The 605 Collective, even when they're standing still, are always so interesting to watch. Their latest full-length creation, The Sensationalists, plays the Vancouver East Cultural Centre's Historic Stage through this Saturday. A collaboration with Theatre Replacement's Maiko Bae Yamamoto, who directed the piece and contributed to its movement design over the course of an amazing two-year development and rehearsal process, the piece is an experiment in immersion--both kinaesthetically and acoustically.
The experience begins in the lobby, with the 605 ensemble--co-directors Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin, along with fellow performers Laura Avery, Walter Kubanek, Lexi Vajda, Jane Osborne, and some additional repertory members--mingling among the audience members around the box office and bar area. Some whisper secrets in patrons' ears; others, leaning back from a bar chair, reach out and clasp your hand for balance, or else, wearing headphones, lean up against you and sway ever so slightly. Occasionally they also form bodily massings amongst themselves, piling on top of one another, both belly to belly and side to side, along a wall, and also freely and fully supporting each other's weight in the middle of the floor by crouching into a ball and offering their backs as platforms to climb and kneel upon. I was offered the latter opportunity by a woman who was about half my size and though I was worried I would crush her I also couldn't resist this invitation of proximate interaction and shared bodily contact.
This is, to a large degree, the entire premise of the piece, for after the pre-show lobby experience we are led by the ensemble toward the theatre, where we have to make a choice: do we join the dancers on the floor, fully immersing ourselves in the choreography while standing and moving about at orchestra-level for the first 50 minutes of the piece; or do we head for the balcony and partake of the bird's eye view of what's going on below, sacrificing the extra sensory involvement for a double dose of surveillance, watching our fellow audience members watching? Truth be told, you have to make this decision in advance, at the time of ticket purchase (as differential costs are involved). Richard and I had opted for the balcony--Richard because he didn't want to stand for that long, and me because, while initially drawn to the idea of moving among and with the dancers, the critic in me craved the additional visual perspective on the aesthetics of the piece that I would get through physical distance. Talking with Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg in the lobby about this decision, she dubbed us Statler and Waldorf, the two crusty critics from The Muppet Show, and imagined us carrying on a running commentary on the piece, or at the very least her own and everyone else's wardrobe choices. And while several others we spoke to said we'd made the wrong choice, Maiko herself reassured us that the balcony option had its own--albeit different--benefits. (That I saw local dancer-choreographers Peter Bingham and Wen Wei Wang also heading upstairs also did much to set my wavering mind at ease.)
Once inside the theatre, the piece begins (as it were) with Gelley teaching Kubanek a simple arm movement phrase to accompany a spoken utterance about the Milky Way. Kubanek repeats this several times, in the process teaching it to the audience members milling about him. Before I noticed his bare feet, I was at first uncertain whether Kubanek was a dancer or an audience member (I hadn't noted his movement presence in the lobby), and of course such sense confusion is a natural offshoot of the total sensory experience of the piece. How precisely does the apparently "reactive" movement of the audience on the floor, in walking about the stage to get a better view or to make space for a bit of spontaneous partnering or to avoid being conscripted into said partnering, differ from the "active" movement (whether choreographed or improvised) of the dancers? Indeed, one of the most fascinating things for me, in the balcony, was watching the different choreographic structures individual audience members developed and quite often repeated over the course of the first 50 minutes. My friend and colleague DD Kugler kept restlessly circling the perimeter of the natural circle the audience mostly formed. Whereas Sophie and Lara largely stayed put--at least in the beginning--in the upstage left corner. Two folks I didn't know--a man in a red shirt and a woman in a purple blouse--for the most part managed to position themselves in the centre of the action. As such, more than once they found themselves responding directly to the dancers' mimed instructions--most compellingly when, along with others, they formed a chorus line of weighted ballast and support as Martin "walked" upside down across their backs.
As interesting as this was to watch, there was also, after a while, a visual sameness to the quality of the immersion. It was like I was watching a rave in slow motion and, sure enough, at one point the taller members of the audience are brought together to form a mosh pit, arms extended vertically to transport the smallest of the female dancers from the upstage wall to downstage floor. In fact, the most visually stunning image for me was when the dancers instructed all of the audience members to mass upstage in a tableaux while they segued into some preliminary unison work. This was the prelude to the orchestra audience then being invited to take a seat and don, with those of us in the balcony, a set of headphones. With Gabriel Saloman's ambient electronic score echoing inside our ears, Martin speaks into a microphone a list of items that I took to be the sort that gave him goose bumps--as, presumably, the intimate amplification of the sound of his voice via our individual headsets was meant to replicate.
In this concluding section of the piece, the ensemble reverts to the more traditional conventions of concert dance, but I have to say that I didn't mind at all. In fact by this point I was craving exactly this kind of movement, with 605's trademark forward accelerations and suspensions in mid-air thrilling to take in, especially when done collectively as a group. There is also a stunning duet between Gelley and Martin that struck me as a seamless blending of their hip hop training with some obvious influence from contact improv. By the end of the piece, as the group masses at the upstage wall once again, supporting each other as they climb and reach for the rafters, the link between the two sections of the piece became more clear, with the first half modelling the embodied skill-set--support, weight transfer, reactive instincts, intimacy, trust--we all have within us, but that these dancers have refined into an art.
P.
Showing posts with label 605 Collective. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 605 Collective. Show all posts
Friday, May 15, 2015
Friday, March 20, 2015
Out Innerspace and 605 Collective at the Vancouver International Dance Festival
Last night's mainstage show at VIDF featured a double bill by two stellar local companies: Out Innerspace and 605 Collective. Both companies were presenting excerpts from works-in-progress.
Up first was Out Innerspace's as yet untitled piece. It begins with a lone woman at a microphone, her face half in shadow, extolling the goodness of us in the audience, what good work we're doing, how she and her peers exist only because of us, and that this is most certainly a very good thing. After a brief blackout, the woman is joined by five other dancers (members of OIS's Modus Operandi youth training initiative, I'm assuming). They stare out at us in terror, recoiling three times in a series of collective gasps; maybe we're not so benignly enabling after all. Thus, turning inward to each other, the dancers link arms and form a single bodily chain, propelling each other in eddying waves of massed movement, as if to let go of each other would be to risk abandonment to some outside force (would that be us in the audience again?).
As much as I enjoyed watching these young dancers move so fluidly together, and the ways in which James Proudfoot's warm and glowingly off-centre lighting would catch and momentarily highlight various outstretched limbs, I thought that this opening sequence went on a bit too long, to the point where the various bodily pivots in the chain (shades of mentor Crystal Pite's influence at work here, for sure) became muddied and indistinguishable. Indeed, when, eventually, members of the group broke apart and began responding to each other with distinct phrases, it was rewarding to see just what excellent movers each of them is. And when they were joined by OIS artistic directors and choreographers David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen for a robust and high-energy bit of unison movement, I was in a definite spectatorial sweet spot.
Soon, however, we're back to that massed clump, only this time it assumes a form that seems to have a face--and that now chases offstage one among the group it had previously spit out. This dancer (Arash Khakpour) will eventually return, breathing and scatting into the now hand-held microphone from the top of the show as the other dancers slowly advance upon him, heaving and pulsing along with his rhythms. But whether they are feeding off of, or on, his energy remains unclear.
Following an intermission, we were treated to a "short draft" of the research that has so far gone into 605 Collective's Vital Few, which according to the program will premiere at VIDF next year. Also exploring the relationship of the individual to the group, but in ways that specifically seek to comment on how members of the 605 ensemble create movement together, the piece begins with six dancers (including co-artistic directors Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin) emerging in a parallel line stage left, improvising a series of lunges and squats and backwards and forwards arm extensions in response to one another. Arriving centre stage, the group forms a circle, into the middle of which one of the women now steps, swiping one arm through the air. Returning to the edge of the circle, the woman repeats the same movement once again. And again. And again. This is the signal for the other dancers to begin adapting their own improvised and previously autonomous movements into a larger choreographic structure.
Over the course of the next twenty minutes each of the dancers will take a turn "in the lead," initiating a phrase which the others will either repeat or adapt. This is the way 605 has always worked, but here they are exposing that process for us, making it the basis for the work itself. And we are able to see and appreciate the way they are working together in part because the group has deliberately slowed down their usual high-speed tempo. This culminates in an amazing round-robin of pick-up movement to an aria by Enrico Caruso, a marrying of contemporary and classical forms that allows us, in turn, to pick up (and out) what makes each of these dancers--and the group as a whole--so distinctive.
P.
Up first was Out Innerspace's as yet untitled piece. It begins with a lone woman at a microphone, her face half in shadow, extolling the goodness of us in the audience, what good work we're doing, how she and her peers exist only because of us, and that this is most certainly a very good thing. After a brief blackout, the woman is joined by five other dancers (members of OIS's Modus Operandi youth training initiative, I'm assuming). They stare out at us in terror, recoiling three times in a series of collective gasps; maybe we're not so benignly enabling after all. Thus, turning inward to each other, the dancers link arms and form a single bodily chain, propelling each other in eddying waves of massed movement, as if to let go of each other would be to risk abandonment to some outside force (would that be us in the audience again?).
As much as I enjoyed watching these young dancers move so fluidly together, and the ways in which James Proudfoot's warm and glowingly off-centre lighting would catch and momentarily highlight various outstretched limbs, I thought that this opening sequence went on a bit too long, to the point where the various bodily pivots in the chain (shades of mentor Crystal Pite's influence at work here, for sure) became muddied and indistinguishable. Indeed, when, eventually, members of the group broke apart and began responding to each other with distinct phrases, it was rewarding to see just what excellent movers each of them is. And when they were joined by OIS artistic directors and choreographers David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen for a robust and high-energy bit of unison movement, I was in a definite spectatorial sweet spot.
Soon, however, we're back to that massed clump, only this time it assumes a form that seems to have a face--and that now chases offstage one among the group it had previously spit out. This dancer (Arash Khakpour) will eventually return, breathing and scatting into the now hand-held microphone from the top of the show as the other dancers slowly advance upon him, heaving and pulsing along with his rhythms. But whether they are feeding off of, or on, his energy remains unclear.
Following an intermission, we were treated to a "short draft" of the research that has so far gone into 605 Collective's Vital Few, which according to the program will premiere at VIDF next year. Also exploring the relationship of the individual to the group, but in ways that specifically seek to comment on how members of the 605 ensemble create movement together, the piece begins with six dancers (including co-artistic directors Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin) emerging in a parallel line stage left, improvising a series of lunges and squats and backwards and forwards arm extensions in response to one another. Arriving centre stage, the group forms a circle, into the middle of which one of the women now steps, swiping one arm through the air. Returning to the edge of the circle, the woman repeats the same movement once again. And again. And again. This is the signal for the other dancers to begin adapting their own improvised and previously autonomous movements into a larger choreographic structure.
Over the course of the next twenty minutes each of the dancers will take a turn "in the lead," initiating a phrase which the others will either repeat or adapt. This is the way 605 has always worked, but here they are exposing that process for us, making it the basis for the work itself. And we are able to see and appreciate the way they are working together in part because the group has deliberately slowed down their usual high-speed tempo. This culminates in an amazing round-robin of pick-up movement to an aria by Enrico Caruso, a marrying of contemporary and classical forms that allows us, in turn, to pick up (and out) what makes each of these dancers--and the group as a whole--so distinctive.
P.
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Le Grand Continental: Rehearsal 15
Last night was our final official rehearsal before the holiday break. To begin with, there was a considerable amount of shuffling of positions on the floor, with the elimination of a whole row from Group B (mostly owing to people dropping out). Mercifully, I stayed put. After that, we learned how to fall properly to the ground at the end of the "India" section, including how to avoid stepping on the head of the person behind us for those of us in the last two rows.
Then it was on to a general review of all the sections, refining some of the trickier moves in each, such as the "Where's the Bunny?" pirouette from "Cumbia." I still don't have that one down--at least not as expertly as Gatis, who was coaxed on stage by Lara to demonstrate for our benefit. But I'll work on it over the holidays. More successful was perfecting the cross of Groups A and B in the middle of "India," with all of us definitively arriving at a consensus about how many marks we are to move at a time, and with the lines from each group now aligning nicely during the little circle move we all do in the middle. Whew!
At the end of the two hours, Lara praised us all for how far we'd come since we started this process. She said we were going to blow Sylvain's socks off when he returns in January. But to do that, she reminded us, we needed to practice over the holidays--preferably just with the music, and not the videos, so that we could listen for cues and learn to anticipate what move was coming next.
A large group of us then began a semi-epic journey along Main Street to find a bar that could accommodate us for a celebratory drink (I think there were about 20-25 people in total). Ling, who was our ringleader, announced that the folks at The Cascade Room, whom she had originally been in touch with about holding their back space for us, had sold us out and given up the room to another large party. So after various desperate telephone calls, she received confirmation that The Whip could take us. Except that when the first wave of us arrived, the aggrieved hostess was aghast to learn that the six people she had anticipated had morphed into a double digit mass. After various other suggestions (The Narrow, The Anza Club), we tramped to nearby Main Street Brewery, which more or less had the space to accommodate us.
It was nice to get to chat with some of my fellow dancers at more length outside of rehearsal. I learned, for example, that Cheryl writes for the Courier; that Ling has previously lived in London and Berlin, working in the arts and entertainment industry, and that after several years in Vancouver she was still finding it hard to make new friends; and that Jessica, the virtuosic mover at the front of my row, did her dance degree at SFU, and is a good friend of my student Alana Gerecke. I also discovered from Caroline how quickly she and Lara and Anna had to learn the piece from Sylvain at the end of October, and from Lara that she was going to be part of a new work at Chutzpah! choreographed by Vanessa Goodman, and featuring Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin from the 605 Collective, alongside top Vancouver dancers Jane Osborne, Bevin Poole, and James Gnam (who studied alongside Lara at the National Ballet School--something I'd learned on Monday having coffee with James).
A common refrain in my conversations with my fellow community dancers was what we were all going to do come February, after our public performances of the piece. We're already anticipating being bereft without our regular Monday and Wednesday evening rehearsals and many of us would like to find a way to keep the group going--not just as an occasional social gathering, but actually as a regular community dance project. Super talented husband and wife team Mark Haney and Diane Park apparently have access to space at the Roundhouse and the Moberley Arts and Cultural Centre and, even better, may have successfully convinced Jessica over her second beer to take creative charge of our motley crew come February/March.
In the meantime, members of the group (again, chiefly Mark and Diane) have taken it upon themselves to organize two additional and self-directed workshops of Le Grand Continental this Saturday and two weeks hence, on January 3rd. Non-professional, volunteer performers wanting to give up their free time to rehearse more? Clearly something--nay, everything--about this project is clicking.
I am so stoked for January!
P.
Then it was on to a general review of all the sections, refining some of the trickier moves in each, such as the "Where's the Bunny?" pirouette from "Cumbia." I still don't have that one down--at least not as expertly as Gatis, who was coaxed on stage by Lara to demonstrate for our benefit. But I'll work on it over the holidays. More successful was perfecting the cross of Groups A and B in the middle of "India," with all of us definitively arriving at a consensus about how many marks we are to move at a time, and with the lines from each group now aligning nicely during the little circle move we all do in the middle. Whew!
At the end of the two hours, Lara praised us all for how far we'd come since we started this process. She said we were going to blow Sylvain's socks off when he returns in January. But to do that, she reminded us, we needed to practice over the holidays--preferably just with the music, and not the videos, so that we could listen for cues and learn to anticipate what move was coming next.
A large group of us then began a semi-epic journey along Main Street to find a bar that could accommodate us for a celebratory drink (I think there were about 20-25 people in total). Ling, who was our ringleader, announced that the folks at The Cascade Room, whom she had originally been in touch with about holding their back space for us, had sold us out and given up the room to another large party. So after various desperate telephone calls, she received confirmation that The Whip could take us. Except that when the first wave of us arrived, the aggrieved hostess was aghast to learn that the six people she had anticipated had morphed into a double digit mass. After various other suggestions (The Narrow, The Anza Club), we tramped to nearby Main Street Brewery, which more or less had the space to accommodate us.
It was nice to get to chat with some of my fellow dancers at more length outside of rehearsal. I learned, for example, that Cheryl writes for the Courier; that Ling has previously lived in London and Berlin, working in the arts and entertainment industry, and that after several years in Vancouver she was still finding it hard to make new friends; and that Jessica, the virtuosic mover at the front of my row, did her dance degree at SFU, and is a good friend of my student Alana Gerecke. I also discovered from Caroline how quickly she and Lara and Anna had to learn the piece from Sylvain at the end of October, and from Lara that she was going to be part of a new work at Chutzpah! choreographed by Vanessa Goodman, and featuring Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin from the 605 Collective, alongside top Vancouver dancers Jane Osborne, Bevin Poole, and James Gnam (who studied alongside Lara at the National Ballet School--something I'd learned on Monday having coffee with James).
A common refrain in my conversations with my fellow community dancers was what we were all going to do come February, after our public performances of the piece. We're already anticipating being bereft without our regular Monday and Wednesday evening rehearsals and many of us would like to find a way to keep the group going--not just as an occasional social gathering, but actually as a regular community dance project. Super talented husband and wife team Mark Haney and Diane Park apparently have access to space at the Roundhouse and the Moberley Arts and Cultural Centre and, even better, may have successfully convinced Jessica over her second beer to take creative charge of our motley crew come February/March.
In the meantime, members of the group (again, chiefly Mark and Diane) have taken it upon themselves to organize two additional and self-directed workshops of Le Grand Continental this Saturday and two weeks hence, on January 3rd. Non-professional, volunteer performers wanting to give up their free time to rehearse more? Clearly something--nay, everything--about this project is clicking.
I am so stoked for January!
P.
Saturday, September 13, 2014
Dance Centre Season Launch
Yesterday evening The Dance Centre launched its 2014-15 season with a cocktail party and showing of DC artist-in-residence Shay Kuebler's work-in-progress, Glory. I counted it as a good sign that on the way to the event we ran in to both Lesley Telford and Emily Molnar, the former in town to create a new piece for the latter's company members at Ballet BC--which will have its premiere in November.
The showing of Glory began with a POV film clip of a drunken man stumbling along a dimly lit road late at night. He falls to the ground and when he looks up he (and we) see a hooded figure staring at him off in the distance. But when he looks again the figure is gone. So begins a cat and mouse game that ends with our protagonist taking shelter in an abandoned building, using a flashlight to navigate its warren of rooms and every now and then catching his pursuer staring at him through a window. It is at this moment that we notice another beam of light being directed across the stage, this one attached to a live body, presumably the reverse avatar of our onscreen hero. As he flails about in the dark, we soon detect that he is being shadowed by four or five others, who emerge silently and stealthily from the wings to encircle the terrified torch bearer, menacing him with an assault of kinetic energy he can sense but not see.
The sequence, which is accompanied by creepy Psycho-esque music, is a suitably vertiginous and sensorily disorienting opening to a work that, as Kuebler subsequently told us, explores the glorification of violence in various forms of media such as films, television, and video games. Kuebler, who grew up practicing martial arts and watching kung fu and action movies, is interested in investigating through movement those moments when violence is spotlighted and amplified on screen: whether it be the slow motion impact of a bullet to a body; a prolonged death scene; a four-on-one fight that just won't quit; or the self that is subject to violent manipulation by external forces. The paradox is that these scenes, as enacted by Kuebler and his amazingly talented dancers (many of them cohorts from the 605 Collective), at once break down as "stunts" the various components we take to be "real" in action films and re-aestheticize them through the dancers' hypnotic virtuosity.
Which is also to say that embedded in Kuebler's title there is both critique and homage. I look forward to witnessing the final working through of this dialectic when the piece premieres at the Chutzpah! Festival next February.
P.
The showing of Glory began with a POV film clip of a drunken man stumbling along a dimly lit road late at night. He falls to the ground and when he looks up he (and we) see a hooded figure staring at him off in the distance. But when he looks again the figure is gone. So begins a cat and mouse game that ends with our protagonist taking shelter in an abandoned building, using a flashlight to navigate its warren of rooms and every now and then catching his pursuer staring at him through a window. It is at this moment that we notice another beam of light being directed across the stage, this one attached to a live body, presumably the reverse avatar of our onscreen hero. As he flails about in the dark, we soon detect that he is being shadowed by four or five others, who emerge silently and stealthily from the wings to encircle the terrified torch bearer, menacing him with an assault of kinetic energy he can sense but not see.
The sequence, which is accompanied by creepy Psycho-esque music, is a suitably vertiginous and sensorily disorienting opening to a work that, as Kuebler subsequently told us, explores the glorification of violence in various forms of media such as films, television, and video games. Kuebler, who grew up practicing martial arts and watching kung fu and action movies, is interested in investigating through movement those moments when violence is spotlighted and amplified on screen: whether it be the slow motion impact of a bullet to a body; a prolonged death scene; a four-on-one fight that just won't quit; or the self that is subject to violent manipulation by external forces. The paradox is that these scenes, as enacted by Kuebler and his amazingly talented dancers (many of them cohorts from the 605 Collective), at once break down as "stunts" the various components we take to be "real" in action films and re-aestheticize them through the dancers' hypnotic virtuosity.
Which is also to say that embedded in Kuebler's title there is both critique and homage. I look forward to witnessing the final working through of this dialectic when the piece premieres at the Chutzpah! Festival next February.
P.
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Veritas.trUth and Dance Machine at DOTE
Earlier this afternoon I took in two site-based works as part of the Dancing on the Edge Festival.
The first was Karissa Barry's Veritas.trUth, staged in the SFU Woodward's Cordova Street atrium and made in collaboration with students from the Modus Operandi Training Program. Six dancers, five women and one man, begin in the fetal position on the concrete plinths built into the brick risers leading towards the entrance to the Woodward's building. They are all clad in black and each sports a slash of orange paint down the length of their right arms. As a mix of house music (initially sounding quite Asian-themed) pours from two adjacent speakers, the dancers slowly unfurl their bodies, raising those orange arms skyward and gradually rising to a standing position. Weaving in and out of patrons sitting along the risers, the dancers eventually make their way to the accessible ramp running the length of the building, bopping up and down in a row behind it, almost as if they were in a studio inside practicing at the barre. Mixing hip-hop moves with parkour-inflected athleticism, Barry's choreography makes clever use of the built environment, with all the dancers eventually ending up on a single plinth, looking out into the courtyard and raising those orange arms in what one only imagines is a kind of group salute.
Then it was onto my bike for a quick ride through Strathcona and a final destination of battery opera's Hopbopshop at the foot of McLean Drive at Powell Street. There Lee Su-Feh, in collaboration with architect Jesse Garlick and dance artist Justine Chambers, has installed what she is calling the "beta version" of Dance Machine, a choreographic "environment" consisting of a series of bamboo poles attached to pulleys threaded through a central steel mechanism affixed to the ceiling; below the bamboo, on the floor, is a carpet of cedar boughs. Beginning yesterday and continuing through to the end of the DOTE Festival this Saturday, Lee and and her collaborators have invited several guest artists from the Vancouver dance community to interact with the machine. When I arrived today, the 605 Collective's Josh Martin was wrestling with the poles like a latter-day Samson (minus the hair): gathering them all up into his massive arms like spaghetti about to be thrown in a pot; carefully spreading them out from his back like wings; and bringing them horizontal so that he might wrap his legs around them, like the survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a makeshift raft. The smell of the cedar boughs as Martin trod upon them and ground them into his body while he was on the floor provided an added sensory element to the proceedings, as did the sound of the clinking bamboo, an extra bit of timpani to accompany the background music that was playing.
Chambers (who, incidentally, has an immersive work of her own--Family Dinner--at this year's DOTE Festival) said to me as I was leaving that each of the guest artists has been given some basic principles to work with in relation to the machine; apart from that, they are free to move and interact with it as they see fit. That the room--and consequently those of us inside it as spectators--is also made to move as a result is part of the quintessentially heterodox "dance-making" we have come to expect from Lee and her battery opera collaborators.
I bet, however, it's a pain to disentangle all that bamboo.
P.
The first was Karissa Barry's Veritas.trUth, staged in the SFU Woodward's Cordova Street atrium and made in collaboration with students from the Modus Operandi Training Program. Six dancers, five women and one man, begin in the fetal position on the concrete plinths built into the brick risers leading towards the entrance to the Woodward's building. They are all clad in black and each sports a slash of orange paint down the length of their right arms. As a mix of house music (initially sounding quite Asian-themed) pours from two adjacent speakers, the dancers slowly unfurl their bodies, raising those orange arms skyward and gradually rising to a standing position. Weaving in and out of patrons sitting along the risers, the dancers eventually make their way to the accessible ramp running the length of the building, bopping up and down in a row behind it, almost as if they were in a studio inside practicing at the barre. Mixing hip-hop moves with parkour-inflected athleticism, Barry's choreography makes clever use of the built environment, with all the dancers eventually ending up on a single plinth, looking out into the courtyard and raising those orange arms in what one only imagines is a kind of group salute.
Then it was onto my bike for a quick ride through Strathcona and a final destination of battery opera's Hopbopshop at the foot of McLean Drive at Powell Street. There Lee Su-Feh, in collaboration with architect Jesse Garlick and dance artist Justine Chambers, has installed what she is calling the "beta version" of Dance Machine, a choreographic "environment" consisting of a series of bamboo poles attached to pulleys threaded through a central steel mechanism affixed to the ceiling; below the bamboo, on the floor, is a carpet of cedar boughs. Beginning yesterday and continuing through to the end of the DOTE Festival this Saturday, Lee and and her collaborators have invited several guest artists from the Vancouver dance community to interact with the machine. When I arrived today, the 605 Collective's Josh Martin was wrestling with the poles like a latter-day Samson (minus the hair): gathering them all up into his massive arms like spaghetti about to be thrown in a pot; carefully spreading them out from his back like wings; and bringing them horizontal so that he might wrap his legs around them, like the survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a makeshift raft. The smell of the cedar boughs as Martin trod upon them and ground them into his body while he was on the floor provided an added sensory element to the proceedings, as did the sound of the clinking bamboo, an extra bit of timpani to accompany the background music that was playing.
Josh Martin wrestling with the Dance Machine, The Hopbopshop, July 10, 2014
Chambers (who, incidentally, has an immersive work of her own--Family Dinner--at this year's DOTE Festival) said to me as I was leaving that each of the guest artists has been given some basic principles to work with in relation to the machine; apart from that, they are free to move and interact with it as they see fit. That the room--and consequently those of us inside it as spectators--is also made to move as a result is part of the quintessentially heterodox "dance-making" we have come to expect from Lee and her battery opera collaborators.
I bet, however, it's a pain to disentangle all that bamboo.
P.
Saturday, February 1, 2014
PuSh 2014: Inheritor Album
605 Collective's Inheritor Album, on at the Dance Centre in a co-presentation with the PuSh Festival through tomorrow, opens with a stunning movement image. As six dancers begin running clockwise in a circle, a light projection on the floor reveals a spinning 78" record (the gorgeous animations used throughout the piece are by Miwa Matreyek). The dancers take turns tagging and pushing off each other, until one of them breaks away and begins running the other way. It's an apt metaphor for the intersection of collective versus individual identity that is at the heart of the concept of inheritance (familial, cultural, artistic) and the musical concept album, which though loosely united around a general idea or theme always has one or two breakout songs.
But, as my SFU Contemporary Arts colleague Rob Kitsos pointed out in the talkback following last night's performance, the opening also speaks to the nature of hip hop as a dance style, structured as it is around the idea of a "crew" who are all grooving in a circle to the same beats, but who also challenge and egg each other on with individual displays of virtuosic B-boy freestyling. There are plenty of those moments in this performance, but what I love about the 605 Collective is they are also not afraid of unison. In Inheritor Album audiences get some of the best contemporary group movement they'll see on any dance stage, not least in its seamless fusing of choreographic styles and training.
The six performers talked about their eclectic and varied dance training during the talkback, and how most of it--with the possible exception of tap--was reflected in some way or another in the piece. Core 605 members Josh Martin and Lisa Gelley also talked about reconstructing the work in less than a month on three new dancers (Hayden Fong, Waldean Nelson, and Renée Sigouin; the sixth dancer is Laura Avery, part of the original production last year along with Shay Kuebler, Justine Chambers, and David Raymond). To start, the main challenge is just teaching and learning the movement in such a short amount of time; however, once that movement was in the new dancers' bodies, Martin was able to work with them to adapt it to their own particular improvisational strengths.
And by such methods one builds a crew.
P.
But, as my SFU Contemporary Arts colleague Rob Kitsos pointed out in the talkback following last night's performance, the opening also speaks to the nature of hip hop as a dance style, structured as it is around the idea of a "crew" who are all grooving in a circle to the same beats, but who also challenge and egg each other on with individual displays of virtuosic B-boy freestyling. There are plenty of those moments in this performance, but what I love about the 605 Collective is they are also not afraid of unison. In Inheritor Album audiences get some of the best contemporary group movement they'll see on any dance stage, not least in its seamless fusing of choreographic styles and training.
The six performers talked about their eclectic and varied dance training during the talkback, and how most of it--with the possible exception of tap--was reflected in some way or another in the piece. Core 605 members Josh Martin and Lisa Gelley also talked about reconstructing the work in less than a month on three new dancers (Hayden Fong, Waldean Nelson, and Renée Sigouin; the sixth dancer is Laura Avery, part of the original production last year along with Shay Kuebler, Justine Chambers, and David Raymond). To start, the main challenge is just teaching and learning the movement in such a short amount of time; however, once that movement was in the new dancers' bodies, Martin was able to work with them to adapt it to their own particular improvisational strengths.
And by such methods one builds a crew.
P.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
PuSh 2014: Tucked and Plucked and FUSE
Leave it to the PuSh Festival to coordinate a PuSh Passholder appreciation event at which one is more likely to be insulted than praised. Such was the case last night at the Club, where those bad bitches from East Van, Isolde N. Barron (aka Cameron Mackenzie) and her wife Peach Cobblah (Dave Deveau) held court in Tucked and Plucked, their sassy "herstory" of the drag scene in Vancouver from the 1960s to the present.
Isolde and Peach each dazzle in a solo musical number--Isolde in classic drag diva fashion to Shirley Bassey's Let's Get this Party Started and Peach rocking it out to the more contemporary stylings of Nicki Minaj--and together they go through enough sequins, fishnets, and paint to costume more than a dozen Liza look-a-likes. However, the show is mostly devoted, à la Oprah or Ellen, to on-stage interviews with three past Empresses of the Dogwood Monarchist Society, the organization that has presided over drag coronations in this city for the past 42 years. We hear from Mona Regina Lee about the early origins of the Society and what it was like, under BC's antiquated liquor laws (and pre the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada) for queers to gather together in bottle clubs; from three-time Empress Myria Le Noir (who did a stand-out number to a slowed-down version of that drag standard I Will Survive) about the DMS's important charitable work during the early days of AIDS; and from the legendary Joan-E about dishing with Debbie Reynolds during the filming of Connie and Carla.
Then it was off to the Vancouver Art Gallery for FUSE: The Push Festival Edition. The place was packed and we arrived just in time to catch an excerpt from the 605 Collective's The Inheritor Album, the full version of which we'll see at the Dance Centre at the end of the month. I had hoped to get up to the fourth floor to see Forest Fringe in collaboration with Tim Etchells; however, I got waylaid by the Muntadas show Entre/Between, which was simply fascinating.
And, of course, there were far too many people to talk to. Kudos to VAG Curator of Public Programs and all-round friend of PuSh, Vanessa Kwan, for putting such a fantastic event together. Vanessa and her collective Norma will be appearing at Club PuSh tonight in Swan Song (for Cats); it is to be the farewell performance for the troupe and will feature, among many other things, musical accompaniment by Veda Hille.
P.
Isolde and Peach each dazzle in a solo musical number--Isolde in classic drag diva fashion to Shirley Bassey's Let's Get this Party Started and Peach rocking it out to the more contemporary stylings of Nicki Minaj--and together they go through enough sequins, fishnets, and paint to costume more than a dozen Liza look-a-likes. However, the show is mostly devoted, à la Oprah or Ellen, to on-stage interviews with three past Empresses of the Dogwood Monarchist Society, the organization that has presided over drag coronations in this city for the past 42 years. We hear from Mona Regina Lee about the early origins of the Society and what it was like, under BC's antiquated liquor laws (and pre the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada) for queers to gather together in bottle clubs; from three-time Empress Myria Le Noir (who did a stand-out number to a slowed-down version of that drag standard I Will Survive) about the DMS's important charitable work during the early days of AIDS; and from the legendary Joan-E about dishing with Debbie Reynolds during the filming of Connie and Carla.
Then it was off to the Vancouver Art Gallery for FUSE: The Push Festival Edition. The place was packed and we arrived just in time to catch an excerpt from the 605 Collective's The Inheritor Album, the full version of which we'll see at the Dance Centre at the end of the month. I had hoped to get up to the fourth floor to see Forest Fringe in collaboration with Tim Etchells; however, I got waylaid by the Muntadas show Entre/Between, which was simply fascinating.
And, of course, there were far too many people to talk to. Kudos to VAG Curator of Public Programs and all-round friend of PuSh, Vanessa Kwan, for putting such a fantastic event together. Vanessa and her collective Norma will be appearing at Club PuSh tonight in Swan Song (for Cats); it is to be the farewell performance for the troupe and will feature, among many other things, musical accompaniment by Veda Hille.
P.
Saturday, April 6, 2013
War: Requiem at SFU Woodward's
Things are bustling at SFU Woodward's, where several year-end shows highlight the immense talent and creativity of Contemporary Arts students across the disciplines. Last night I got a chance to see the senior repertory dance students shine in War: Requiem, an intense, athletic, and visually stunning show overseen and co-created by Rob Kitsos, and featuring additional choreography by the 605 Collective, Shauna Elton, and Vanessa Goodman.
The show begins, more or less in medias res, with the full company of 18 dancers scattered about the Fei and Milton Wong Theatre's reconfigured thrust stage, clad in gender-neutral variations of grey and black (the costumes are by Carmen Alatorre), and each standing at rigid military attention. As the audience begins to file to their seats, one of the dancers shouts a command and, en masse, the group begins to march in place, 18 pairs of sneakers echoing like artillery fire off the Wong's sprung floor. Another command and the group comes together centre stage, a single unit now, marching with collective purpose, but going nowhere, their blank performance faces in this case telegraphing the anonymous--and obedient--abrogation of self required of the common soldier.
Here and elsewhere throughout the evening I was also reminded about how much unison choreography has in common with military drills and formations, not least in terms of the bodily discipline (and disciplining of the body) required for each. In one full-throttle sequence after another, in straight lines or diagonal v-shapes, running or simply standing in place, standing on tables upstage, or rolling on the floor downstage, the dancers executed a range of complex and intensely physical choreography with precision and virtuosic timing. Which made all the more memorable and impactful those moments when one among them broke away from or moved counter to the group. Often this occurred in combination with spoken text, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear one of my favourite parts from the Homebody's monologue in Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul being recited at a certain point (although it wasn't credited in the program).
It's also a credit to the overall curation of this show that while I could pick out what I thought were recognizable 605 moments or phrases and whole sequences that likely came from Rob or Shauna or Vanessa, the total experience of the choreography felt seamless. Which is also to say that the dancers' interpretations of the variations in style were also incredibly fluid and organic.
Finally a shout-out to the amazingly integrated design concept for the piece, with music by Gabriel Saloman, lighting by Sarah Bourdeau and Rui Su, projections by Chimerik (brothers and new media wizards Sammy Chien and Shang-Han Chien), and installation work by guest artist Nancy Tam. At moments throughout the piece we glimpse a figure walking slowing behind a scrim upstage, wearing what looks like a Hazmat suit. It's Tam, wrapped in layers of plastic. This mysterious figure finds a visual corollary at the end of the piece: as the dancers one by one deposit plastic replica bodies downstage and join each other in a heap on the floor centre stage, heaving for a few moments together as they collect, or expend, a final breath, Tam begins emerging from her own plastic cocoon, like a butterfly from its chrysalis. Creation from destruction? Beauty from ugliness? It's a deliberately ambiguous closing image, but one that, like everything else in this production, is full of meaning and resonance.
War: Requiem runs for two more performance today, at 2 pm and 8 pm.
P.
The show begins, more or less in medias res, with the full company of 18 dancers scattered about the Fei and Milton Wong Theatre's reconfigured thrust stage, clad in gender-neutral variations of grey and black (the costumes are by Carmen Alatorre), and each standing at rigid military attention. As the audience begins to file to their seats, one of the dancers shouts a command and, en masse, the group begins to march in place, 18 pairs of sneakers echoing like artillery fire off the Wong's sprung floor. Another command and the group comes together centre stage, a single unit now, marching with collective purpose, but going nowhere, their blank performance faces in this case telegraphing the anonymous--and obedient--abrogation of self required of the common soldier.
Here and elsewhere throughout the evening I was also reminded about how much unison choreography has in common with military drills and formations, not least in terms of the bodily discipline (and disciplining of the body) required for each. In one full-throttle sequence after another, in straight lines or diagonal v-shapes, running or simply standing in place, standing on tables upstage, or rolling on the floor downstage, the dancers executed a range of complex and intensely physical choreography with precision and virtuosic timing. Which made all the more memorable and impactful those moments when one among them broke away from or moved counter to the group. Often this occurred in combination with spoken text, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear one of my favourite parts from the Homebody's monologue in Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul being recited at a certain point (although it wasn't credited in the program).
It's also a credit to the overall curation of this show that while I could pick out what I thought were recognizable 605 moments or phrases and whole sequences that likely came from Rob or Shauna or Vanessa, the total experience of the choreography felt seamless. Which is also to say that the dancers' interpretations of the variations in style were also incredibly fluid and organic.
Finally a shout-out to the amazingly integrated design concept for the piece, with music by Gabriel Saloman, lighting by Sarah Bourdeau and Rui Su, projections by Chimerik (brothers and new media wizards Sammy Chien and Shang-Han Chien), and installation work by guest artist Nancy Tam. At moments throughout the piece we glimpse a figure walking slowing behind a scrim upstage, wearing what looks like a Hazmat suit. It's Tam, wrapped in layers of plastic. This mysterious figure finds a visual corollary at the end of the piece: as the dancers one by one deposit plastic replica bodies downstage and join each other in a heap on the floor centre stage, heaving for a few moments together as they collect, or expend, a final breath, Tam begins emerging from her own plastic cocoon, like a butterfly from its chrysalis. Creation from destruction? Beauty from ugliness? It's a deliberately ambiguous closing image, but one that, like everything else in this production, is full of meaning and resonance.
War: Requiem runs for two more performance today, at 2 pm and 8 pm.
P.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Chutzpah! 2013: Lesley Telford's Brittle Failure
Coming hot on the heels of PuSh, any other performing arts festival in the city would, even under the best of circumstances, be a challenge for my energy and attention. Fortunately, Chutzpah!, Vancouver's International Showcase of Jewish Performing Arts, always finds my sweet spot with its abundant programming of cutting-edge contemporary dance (Artistic Director Mary-Louise Albert is herself a former dancer and dance instructor). What's more, this year's three dance offerings have been bundled into a very attractively priced ticket package. Who could resist?
Last night the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre featured the return of Vancouver-born choreographer Lesley Telford, who is presenting a new work called Brittle Failure. A collaboration with Japanese scenographer Yoko Seyama, the piece opens with hundreds of tiny white paper houses lined up in neat rows on the stage. In terms of size, scale, and uniformity, one is reminded of architectural models for planned communities or, worse, a concentration camp. Dancer Clyde Emmauel Archer emerges from the wings and picks up one of the paper houses, placing it gently in the crook of his elbow, behind his knee, in the small of his back, all the while slowly moving (sometimes standing up, sometimes along the floor) clockwise around Seyama's fragile installation. He is soon joined by fellow dancers Iratxe Ansa and Miguel Oliviera, who begin an increasingly energetic duet upstage left, one that constantly threatens to spill over and upset the tidy rows of houses.
Indeed, the couple's movements seem deliberately counterpointed to Archer's as soloist: where he moves slowly and deliberately, respecting the architectural integrity of one model house at a time (and later using spoken word to reflect on his own childhood home), they move more quickly and cavalierly, at one point piling up dozens of houses in each other's arms, an image that succinctly encapsulates our natural acquisitiveness--whether for real estate or for memories. There are several other stunning visual effects created throughout the piece, as when a wash of moving lights cinematically animates the rows of houses, or when, in a coup-de-théâtre, the mat upon which the houses have been neatly aligned is pulled up by two wires, causing the houses to tumble into each other, creating an instant shantytown that is very quickly swept away.
As for the dancing, I was most taken by the two duets--between Ansa and Archer, and then between Ansa and Oliviera--that conclude the piece. The first is by far the more physical, the strength of one partner's fragile hold tested by the counter-weight of the other's oppositely straining body, Ansa and Archer enacting their own "brittle failure," which as the program notes remind us "is a technical term used to define the conditions under which solid materials fracture under pressure." Then, in the final duet between Ansa and Oliviera, Telford seems to be asking under what conditions might those broken pieces be put back together, a final origami abode placed gingerly between one foot of each of the dancers as they slowly pivot around it and also raise it delicately aloft, careful now not to crush what real or imagined space binds them together: "safe as houses."
Brittle Failure shares a program with a remix of work by local hip-hop favourites 605 Collective, as well as a moving duet by Israeli choreographer Itzik Galili, danced by Oliviera and Telford herself. There is one more performance tonight at 7 pm.
P.
Last night the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre featured the return of Vancouver-born choreographer Lesley Telford, who is presenting a new work called Brittle Failure. A collaboration with Japanese scenographer Yoko Seyama, the piece opens with hundreds of tiny white paper houses lined up in neat rows on the stage. In terms of size, scale, and uniformity, one is reminded of architectural models for planned communities or, worse, a concentration camp. Dancer Clyde Emmauel Archer emerges from the wings and picks up one of the paper houses, placing it gently in the crook of his elbow, behind his knee, in the small of his back, all the while slowly moving (sometimes standing up, sometimes along the floor) clockwise around Seyama's fragile installation. He is soon joined by fellow dancers Iratxe Ansa and Miguel Oliviera, who begin an increasingly energetic duet upstage left, one that constantly threatens to spill over and upset the tidy rows of houses.
Indeed, the couple's movements seem deliberately counterpointed to Archer's as soloist: where he moves slowly and deliberately, respecting the architectural integrity of one model house at a time (and later using spoken word to reflect on his own childhood home), they move more quickly and cavalierly, at one point piling up dozens of houses in each other's arms, an image that succinctly encapsulates our natural acquisitiveness--whether for real estate or for memories. There are several other stunning visual effects created throughout the piece, as when a wash of moving lights cinematically animates the rows of houses, or when, in a coup-de-théâtre, the mat upon which the houses have been neatly aligned is pulled up by two wires, causing the houses to tumble into each other, creating an instant shantytown that is very quickly swept away.
As for the dancing, I was most taken by the two duets--between Ansa and Archer, and then between Ansa and Oliviera--that conclude the piece. The first is by far the more physical, the strength of one partner's fragile hold tested by the counter-weight of the other's oppositely straining body, Ansa and Archer enacting their own "brittle failure," which as the program notes remind us "is a technical term used to define the conditions under which solid materials fracture under pressure." Then, in the final duet between Ansa and Oliviera, Telford seems to be asking under what conditions might those broken pieces be put back together, a final origami abode placed gingerly between one foot of each of the dancers as they slowly pivot around it and also raise it delicately aloft, careful now not to crush what real or imagined space binds them together: "safe as houses."
Brittle Failure shares a program with a remix of work by local hip-hop favourites 605 Collective, as well as a moving duet by Israeli choreographer Itzik Galili, danced by Oliviera and Telford herself. There is one more performance tonight at 7 pm.
P.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Beyond the Status Quo
The 22nd edition of the Dancing on the Edge Festival got off to a flying start (quite literally) last night at the Firehall Arts Centre, first with Byron Chief-Moon's Essence of Life, his dance-media reinterpretation of the Blackfoot Sun-dance ceremony, and then with Amber Funk Barton and Shay Kuebler's return presentation of Status Quo (see photo above), a high-octane, high-altitude surfing/surfeit of gravity-defying movement and thumping music.
It's always intoxicating to see Barton and Kuebler--joined here by Kuebler's fellow 605 Collective member Josh Martin, and Manuel Sorge--launch themselves horizontally through the air, and the kinesthetic energy pulsing through the audience was palpable. However, I think I've had enough of the jerky convulsions and spastic gasps of air that often accompany their work. These young and immensely talented dancers certainly have a distinct and urban/hip-hop inspired aesthetic. Now I think it's time to change things up a bit, which was ostensibly the motive behind the two solos by Kuebler and Barton that preceded the quartet. In this regard, I think Kuebler's was the more successful of the two.
In her opening remarks, Firehall Artistic Director and DOTE Producer Donna Spencer mentioned that they were selling raffle tickets (at $20 a piece) to make up a shortfall in funding due to the BC Government's cuts to gaming fund allocations to the arts (and festivals like DOTE, in particular). I bought two, and I encourage other patrons to dig into their pockets and do the same. We want this Vancouver dance institution to stick around for another 22 years.
Next up for us on the program is the Vancouver premiere of German choreographer Thomas Lehman's Schriebstück at the Dance Centre on Saturday. Looking forward to what promises to be a fascinating experiment.
P.
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