fall.
For the second piece on the program, Peter Bingham's Engage the Feeling Arms, the blinds had been lowered on the windows, though the slats remained open, which produced a nice constellation of light pinpricks along the upstage wall. The audience was treated to another trio, this one featuring EDAM stalwarts Farley Johansson, Walter Kubanek and Olivia Shaffer. In terms of Bingham's trademark contact choreography, the piece begins somewhat unusually. All three dancers are in a horizontal line upstage and remain vertical for far longer than we might expect: Johansson and Shaffer are engaged in a vigorous duet, but there is no offering of backs or legs to tumble over or slide down, just a complex intertwining of arms and cupping of heads that put me in mind of ice dancing or tango. Meanwhile Kubanek is off to the side, stage left, improvising a solo, his arms also extending with abandon about his head as he does a series of pirouettes on his feet and knees (the Indian-themed music made it seem at times that all the dancers were multi-limbed Hindu gods). Soon enough Kubanek bumps Johansson and begins his own duet with Shaffer, and then Johannson does the same with Shaffer, the two men partnering while Shaffer performs a solo beside them. Eventually the three dancers break out of this pattern, and their line, beginning a run downstage which serves as the initiation of a series of repeated lifts, contact with other parts of their bodies and, of course, those at once supremely athletic and graceful leaps and tumbles and rolls to/along the floor for which EDAM performers are known. It always takes my breath away to watch dancers trained by Bingham fall: there is a suspension and yet simultaneous giving into gravity that seems to defy the rules of physics, but as satisfyingly there is always such a beautifully soft landing. Such is the case here with these three expert fallers and the image that will stay with me longest from last night's performance is the sequence (repeated twice) in which each dancer falls successively into the outstretched arms of another who lies prone on the floor. Feeling arms indeed.
The final piece, The Way, was choreographed by Shay Kuebler and by this point in the program the stage blacks had been pulled entirely across the windows on the western wall. The lights come up slowly on dancer Nicholas Lydiate, who starts twitching centre stage. Dancer Lexi Vajda soon appears in the upstage right doorway, walks toward Lydiate with purpose, and begins pushing him about the stage. It was great to see the diminutive Vajda be the controlling force at the start of the duet that ensues, which gradually gets more and more physical, and ends up with the two dancers collapsed on the floor upstage. This is the cue for Kuebler to enter, stepping gingerly between the bodies of the other dancers, slowly lowering himself to his knees, and finally initiating a gestural sequence with his arms that the other dancers join in. The unison becomes more and more captivating as it picks up speed, but also because in so doing it begins to break down. Lydiate's twitches from the top of the piece are hear reintroduced as glitches, with first Kuebler and then Vajda and Lydiate splaying one leg jarringly to the side, or else knocking themselves over with a miscued arm. Extremity has always been part of Kuebler's aesthetic, which draws as much from martial arts as from hip hop and contemporary dance. Nowhere is this more evident in this work than the solo Kuebler gives himself in the middle of the piece: it begins as a pantomime of boxing moves and ends with Kuebler thrashing back and forth violently on the floor. There is a suggestion of self-parody in the "dudeness" of this scene as, at its end, Vajda begins a slow clap, as if to say "Good for you, what next?" But, in fact, rather then ending things there, Kuebler takes up the bait, rolling back and forth along the floor as the rhythm of Vajda's clapping--now joined by Lydiate--picks up speed. Wait, there's more! The piece ends with this final trio throwing their bodies against the upstage wall, each reverberating slap of skin registering as a wince in my own body. I so appreciate what Kuebler and his dancers can do physically; but because I worry about how much it hurts, I'm just not sure I support the philosophy of doing it. To that end, I left longing for a return to the silent tableau that concluded Chapple's piece.
P.
Sunday, November 27, 2016
Long Division: Closing
It was the closing performance last night. A good-sized house. I thought the audience was a bit subdued, but my parents--who are visiting from Ontario and who had already seen the show once, this past Wednesday--said they felt people were very responsive. I guess it's hard for me to tell as the lines I think will (or should) get a laugh, or otherwise elicit some kind of more embodied response, often don't. But of course that doesn't mean folks aren't engaged with the work. As my Dad put it to me this morning, mine is a play that rewards more than one viewing. Of course, he's biased, but it was a deliberate formal strategy on my part to construct a work whose patterns and layers of connection only fully emerge at a distance. To that end, it has been most rewarding for me to hear from friends and colleagues about how the work has stayed with them after the end. Perhaps we should use this as a marketing strategy for the April run.
Closing a show is always bittersweet, especially when the process has been so generative and one has had the privilege of working with such an amazingly talented and warm and funny and intelligent creative team. It was great to hang out with some of that team last night after the show and share a drink and gossip and talk about holiday plans (London for Anousha; Cuba for Kerry; Vietnam for Jay; Mexico for Melissa; Toronto and Israel for Shayna; Hawai'i for Richard and Connie). It was a long two-show day for the cast, so I was grateful that most of them came out. And parting at 2 am on Granville Street was less painful knowing we'd all be gathering again in a few months to dive back into the work. I was only half joking when I said to the actors that I'd like to double the length of each of their monologues. I could watch all of them on stage forever. But in actual fact, any tinkering with the script between now and April will likely involve cuts and maybe the odd finessing of the choral interludes. I know Lesley is dying to revisit and even add to some of the movement, but Richard will likely have to restrain her given we only have a week's worth of re-rehearsal. At the very least, Jergus and Lauchlin and Jamie will get to supplement the visual design of the piece given the added space and technical resources available at the Annex.
Funny last note on the technical front. I knew that the lighting board and other equipment at the Gateway's Studio B dated from circa 1985. But what I didn't know was that everything connected with preserving our work was similarly ante-diluvian. At the end of the night, along with his stage manager reports on yesterday's shows, Jethelo sent Jayson McLean, our production manager, a note about making sure to save all the lighting, video and sound cues. On the drive home I learned from Richard that the method for storing said data was a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk!
I feel like there's something strangely appropriate about said means of transferring the binary code of our play. Just like the image below--supplied courtesy of Jay (aka Reid).
P
Closing a show is always bittersweet, especially when the process has been so generative and one has had the privilege of working with such an amazingly talented and warm and funny and intelligent creative team. It was great to hang out with some of that team last night after the show and share a drink and gossip and talk about holiday plans (London for Anousha; Cuba for Kerry; Vietnam for Jay; Mexico for Melissa; Toronto and Israel for Shayna; Hawai'i for Richard and Connie). It was a long two-show day for the cast, so I was grateful that most of them came out. And parting at 2 am on Granville Street was less painful knowing we'd all be gathering again in a few months to dive back into the work. I was only half joking when I said to the actors that I'd like to double the length of each of their monologues. I could watch all of them on stage forever. But in actual fact, any tinkering with the script between now and April will likely involve cuts and maybe the odd finessing of the choral interludes. I know Lesley is dying to revisit and even add to some of the movement, but Richard will likely have to restrain her given we only have a week's worth of re-rehearsal. At the very least, Jergus and Lauchlin and Jamie will get to supplement the visual design of the piece given the added space and technical resources available at the Annex.
Funny last note on the technical front. I knew that the lighting board and other equipment at the Gateway's Studio B dated from circa 1985. But what I didn't know was that everything connected with preserving our work was similarly ante-diluvian. At the end of the night, along with his stage manager reports on yesterday's shows, Jethelo sent Jayson McLean, our production manager, a note about making sure to save all the lighting, video and sound cues. On the drive home I learned from Richard that the method for storing said data was a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk!
I feel like there's something strangely appropriate about said means of transferring the binary code of our play. Just like the image below--supplied courtesy of Jay (aka Reid).
P
Saturday, November 19, 2016
Long Division: Opening
So we're officially open. Last night was a full house, there was a good energy, and the actors nailed it. Richard insisted I take a bow, which I didn't really want to do. But it did allow me to sneak backstage with the actors afterwards and give them each a card and little joke gift, as well as share a quick sip of prosecco with them in the dressing room before the public reception put on by the Gateway.
Richard had said the night before, after Thursday's preview, that he thought folks would either love the play or hate it--which we both agreed was better than a meh reaction. I had some great conversations with audience members last night who fell into the former camp, although it mostly seems the critics so far are firmly in the latter. Not sure why, when it's obvious from the beginning that the conceit of the play is lecture-performance you'd dwell on the fact that there's not enough conventional storytelling. I also wonder why it was the preview performance that got reviewed instead of the opening. Oh well.
None of the actors could go out for a drink afterwards, as they have a 2 pm matinee today. So before we all scattered from the reception I gathered them together to tell them about the dream I had had about the play the night before. I never remember my dreams, but this one was incredibly vivid. It involved the entire cast and crew passing around a bong (which was no doubt planted in my subconscious by the fact that on Thursday afternoon we had been joking about a version of the play called Bong Division). In the dream, the police suddenly arrive and decide they have to arrest someone--whether for getting high or doing so in the theatre is unclear. They settle on Jay Clift as the fall guy--likely again this was related to the fact that in the play Jay's character, Reid, talks about being a small-time weed dealer in high school. Then again, it could simply be because Jay is so tall and he was easiest to pick out of the crowd. At any rate, the whole production was thrown into a tailspin because of this, requiring us to find a replacement Reid at the last minute. The candidate turned out to be a whiz at memorizing his lines in no time, but when it came to the choreography he decided that the best thing was to improvise. Unfortunately his improvisation involved doing grand jetes and multiple pirouettes across the stage during everyone else's monologue. The last thing I remember from the dream is Jethelo, our stage manager, madly trying to write down all the new blocking as Lesley, our choreographer, sunk deeper and deeper in stunned bewilderment into her chair.
Afterwards, over still more drinks with Richard, Lesley, Jethelo, Shayna Goldberg, Pi's GM, Rob Maguire, President of Pi's Board of Directors, and my Richard, we all agreed that ours is just about the best cast ever. Given all we've thrown at them--10+ minute monologues filled with math jargon, complicated choreography--and given all that they've been through during the process, it's such a gift to see them embrace the material so fully. And we get to do it all over again in April.
P
Richard had said the night before, after Thursday's preview, that he thought folks would either love the play or hate it--which we both agreed was better than a meh reaction. I had some great conversations with audience members last night who fell into the former camp, although it mostly seems the critics so far are firmly in the latter. Not sure why, when it's obvious from the beginning that the conceit of the play is lecture-performance you'd dwell on the fact that there's not enough conventional storytelling. I also wonder why it was the preview performance that got reviewed instead of the opening. Oh well.
None of the actors could go out for a drink afterwards, as they have a 2 pm matinee today. So before we all scattered from the reception I gathered them together to tell them about the dream I had had about the play the night before. I never remember my dreams, but this one was incredibly vivid. It involved the entire cast and crew passing around a bong (which was no doubt planted in my subconscious by the fact that on Thursday afternoon we had been joking about a version of the play called Bong Division). In the dream, the police suddenly arrive and decide they have to arrest someone--whether for getting high or doing so in the theatre is unclear. They settle on Jay Clift as the fall guy--likely again this was related to the fact that in the play Jay's character, Reid, talks about being a small-time weed dealer in high school. Then again, it could simply be because Jay is so tall and he was easiest to pick out of the crowd. At any rate, the whole production was thrown into a tailspin because of this, requiring us to find a replacement Reid at the last minute. The candidate turned out to be a whiz at memorizing his lines in no time, but when it came to the choreography he decided that the best thing was to improvise. Unfortunately his improvisation involved doing grand jetes and multiple pirouettes across the stage during everyone else's monologue. The last thing I remember from the dream is Jethelo, our stage manager, madly trying to write down all the new blocking as Lesley, our choreographer, sunk deeper and deeper in stunned bewilderment into her chair.
Afterwards, over still more drinks with Richard, Lesley, Jethelo, Shayna Goldberg, Pi's GM, Rob Maguire, President of Pi's Board of Directors, and my Richard, we all agreed that ours is just about the best cast ever. Given all we've thrown at them--10+ minute monologues filled with math jargon, complicated choreography--and given all that they've been through during the process, it's such a gift to see them embrace the material so fully. And we get to do it all over again in April.
P
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Long Division: Tech Dress
So there were a few missed cues with the projections, and one of the lights blew at the top of act two, and not all of the actors had gotten the note about the revised exit at the end of act one, but otherwise it was a pretty fantastic tech dress yesterday afternoon.
It was amazing to see the actors in the vibrantly coloured costumes Connie Hosie has put together for each of them--and also to have Connie as an enthusiastic audience member. All of the actors nailed their monologues and were also pros with the new tweaks to the choreography Lesley had made only that morning. I also made one final cut and adjustment to the text that the women in the cast handled with aplomb.
I'm taking all of this--as well as Gateway AD Jovanni Sy's positive reaction and Richard's general calm--as a good sign. Preview performance tonight, then the opening on Friday. Three and a half weeks of rehearsal plus one workshop week on the script plus four odd years of writing and revising and dramaturging the original idea: all to get to this point. When you balance the run of the show (even including the remount at the Annex in April) against the length of time for its development, it seems an unfair equation. But I can live with the math.
Merde to all of us.
P
It was amazing to see the actors in the vibrantly coloured costumes Connie Hosie has put together for each of them--and also to have Connie as an enthusiastic audience member. All of the actors nailed their monologues and were also pros with the new tweaks to the choreography Lesley had made only that morning. I also made one final cut and adjustment to the text that the women in the cast handled with aplomb.
I'm taking all of this--as well as Gateway AD Jovanni Sy's positive reaction and Richard's general calm--as a good sign. Preview performance tonight, then the opening on Friday. Three and a half weeks of rehearsal plus one workshop week on the script plus four odd years of writing and revising and dramaturging the original idea: all to get to this point. When you balance the run of the show (even including the remount at the Annex in April) against the length of time for its development, it seems an unfair equation. But I can live with the math.
Merde to all of us.
P
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Long Division: Third Week of Rehearsal
Today is Q-2-Q day for the play. It's a long, twelve-hour day for the cast and production crew as they work to resolve and lock down all of the different sound, lighting, and video/projection cues in relation to the text and movement. Things are a bit more complicated than usual on this front for a number of reasons. First, there is the sheer number of cues (well over 80 for the video and projections alone). Then there is the fact that movement in Long Division is operating both on the level of traditional theatre blocking and in relation to an additional choreographic score. Richard and Lesley have been working hard, especially in the last week, to make the integration between the two as seamless as possible, but inevitably challenges arise with so much activity happening on stage--not to mention the sheer number of bodies engaging in that activity for the entirety of the play's 90+ minutes. Finally, there is the competition between the lighting and the video projections; despite the super-powered projectors video designer Jamie Nesbitt has borrowed for the production, as well as the decision to forgo any lino whatsoever in favour of the bare black stage floor, the word yesterday from the crew was that Jergus Oprsal's lighting was still washing out some of the images. (The fact that the Gateway's Studio B only has 24 dimmers for Jergus to work with isn't helping on this front.)
No doubt all of that will be resolved today (and possibly on Monday). For my part, it was just so exciting to see Lauchlin Johnston's amazing set installed yesterday, as well as a few of the designs Jamie has come up with projected onto it. Otherwise it was an intense day of grinding through with the actors and Richard and Lesley the finer details of both acts yesterday, especially with respect to the transitions between scenes. Part of me (the part eyeing next Thursday's preview performance) found the progress painfully incremental at times. But as Jennifer Lines said to me on the drive back into Vancouver, the minuteness and repetition of such drilling actually makes things go much faster in the long run. There is a moment, she said, when everything will click and fall into place for the actors and then the tech runs will seem like they are flying by. I certainly got a glimpse of this yesterday when we did full run-throughs of both acts; sure there were lines dropped and movement cues that were missed or late, but there was a definite sense that the actors were getting increasingly comfortable with the material and that things were coming together.
I can't wait to see a full run-through with tech to see all of the elements working off of each other. That will have to wait until Tuesday afternoon for me due to other commitments, including an interview with Radio-Canada about the play. I don't know who I'm going to talk about mathematics in French, but hopefully I'll muddle through.
P
No doubt all of that will be resolved today (and possibly on Monday). For my part, it was just so exciting to see Lauchlin Johnston's amazing set installed yesterday, as well as a few of the designs Jamie has come up with projected onto it. Otherwise it was an intense day of grinding through with the actors and Richard and Lesley the finer details of both acts yesterday, especially with respect to the transitions between scenes. Part of me (the part eyeing next Thursday's preview performance) found the progress painfully incremental at times. But as Jennifer Lines said to me on the drive back into Vancouver, the minuteness and repetition of such drilling actually makes things go much faster in the long run. There is a moment, she said, when everything will click and fall into place for the actors and then the tech runs will seem like they are flying by. I certainly got a glimpse of this yesterday when we did full run-throughs of both acts; sure there were lines dropped and movement cues that were missed or late, but there was a definite sense that the actors were getting increasingly comfortable with the material and that things were coming together.
I can't wait to see a full run-through with tech to see all of the elements working off of each other. That will have to wait until Tuesday afternoon for me due to other commitments, including an interview with Radio-Canada about the play. I don't know who I'm going to talk about mathematics in French, but hopefully I'll muddle through.
P
Sunday, November 6, 2016
Long Division: Second Week of Rehearsal
If you'd asked me on Wednesday how things were going in terms of building the show, I probably would have smiled tightly and said "We're getting there ... slowly." I confess I was a bit panicked by the incremental progress we seemed to be making in blocking the play and integrating this with the movement sequences. And then there were all the other production elements that had yet to be integrated, including sound, lighting and video. Richard had distributed a scene breakdown table earlier in the week, with columns for all of these things and by mid-week a lot of them still remained blank.
But what a difference two days away makes. In the interim, Richard and the cast had sketched the blocking for all but the last few pages of the play, Lesley had set the movement for the top of the second act and refined several other sequences, and the designers had held a production meeting in which much of the video had been locked down and a production schedule laid out for paper tech, lighting hang, set load-in and install, and Q-2-Q. Clearly I should keep clear of rehearsals more often.
That said, I was back at the Gateway yesterday to watch Richard set the remaining blocking in the morning, as well as Lesley teach the actors in the early afternoon what she had come up with for the part near the end of act one in which Mobius bands are discussed. Then it was time for a stumble through of the whole play. To this point the scenes had been built and rehearsed in fragments, often out of order, and so it was revelatory to watch the whole thing unfold from start to finish, hiccups included. I know Lesley was concerned with the execution of much of the movement in the second half, and we have yet to come up with a physical score for the ending, but I was so pleased to see where we were. Rough around the edges though it currently is, we at least have a structure. And as Richard reminded Lesley and myself, there was, relatively speaking, still a fair amount of time to refine and polish things.
And all of this was accomplished in the midst of some unexpected and deeply trying personal circumstances for one member of our team. This play is partly about dealing with grief and let's just say that it has been a bit of shock to have that theme hit so close to home. But it has also reminded me of what a strong and resilient tribe actors are.
P
But what a difference two days away makes. In the interim, Richard and the cast had sketched the blocking for all but the last few pages of the play, Lesley had set the movement for the top of the second act and refined several other sequences, and the designers had held a production meeting in which much of the video had been locked down and a production schedule laid out for paper tech, lighting hang, set load-in and install, and Q-2-Q. Clearly I should keep clear of rehearsals more often.
That said, I was back at the Gateway yesterday to watch Richard set the remaining blocking in the morning, as well as Lesley teach the actors in the early afternoon what she had come up with for the part near the end of act one in which Mobius bands are discussed. Then it was time for a stumble through of the whole play. To this point the scenes had been built and rehearsed in fragments, often out of order, and so it was revelatory to watch the whole thing unfold from start to finish, hiccups included. I know Lesley was concerned with the execution of much of the movement in the second half, and we have yet to come up with a physical score for the ending, but I was so pleased to see where we were. Rough around the edges though it currently is, we at least have a structure. And as Richard reminded Lesley and myself, there was, relatively speaking, still a fair amount of time to refine and polish things.
And all of this was accomplished in the midst of some unexpected and deeply trying personal circumstances for one member of our team. This play is partly about dealing with grief and let's just say that it has been a bit of shock to have that theme hit so close to home. But it has also reminded me of what a strong and resilient tribe actors are.
P
Saturday, November 5, 2016
Ballet BC's Program 1 at the Queen E
In the pre-show chat that preceded last night's performance of Ballet BC's season-opening Program 1, choreographer-in-residence Cayetano Soto talked in glowing terms about his admiration for the company, its dancers, Emily Molnar as artistic director, and about how, following the premiere of his acclaimed Twenty Eight Thousand Waves in 2014, he didn't have to think twice about Molnar's invitation to accept his current appointment. Soto, who not only choreographs but also designs the lighting and costumes for his pieces, is unusually adept at creating provocative and sensorially arresting atmospheres in and through his dances. That talent was on abundant display last night, as in an evening devoted to four of his works the mood shifted gradually from darker to lighter.
Beginning After, the first piece on the program and a world premiere, begins with a projected title about the fine line between truth and the illusion of memory. The dancers emerge singly and in pairs from the upstage darkness in shiny black singlets that resemble exoskeletons. There is rarely ever more than two dancers on stage, but such is the shutter-like effect that Soto creates with his lighting (which in addition to the general dim half-light throughout includes brief blackouts and later strobe-like flashes) and the slow fade ins and fade outs that accompany the dancers' entrances and exits that the whole piece has the look and feel of time-lapse photography or stop-motion cinema. Certainly we are meant to question what we are seeing, which extends to the extraordinary partnering that Soto builds to at the conclusion of the piece. I had thought that the lifts in Twenty Eight Thousand Waves were the most complicated I had ever seen, but here Soto takes things to a whole other level, and it is impossible not to marvel at how the dancers--who often put me in mind of baroque versions of pairs figure skaters (the music is by Handel)--combine the speed, fluidity and angularity required to accomplish the partnering for this piece. As my colleague Judith Garay put it at intermission, it's the tangled lines Soto creates in this work that are so captivating.
There followed two short pieces created by Soto in 2007 and 2013 respectively, but here receiving their Canadian premieres. The first, Fugaz, is a meditation on the death of Soto's father, but it unfolds in such a way that it is impossible not to meditate on the gender politics embedded--whether consciously or not--in the piece. Emily Chessa, Racheal Prince, Nicole Ward and Livona Ellis form a feminine quartet whose spatial interactions are interrupted by successive appearances of masculine ghost-like presences, these figures in black emerging from stairs at the lip of the stage and then disappearing into the darkness upstage. However, on one such pass towards the end of the piece, first Christoph von Riedemann and then Peter Smida partners with Chessa and Ellis respectively, the latter pairing turning into a violent scene that almost resembles a rape, and that left me a little confused as to how to read the piece. The gender dynamics that necessarily accrue to traditional dance partnering are less obviously on display in Sortijas, an affecting duet for Scott Fowler and Alexis Fletcher performed to the music of Lhasa de Sela. This is partly because of the nude jersey that Fletcher wears on her torso, that next to Fowler's bare chest and when combined with their matching black pants, has the effect of making her appear androgynous. To be sure, it is the powerful and technically superb Fowler who is still doing the lifting throughout but elsewhere in the piece one has the sense that the two dancers are equal halves of the same striving soul. This is nowhere more apparent than at the end of the piece when, after the music cuts out, the movement continues for a moment longer, the dancers' breathing synchronizing into its own lush and immersive soundscape as the curtain drops (a similar conceit ends Beginning After).
The evening concluded with the second world premiere of the program. Schachmatt, which is German for check-mate, and which Soto has developed and expanded from an earlier piece called Conrazoncorazon. Tapping into the ribald energy of Weimar-era cabaret (think Marlene Dietrich's Blue Angel crossed with Fosse's Kit Kat girls, referenced not least in the short shorts worn by both the male and female dancers), this exuberant ensemble piece showcases lots of quick shuffle toe and ball change unison footwork, swivelling hips, and even jazz hands. But it's by no means a parody and the virtuosity of the dancers is utterly compelling. It was a great way to finish the evening and to punctuate the start of the company's new season.
P
Beginning After, the first piece on the program and a world premiere, begins with a projected title about the fine line between truth and the illusion of memory. The dancers emerge singly and in pairs from the upstage darkness in shiny black singlets that resemble exoskeletons. There is rarely ever more than two dancers on stage, but such is the shutter-like effect that Soto creates with his lighting (which in addition to the general dim half-light throughout includes brief blackouts and later strobe-like flashes) and the slow fade ins and fade outs that accompany the dancers' entrances and exits that the whole piece has the look and feel of time-lapse photography or stop-motion cinema. Certainly we are meant to question what we are seeing, which extends to the extraordinary partnering that Soto builds to at the conclusion of the piece. I had thought that the lifts in Twenty Eight Thousand Waves were the most complicated I had ever seen, but here Soto takes things to a whole other level, and it is impossible not to marvel at how the dancers--who often put me in mind of baroque versions of pairs figure skaters (the music is by Handel)--combine the speed, fluidity and angularity required to accomplish the partnering for this piece. As my colleague Judith Garay put it at intermission, it's the tangled lines Soto creates in this work that are so captivating.
There followed two short pieces created by Soto in 2007 and 2013 respectively, but here receiving their Canadian premieres. The first, Fugaz, is a meditation on the death of Soto's father, but it unfolds in such a way that it is impossible not to meditate on the gender politics embedded--whether consciously or not--in the piece. Emily Chessa, Racheal Prince, Nicole Ward and Livona Ellis form a feminine quartet whose spatial interactions are interrupted by successive appearances of masculine ghost-like presences, these figures in black emerging from stairs at the lip of the stage and then disappearing into the darkness upstage. However, on one such pass towards the end of the piece, first Christoph von Riedemann and then Peter Smida partners with Chessa and Ellis respectively, the latter pairing turning into a violent scene that almost resembles a rape, and that left me a little confused as to how to read the piece. The gender dynamics that necessarily accrue to traditional dance partnering are less obviously on display in Sortijas, an affecting duet for Scott Fowler and Alexis Fletcher performed to the music of Lhasa de Sela. This is partly because of the nude jersey that Fletcher wears on her torso, that next to Fowler's bare chest and when combined with their matching black pants, has the effect of making her appear androgynous. To be sure, it is the powerful and technically superb Fowler who is still doing the lifting throughout but elsewhere in the piece one has the sense that the two dancers are equal halves of the same striving soul. This is nowhere more apparent than at the end of the piece when, after the music cuts out, the movement continues for a moment longer, the dancers' breathing synchronizing into its own lush and immersive soundscape as the curtain drops (a similar conceit ends Beginning After).
The evening concluded with the second world premiere of the program. Schachmatt, which is German for check-mate, and which Soto has developed and expanded from an earlier piece called Conrazoncorazon. Tapping into the ribald energy of Weimar-era cabaret (think Marlene Dietrich's Blue Angel crossed with Fosse's Kit Kat girls, referenced not least in the short shorts worn by both the male and female dancers), this exuberant ensemble piece showcases lots of quick shuffle toe and ball change unison footwork, swivelling hips, and even jazz hands. But it's by no means a parody and the virtuosity of the dancers is utterly compelling. It was a great way to finish the evening and to punctuate the start of the company's new season.
P
Sunday, October 30, 2016
Jessica Lang Dance at The Playhouse
DanceHouse's 2016/17 season launched this past weekend with the Vancouver premiere of Jessica Lang Dance. Not to be confused with the American actress of American Horror Story fame, Lang is a New York-based choreographer (and former Twyla Tharp dancer) who established her eponymous company in 2011 and has since been gaining international notice, having been most recently commissioned by American Ballet Theatre.
For her Vancouver visit Lang offered audiences a mixed repertoire of five pieces. The first was Lines Cubed, from 2012, a Mondrian-like riff on pathways through space that was made up of four colour-coded sections--black, red, yellow, and blue--plus a concluding coda that brought all the different patterns (grids, circles and spirals) together. It was an interesting conceit and the steps were well-executed but I was never emotionally invested. It also felt to me that if Lang was going to be so rigorously formal in her conception of the piece then she shouldn't have introduced dancers in black into the duet she had constructed for the blue section. I get that they were meant to be impediments to the successful completion of the duet, but the unfurling and furling back up of the black crepe paper on stage struck me as altogether unnecessary.
The Calling was a short excerpt from Lang's Splendid Isolation II (2006); it featured company member Julie Fiorenza sheathed in an elegant white dress, the extended length of which spilled about her like flower petals or a rippling moonlit pond on the stage. Working on pointe (I'm assuming), Fiorenza would rise vertically and then sink down at the knees, an effect that because of the dress momentarily gave the illusion that she was sinking through rather than merely into the floor. The short piece ends with the dancer doing a succession of micro-turns, gathering the dress's material inward around her legs like she is a beautiful butterfly going back into its cocoon. Again, it was pretty to look at but did not really engage me in a profound way.
Things got more interesting in Thousand Yard Stare (2015), which I gather was made in consultation with veterans suffering from PSTD. Lang sends her ensemble out on stage in army fatigues, their slow horizontal march backwards and forwards across the stage in formation every now and then arrested mid-movement when one of the dancers holds a raised leg off the floor. Other canon formations evoke images of soldiers burrowing through tunnels or falling against each other in battle. As fascinated as I was by the different bodily structures of support that Lang seemed to be investigating in the context of war, it struck me that the very precision with which she was creating them worked against the idea that in such situations one cannot possibly know at every moment what to do or how to react.
The fourth piece on the program, White (2011), was actually a film. Overlaying different images of bodies moving through space, and using different film speeds, Lang--working with director of photography Shinichi Maruyama and editors Tetsushi Wakasugi and Jackson Notier--was able to convey a sense of kinaesthetic immersion through this work. It segued seamlessly into the final work on the program: i.n.k. (2011) is another collaboration between Lang and Maruyama and Wakasugi and Notier. As washes and droplets of india ink traverse the upstage screen the dancers interact with them, ducking beneath or jumping over them, for example, and through their additional movement across the stage extending the dance that is also happening on the screen. This last piece was by far the most successful of the evening, but even here the concept felt somewhat programmatic. Lang is clearly a choreographer of abundant ideas; I just wish the work was more emotionally involving.
P
For her Vancouver visit Lang offered audiences a mixed repertoire of five pieces. The first was Lines Cubed, from 2012, a Mondrian-like riff on pathways through space that was made up of four colour-coded sections--black, red, yellow, and blue--plus a concluding coda that brought all the different patterns (grids, circles and spirals) together. It was an interesting conceit and the steps were well-executed but I was never emotionally invested. It also felt to me that if Lang was going to be so rigorously formal in her conception of the piece then she shouldn't have introduced dancers in black into the duet she had constructed for the blue section. I get that they were meant to be impediments to the successful completion of the duet, but the unfurling and furling back up of the black crepe paper on stage struck me as altogether unnecessary.
The Calling was a short excerpt from Lang's Splendid Isolation II (2006); it featured company member Julie Fiorenza sheathed in an elegant white dress, the extended length of which spilled about her like flower petals or a rippling moonlit pond on the stage. Working on pointe (I'm assuming), Fiorenza would rise vertically and then sink down at the knees, an effect that because of the dress momentarily gave the illusion that she was sinking through rather than merely into the floor. The short piece ends with the dancer doing a succession of micro-turns, gathering the dress's material inward around her legs like she is a beautiful butterfly going back into its cocoon. Again, it was pretty to look at but did not really engage me in a profound way.
Things got more interesting in Thousand Yard Stare (2015), which I gather was made in consultation with veterans suffering from PSTD. Lang sends her ensemble out on stage in army fatigues, their slow horizontal march backwards and forwards across the stage in formation every now and then arrested mid-movement when one of the dancers holds a raised leg off the floor. Other canon formations evoke images of soldiers burrowing through tunnels or falling against each other in battle. As fascinated as I was by the different bodily structures of support that Lang seemed to be investigating in the context of war, it struck me that the very precision with which she was creating them worked against the idea that in such situations one cannot possibly know at every moment what to do or how to react.
The fourth piece on the program, White (2011), was actually a film. Overlaying different images of bodies moving through space, and using different film speeds, Lang--working with director of photography Shinichi Maruyama and editors Tetsushi Wakasugi and Jackson Notier--was able to convey a sense of kinaesthetic immersion through this work. It segued seamlessly into the final work on the program: i.n.k. (2011) is another collaboration between Lang and Maruyama and Wakasugi and Notier. As washes and droplets of india ink traverse the upstage screen the dancers interact with them, ducking beneath or jumping over them, for example, and through their additional movement across the stage extending the dance that is also happening on the screen. This last piece was by far the most successful of the evening, but even here the concept felt somewhat programmatic. Lang is clearly a choreographer of abundant ideas; I just wish the work was more emotionally involving.
P
Saturday, October 29, 2016
Long Division: First Week of Rehearsal
Today is the end of the first week of rehearsals for Long Division. In fact, as I write this our amazing cast is still hard at it in Richmond, taking turns working on their respective monologues with director Richard Wolfe and Assistant Director Keltie Forsyth, while presumably also running lines from the choral group scenes under the watchful eye of stage manager Jethelo Cabilete. Having worked our way through the beats of those scenes and any lingering questions about them by the end of the day yesterday, I decided to knock off from today's rehearsals as I have so much else to catch up on.
Not that I regret for a moment being there the rest of this past week. It's such an exciting--and terrifying--thing to dive into the rehearsal process. The exploration and moments of discovery are so stimulating; at the same time, one is always in a bit of a panic about the steadily diminishing amount of time one has for said exploration and discovery. In our case, because there are so many different moving parts to the production--not the least of which is creating and learning actual physical movement--juggling available time is one of Richard's main priorities. Fortunately, choreographer Lesley Telford hit the ground running during the first three days of rehearsal, aided by the emerging dance artists from her Arts Umbrella class with whom she has been building much of the choreography for the show, and many of whom have very generously agreed to accompany Lelsey to our rehearsals to help teach the material to the actors. And in this respect, one of the delights so far has been to watch the dancers' and actors' mutual admiration for each other's specific performance gifts. The entire cast has done an amazing, and exceedingly fast, job of absorbing into their bodies some fairly difficult physical phrases. At the same time, they've also absorbed much of the text into their brains, with several of them already off book in terms of their very long monologues. Composer Owen Belton was also present to observe what Lesley was working on in relation to his music, and to get a sense of what he still needed to come up with to accompany the rest of her movement score.
Yesterday we also got a glimpse of Lauchlin Johnston's mock-up of the set, which blew me away with its elegance and beauty. The Gateway's Studio B is not a huge space and we're losing some of that to the backdrop that Lauchlin has created, and that will additionally serve as the surface onto which video designer Jamie Nesbitt's will project his images. One thing Jamie flagged for Lauchlin and Richard was the colour of the floor. If, as originally intended, it remained white, like the backdrop, then it would create a lot of bounce from the lights that would make it hard to see the projections. This would only be exacerbated if, as planned, lighting designer Jergus Oprsal used a series of shins to provide side light from the wings. So the lino floor will now be a light shade of grey. If everything goes accroding to plan the set will be installed by next Thursday, with the lighting grid hung soon after and the cue-to-cue happening much earlier than usual so that the performers will ideally have three full tech runs instead of cramming everything into one half day.
It was also useful to have Jamie at the table yesterday for our final beat-by-beat read-through of the text, as he asked a lot of tough dramaturgical questions about what exactly was going on in different sections, and how video might support them in some instances, or conceivably work against them in others. Combined with the cast's similarly probing questions from the rest of the week, the rigorous text analysis has really forced me to justify my choices, and to explain their relevance to the overall structure of the play and the respective inner worlds of each of the characters. It also required me to not be precious about material that clearly had to go, or about changes to specific lines, however micro or macro. I really appreciate the attentiveness of all involved to my writing, as it has indeed made the work stronger and, in one instance spotted by Keltie, saved me from making a pretty glaring mistake in the math!
Lots more work to do, of course, but so far the process has been thoroughly rewarding. The level of collegiality and collaboration on everyone's part has been inspiring, and that's in no small measure to the open and non-hierarchical environment Richard has worked hard to create. I can't be in the studio on Monday due to teaching commitments, but I look forward to being back at rehearsals on Tuesday.
So stay tuned for more.
P
Not that I regret for a moment being there the rest of this past week. It's such an exciting--and terrifying--thing to dive into the rehearsal process. The exploration and moments of discovery are so stimulating; at the same time, one is always in a bit of a panic about the steadily diminishing amount of time one has for said exploration and discovery. In our case, because there are so many different moving parts to the production--not the least of which is creating and learning actual physical movement--juggling available time is one of Richard's main priorities. Fortunately, choreographer Lesley Telford hit the ground running during the first three days of rehearsal, aided by the emerging dance artists from her Arts Umbrella class with whom she has been building much of the choreography for the show, and many of whom have very generously agreed to accompany Lelsey to our rehearsals to help teach the material to the actors. And in this respect, one of the delights so far has been to watch the dancers' and actors' mutual admiration for each other's specific performance gifts. The entire cast has done an amazing, and exceedingly fast, job of absorbing into their bodies some fairly difficult physical phrases. At the same time, they've also absorbed much of the text into their brains, with several of them already off book in terms of their very long monologues. Composer Owen Belton was also present to observe what Lesley was working on in relation to his music, and to get a sense of what he still needed to come up with to accompany the rest of her movement score.
Yesterday we also got a glimpse of Lauchlin Johnston's mock-up of the set, which blew me away with its elegance and beauty. The Gateway's Studio B is not a huge space and we're losing some of that to the backdrop that Lauchlin has created, and that will additionally serve as the surface onto which video designer Jamie Nesbitt's will project his images. One thing Jamie flagged for Lauchlin and Richard was the colour of the floor. If, as originally intended, it remained white, like the backdrop, then it would create a lot of bounce from the lights that would make it hard to see the projections. This would only be exacerbated if, as planned, lighting designer Jergus Oprsal used a series of shins to provide side light from the wings. So the lino floor will now be a light shade of grey. If everything goes accroding to plan the set will be installed by next Thursday, with the lighting grid hung soon after and the cue-to-cue happening much earlier than usual so that the performers will ideally have three full tech runs instead of cramming everything into one half day.
It was also useful to have Jamie at the table yesterday for our final beat-by-beat read-through of the text, as he asked a lot of tough dramaturgical questions about what exactly was going on in different sections, and how video might support them in some instances, or conceivably work against them in others. Combined with the cast's similarly probing questions from the rest of the week, the rigorous text analysis has really forced me to justify my choices, and to explain their relevance to the overall structure of the play and the respective inner worlds of each of the characters. It also required me to not be precious about material that clearly had to go, or about changes to specific lines, however micro or macro. I really appreciate the attentiveness of all involved to my writing, as it has indeed made the work stronger and, in one instance spotted by Keltie, saved me from making a pretty glaring mistake in the math!
Lots more work to do, of course, but so far the process has been thoroughly rewarding. The level of collegiality and collaboration on everyone's part has been inspiring, and that's in no small measure to the open and non-hierarchical environment Richard has worked hard to create. I can't be in the studio on Monday due to teaching commitments, but I look forward to being back at rehearsals on Tuesday.
So stay tuned for more.
P
Monday, October 24, 2016
Long Division on Roundhouse Radio
As we head into the first week of rehearsals today, I thought I would share the link to a segment I did this past Friday on Roundhouse Radio's "Sense of Place" show, with host Minelle Mahtani. All you need to do is go here.
Minelle was terrific and she seemed keen to have me back before the show opens, perhaps with some cast members to read an excerpt from the play on air. Stay tuned for more on that, as well as updates on the rehearsal process.
P
Minelle was terrific and she seemed keen to have me back before the show opens, perhaps with some cast members to read an excerpt from the play on air. Stay tuned for more on that, as well as updates on the rehearsal process.
P
Sunday, October 23, 2016
Dance Weekend Roundup: Noam Gagnon, Lesley Telford, Donald Sales
What do the Bionic Woman, Leigh Bowery and Michel Tremblay all have in common? They're all influences on Noam Gagnon's ambitious new dance-theatre piece, This Crazy Show, which ran at The Dance Centre this past weekend. The Vision Impure choreographer and performer, working with a team that includes composer, sound designer and on-stage accordionist James Coomber, rehearsal director and outside eye Danielle Lecourtois, lighting designer Stéphane Ménigot, and performer Ken Blaschuk, among many other collaborators, has created a collage of kinetic, visual and sonic set pieces. This allows Gagnon to move in and through a range of different personas, all of them further refracted and multiplied in the sixteen disco balls suspended within Bryan Kenney's amazing set, and which are themselves spun or swung like pendulums at various points by Blaschuk, who enters in a series of increasingly elaborate and ornamental costumes (always, like Coomber, with his face covered, which is not the only curious, gender-bending and slightly problematic allusion to the veil over the course of the evening). The always charismatic Gagnon addresses the audience at the top of the show, inviting us, if we feel like it, to get up and dance at any point. However, the audience on Friday evening mostly left that to Gagnon, who in addition to a funky bit of interactive partnering with the disco balls timed to a series of glitches in Coomber's score, also later donned a pair of heels and a succession of wigs to perform a kind of off-balance stumbling slip-and-slide mop dance as Coomber played his accordion while lying prone on the floor.
In the talkback I led after the show with the Gagnon and his aforementioned collaborators, we were given further insight into the process behind creating the signature craziness of this particular show; according to Gagnon this mostly involved him abandoning the way he usually works, which is alone and pushing one, largely physical, idea to the max. This time, he took on whatever his collaborators threw at him, trusting that they would eventually find a way to put it all together. Gagnon was also asked about that invitation to dance he issues at the beginning, and what his response would be if someone took him up on his offer. Grinning broadly he said he would love it.
Earlier this afternoon, I also took in New Works' latest addition to its Dance Allsorts series at the Roundhouse. It was a double bill featuring work by Lesley Telford and Donald Sales for his company Project20. Telford's Only who is left is a reworking of the large-scale ensemble piece that she created for Arts Umbrella's Season Finale this past May, and which I wrote about here. Working this time with just seven dancers (many of whom are helping out with the choreographic process on Long Division), the effect of her opening play of having the dancers move into various heroic poses and then retreat affectlessly and almost listlessly into a kind of non-presentational on-stage embodiment registered much more powerfully--especially as this dialectic was both amplified by and served to undercut the very martial music she was working with (the name of which I should know). In the more intimate space of the Roundhouse and in this scaled down staging, I was also able to appreciate the way Telford is working with deliberately broken lines and an aesthetic of what I'll call anti-virtuosity: it's there in the bent leg extensions, the pirouettes that don't quite finish, the series of stutter steps and incredibly loud foot thumps all the dancers engage in, even the torpid way the lone male dancer whistles into his bullhorn. Who and what is all of this for is the question undergirding this piece, and it's one that can be asked not just of dance as a species of live performance, but of any human enterprise.
The latter theme is taken up by Donald Sales in his preview of Gates of Hell, a new work in development for his company Project20. Throughout this 30-minute work we hear in voiceover excerpts from two different British sociologists commenting on the conundrum of humanity, of how to a certain extent we are hard wired to be selfish, but how we also need to work together if we--and our planet--are to survive. This paradox is initiated in movement at the top of the show by having the six women dancers engage in a succession of brief duets that register at once as territorial provocations and invitations to share space. The theme of competition versus collaboration plays out elsewhere in the piece through the juxtaposing of individual solos and some gorgeous unison. The last piece I saw by Sales was gR33N, which I thought was weighed down by a confusing narrative structure and too much gimmicky stage business. It was a delight to see what is in effect a pure movement piece by the former Ballet BC dancer; that the work was set to a score by Long Division composer Owen Belton only made it that much better.
P
In the talkback I led after the show with the Gagnon and his aforementioned collaborators, we were given further insight into the process behind creating the signature craziness of this particular show; according to Gagnon this mostly involved him abandoning the way he usually works, which is alone and pushing one, largely physical, idea to the max. This time, he took on whatever his collaborators threw at him, trusting that they would eventually find a way to put it all together. Gagnon was also asked about that invitation to dance he issues at the beginning, and what his response would be if someone took him up on his offer. Grinning broadly he said he would love it.
Earlier this afternoon, I also took in New Works' latest addition to its Dance Allsorts series at the Roundhouse. It was a double bill featuring work by Lesley Telford and Donald Sales for his company Project20. Telford's Only who is left is a reworking of the large-scale ensemble piece that she created for Arts Umbrella's Season Finale this past May, and which I wrote about here. Working this time with just seven dancers (many of whom are helping out with the choreographic process on Long Division), the effect of her opening play of having the dancers move into various heroic poses and then retreat affectlessly and almost listlessly into a kind of non-presentational on-stage embodiment registered much more powerfully--especially as this dialectic was both amplified by and served to undercut the very martial music she was working with (the name of which I should know). In the more intimate space of the Roundhouse and in this scaled down staging, I was also able to appreciate the way Telford is working with deliberately broken lines and an aesthetic of what I'll call anti-virtuosity: it's there in the bent leg extensions, the pirouettes that don't quite finish, the series of stutter steps and incredibly loud foot thumps all the dancers engage in, even the torpid way the lone male dancer whistles into his bullhorn. Who and what is all of this for is the question undergirding this piece, and it's one that can be asked not just of dance as a species of live performance, but of any human enterprise.
The latter theme is taken up by Donald Sales in his preview of Gates of Hell, a new work in development for his company Project20. Throughout this 30-minute work we hear in voiceover excerpts from two different British sociologists commenting on the conundrum of humanity, of how to a certain extent we are hard wired to be selfish, but how we also need to work together if we--and our planet--are to survive. This paradox is initiated in movement at the top of the show by having the six women dancers engage in a succession of brief duets that register at once as territorial provocations and invitations to share space. The theme of competition versus collaboration plays out elsewhere in the piece through the juxtaposing of individual solos and some gorgeous unison. The last piece I saw by Sales was gR33N, which I thought was weighed down by a confusing narrative structure and too much gimmicky stage business. It was a delight to see what is in effect a pure movement piece by the former Ballet BC dancer; that the work was set to a score by Long Division composer Owen Belton only made it that much better.
P
Thursday, October 20, 2016
Long Division: In the Studio with Lesley Telford
Earlier today the choreographer of Long Division, Lesley Telford, invited me to drop by the studio at Arts Umbrella on Granville Island, where she was working with members of her new pilot research-training program for early career dancers to test out some possible studies for different movement sections in the play. (In fact, I invited myself and Lesley generously agreed that I could stop by.)
As I have previously mentioned, Lesley just happens to be working with seven amazingly talented dancers as part of this program, and they have each taken on a character in the play, drawing from the text (which was spread out across the studio floor when I arrived) to improvise and develop individual gesture phrases that may or may not eventually get set in some related form on our corresponding actors when we begin rehearsals next week (yikes!). Lesley asked each of the dancers--Aden as Paul, Corrine as Reid, Brenna as Jo, Maya as Lucy, Stephanie as Naathim, Caitlyn as Grace, and Katie as Alice (apologies for any misspellings)--to run through the solo phrases they had come up with and I was amazed at how bang-on their instincts were in terms of energy and tempo and line, as well as things like muscularity vs. flow, repetition, different levels and directional facings, and so on. I was also pleased to note that I could also read each character in the movement without reading the movement itself as telegraphing too obviously this or that character's psychology or profession. Which is to say that is the furthest thing from mimeticism or pantomime.
The dancers also ran through different group sequences that they had developed with Lesley, including a portion of what might become the opening walking pattern (there's a recurring falling into gravity motif that together with simple moments where the dancers just stop and acknowledge each other in space, or else let a loose arm swing back and forth that had me smiling the whole way through). Lesley has additionally choreographed a bit where the dancers move downstage as a clump, with each of them taking turns fading into the pack, which is a nice visual image for how the characters are connected to each other, whether they want to be or not. Another sequence Lesley tried in canon for the first time today, and despite the fact that some of the dancers were only just learning the movement, it was most effective. Ditto the moments when the dancers took turns manipulating each other.
It was all so exciting to see and it was a joy to share with the dancers some of my thoughts on each of the characters whose movement vocabularies they are helping to build. That vocabulary will necessarily look somewhat different (less dancerly, more pedestrian) when transferred to the actors, but the point is that no matter where it has come from, it has to be performed with intention. To that end, it will be an enormous help to have the dancers with us on Wednesday afternoons as we move through the rehearsal process.
I keep having to pinch myself that we have such a fabulous creative team.
P
As I have previously mentioned, Lesley just happens to be working with seven amazingly talented dancers as part of this program, and they have each taken on a character in the play, drawing from the text (which was spread out across the studio floor when I arrived) to improvise and develop individual gesture phrases that may or may not eventually get set in some related form on our corresponding actors when we begin rehearsals next week (yikes!). Lesley asked each of the dancers--Aden as Paul, Corrine as Reid, Brenna as Jo, Maya as Lucy, Stephanie as Naathim, Caitlyn as Grace, and Katie as Alice (apologies for any misspellings)--to run through the solo phrases they had come up with and I was amazed at how bang-on their instincts were in terms of energy and tempo and line, as well as things like muscularity vs. flow, repetition, different levels and directional facings, and so on. I was also pleased to note that I could also read each character in the movement without reading the movement itself as telegraphing too obviously this or that character's psychology or profession. Which is to say that is the furthest thing from mimeticism or pantomime.
The dancers also ran through different group sequences that they had developed with Lesley, including a portion of what might become the opening walking pattern (there's a recurring falling into gravity motif that together with simple moments where the dancers just stop and acknowledge each other in space, or else let a loose arm swing back and forth that had me smiling the whole way through). Lesley has additionally choreographed a bit where the dancers move downstage as a clump, with each of them taking turns fading into the pack, which is a nice visual image for how the characters are connected to each other, whether they want to be or not. Another sequence Lesley tried in canon for the first time today, and despite the fact that some of the dancers were only just learning the movement, it was most effective. Ditto the moments when the dancers took turns manipulating each other.
It was all so exciting to see and it was a joy to share with the dancers some of my thoughts on each of the characters whose movement vocabularies they are helping to build. That vocabulary will necessarily look somewhat different (less dancerly, more pedestrian) when transferred to the actors, but the point is that no matter where it has come from, it has to be performed with intention. To that end, it will be an enormous help to have the dancers with us on Wednesday afternoons as we move through the rehearsal process.
I keep having to pinch myself that we have such a fabulous creative team.
P
Sunday, October 16, 2016
The Flick at Granville Island Stage
I admit to hitherto being a somewhat skeptical celebrant at the church of Annie Baker, the thirtysomething American playwriting phenom who has taken the New York stage by storm with her extreme, almost hyper-naturalistic portraits of everyday folks going about their banally uninteresting lives, and struggling to make connections in language that is acutely and often painfully attuned to the prosaic speech patterns of our current digital age (lots of "likes" and "uhms" and many many pauses). The 2012 Arts Club production of Circle Mirror Transformation, the play that made Baker's name, struck me as disingenuously ingenuous in its unstudied approach to the baring of the inner lives of a group of amateur mechanicals in Vermont who find themselves part of a community centre theatrical workshop--and in my recollection that was only partly the fault of Nicola Cavendish's weak direction. However, the Arts Club's current production of The Flick, the play that won Baker the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, has made me rethink my assessment. The play contains all of Baker's trademark anti-theatrical conceits--long pauses, quotidian dialogue, real-time action in which nothing really happens--but this time there is more depth to her characters, not to mention the development of real dramatic tension between them. In this regard, the playwright seems to have substituted what I previously took to be winking irony for sincere empathy. She also embeds within this play a cogent aesthetic and socio-economic critique.
The Flick is set in a single-screen movie theatre in a small town in Massachusetts, one of the last such venues in the state that still shows 35 millimetre films. The plot centres on three main characters, all employees at the cinema. Avery, played by a superb Jesse Reid, is an upper-middle class college-age black man who is just starting out. Avery is a cinematic savant, with a deep knowledge of and affinity for the movies, but only those made on and projected as celluloid. He is also socially awkward in a way that suggests he resides somewhere on the autism spectrum, his phobias about shit and his depression about the breakup of his parents' marriage belying much deeper anxieties about the state of the world. Sam, a veteran employee in his thirties, is in charge of training Avery, which mainly consists of handing him a broom and waste bin into which to sweep the popcorn and other detritus left behind by the theatre's patrons (only one of whom, played by Aaron Paul Stewart, we ever see). Sam has never been to college and still lives with his parents, and Haig Sutherland portrays the character's affronted weariness, not to mention genuine woundedness, at the lot life has handed him (including at one point a painful skin rash) with a quiet dignity that by the end of the play almost makes Sam appear heroic. The third main character in the play is Rose, the projectionist, a super-sexual free spirit for whom Sam pines, but who only seems to have eyes for Avery. Shannon Chan-Kent manages the difficult trick of making Rose seem at once an unattainable romantic goddess (that she spends much of her time moving about silently in the illuminated projection booth of Lauchlin Johnston's amazing set helps on this front) and a flesh and blood desiring woman intent on getting what she wants (cue a hilarious seen of Rose twerking in front of Avery).
The inevitable romantic triangle becomes the most immediate source of dramatic conflict in the play, which stretches three hours and involves multiple scenes of Avery and Sam silently sweeping up popcorn. But it is part of Baker's durational method to show us that in the midst of these apparently trivial scenes of repetitive and routinized labour, and the "ordinary affects" that accompany that labour (to quote from the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart), things erupt without warning to throw us--and our characters--off course. What's more, the play suggests that these personal eruptions are actually symptomatic of a larger neoliberal ideology that, to quote another fancy-shmancy affect theorist, Lauren Berlant, conspire to keep folks like Sam especially in a constant state of "cruel optimism," perpetually longing for the thing they want, but which they are perpetually denied, or told they cannot have. Thus, Rose's clumsy attempted seduction of Avery during a weekend that Sam is away at a family wedding sets off a chain of mutual recriminations that actually climaxes in a tense scene in which race and class are set against each other as part of a zero-sum equation of employee solidarity versus individual self-interest. That is, the new owner of the movie theatre, having first announced his decision to move exclusively to digital projection (something that causes Avery physical pain), subsequently accuses Avery of being solely responsible for skimming off a portion of box office proceeds under the previous management, a scheme into which he was very reluctantly conscripted by Rose and Sam when he first started his job (because, as Rose puts it, "No one can live on $8.50 an hour"). Avery thinks the new boss is targeting him because he is black and wants his coworkers to come clean on the fact that they were also part of the plan, in the hopes that they'll all be forgiven. However, Rose suggests that there is less at stake for Avery because he is the son of well-paid academic whose tuition is free and who is only working this job as a hobby, whereas for her and Sam this is their livelihood. For his part, Sam sheepishly notes that Avery said he'd quit anyway if the place stopped screening actual celluloid films.
All of this is accomplished without any flashy screaming and yelling, just a simmering stand-off that is telegraphed mostly through silently accusatory glances. And it is to director Dean Paul Gibson's immense credit that he is able to get his actors to say so much with just the subtlest movements of their bodies, a slump of the shoulders or a refusal to turn around or the hanging of a head communicating so economically--but no less affectingly--defeat or pride or hurt. As Avery notes to Sam in a brief coda at the end of the play, these characters have been thrown together by circumstance, and that circumstance--a minimum wage job in a soon-to-be obsolete service industry--conspires against the chance of them ever becoming real friends. Given that, the kindnesses we do witness between the characters--including the one Sam makes to Avery at the very end--register as all the more powerful.
This is a superb production of a very thoughtful play. It deserves to be seen.
P
The Flick is set in a single-screen movie theatre in a small town in Massachusetts, one of the last such venues in the state that still shows 35 millimetre films. The plot centres on three main characters, all employees at the cinema. Avery, played by a superb Jesse Reid, is an upper-middle class college-age black man who is just starting out. Avery is a cinematic savant, with a deep knowledge of and affinity for the movies, but only those made on and projected as celluloid. He is also socially awkward in a way that suggests he resides somewhere on the autism spectrum, his phobias about shit and his depression about the breakup of his parents' marriage belying much deeper anxieties about the state of the world. Sam, a veteran employee in his thirties, is in charge of training Avery, which mainly consists of handing him a broom and waste bin into which to sweep the popcorn and other detritus left behind by the theatre's patrons (only one of whom, played by Aaron Paul Stewart, we ever see). Sam has never been to college and still lives with his parents, and Haig Sutherland portrays the character's affronted weariness, not to mention genuine woundedness, at the lot life has handed him (including at one point a painful skin rash) with a quiet dignity that by the end of the play almost makes Sam appear heroic. The third main character in the play is Rose, the projectionist, a super-sexual free spirit for whom Sam pines, but who only seems to have eyes for Avery. Shannon Chan-Kent manages the difficult trick of making Rose seem at once an unattainable romantic goddess (that she spends much of her time moving about silently in the illuminated projection booth of Lauchlin Johnston's amazing set helps on this front) and a flesh and blood desiring woman intent on getting what she wants (cue a hilarious seen of Rose twerking in front of Avery).
The inevitable romantic triangle becomes the most immediate source of dramatic conflict in the play, which stretches three hours and involves multiple scenes of Avery and Sam silently sweeping up popcorn. But it is part of Baker's durational method to show us that in the midst of these apparently trivial scenes of repetitive and routinized labour, and the "ordinary affects" that accompany that labour (to quote from the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart), things erupt without warning to throw us--and our characters--off course. What's more, the play suggests that these personal eruptions are actually symptomatic of a larger neoliberal ideology that, to quote another fancy-shmancy affect theorist, Lauren Berlant, conspire to keep folks like Sam especially in a constant state of "cruel optimism," perpetually longing for the thing they want, but which they are perpetually denied, or told they cannot have. Thus, Rose's clumsy attempted seduction of Avery during a weekend that Sam is away at a family wedding sets off a chain of mutual recriminations that actually climaxes in a tense scene in which race and class are set against each other as part of a zero-sum equation of employee solidarity versus individual self-interest. That is, the new owner of the movie theatre, having first announced his decision to move exclusively to digital projection (something that causes Avery physical pain), subsequently accuses Avery of being solely responsible for skimming off a portion of box office proceeds under the previous management, a scheme into which he was very reluctantly conscripted by Rose and Sam when he first started his job (because, as Rose puts it, "No one can live on $8.50 an hour"). Avery thinks the new boss is targeting him because he is black and wants his coworkers to come clean on the fact that they were also part of the plan, in the hopes that they'll all be forgiven. However, Rose suggests that there is less at stake for Avery because he is the son of well-paid academic whose tuition is free and who is only working this job as a hobby, whereas for her and Sam this is their livelihood. For his part, Sam sheepishly notes that Avery said he'd quit anyway if the place stopped screening actual celluloid films.
All of this is accomplished without any flashy screaming and yelling, just a simmering stand-off that is telegraphed mostly through silently accusatory glances. And it is to director Dean Paul Gibson's immense credit that he is able to get his actors to say so much with just the subtlest movements of their bodies, a slump of the shoulders or a refusal to turn around or the hanging of a head communicating so economically--but no less affectingly--defeat or pride or hurt. As Avery notes to Sam in a brief coda at the end of the play, these characters have been thrown together by circumstance, and that circumstance--a minimum wage job in a soon-to-be obsolete service industry--conspires against the chance of them ever becoming real friends. Given that, the kindnesses we do witness between the characters--including the one Sam makes to Avery at the very end--register as all the more powerful.
This is a superb production of a very thoughtful play. It deserves to be seen.
P
Saturday, October 15, 2016
Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 27
Yesterday we didn't have an interview subject booked, so Justine volunteered to recount her dance history to Alexa and I. This is something that the three of us are each supposed to do before this project is over. Mine will be very short.
Justine has been in Vancouver exactly a decade, arriving in 2006 with her partner, Josh Hite, who was starting an MFA at UBC. At this point, as Justine noted, she thought she had retired from dance, leaving behind a long career in Toronto without much regret (more on this below), as well as fourteen months in Los Angeles when she danced for two companies/entertainment franchises that seemed the antithesis of her rigorous contemporary training. The first was Diavolo Dance Company, which combined dance, acrobatics and circus arts, and whose death-defying stunts on stage were always preceded by cult-like backstage circle in which company members were required to say "I will die for you" (Justine recounted a terrifying story of a forward leap off a rocking boat that she had to do, but without the normal counter-ballast because one of her fellow members' feet had been crushed by the weight of the boat). The second troupe was called Hot Thing, and involved women in fishnets and short shorts doing the splits and lots of bootie pops at various celebrity clubs around LA.
After all of this, upon arriving in Vancouver Justine was quite content to be waitressing at Rangoli instead of dancing professionally. But eventually, through a connection with one of her former teachers at Ryerson in Toronto (where Justine did her post-secondary dance training), she was invited by Artemis Gordon at Arts Umbrella to sub for some of the classes normally taught by Yannick Matthon, who was at that time very often on the road with Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot. Gordon then invited Justine to join as a full-time faculty member, and also to help her run the school administratively. Justine said that it was an insane amount of work and that the teaching was very hard, but that it made her a better dancer. It was also while at Arts Umbrella that Justine met Emily Molnar, John Alleyne (with whom she collaborated on a section of The Four Seasons), and various of the then company members of Ballet BC--an institutional connection that Justine maintains to this day.
Indeed, one of Justine's first choreographic forays in Vancouver was to remount a section of a duet she had created in Toronto on herself and recently retired Ballet BC rehearsal director Sylvain Senez for the 2009 iteration of 12 Minutes Max (which was curated by Joyce Rosario and Tanya Marquardt). The piece got picked up by Donna Spencer for the Dancing on the Edge Festival, and together with new work that Justine was creating with her partner Josh--notably, Copy, a performance-cum-installation at the Roundhouse that featured, among others, Megan and Vanessa Goodman, Molly McDermott and Laura Avery--Justine suddenly found herself making dances again, albeit in a way (and primarily as a result of her interdisciplinary collaborations with visual artists like Josh and Jen Wei and Brendan Fernandes and Kristina Lee Podevsa) that was fundamentally different in its conceptual focus from what she had previously understood dance to be.
Parallel to this Justine was also teaching, offering a class in contemporary technique at Harbour Dance (then the only such class in the city), and collaborating with Day Helesic to launch what would eventually become Working Class (now overseen by the Training Society of Vancouver and run out of The Dance Centre). And she was dancing in other folks' work, including Jennifer Mascall's White Spider, Company 605's The Inheritor Album, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg's Highgate, and pieces by Wen Wei Wang, Claire French, Science Friction (Farley Johansson and Shannon Moreno), and others.
It was only after narrating her most recent dance history that Justine circled back to her time in Toronto, which began with her joining Robert Desroisers' eponymous dance theatre company upon graduation from Ryerson. During her years in the company, which toured regularly, she learned that nothing gets easier, you only become a better dancer. She also recounted stories of lost passports in Miami and drunken pool accidents in Bermuda. Interestingly, Justine framed her early career in Toronto in the context of her post-Vancouver returns to the city for the collaborative peer-to-peer choreographic and teaching workshops/explorations/creative exchanges 8 Days and Love In, which she noted have been so instrumental to the dance relationships she has formed in the past decade.
To this end, in answering the "Why Vancouver?" question Justine noted that the collaborators she now has in Toronto (including Jenn Goodwin, Heidi Strauss, Julia Sasso, and others) are a result of what she's done since moving to Vancouver. While initially Justine had absolutely no intention of staying here, she stated that she now has a deep support network, and that she also wouldn't be making the kind of work she's making if she hadn't come to the city. She likewise affirmed that for her the future is exciting and potentially limitless, not least because of a new generation of "badass dancers" for whom ideas of expanded choreographic practices are just a given and who have access to a range of resources that weren't available a decade ago. The key, according to Justine, is just to learn to share those resources and, in so doing, to do less in order to do more.
P
Justine has been in Vancouver exactly a decade, arriving in 2006 with her partner, Josh Hite, who was starting an MFA at UBC. At this point, as Justine noted, she thought she had retired from dance, leaving behind a long career in Toronto without much regret (more on this below), as well as fourteen months in Los Angeles when she danced for two companies/entertainment franchises that seemed the antithesis of her rigorous contemporary training. The first was Diavolo Dance Company, which combined dance, acrobatics and circus arts, and whose death-defying stunts on stage were always preceded by cult-like backstage circle in which company members were required to say "I will die for you" (Justine recounted a terrifying story of a forward leap off a rocking boat that she had to do, but without the normal counter-ballast because one of her fellow members' feet had been crushed by the weight of the boat). The second troupe was called Hot Thing, and involved women in fishnets and short shorts doing the splits and lots of bootie pops at various celebrity clubs around LA.
After all of this, upon arriving in Vancouver Justine was quite content to be waitressing at Rangoli instead of dancing professionally. But eventually, through a connection with one of her former teachers at Ryerson in Toronto (where Justine did her post-secondary dance training), she was invited by Artemis Gordon at Arts Umbrella to sub for some of the classes normally taught by Yannick Matthon, who was at that time very often on the road with Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot. Gordon then invited Justine to join as a full-time faculty member, and also to help her run the school administratively. Justine said that it was an insane amount of work and that the teaching was very hard, but that it made her a better dancer. It was also while at Arts Umbrella that Justine met Emily Molnar, John Alleyne (with whom she collaborated on a section of The Four Seasons), and various of the then company members of Ballet BC--an institutional connection that Justine maintains to this day.
Indeed, one of Justine's first choreographic forays in Vancouver was to remount a section of a duet she had created in Toronto on herself and recently retired Ballet BC rehearsal director Sylvain Senez for the 2009 iteration of 12 Minutes Max (which was curated by Joyce Rosario and Tanya Marquardt). The piece got picked up by Donna Spencer for the Dancing on the Edge Festival, and together with new work that Justine was creating with her partner Josh--notably, Copy, a performance-cum-installation at the Roundhouse that featured, among others, Megan and Vanessa Goodman, Molly McDermott and Laura Avery--Justine suddenly found herself making dances again, albeit in a way (and primarily as a result of her interdisciplinary collaborations with visual artists like Josh and Jen Wei and Brendan Fernandes and Kristina Lee Podevsa) that was fundamentally different in its conceptual focus from what she had previously understood dance to be.
Parallel to this Justine was also teaching, offering a class in contemporary technique at Harbour Dance (then the only such class in the city), and collaborating with Day Helesic to launch what would eventually become Working Class (now overseen by the Training Society of Vancouver and run out of The Dance Centre). And she was dancing in other folks' work, including Jennifer Mascall's White Spider, Company 605's The Inheritor Album, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg's Highgate, and pieces by Wen Wei Wang, Claire French, Science Friction (Farley Johansson and Shannon Moreno), and others.
It was only after narrating her most recent dance history that Justine circled back to her time in Toronto, which began with her joining Robert Desroisers' eponymous dance theatre company upon graduation from Ryerson. During her years in the company, which toured regularly, she learned that nothing gets easier, you only become a better dancer. She also recounted stories of lost passports in Miami and drunken pool accidents in Bermuda. Interestingly, Justine framed her early career in Toronto in the context of her post-Vancouver returns to the city for the collaborative peer-to-peer choreographic and teaching workshops/explorations/creative exchanges 8 Days and Love In, which she noted have been so instrumental to the dance relationships she has formed in the past decade.
To this end, in answering the "Why Vancouver?" question Justine noted that the collaborators she now has in Toronto (including Jenn Goodwin, Heidi Strauss, Julia Sasso, and others) are a result of what she's done since moving to Vancouver. While initially Justine had absolutely no intention of staying here, she stated that she now has a deep support network, and that she also wouldn't be making the kind of work she's making if she hadn't come to the city. She likewise affirmed that for her the future is exciting and potentially limitless, not least because of a new generation of "badass dancers" for whom ideas of expanded choreographic practices are just a given and who have access to a range of resources that weren't available a decade ago. The key, according to Justine, is just to learn to share those resources and, in so doing, to do less in order to do more.
P
Thursday, October 13, 2016
Major Motion Picture at The Firehall
Out Innerspace's ambitious new full-length work of dance-theatre, Major Motion Picture, had its official premiere this past January at Dance Victoria. Now Vancouver audiences get to see the piece through this Saturday as it launches the Firehall Arts Centre's 2016/17 season of dance programming.
As their title suggests, Out Innerspace's David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen have drawn inspiration from film history, with various noir, spaghetti western, and martial arts motifs, among others, referenced in the choreography. Indeed, one of the many pleasures of watching this piece comes from revelling in how the movement, both in more rapid moments of horizontal seriality and in slower and sometimes static group massings out of which different bodies appear (and, just as ominously, into which others disappear), approaches the kinetic equivalent of cinematic montage. The terrific physicality of all the performers--Raymond and Tregarthen, joined by Laura Avery, Ralph Escamillan, Elissa Hanson, Arash Khakpour, Renée Sigoun and apprentice Elya Grant (all graduates of OIS's pre-professional training program, Modus Operandi)--is a reminder that for film theorists like Gilles Deleuze the "movement-image" of cinema is fundamentally rooted in the gestural vocabulary of dance. To this end, Deleuze references Charlie Chaplin and Fred Astaire, and there are arguably homages to both of these men's film oeuvres in MMP, not least in the funny and romantic closing "duet" that Tregarthen performs with a giant overcoat.
However, that overcoat is mostly worn throughout the piece by three other bodies, whose feet and arms we see moving in striking coordination, but whose collective torso remains headless. This overlord figure seems to preside over some dystopic future in which two different bands of comrades--one group all in black who appear to have mostly been cowed into reactive subservience by the system in which they find themselves, the other clad in white patterned onesies and balaclavas, who seem to incarnate a more anarchic impulse toward disrupting and even overthrowing that system--are set against each other. For some reason all of this put me in mind of Pink Floyd's The Wall, with the headless overcoated figure a version of the sadistic headmaster who grinds the students into meat, and with that film's aesthetic mix of live action and animation also translating into this work's unique juxtaposition of super sped-up and almost stop-motion choreography. The work is also filled with multiple moments of the dancers running on stage, doing double takes, occasionally crashing into or grappling with each other, and then dashing back into the wings--which suggested to me those sequences from Saturday morning cartoons when Scooby and Shaggy and Thelma and all the others keep running in and out of doorways and hallways, every now and then meeting up in the middle, but no one really knowing whom they might be chasing or fleeing, and why.
There is in fact a wall in this piece. It very prominently fills the downstage space at the top of the show, but is slowly pulled upstage during the spoken word prologue, in which Sigouin (I think) recites a mantra of "This is for you" into a stand-up mic stage right. (Now that I think of it, there are shades of Pink Floyd's "Hey You" lyrics in that opening interpellative direct address, and Sigouin at the mic at the top of the show portends Khakpour's later heavy breathing solo with an old-style hand-held mic later on, all of which brings to mind the Bob Geldof character ranting into a microphone in The Wall...) The wall is subsequently transformed into a screen, onto which the piece's stunning video designs are projected. This includes images of the performers--and also the audience--that are captured live via a light and motion-sensitive and radio frequency transmitting mobile camera hung from the stage left lighting grid. Seeking out different dancers' bodies crouched and cowering in the wings--including in one eerie moment the figure of Hanson looking at what I took to be a representation of her character's younger self on a cell phone--the camera is the real controlling mechanism in this hyper-mediated world, suggesting in turn that in our contemporary surveillance culture we may no longer have any real autonomy over any of our movements.
For all of these instances of revelation, I was left thinking that MMP never quite gelled into the sum of its parts. There were moments of amazing physical artistry--from the collective arraying of bodies and arms into a scary talking monster (whose image later returns on screen) and an amazing shaking solo by Raymond, to high impact partnering and richly organic segues into very satisfying bits of group unison. And yet, taken together, these moments felt inchoate in terms of the larger story being told: are the black and white groups at war with each other, or two different but equally oppressed groups; is the overcoated overlord figure defeated in the end and, if so, why the playfully romantic dance with Tregarthen that concludes the piece? All of which is to say that while I was definitely aware that some sort of narrative was being constructed in the piece (something I'm all for in contemporary dance-theatre and what generally attracts me to the work of Out Innerspace), I couldn't figure out how that narrative cohered. I'm not saying that I need meaning laid out for me or some kind of closure; but I do need an organizational logic. I also crave an emotional investment, which in this case was also lacking. I was definitely awed several times last night, but I can't say that I was genuinely moved.
P
As their title suggests, Out Innerspace's David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen have drawn inspiration from film history, with various noir, spaghetti western, and martial arts motifs, among others, referenced in the choreography. Indeed, one of the many pleasures of watching this piece comes from revelling in how the movement, both in more rapid moments of horizontal seriality and in slower and sometimes static group massings out of which different bodies appear (and, just as ominously, into which others disappear), approaches the kinetic equivalent of cinematic montage. The terrific physicality of all the performers--Raymond and Tregarthen, joined by Laura Avery, Ralph Escamillan, Elissa Hanson, Arash Khakpour, Renée Sigoun and apprentice Elya Grant (all graduates of OIS's pre-professional training program, Modus Operandi)--is a reminder that for film theorists like Gilles Deleuze the "movement-image" of cinema is fundamentally rooted in the gestural vocabulary of dance. To this end, Deleuze references Charlie Chaplin and Fred Astaire, and there are arguably homages to both of these men's film oeuvres in MMP, not least in the funny and romantic closing "duet" that Tregarthen performs with a giant overcoat.
However, that overcoat is mostly worn throughout the piece by three other bodies, whose feet and arms we see moving in striking coordination, but whose collective torso remains headless. This overlord figure seems to preside over some dystopic future in which two different bands of comrades--one group all in black who appear to have mostly been cowed into reactive subservience by the system in which they find themselves, the other clad in white patterned onesies and balaclavas, who seem to incarnate a more anarchic impulse toward disrupting and even overthrowing that system--are set against each other. For some reason all of this put me in mind of Pink Floyd's The Wall, with the headless overcoated figure a version of the sadistic headmaster who grinds the students into meat, and with that film's aesthetic mix of live action and animation also translating into this work's unique juxtaposition of super sped-up and almost stop-motion choreography. The work is also filled with multiple moments of the dancers running on stage, doing double takes, occasionally crashing into or grappling with each other, and then dashing back into the wings--which suggested to me those sequences from Saturday morning cartoons when Scooby and Shaggy and Thelma and all the others keep running in and out of doorways and hallways, every now and then meeting up in the middle, but no one really knowing whom they might be chasing or fleeing, and why.
There is in fact a wall in this piece. It very prominently fills the downstage space at the top of the show, but is slowly pulled upstage during the spoken word prologue, in which Sigouin (I think) recites a mantra of "This is for you" into a stand-up mic stage right. (Now that I think of it, there are shades of Pink Floyd's "Hey You" lyrics in that opening interpellative direct address, and Sigouin at the mic at the top of the show portends Khakpour's later heavy breathing solo with an old-style hand-held mic later on, all of which brings to mind the Bob Geldof character ranting into a microphone in The Wall...) The wall is subsequently transformed into a screen, onto which the piece's stunning video designs are projected. This includes images of the performers--and also the audience--that are captured live via a light and motion-sensitive and radio frequency transmitting mobile camera hung from the stage left lighting grid. Seeking out different dancers' bodies crouched and cowering in the wings--including in one eerie moment the figure of Hanson looking at what I took to be a representation of her character's younger self on a cell phone--the camera is the real controlling mechanism in this hyper-mediated world, suggesting in turn that in our contemporary surveillance culture we may no longer have any real autonomy over any of our movements.
For all of these instances of revelation, I was left thinking that MMP never quite gelled into the sum of its parts. There were moments of amazing physical artistry--from the collective arraying of bodies and arms into a scary talking monster (whose image later returns on screen) and an amazing shaking solo by Raymond, to high impact partnering and richly organic segues into very satisfying bits of group unison. And yet, taken together, these moments felt inchoate in terms of the larger story being told: are the black and white groups at war with each other, or two different but equally oppressed groups; is the overcoated overlord figure defeated in the end and, if so, why the playfully romantic dance with Tregarthen that concludes the piece? All of which is to say that while I was definitely aware that some sort of narrative was being constructed in the piece (something I'm all for in contemporary dance-theatre and what generally attracts me to the work of Out Innerspace), I couldn't figure out how that narrative cohered. I'm not saying that I need meaning laid out for me or some kind of closure; but I do need an organizational logic. I also crave an emotional investment, which in this case was also lacking. I was definitely awed several times last night, but I can't say that I was genuinely moved.
P
Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 26
Yesterday Justine and Alexa and I were finally able to coordinate our schedules to undertake our first group interview since before the summer. Luckily for us our interview subject was Amber Funk Barton, who was so open and generous with us. The recounting of her dance history was like a long love letter to the community: starting with Arts Umbrella's Artemis Gordon, who took Amber under her wing following Amber's graduation from high school (throughout which Amber had been doing Goh Ballet Academy's half-day program), and eventually steering her towards Ballet BC's mentor program.
Following the conclusion of her formal training, Amber was lucky to dance for and receive further guidance from three other icons in the community: Joe Laughlin (where she first met James Gnam and Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg), Judith Marcuse, and Lola McLaughlin. Lola took Amber on her first tour of Europe, an epic transmigration of several major Vancouver dance artists and companies to Croatia coordinated by The Dance Centre's Mirna Zagar. Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras of Holy Body Tattoo, Alvin Erasga, battery opera, Crystal Pite, Joe Laughlin, and others all made the journey. Gingras, in particular, would become a major influence on Amber, inviting her to be part of Heart is an Arena and teaching Amber that dance was as much about embodying ideas and energy as it was about performing the steps correctly.
During this time Amber was also starting to create her own work, beginning with two full-length creations in four months. As Amber said, in retrospect the way she went about launching her choreographic career was naively ambitious. For example, she created her company, the response, in 2008 because she had maxed out her eligibility for individual project funding. But she had an idea for a new piece and so she created a company in order to tap into a different pool of money and make the work happen. The result was Risk, which I well remember seeing at The Firehall, with Amber, the two Joshes (Beamish and Martin), David Raymond, and Heather L. Gray creating kinetic magic in and around a couch (a prop that Amber said they incorporated from the rehearsal studio upstairs at the Firehall). Amber took time to credit Firehall Artistic Producer Donna Spencer for her faith in her work, as well as her immense contributions to the development and promotion of dance in Vancouver more generally. For example, it was Donna who first connected Amber with Shay Kuebler, commissioning what would become Status Quo from them, and facilitating the work's subsequent travel to the Canada Dance Festival. Amber also noted that what she appreciated about Donna was that she was willing to invest in an artist's career over the long haul, recognizing that mistakes made in the short term would eventually pay off in more mature and satisfying work.
In terms of memorable experiences (both good and bad), Amber recounted the time she fainted on stage during rehearsal for Lola's piece while in Croatia. As Amber put it, the rehearsal was very hot, and she was wearing a plastic dress; but she didn't want to say anything, as she feared looking unprofessional. And so she continued to try to perform her steps and she collapsed to the floor. Afterwards Lola apparently worried that Amber might be pregnant. Then there was the story behind the creation of Hero and Heroine, a 30-minute duet that Amber created for herself and Josh Martin in 2010. Showing an excerpt of the work-in-progress at Dance Victoria for a bunch of different presenters changed Amber's perspective on how and why she makes work, and when and with whom she decides to share it. The work was apparently ripped apart, and in a way that reflected more of the presenters' own internal aesthetic battles than the integrity of the piece per se. Still, the experience taught Amber that she had to create work on her own terms, and not in order to please individuals who might be able to help tour that work.
Amber concluded her interview by saying that her decision to forge a career in dance was always simultaneously a decision to have that career here, in Vancouver. She also very wisely said that thinking about the future always involves a process of checking in with where she is at in the present, and that currently she is being sustained by and getting renewed energy from teaching. She noted that being a dance artist is undeniably hard, but that part of her also loves and thrives on the rigour. She also said that as a first world artist with access to resources that other folks in the world don't have (and no matter one's grumbling about how even more of such resources should be made available), she felt it was her responsibility to keep creating: because others elsewhere can't; and also because if you stop then the system wins. It was a very moving conclusion to an incredibly wise and wonderful interview.
P
Following the conclusion of her formal training, Amber was lucky to dance for and receive further guidance from three other icons in the community: Joe Laughlin (where she first met James Gnam and Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg), Judith Marcuse, and Lola McLaughlin. Lola took Amber on her first tour of Europe, an epic transmigration of several major Vancouver dance artists and companies to Croatia coordinated by The Dance Centre's Mirna Zagar. Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras of Holy Body Tattoo, Alvin Erasga, battery opera, Crystal Pite, Joe Laughlin, and others all made the journey. Gingras, in particular, would become a major influence on Amber, inviting her to be part of Heart is an Arena and teaching Amber that dance was as much about embodying ideas and energy as it was about performing the steps correctly.
During this time Amber was also starting to create her own work, beginning with two full-length creations in four months. As Amber said, in retrospect the way she went about launching her choreographic career was naively ambitious. For example, she created her company, the response, in 2008 because she had maxed out her eligibility for individual project funding. But she had an idea for a new piece and so she created a company in order to tap into a different pool of money and make the work happen. The result was Risk, which I well remember seeing at The Firehall, with Amber, the two Joshes (Beamish and Martin), David Raymond, and Heather L. Gray creating kinetic magic in and around a couch (a prop that Amber said they incorporated from the rehearsal studio upstairs at the Firehall). Amber took time to credit Firehall Artistic Producer Donna Spencer for her faith in her work, as well as her immense contributions to the development and promotion of dance in Vancouver more generally. For example, it was Donna who first connected Amber with Shay Kuebler, commissioning what would become Status Quo from them, and facilitating the work's subsequent travel to the Canada Dance Festival. Amber also noted that what she appreciated about Donna was that she was willing to invest in an artist's career over the long haul, recognizing that mistakes made in the short term would eventually pay off in more mature and satisfying work.
In terms of memorable experiences (both good and bad), Amber recounted the time she fainted on stage during rehearsal for Lola's piece while in Croatia. As Amber put it, the rehearsal was very hot, and she was wearing a plastic dress; but she didn't want to say anything, as she feared looking unprofessional. And so she continued to try to perform her steps and she collapsed to the floor. Afterwards Lola apparently worried that Amber might be pregnant. Then there was the story behind the creation of Hero and Heroine, a 30-minute duet that Amber created for herself and Josh Martin in 2010. Showing an excerpt of the work-in-progress at Dance Victoria for a bunch of different presenters changed Amber's perspective on how and why she makes work, and when and with whom she decides to share it. The work was apparently ripped apart, and in a way that reflected more of the presenters' own internal aesthetic battles than the integrity of the piece per se. Still, the experience taught Amber that she had to create work on her own terms, and not in order to please individuals who might be able to help tour that work.
Amber concluded her interview by saying that her decision to forge a career in dance was always simultaneously a decision to have that career here, in Vancouver. She also very wisely said that thinking about the future always involves a process of checking in with where she is at in the present, and that currently she is being sustained by and getting renewed energy from teaching. She noted that being a dance artist is undeniably hard, but that part of her also loves and thrives on the rigour. She also said that as a first world artist with access to resources that other folks in the world don't have (and no matter one's grumbling about how even more of such resources should be made available), she felt it was her responsibility to keep creating: because others elsewhere can't; and also because if you stop then the system wins. It was a very moving conclusion to an incredibly wise and wonderful interview.
P
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Angels in America at Studio 58
Twenty-three years after it premiered on Broadway, Vancouver audiences get to revisit the first part of Tony Kushner's searing and historically epic AIDS drama Angels in America not once, but twice this theatrical season. The Arts Club's staging of "Millennium Approaches," which together with its bookend, "Perestroika," makes up Kushner's swirling and queerly Shavian "Gay Fantasia on National Themes," will be up at the Stanley next March. But right now, Studio 58 launches its 2016/2017 season with its own production of the same play. Under the assured direction of Rachel Peake, it's a terrific take on what is now a contemporary classic (if that doesn't seem like an oxymoron).
While Kushner's richly complex and linguistically luxurious dissection of American politics ensures that the work transcends its Reagan-era setting (indeed, the resonances of Roy Cohn's take-no-prisoners conservative bluster with Donald Trump's current election campaign are eerie), Peake nevertheless wisely eschews the potential trap of making this an artifactual period piece (though the 80s pop soundtrack pre-show and in between scene changes was greatly appreciated). She also enlists her incredibly talented cast and crew to help create the play's many moments of design magic in ways that are utterly quotidian, but no less breathtaking because of that. The Angel does not crash through the ceiling of Prior Walter's Manhattan apartment in this version of the play; instead, she enters on foot from upstage, the twinned concave walls of Drew Facey's elegantly simple set parting to let her and her impressive wingspan through as rock star lighting illuminates her way. A small army of silent but physically adept supernumeraries is crucial to achieving the Spielbergian effect of this climactic scene, as they are to ensuring earlier low-fi, high-impact bits of stage spectacle, as well as, more generally, the smooth transitions of set and properties between scenes. In this regard, Peake takes to heart Kushner's injunction in his notes to the play that it is alright--and maybe even imperative--that the wires show, as seeing the unseen hands that give shape to and support a worldview (be it an imagined theatrical one or an all too real ideological one) is a crucial element of the politics of this play.
But what deserves the most praise in this production are the performances. Dramaturgically, Kushner's play calls for many of the parts to be double cast, a conceit designed not just to save money, but that also thematically structures elements of the text, with different characters played by the same actor often echoing each other in terms of their dialogue or actions. However, in a student production like this it makes sense to draw upon Studio 58's deep talent pool and have each character, no matter how briefly on stage, played by a different actor. Happily, almost all of the supporting ensemble make the most of their short time in the spotlight, with Chloe Richardson's intensely physical Mr. Lies, Stephanie Wong's acerbic and practical Sister Ella Chapter, Krista Skwarok's weary and wise Rabbi Isador Chemelwitz, and Camille Legg's Republican Washington fixer Martin Heller making especially memorable impressions (and on the latter two fronts I was glad to see that Peake preserved the play's penchant for cross-gender casting). Josh Chambers and Raylene Harewood play Belize and Hannah Pitt, respectively, characters who enter late in the plot of "Millennium Approaches," but who become important figures in "Perestroika." Here both actors deliver quietly confident performances, with Chambers channeling just the right amount of camp and simmering resentment in Belize's dealings with "white crackers" like Louis, and with the physically tiny Harewood nevertheless giving us a sense of how the no-nonsense Hannah is able to command others to do her bidding, while also revealing a bit of the compassion that lurks underneath Hannah's hard exterior.
Conor Stinson O'Gorman's take on the historical figure of Roy M. Cohn, the closeted gay henchman of Joseph McCarthy and de facto executioner of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, is an idiosyncratic one. He dials down the loud outward bluster and the explosive kinetic energy that I've seen other actors bring to the part (including F. Murray Abraham on Broadway and Al Pacino in the HBO miniseries); combined with a way of speaking that suggested to me more midwestern drawl than New York Jewish verbosity, and an almost laconic way of dealing with Roy's beloved multi-line phone in the scene in which the character is introduced, I was worried that things would go south very quickly with this crucial part. But cumulatively, over the course of the play, O'Gorman is able to give us a sense of the anger and deep self-hatred roiling underneath this Roy's more contained and deliberative surface appearance, which makes the character's late-in-the-play confrontation with his wayward surrogate son, Joe, all the more terrifying when it is unleashed in all its fullness of volume, physicality, and latent eroticism.
At its heart, however, this production is anchored by the stellar performances of the actors who play the two sets of couples whose relationships are imploding. Mason Temple and Elizabeth Barrett, as the unhappy Mormans Joe and Harper Pitt, and Brandon Bagg and Julien Galipeau as Louis Ironson and Prior Walter, gay lovers dealing with Prior's recent AIDS diagnosis, manage the delicate dance of conveying with utter conviction and heartbreaking honesty just how much they love their partners, but also how completely and hopelessly alone they are. The montaged scene in which Joe and Louis separately tell Harper and Prior that they are leaving is tricky not just because of all the different emotions that must be kept in balance, but also because of the rapid shifts in intercut dialogue. Here it is accomplished with affecting precision on both fronts, and that is thanks as much to savvy choices Peake has made in her casting as it is to her own exacting direction.
Temple's Joe, struggling with his repressed homosexual desires and with the weight of Roy's poisoned mentorship, is literally gutted by the years of denying and stamping out what he wants, coughing up his self-lacerated insides in the form of a bleeding ulcer. Joe, who feels so unloved, in fact becomes the least lovable character by the end of the second part of Angels in America; but it is to Temple's immense credit that here we genuinely understand Joe's struggle and even support Roy's and Louis's separate urgings of him to transgress. That such a transgression comes at the expense of the happiness of his long-suffering wife, Harper, is part of this play's heartbreak; Barrett plays this wronged character, who is also something of a truth-saying Cassandra in terms of what (both with and without the aid of pills) she sees going on around her in the universe, with such openness and vulnerability that the flip side of her pain, namely the wonder she experiences with the aid of Mr. Lies during her hallucinations, comes as such a marvellous and surprising balm. It is hard to convey genuine astonishment on stage, but Barrett accomplishes this task with great naturalness and spontaneity, such that the delight she experiences upon arriving in Antarctica is immediately transferred as something to share and feel alongside her.
Any actor who takes on the part of Louis has his work cut out for him. Not only does the character have the most lines to speak, many of them further freighted with the weight of Kushner's dialectical philosophy, but Louis also does the most despicable thing of all the characters in the play: he walks out on his lover at his time of greatest need. Bagg is an utter natural as Louis, luxuriating in the complex richness of Kushner's dialogue while also conveying how utterly wracked by guilt is this man who, as adept as he is at spouting the theoretical cant of revolutionary struggle, is not so good with the practical day-to-day struggles of dealing with sickness and death. Bagg also successfully taps into his character's gay Jewish charm; despite the actor's avoir du pois and bad hairpiece, it is easy to see why both Prior and Joe would fall in love with Louis. Finally, there is Galipeau as Prior, fabulous chosen messenger of the heavens who would give up that role for a little bit more time as a depassé diva on earth. Galipeau is tall and muscular, with a deep and sonorous voice that commands attention, making it easy to understand why he might be an angelic spokesperson. But he is also not afraid to tap into his feminine side, moving with lightness and grace while in drag and also, in the face of his illness and Louis's abandonment, showing us just how small and afraid he feels. The aforementioned split scene, which culminates in a shattered Prior indicting Louis for his crimes, is all the more powerful for how spent and empty and even more alone Galipeau makes Prior appear after Louis has gone.
In my personal repertoire of canonical works of Western drama, Angels in America holds a special place. I saw the play soon after it opened on Broadway, and subsequently in a very accomplished staging in Seattle. I also own DVDs of the HBO miniseries and have taught the play many times (and will be again this spring, in conjunction with the Arts Club production). Coincidentally one of the students I introduced the play to more than a decade ago during a course devoted to Kushner at SFU came up to me at intermission. He reminded me of the class and said that this was actually the first time he was seeing the play live. We both agreed that this production was an absolutely stellar way to experience this work in performance.
P
While Kushner's richly complex and linguistically luxurious dissection of American politics ensures that the work transcends its Reagan-era setting (indeed, the resonances of Roy Cohn's take-no-prisoners conservative bluster with Donald Trump's current election campaign are eerie), Peake nevertheless wisely eschews the potential trap of making this an artifactual period piece (though the 80s pop soundtrack pre-show and in between scene changes was greatly appreciated). She also enlists her incredibly talented cast and crew to help create the play's many moments of design magic in ways that are utterly quotidian, but no less breathtaking because of that. The Angel does not crash through the ceiling of Prior Walter's Manhattan apartment in this version of the play; instead, she enters on foot from upstage, the twinned concave walls of Drew Facey's elegantly simple set parting to let her and her impressive wingspan through as rock star lighting illuminates her way. A small army of silent but physically adept supernumeraries is crucial to achieving the Spielbergian effect of this climactic scene, as they are to ensuring earlier low-fi, high-impact bits of stage spectacle, as well as, more generally, the smooth transitions of set and properties between scenes. In this regard, Peake takes to heart Kushner's injunction in his notes to the play that it is alright--and maybe even imperative--that the wires show, as seeing the unseen hands that give shape to and support a worldview (be it an imagined theatrical one or an all too real ideological one) is a crucial element of the politics of this play.
But what deserves the most praise in this production are the performances. Dramaturgically, Kushner's play calls for many of the parts to be double cast, a conceit designed not just to save money, but that also thematically structures elements of the text, with different characters played by the same actor often echoing each other in terms of their dialogue or actions. However, in a student production like this it makes sense to draw upon Studio 58's deep talent pool and have each character, no matter how briefly on stage, played by a different actor. Happily, almost all of the supporting ensemble make the most of their short time in the spotlight, with Chloe Richardson's intensely physical Mr. Lies, Stephanie Wong's acerbic and practical Sister Ella Chapter, Krista Skwarok's weary and wise Rabbi Isador Chemelwitz, and Camille Legg's Republican Washington fixer Martin Heller making especially memorable impressions (and on the latter two fronts I was glad to see that Peake preserved the play's penchant for cross-gender casting). Josh Chambers and Raylene Harewood play Belize and Hannah Pitt, respectively, characters who enter late in the plot of "Millennium Approaches," but who become important figures in "Perestroika." Here both actors deliver quietly confident performances, with Chambers channeling just the right amount of camp and simmering resentment in Belize's dealings with "white crackers" like Louis, and with the physically tiny Harewood nevertheless giving us a sense of how the no-nonsense Hannah is able to command others to do her bidding, while also revealing a bit of the compassion that lurks underneath Hannah's hard exterior.
Conor Stinson O'Gorman's take on the historical figure of Roy M. Cohn, the closeted gay henchman of Joseph McCarthy and de facto executioner of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, is an idiosyncratic one. He dials down the loud outward bluster and the explosive kinetic energy that I've seen other actors bring to the part (including F. Murray Abraham on Broadway and Al Pacino in the HBO miniseries); combined with a way of speaking that suggested to me more midwestern drawl than New York Jewish verbosity, and an almost laconic way of dealing with Roy's beloved multi-line phone in the scene in which the character is introduced, I was worried that things would go south very quickly with this crucial part. But cumulatively, over the course of the play, O'Gorman is able to give us a sense of the anger and deep self-hatred roiling underneath this Roy's more contained and deliberative surface appearance, which makes the character's late-in-the-play confrontation with his wayward surrogate son, Joe, all the more terrifying when it is unleashed in all its fullness of volume, physicality, and latent eroticism.
At its heart, however, this production is anchored by the stellar performances of the actors who play the two sets of couples whose relationships are imploding. Mason Temple and Elizabeth Barrett, as the unhappy Mormans Joe and Harper Pitt, and Brandon Bagg and Julien Galipeau as Louis Ironson and Prior Walter, gay lovers dealing with Prior's recent AIDS diagnosis, manage the delicate dance of conveying with utter conviction and heartbreaking honesty just how much they love their partners, but also how completely and hopelessly alone they are. The montaged scene in which Joe and Louis separately tell Harper and Prior that they are leaving is tricky not just because of all the different emotions that must be kept in balance, but also because of the rapid shifts in intercut dialogue. Here it is accomplished with affecting precision on both fronts, and that is thanks as much to savvy choices Peake has made in her casting as it is to her own exacting direction.
Temple's Joe, struggling with his repressed homosexual desires and with the weight of Roy's poisoned mentorship, is literally gutted by the years of denying and stamping out what he wants, coughing up his self-lacerated insides in the form of a bleeding ulcer. Joe, who feels so unloved, in fact becomes the least lovable character by the end of the second part of Angels in America; but it is to Temple's immense credit that here we genuinely understand Joe's struggle and even support Roy's and Louis's separate urgings of him to transgress. That such a transgression comes at the expense of the happiness of his long-suffering wife, Harper, is part of this play's heartbreak; Barrett plays this wronged character, who is also something of a truth-saying Cassandra in terms of what (both with and without the aid of pills) she sees going on around her in the universe, with such openness and vulnerability that the flip side of her pain, namely the wonder she experiences with the aid of Mr. Lies during her hallucinations, comes as such a marvellous and surprising balm. It is hard to convey genuine astonishment on stage, but Barrett accomplishes this task with great naturalness and spontaneity, such that the delight she experiences upon arriving in Antarctica is immediately transferred as something to share and feel alongside her.
Any actor who takes on the part of Louis has his work cut out for him. Not only does the character have the most lines to speak, many of them further freighted with the weight of Kushner's dialectical philosophy, but Louis also does the most despicable thing of all the characters in the play: he walks out on his lover at his time of greatest need. Bagg is an utter natural as Louis, luxuriating in the complex richness of Kushner's dialogue while also conveying how utterly wracked by guilt is this man who, as adept as he is at spouting the theoretical cant of revolutionary struggle, is not so good with the practical day-to-day struggles of dealing with sickness and death. Bagg also successfully taps into his character's gay Jewish charm; despite the actor's avoir du pois and bad hairpiece, it is easy to see why both Prior and Joe would fall in love with Louis. Finally, there is Galipeau as Prior, fabulous chosen messenger of the heavens who would give up that role for a little bit more time as a depassé diva on earth. Galipeau is tall and muscular, with a deep and sonorous voice that commands attention, making it easy to understand why he might be an angelic spokesperson. But he is also not afraid to tap into his feminine side, moving with lightness and grace while in drag and also, in the face of his illness and Louis's abandonment, showing us just how small and afraid he feels. The aforementioned split scene, which culminates in a shattered Prior indicting Louis for his crimes, is all the more powerful for how spent and empty and even more alone Galipeau makes Prior appear after Louis has gone.
In my personal repertoire of canonical works of Western drama, Angels in America holds a special place. I saw the play soon after it opened on Broadway, and subsequently in a very accomplished staging in Seattle. I also own DVDs of the HBO miniseries and have taught the play many times (and will be again this spring, in conjunction with the Arts Club production). Coincidentally one of the students I introduced the play to more than a decade ago during a course devoted to Kushner at SFU came up to me at intermission. He reminded me of the class and said that this was actually the first time he was seeing the play live. We both agreed that this production was an absolutely stellar way to experience this work in performance.
P
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 25
Today Bevin Poole was in the house--or, rather, my office. Her dance history started in Williams Lake, where she grew up taking ballet and "70s-style jazz" (her words) classes in a pretty informal and "super-recreational" setting. So relaxed was the attitude, Bevin suggested, that you were actually discouraged from doing things too well. So it was a big learning curve for Bevin when she followed her sister to SFU to study in the dance program here at the School for the Contemporary Arts.
As Bevin put it, she had a hard time not just because her training to that point had been less rigorous (for her a battement was just a high kick), but also because she had an attitude problem. Now, knowing Bevin to be one of the more open and easy-going dancers in the community, this news came as quite a surprise. But Bevin confirmed that she was initially quite combative with her teachers--now my colleagues--at SFU. It was only when she did a fourth-year directed studies apprenticeship with Day Helesic at MoveEnt and saw how open and collaborative dancers like Amber Funk Barton and Farley Johansson and Shauna Elton were that she understood what it meant to be part of a process: to listen and be receptive as opposed to always being resistant and questioning.
This served her well as she launched her professional career post-graduation in 2007, first working with my colleague Judith Garay's company Dancers Dancing (as so many dancers in the community, I'm discovering, have over the past 20+ years). From there, she moved on to collaborations with Alvin Erasga (on Shadow Machine), James Gnam and plastic orchid factory (with whom she has been working since the premiere of _post), Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg (the first person to seek Bevin out to be in a show, in this case Highgate), Vanessa Goodman, Helen Walkley, Nicole Mion, and MACHiNENOiSY, among others.
More recently, Bevin has begun exploring her own choreography, developing her first solo as part of the most recent iteration of 12 Minutes Max at The Dance Centre. Challenging herself to think about what questions are in her body that she has not yet had a chance to explore in other people's processes, Bevin chose to engage in a rich exploration of slowness as a movement epistemology. Unfortunately I wasn't able to see that piece, but she received great feedback, and is eager to continue her choreographic explorations, including working with other dancers.
Most immediately, however, Bevin and her husband are preparing for the birth of their first child, who is due to arrive at the end of this month. It's amazing to me that Bevin was dancing up until just yesterday (in a music video for Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg). And also that she'll be dancing again in April, when Tara's How to Be premieres at the Cultch.
But then dancers are amazing people, and none more so than folks like Bevin who have agreed to be interviewed as part of this project.
P
As Bevin put it, she had a hard time not just because her training to that point had been less rigorous (for her a battement was just a high kick), but also because she had an attitude problem. Now, knowing Bevin to be one of the more open and easy-going dancers in the community, this news came as quite a surprise. But Bevin confirmed that she was initially quite combative with her teachers--now my colleagues--at SFU. It was only when she did a fourth-year directed studies apprenticeship with Day Helesic at MoveEnt and saw how open and collaborative dancers like Amber Funk Barton and Farley Johansson and Shauna Elton were that she understood what it meant to be part of a process: to listen and be receptive as opposed to always being resistant and questioning.
This served her well as she launched her professional career post-graduation in 2007, first working with my colleague Judith Garay's company Dancers Dancing (as so many dancers in the community, I'm discovering, have over the past 20+ years). From there, she moved on to collaborations with Alvin Erasga (on Shadow Machine), James Gnam and plastic orchid factory (with whom she has been working since the premiere of _post), Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg (the first person to seek Bevin out to be in a show, in this case Highgate), Vanessa Goodman, Helen Walkley, Nicole Mion, and MACHiNENOiSY, among others.
More recently, Bevin has begun exploring her own choreography, developing her first solo as part of the most recent iteration of 12 Minutes Max at The Dance Centre. Challenging herself to think about what questions are in her body that she has not yet had a chance to explore in other people's processes, Bevin chose to engage in a rich exploration of slowness as a movement epistemology. Unfortunately I wasn't able to see that piece, but she received great feedback, and is eager to continue her choreographic explorations, including working with other dancers.
Most immediately, however, Bevin and her husband are preparing for the birth of their first child, who is due to arrive at the end of this month. It's amazing to me that Bevin was dancing up until just yesterday (in a music video for Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg). And also that she'll be dancing again in April, when Tara's How to Be premieres at the Cultch.
But then dancers are amazing people, and none more so than folks like Bevin who have agreed to be interviewed as part of this project.
P
Saturday, October 8, 2016
Long Division Creative Meetings
So I submitted the rehearsal draft of my play, Long Division, earlier this week. We're at draft 17 by this point. While I know individual lines and maybe even whole sections of the script will inevitably change once we get into rehearsals, and potentially once we open as a result of audience response, and likely as well in the gap between closing at The Gateway at the end of November and opening at the Orpheum Annex next April (did I mention that part yet?), for the time being I had to stop tinkering--if only so that the cast can start to absorb their parts before we begin rehearsals.
Those rehearsals begin in two weeks, but in the interim our director, Richard Wolfe, has been holding a series of creative meetings at the Pi Theatre offices with various members of the production team. So, for example, last week Richard and I met with our choreographer, Lesley Telford, to talk about ideas for the movement score. We went through the script page by page and very intuitively and organically threw out potential ideas. If you'll forgive the metaphor, it was amazing to see how in sync we all were, fairly quickly deciding on a set of three conventions for each of the monologues that we could manipulate and play with over the course of each's delivery. Then, too, the choral sections, and the different math concepts described therein, seemed to lend themselves fairly easily to different kinetic frameworks, ranging from geometric patterning and canon structures and instances of retrograde, to changes in tempo and direction and the use of spirals and even moments of stillness. It was exciting to hear and watch Lesley (moving in her chair and every now and then leaping to her feet) begin to develop a gestural vocabulary for each of the characters based on my descriptions of their imagined psychic and physical states within the play, as well as her own mental notes on the actors' responses to her movement prompts during the last day of our workshop back in September. Because we don't have the luxury of infinite amounts of rehearsal time to devote to a more collaborative and improvisatory development of the choreography (which is the way Lesley is used to working), we are incredibly lucky that in the next two weeks Lesley will be able to test and develop her ideas for different sections with the aid of the students in her Arts Umbrella pre-professional class. By some magical coincidence, there are seven students in that class, and she has already distributed the script to them, with the goal that they will each take on one of the characters and, even better, be available during some of the rehearsal period to act as individual movement coaches to the actors playing their corresponding parts. This is just one of the many bits of extra resourcing for this production that has fortuitously fallen into our laps; another is Keltie Forsyth, a recent MFA grad in directing from UBC, who is doing an internship with Pi this year, and who will also be helping to get our show up.
I met Keltie last night at another creative meeting that Richard organized, this time so that we could hear some samples of the musical score that our composer Owen Belton has created, and so that Owen and Lesley, especially, could think through some ideas together. It's easy to see why Owen, who works regularly with Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot, is such an in-demand composer for dance (simultaneously with my play he is working on commissions for companies in Switzerland and Germany); he creates music with so much texture and mood, and with so much room to move with and inside of it. What he played for us as a possible opening sequence, to which Lesley would add some more geometric and directional choreography, was absolutely perfect; ditto the underscoring he suggested for the opening bit of dialogue, which he has composed in two versions, once with piano and percussion, and once with just percussion (I think I prefer the addition of the piano). As someone who is not very musical, it was also amazing for me to instantly recognize where some of the samples Owen shared with us would go. For example, there was a cello sequence that immediately put me in mind of the God proof section of the play, for which Lesley had already been thinking of something quadrille-like that riffed on Beckett's square (Pascal's God quadrant is referenced in the text). Another bit of atmospheric piano underscoring I thought would work well with Alice's monologue. As Lesley said to Owen afterwards, "You make it so easy."
Of course the music is not just a support or supplement for the text and the movement. It is a key conceptual component of the work in its own right, and to this end Owen has even written a sequence based on the Fibonacci numbers. I thought it worked brilliantly and can see it providing a nice transition into the final section of the play, which is structured around the golden ratio, and which is where I see movement, music, text and video to be the most integrated.
It's all so exciting to see unfold--and we haven't even gotten to Jamie Nesbitt's video projections yet! Part of me would be happy just to see the creative process extend indefinitely, forgoing an actual opening. But I'd also be lying if I said I didn't also want to share the work with an audience. Working with such talented collaborators makes that prospect so much easier to contemplate.
P.
P.S. It's already been announced on Pi's website, so I can now also share it here: the news of who is in our cast. They are pictured below: left to right, Anousha Alamian (Naathim), Jennifer Lines (Jo), Melissa Oei (Lucy), Kerry Sandomirsky (Alice), Jay Clift (Reid), Linda Quibell (Grace), and Nicco Lorenzo Garcia (Paul). Photo by David Copper. Drawing by me!
Those rehearsals begin in two weeks, but in the interim our director, Richard Wolfe, has been holding a series of creative meetings at the Pi Theatre offices with various members of the production team. So, for example, last week Richard and I met with our choreographer, Lesley Telford, to talk about ideas for the movement score. We went through the script page by page and very intuitively and organically threw out potential ideas. If you'll forgive the metaphor, it was amazing to see how in sync we all were, fairly quickly deciding on a set of three conventions for each of the monologues that we could manipulate and play with over the course of each's delivery. Then, too, the choral sections, and the different math concepts described therein, seemed to lend themselves fairly easily to different kinetic frameworks, ranging from geometric patterning and canon structures and instances of retrograde, to changes in tempo and direction and the use of spirals and even moments of stillness. It was exciting to hear and watch Lesley (moving in her chair and every now and then leaping to her feet) begin to develop a gestural vocabulary for each of the characters based on my descriptions of their imagined psychic and physical states within the play, as well as her own mental notes on the actors' responses to her movement prompts during the last day of our workshop back in September. Because we don't have the luxury of infinite amounts of rehearsal time to devote to a more collaborative and improvisatory development of the choreography (which is the way Lesley is used to working), we are incredibly lucky that in the next two weeks Lesley will be able to test and develop her ideas for different sections with the aid of the students in her Arts Umbrella pre-professional class. By some magical coincidence, there are seven students in that class, and she has already distributed the script to them, with the goal that they will each take on one of the characters and, even better, be available during some of the rehearsal period to act as individual movement coaches to the actors playing their corresponding parts. This is just one of the many bits of extra resourcing for this production that has fortuitously fallen into our laps; another is Keltie Forsyth, a recent MFA grad in directing from UBC, who is doing an internship with Pi this year, and who will also be helping to get our show up.
I met Keltie last night at another creative meeting that Richard organized, this time so that we could hear some samples of the musical score that our composer Owen Belton has created, and so that Owen and Lesley, especially, could think through some ideas together. It's easy to see why Owen, who works regularly with Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot, is such an in-demand composer for dance (simultaneously with my play he is working on commissions for companies in Switzerland and Germany); he creates music with so much texture and mood, and with so much room to move with and inside of it. What he played for us as a possible opening sequence, to which Lesley would add some more geometric and directional choreography, was absolutely perfect; ditto the underscoring he suggested for the opening bit of dialogue, which he has composed in two versions, once with piano and percussion, and once with just percussion (I think I prefer the addition of the piano). As someone who is not very musical, it was also amazing for me to instantly recognize where some of the samples Owen shared with us would go. For example, there was a cello sequence that immediately put me in mind of the God proof section of the play, for which Lesley had already been thinking of something quadrille-like that riffed on Beckett's square (Pascal's God quadrant is referenced in the text). Another bit of atmospheric piano underscoring I thought would work well with Alice's monologue. As Lesley said to Owen afterwards, "You make it so easy."
Of course the music is not just a support or supplement for the text and the movement. It is a key conceptual component of the work in its own right, and to this end Owen has even written a sequence based on the Fibonacci numbers. I thought it worked brilliantly and can see it providing a nice transition into the final section of the play, which is structured around the golden ratio, and which is where I see movement, music, text and video to be the most integrated.
It's all so exciting to see unfold--and we haven't even gotten to Jamie Nesbitt's video projections yet! Part of me would be happy just to see the creative process extend indefinitely, forgoing an actual opening. But I'd also be lying if I said I didn't also want to share the work with an audience. Working with such talented collaborators makes that prospect so much easier to contemplate.
P.
P.S. It's already been announced on Pi's website, so I can now also share it here: the news of who is in our cast. They are pictured below: left to right, Anousha Alamian (Naathim), Jennifer Lines (Jo), Melissa Oei (Lucy), Kerry Sandomirsky (Alice), Jay Clift (Reid), Linda Quibell (Grace), and Nicco Lorenzo Garcia (Paul). Photo by David Copper. Drawing by me!
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 24
After interviewing Kokoro Dance's Barbara Bourget on Tuesday, I returned to the company's offices at Woodward's yesterday to interview Jay Hirabayashi. Beginning, as usual, with our "when" question (i.e. when dance/when Vancouver), I learned that, remarkably, Jay only began dancing at age 30 and, even more extraordinarily, he was invited to join his first company after only nine months of study. To explain.
Jay had come to Vancouver in 1973 to do graduate work in Buddhist Studies at UBC. He had no connection to dance at that time, but he had been a competitive downhill skier. As a result of an accident at the Canadian national championships in Whistler a few years earlier (a fascinating story in and of itself), Jay had blown out one of his knees; after consulting the physician to the BC Lions, he underwent corrective surgery, a long and painful process in those pre-orthoscopic days. Around the same time, Jay and his first wife had enrolled their daughter in dance class, and had chosen the Paula Ross dance studio. Noting that Paula offered beginner adult classes, and thinking that dance would help with rehabilitating his knee, Jay signed up for a class. He liked it, and soon he was taking three classes a day. It wasn't too long before Paula, liking what she saw, offered Jay a scholarship to pay for full-time dance studies. And then, after less than a year of training, came the invitation to join her company.
Jay danced for Paula from 1978-80, during which time he met Barbara. Jay and Barbara both separately confirmed to me that while Paula was an amazing choreographer, she was a volatile person, with a habit of firing people. After one episode in which she kicked everyone out of the studio, telling them not to come back unless they were willing to work twice as hard, Jay and Barbara quit. Two years later, and after a brief stint working with Mountain Dance, the initial seeds of EDAM began to take shape. Jay filled in some additional detail on how this happened by explaining Karen Jamieson's crucial role in hiring most of the eventual EDAM co-founders to dance in her piece Coming Out of Chaos. Having gotten to know each other as a result of that process, the idea for a collective was born. And that idea, as Jay also confirmed, was at base altruistic: share a studio and dance in each other's work in order to save money and be as creative as possible. But differences in style and training, combined with seven strong personalities, meant that things were a struggle from the get-go. There was also the issue of management, which Jay said they tried to resolve by appointing an individual AD for each project, and then eventually by hiring a company manager. But it was what both Jay and Barbara described as the Expo 86 debacle of presenting an early multi-media and immersive piece called Bach to the Future that was the straw that broke the camel's back for the two of them. They left EDAM after that show and established Kokoro shortly thereafter.
Jay, noting that Kokoro's approach to butoh evolved through a combination of self-instruction through research and workshops with visiting companies, and eventually trips to Japan (where Jay studied with Kazuo Ohno in 1995), said that the company's style is beholden to no particular tradition of butoh (e.g. the Ohno versus Tatsumi Hijikata traditions). It is easier for them to say that their movement is influenced by butoh rather than to call themselves a butoh company per se. This was offered in the context of Jay's discussion of some favourite and memorable performances over the years, including Episode in Blue, which was a musical based on Nabokov's retelling of the Faust story in The Master and Margarita, and which employed 16 mm film projections (on which Jay appeared as the devil) and audience participation. It was a critical disaster though to this day Jay insists it was brilliant and ahead of its time in its combining of different media. Then there was the story of Jay passing out during a performance of Bats, in which Jay is suspended upside down by his feet. On this particular performance he had tied the ropes that secure him around his chest too tightly, and he began to have trouble breathing, eventually losing consciousness. He woke himself up with a sneeze, and realizing he couldn't get anyone's attention, he concentrated on breathing very shallowly until the end of the performance and someone came to cut him down.
At the end of our time together, when I asked the "why" question--as in, why do this, why keep going, especially in Vancouver--Jay said he never really thinks of stuff like that. He just thinks about getting through the work to be done one day at a time. He admitted that he has never really been practical and strategic about that work, that running two organizations (Kokoro and VIDF), and now having taken over the management of KW Studios, is somewhat absurd given they have no real full-time staff apart from he and Barbara. But what motivates Jay is, in his words, that there "are always things that are yet to be done that need to be done." And so he keeps on doing.
P
Jay had come to Vancouver in 1973 to do graduate work in Buddhist Studies at UBC. He had no connection to dance at that time, but he had been a competitive downhill skier. As a result of an accident at the Canadian national championships in Whistler a few years earlier (a fascinating story in and of itself), Jay had blown out one of his knees; after consulting the physician to the BC Lions, he underwent corrective surgery, a long and painful process in those pre-orthoscopic days. Around the same time, Jay and his first wife had enrolled their daughter in dance class, and had chosen the Paula Ross dance studio. Noting that Paula offered beginner adult classes, and thinking that dance would help with rehabilitating his knee, Jay signed up for a class. He liked it, and soon he was taking three classes a day. It wasn't too long before Paula, liking what she saw, offered Jay a scholarship to pay for full-time dance studies. And then, after less than a year of training, came the invitation to join her company.
Jay danced for Paula from 1978-80, during which time he met Barbara. Jay and Barbara both separately confirmed to me that while Paula was an amazing choreographer, she was a volatile person, with a habit of firing people. After one episode in which she kicked everyone out of the studio, telling them not to come back unless they were willing to work twice as hard, Jay and Barbara quit. Two years later, and after a brief stint working with Mountain Dance, the initial seeds of EDAM began to take shape. Jay filled in some additional detail on how this happened by explaining Karen Jamieson's crucial role in hiring most of the eventual EDAM co-founders to dance in her piece Coming Out of Chaos. Having gotten to know each other as a result of that process, the idea for a collective was born. And that idea, as Jay also confirmed, was at base altruistic: share a studio and dance in each other's work in order to save money and be as creative as possible. But differences in style and training, combined with seven strong personalities, meant that things were a struggle from the get-go. There was also the issue of management, which Jay said they tried to resolve by appointing an individual AD for each project, and then eventually by hiring a company manager. But it was what both Jay and Barbara described as the Expo 86 debacle of presenting an early multi-media and immersive piece called Bach to the Future that was the straw that broke the camel's back for the two of them. They left EDAM after that show and established Kokoro shortly thereafter.
Jay, noting that Kokoro's approach to butoh evolved through a combination of self-instruction through research and workshops with visiting companies, and eventually trips to Japan (where Jay studied with Kazuo Ohno in 1995), said that the company's style is beholden to no particular tradition of butoh (e.g. the Ohno versus Tatsumi Hijikata traditions). It is easier for them to say that their movement is influenced by butoh rather than to call themselves a butoh company per se. This was offered in the context of Jay's discussion of some favourite and memorable performances over the years, including Episode in Blue, which was a musical based on Nabokov's retelling of the Faust story in The Master and Margarita, and which employed 16 mm film projections (on which Jay appeared as the devil) and audience participation. It was a critical disaster though to this day Jay insists it was brilliant and ahead of its time in its combining of different media. Then there was the story of Jay passing out during a performance of Bats, in which Jay is suspended upside down by his feet. On this particular performance he had tied the ropes that secure him around his chest too tightly, and he began to have trouble breathing, eventually losing consciousness. He woke himself up with a sneeze, and realizing he couldn't get anyone's attention, he concentrated on breathing very shallowly until the end of the performance and someone came to cut him down.
At the end of our time together, when I asked the "why" question--as in, why do this, why keep going, especially in Vancouver--Jay said he never really thinks of stuff like that. He just thinks about getting through the work to be done one day at a time. He admitted that he has never really been practical and strategic about that work, that running two organizations (Kokoro and VIDF), and now having taken over the management of KW Studios, is somewhat absurd given they have no real full-time staff apart from he and Barbara. But what motivates Jay is, in his words, that there "are always things that are yet to be done that need to be done." And so he keeps on doing.
P
Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 23
Yesterday I had lunch with Barbara Bourget and then interviewed her for our Vancouver Dance Histories project. Barbara's long and distinguished career started with tap lessons at age four, before she switched full-time to ballet five years later--although not before creating her first work of choreography to Elvis Presley's "Stuck on You" at eight years old. Barbara's first ballet teacher in Vancouver was Miss Mara McBirney, who had taught Lynn Seymour, and who was also friends with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's Arnold Spohr. It was through the latter connection that Barbara was invited to join the RWB at 16 as a scholarship student, getting to study with and dance in works by such pioneering American women choreographers as Pauline Koner and Agnes de Mille.
From the RWB, and following a brief stint in Banff, Barbara moved on to Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, just missing Judith Marcuse, who had left the company the previous year. Fernand Nault cast Barbara as the original Sally Simpson in Les Grands Ballets' highly successful rock ballet of The Who's Tommy. But despite great success with the company, Barbara, at age 22, became disillusioned with dance. She wanted a boyfriend, and as she put it to me in her inimitably frank way, she took a look at the men in the company (most of them gay) and quickly realized that wasn't going to happen here. A family crisis also necessitated Barbara's return to Vancouver, and so in 1974 she found herself back in the city.
However, Barbara's retirement from dance didn't last long, and she soon found herself dancing for the fledgling Mountain Dance Theatre Company, under the direction of local legends Mauryne Allan and Iris Garland. From there, and following the birth of her first child and also the dissolution of her first marriage, Barbara went on to the Paula Ross Dance Company, which along with Anna Wyman Dance Theatre and the Pacific Ballet Theatre (the forerunner of Ballet BC) was one of the preeminent local companies in the 1970s. It was while dancing for Ross that Barbara met Jay Hirabayashi, which began a personal and professional relationship that has lasted 38 years and counting.
Jay and Barbara began creating work together in 1979, working out of the Western Front. And it was there, of course, that they met Peter Bingham, Lola MacLaughlin, Jennifer Mascall, Peter Ryan and Ahmed Hassan, all of whom would come together to create EDAM in 1982. Barbara told me that with such strong personalities all vying to create new work, the collective was doomed to failure; she said they would have meetings that lasted seven hours--just to decide what kind of cash box to buy! And then there was the fact that their styles and dance vocabularies were so different. Barbara, who says she can barely stand to be touched by anyone other than Jay, described to me doing contact improv and it was hilarious. But at the same time Barbara was proud of the amazing work that EDAM had created (none of it, unfortunately, captured on video), and said that audiences ate it up. And of course there is no denying the legacy of that work and how it has continued to shape the local dance community.
Kokoro Dance was born in 1986, its post-butoh aesthetic shaped by a performance by the Tamano brothers that Barbara and Jay had seen in the basement theatre of the VAG in 1982. Several hundred choreographed works later the company is still going strong, with so many folks in this city having been affected by the work, whether as spectators or as performer-collaborators. In my case, it's been both, and the combustible creative process that is Barbara and Jay's partnership is certainly something unique to behold; but what results is almost always an amazing experience.
Of course Barbara and Jay have helped shaped the Vancouver dance landscape in so many other ways: through the establishment of the Vancouver International Dance Festival; through their longtime teaching at Harbour Dance (which just came to an end this summer); and, most recently, through their founding of KW Studios, the new rehearsal, performance, and administrative space at Woodward's that Kokoro and VIDF shares with Vancouver Moving Theatre and Raven Spirit Dance. Barbara gave me a tour of the space before we went to lunch, and while there remains much to do, and while I know this weighs heavily upon both her and Jay, I also know from class that Barbara's tiredness contains within in it reserves of energy that the rest of us could only hope to one day harness.
P
From the RWB, and following a brief stint in Banff, Barbara moved on to Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, just missing Judith Marcuse, who had left the company the previous year. Fernand Nault cast Barbara as the original Sally Simpson in Les Grands Ballets' highly successful rock ballet of The Who's Tommy. But despite great success with the company, Barbara, at age 22, became disillusioned with dance. She wanted a boyfriend, and as she put it to me in her inimitably frank way, she took a look at the men in the company (most of them gay) and quickly realized that wasn't going to happen here. A family crisis also necessitated Barbara's return to Vancouver, and so in 1974 she found herself back in the city.
However, Barbara's retirement from dance didn't last long, and she soon found herself dancing for the fledgling Mountain Dance Theatre Company, under the direction of local legends Mauryne Allan and Iris Garland. From there, and following the birth of her first child and also the dissolution of her first marriage, Barbara went on to the Paula Ross Dance Company, which along with Anna Wyman Dance Theatre and the Pacific Ballet Theatre (the forerunner of Ballet BC) was one of the preeminent local companies in the 1970s. It was while dancing for Ross that Barbara met Jay Hirabayashi, which began a personal and professional relationship that has lasted 38 years and counting.
Jay and Barbara began creating work together in 1979, working out of the Western Front. And it was there, of course, that they met Peter Bingham, Lola MacLaughlin, Jennifer Mascall, Peter Ryan and Ahmed Hassan, all of whom would come together to create EDAM in 1982. Barbara told me that with such strong personalities all vying to create new work, the collective was doomed to failure; she said they would have meetings that lasted seven hours--just to decide what kind of cash box to buy! And then there was the fact that their styles and dance vocabularies were so different. Barbara, who says she can barely stand to be touched by anyone other than Jay, described to me doing contact improv and it was hilarious. But at the same time Barbara was proud of the amazing work that EDAM had created (none of it, unfortunately, captured on video), and said that audiences ate it up. And of course there is no denying the legacy of that work and how it has continued to shape the local dance community.
Kokoro Dance was born in 1986, its post-butoh aesthetic shaped by a performance by the Tamano brothers that Barbara and Jay had seen in the basement theatre of the VAG in 1982. Several hundred choreographed works later the company is still going strong, with so many folks in this city having been affected by the work, whether as spectators or as performer-collaborators. In my case, it's been both, and the combustible creative process that is Barbara and Jay's partnership is certainly something unique to behold; but what results is almost always an amazing experience.
Of course Barbara and Jay have helped shaped the Vancouver dance landscape in so many other ways: through the establishment of the Vancouver International Dance Festival; through their longtime teaching at Harbour Dance (which just came to an end this summer); and, most recently, through their founding of KW Studios, the new rehearsal, performance, and administrative space at Woodward's that Kokoro and VIDF shares with Vancouver Moving Theatre and Raven Spirit Dance. Barbara gave me a tour of the space before we went to lunch, and while there remains much to do, and while I know this weighs heavily upon both her and Jay, I also know from class that Barbara's tiredness contains within in it reserves of energy that the rest of us could only hope to one day harness.
P
Saturday, September 24, 2016
Between Two Rocks at SFU Woodward's
I wanted to give a brief shout out to Between Two Rocks, Robert Leveroos' MFA graduating show in SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, which has one more performance this evening at SFU Woodward's Studio T. If you want to luxuriate in the spinning of theatrical magic, then this is the show for you. In fact, a spinning wheel is a key prop in the performance, as is the wool spun from it. Some of that wool has been woven into a gorgeous curtain of string behind which many mysterious things happen, and out of which lots of additional objects (and the occasional body) emerge.
Taking his inspiration from a Norse folktale, "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," Leveroos, while combining text, movement and sound to impressive effect, very much foregrounds scenographic design in this piece, which contains myriad surfaces and textures. This includes a moveable raked plywood "stage" that to begin with is covered in a resplendent golden fabric, and that in one memorable moment near the top of the show appears to ripple and gather and bunch up all on its own, as if some strange creature is burrowing underneath it. It is this attention to the animacy of objects--not least the pliability and sensuousness of the wool that is such a key element of the overall design--that makes this work so unique. Not that human actors, including performer-collaborators Pascal Reiners, Elliot Vaughn, Gordan Havelaar, Linnea Gwiazda and Elysse Cheadle, aren't also important; it's just that those actors' primary function is not necessarily to animate the space by exerting their human will upon it (in the form, say, of traditional dramatic conflict), but rather to respond to how the space, and what else is already inside it, is acting upon them.
This piece is a feast for the senses: from the squeak of the spinning wheel's pedal echoing through the dark to the sound of wet wool being wrung out in a bucket; and from the sight of a smoke-breathing woolly dragon to the strange but compelling spectacle of the performers rolling their heads along the upstage edge of the plywood platform (which, not least because of the overlapping speech that accompanies this scene, I registered as a nod to Beckett's Play). There are so many wonderful moments in this piece that work to reorient our perception. I cannot do justice to them all in this short post. Conveniently, however, Leveroos provides us with a documentary record of his scenographic score on the back of the program.
That program also provides a record of Leveroos's additional collaborations on this piece, including with the Norwegian playwright Maria Tryti Vennerød, from whom Leveroos commissioned a poem that we hear Vennerød reading in voiceover at different moments. Also listed are contributions from fellow SCA students: past and present, graduate and undergraduate. One can of course never go it alone in art and performance (despite what some modernist visual art critics might think). But what I love about the work produced by the students and my faculty colleagues in SCA is that this axiom is always made explicit.
P
Taking his inspiration from a Norse folktale, "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," Leveroos, while combining text, movement and sound to impressive effect, very much foregrounds scenographic design in this piece, which contains myriad surfaces and textures. This includes a moveable raked plywood "stage" that to begin with is covered in a resplendent golden fabric, and that in one memorable moment near the top of the show appears to ripple and gather and bunch up all on its own, as if some strange creature is burrowing underneath it. It is this attention to the animacy of objects--not least the pliability and sensuousness of the wool that is such a key element of the overall design--that makes this work so unique. Not that human actors, including performer-collaborators Pascal Reiners, Elliot Vaughn, Gordan Havelaar, Linnea Gwiazda and Elysse Cheadle, aren't also important; it's just that those actors' primary function is not necessarily to animate the space by exerting their human will upon it (in the form, say, of traditional dramatic conflict), but rather to respond to how the space, and what else is already inside it, is acting upon them.
This piece is a feast for the senses: from the squeak of the spinning wheel's pedal echoing through the dark to the sound of wet wool being wrung out in a bucket; and from the sight of a smoke-breathing woolly dragon to the strange but compelling spectacle of the performers rolling their heads along the upstage edge of the plywood platform (which, not least because of the overlapping speech that accompanies this scene, I registered as a nod to Beckett's Play). There are so many wonderful moments in this piece that work to reorient our perception. I cannot do justice to them all in this short post. Conveniently, however, Leveroos provides us with a documentary record of his scenographic score on the back of the program.
That program also provides a record of Leveroos's additional collaborations on this piece, including with the Norwegian playwright Maria Tryti Vennerød, from whom Leveroos commissioned a poem that we hear Vennerød reading in voiceover at different moments. Also listed are contributions from fellow SCA students: past and present, graduate and undergraduate. One can of course never go it alone in art and performance (despite what some modernist visual art critics might think). But what I love about the work produced by the students and my faculty colleagues in SCA is that this axiom is always made explicit.
P
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
