taker at BoomBox

Never say never, I guess. A couple of weeks ago Billy Marchenski emailed me to see if I'd be interested in writing something about the new butoh-inspired work he and Molly McDermott were working on with their Japanese collaborator Daiichiro Yuyama. Something made me say yes, and so here we are, more than a year after saying goodbye to regular posts about what I was seeing locally in terms of performance, reviving my peculiar take on the scene. Let's hope I still have something interesting to say.

Billy and Molly are, of course, fixtures in the dance community, and have moved memorably together over many years as longtime Kokoro company members. Indeed, it was under those auspices, as part of a trip that Billy and Molly and Kokoro principals Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi took to Japan in 2016 to do a workshop with the butoh company Dairakudakan, that they met Daiichiro. The three hit it off, and decided to come together under the name gigamal to initiate a trans-national creative collaboration.

The result is taker, which was developed collectively in 2018 at the Caravan Farm Theatre, and which has additionally benefitted from the rehearsal direction of Alison Denham and the dramaturgy of Tomoya Tsujisaki. Though not conceived specifically for the space, the work seems particularly well-suited to BoomBox's semi-trailer confines, which I'm embarrassed to say I had not previously visited before last night. But waiting this long to trek down to Great Northern Way to huddle with friends behind a propane heater while sipping a cider sold to me by BoomBox Artistic Producer Diego Romero's mom did come with some benefits. These include the new, portable entrance steps that Diego ushered me up, an enhanced lighting and sound system, and the murals by Chris Bose that now adorn each side of the semi's interior. Reminiscent of cave paintings that leap with added allegorical intensity due to the shadows cast by the propane tank's flames, the decorated walls framed taker's metamorphotic story in particularly apt ways.

That story begins with Billy and Molly arising, as if magically from some primordial ooze, into the open west doorframe of the semi-trailer (a flipping, I was told, of the normal performance/audience configuration of the space). With their painted white faces, their stunned, unblinking eyes, their crouched poses, and the curling inwards of their arms and hands that accompanies their halting physical progress forward, we might think their butoh bodies are summoning for us an image of the first humans. Except that both Billy and Molly are dressed formally, in matching black slacks and white tops, and when they come to stop--Molly posed like an odalisque centre stage, Billy standing gravely behind her--we are arguably presented instead with a grotesque portrait of our contemporary late-capitalist selves, the good-looking couple whose backs are turned on the industrial wasteland that feeds their lifestyle.

That's when, peering into the void behind Billy and Molly, we notice another figure, perched on a mound outside the truck, and slowly starting to sway his body and flap his arms. This is Daiichiro, incarnating some kind of trickster figure, his body painted black (a visually powerful novelty for me, as I've been so trained to expect chalk-white bodies in butoh), his arms adorned with wings made of torn garbage bags, and sporting a red mask and beak. Inserting himself between Molly and Billy, Daiichiro's character moves like an unleashed id, sparking a transformation in our hitherto composed and kinetically contained couple. When, after Daiichiro's exit, Molly and Billy bend down to inspect a bit of plastic detritus left behind, they are hurtled literally backwards in space--and metaphorically in time.

Indeed, when next we see this pair they are clad only in traditional butoh fundoshis, their exposed white-painted bodies, joined by Daiichiro's black-painted one, now rawly attuned to the environment and the harshness of existence. This was represented most effectively for me when all three creators channeled through the language of butoh--already so attuned to states of extremity--various static poses of suffering. For example, lined up in a row with their backs to the audience, the trio at one point adopted different arm gestures that seemed to signify brokenness or confinement: Daiichiro bent at the waist, his arms crossed behind him; Billy's arms crossed above his head as if in crucifixion; and Molly's elbows bent above her mouth, her head thrown back in lamentation or horror. Working together as a single organism during this long middle sequence, the trio also interlaces their arms behind each other's heads, taking turns moving one or another's gaze this way and that as they explore this new strange world they find themselves in. Likewise, when on all fours the ensemble launches into a bit of counterpointed unison, a hand splayed first this way, then a hip that way, it put me in mind of a pack or a herd trying collectively to decide on which direction to move. The key is that this exploration is taking place together, and in relation to the environment, a concept that in the creators' notes on the piece they liken to foraging.

When, however, our trio rises up from the floor--an exquisitely slow and twisted and joint-by-joint vertical stacking of their bodies--something happens to change the dynamic of their relationship, a transition signalled by what appears to be the involuntary throwing of their bodies against the sides of the semi-trailer. Thereafter, they devolve into their own individual movement patterns, a sequence that culminates in another static freeze, but this time with the bodies of our performers at a noticeable remove from each other. This is the cue for Tomoya, who up until this point has been sitting with Diego at the control panel behind me, to make his way to the stage and, in his role as "curator," invite us to get up and inspect as closely as we wish each of the performers' bodies--as if they are anthropological specimens in a museum. Those bodies, however, will not remain frozen in time for us, and whether because of or in spite of our scrutinizing gaze, they once again start to move, making their way to where we had previously been seated, reprising a version of the piece's opening tableau--this time with Molly's odalisque perched on a bench and framed by Billy and Daiichiro hanging off of hooks on each wall.

But by flipping once again the performing and spectating spaces, the conclusion of taker also asks us to consider who, exactly, is on display--who is feeding on, or off, of whom? In terms of the ideas gigamal's team is exploring about humans' transition from foraging to scavenging, from sustaining what we need through environmental co-stewardship to extracting all that we want through individual ownership--here powerfully encapsulated in Billy's character's leaving behind of the prone bodies of Molly and Daiichiro (the woman and the man of colour)--this implicating of the audience in what we are taking away from this experience is one final satisfying moment in what is an incredibly smart and deeply thoughtful performance.

taker continues this evening at BoomBox. It will travel to Kyoto later this year, and we can look forward to a companion piece sometime next year. But maybe don't look forward to another blog post from me for awhile...

P