Dialogue at The Dance Centre

Wen Wai Wang's newest full-length dance, Dialogue, premiered at the Dance Centre last night. Inspired in part by the movement history of Wang's own migrant body, the work was built on and in collaboration with six talented young male dancers in the city: Ralph Escamillan, Andrew Haydock, Arash Khakpour, Tyler Layton-Olson, Nicholas Lydiate, and Alex Tam. As I understand Wang's process, each dancer was invited to bring aspects of his own dance training and personal story to the work. The result is a unique and deeply engaging meditation on what it means to communicate kinetically across cultural identity and individual experience.

With the house lights still up, five of the dancers--Escamillan, Haydock, Khakpour, Layton-Olson, and Tam--enter and casually sit down on the chairs that have been positioned along the upstage wall. During the curtain speech they stare out at the audience, while alternately crossing their legs demurely (Escamillan), or lifting one up to the edge of the chair (Haydock), or manspreading (Tam and Khakpour), or slouching (Layton-Olson), each physical choice already inviting us to read their bodies--and thus their identities--in different ways. Lydiate only enters at the end of the curtain speech, pausing to stand in front of the remaining empty chair, and trading some not very friendly looks with his fellow dancers. Indeed, when Lydiate finally does sit down, this is the cue for the others to move their chairs into a semi-circle centre stage, with Tam beginning a relay of hand and arm gestures that gets taken up, adapted and expanded in turn by each of the other dancers. The gestures grow steadily bigger and bolder in their sweep out from the dancers' torsos and the arcs they make through the air, with Lydiate eventually joining the circle as the thrown movements ricochet back and forth from body to body at a faster and faster pace. It was like we were watching a seated hip hop dance circle, each dancer's ever more complicated gestures at once an invitation and a challenge to the others to top. This opening sequence is echoed later in the work when the dancers, standing now, form another semi-circle around the body of Khakpour, who has just finished a wrenchingly physical floor solo. Drawing their bodies into various Transformer-esque poses while simultaneously making lock and load sounds with their voices, the dancers now use their newly weaponized limbs to send imaginary bullets around the circle, but with each ricochet this time additionally passing through the defenceless body of Khakpour.

Much like the ethos of hip hop, the literal momentum of Dialogue accrues through the tension between these alternately combative and collaborative group sequences and individual moments of virtuosic solo improvisation. For example, early on in the piece, during a section featuring club music, the dancers groove on the spot in their own singular ways, alternately slowing down and speeding up the tempo, moving in and out of unison. But what's most striking about the tableau Wang creates here is that the two white dancers face front, while the dancers of colour have their backs turned to the audience, a simple yet highly effective comment on the politics of (in)visibility in social spaces, and one that is tellingly followed by a solo from Lydiate in his tighty whities. This dialectics of surface and depth, inside and outside, looking and being seen is further highlighted in the sequence that immediately follows, which sees each of the dancers don a hat (initially in Khakpour's case, a hair pic) that presumably somehow telegraphs an aspect of their personality, and then rotate through a series of poses as Elvis' Love Me Tender plays.

All of this builds to what I found to be the most arresting section of the dance, which immediately follows the aforementioned Transformer sequence. The dancers link arms and gather in a circle around Khakpour who, at first feeling trapped, lifts his shirt up over his head, a cloaking movement he has made before that is rich in imagistic associations we are wont to project onto Khakpour's Muslim body: from balaclava to veil. Here, however, the other dancers seem intent on letting Khakpour be seen, removing the mask and insisting on their own presence by placing their hands in turn in front of his face. This is followed by Escamillan then ducking his head and shoulders inside the circle, which sets off a succession of similar breaches by the group that gets repeated twice, with the circle eventually breaking apart to form a linked chain, the tethering of each of the men's bodies and the flow of movement that now gets passed up and down the line here suggesting balance and mutual support rather than competition and one upmanship.

I would have preferred if Dialogue ended there, but the piece--which, in my view, is about 10-15 minutes too long--continues on for a series of codas that culminates in a disco ball-infused tango duet between Escamillan (in heels) and Khakpour. I appreciated Escamillan's physical and emotional commitment to this scene, but structurally and conceptually it seemed to signal the start of a separate journey rather than satisfactorily concluding this one. Such caveats aside, Wang and his dancers have crafted a rich aesthetic and affective experience with this work and I hope, beyond its brief run here in Vancouver, that it tours widely.

P

Induction at EDAM

Friday evening Richard and I enjoyed a lovely walk to the Western Front to take in EDAM's presentation of its latest choreographic series. The fans in the studio were whirling, it was not overly crowded (though the house was more or less full, which was nice to see), and cold wine and beer was for sale by Daelik at the bar: in other words, viewing conditions were just right.

First on the program was Tom Stroud and Peter Bingham's A Delicate Balance, a duet for Delia Brett and Elissa Hansen that builds slowly and subtly, sneaking up on one's senses. Which is only fitting given that it is about memory. The piece begins with the two dancers standing against the upstage wall; their gazes are fixed resolutely outward to the audience. First Brett and then Hansen draws a hand to her face and opens her mouth in a silent scream. In voiceover we hear someone describing her memories of a house she lived in. At a certain point the performers notice each other, and they slide closer to each other along the wall, at first curiously and then more threateningly, the dancers' more or less matching height used to wonderful effect as each alternates in looming over or cowering from the other, a shadow play enfleshed and come to life. Perhaps we are witnessing a battle between the ego and the id over who owns the past (or is enslaved by it); then again, as per the epigraph from Richard Holmes in the program about the muse Mnemosyne needing a twin (one who forgets alongside her remembering), that battle might actually be between two sisters' different recollections of the house they grew up in.

After this prologue, the dancers push away from the wall and advance toward the audience in parallel lines, improvising solo movement phrases as they reach searchingly into the immediate spatial void around them, building corporeal architectures in the absence of ones made of bricks and mortar. Eventually the dancers will cross paths, making contact and, using the vocabulary of that dance form, partnering in the sharing and redistributing of each other's weight--which, in this case, must include the weight of memory. To this end, the piece ends with an uncanny visual trick whereby the two dancers' bodies become one, Brett's initially off-beat and slightly delayed mimicking of Hansen's gestures eventually matching her partner's movements exactly as she slowly moves behind her, the two bodies now a perfect palimpsest as the voiceover intones about rooms and hallways leading to still more rooms. If, as Frances Yates and Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud (among many others) have taught us, memory is essentially an architectural system, then what better medium than dance (whose archive is the body) to incarnate that system.

Following the first intermission longtime EDAM dancer Anne Cooper debuted FormSongs, which if I'm not mistaken might be her first work of original choreography. In the piece Cooper, along with partner Kelly McInnes, alternate between composed and improvised structures, solo and unison phrases, all performed to the live vocal improvisations of the wonderful DB Boyko (recorded music by Veda Hille is also used in the piece). The interplay between movement and voice was frequently fascinating to behold, as when Boyko's long sibilant exhalations of breath sent the dancers swooshing backwards into the distance, or when her staccato clucking had them ricocheting off of the floor and each other. I also appreciated the cross-disciplinary call and response aesthetic embedded into the work, with Cooper and McInnes at times answering Boyko vocally and Boyko likewise getting up from her station stage left to every now and then join the dancers in a bit of movement. On the whole, however, I think the piece went on a bit too long. The bit about the "Lemon Poem" by Pablo Neruda felt especially superfluous and unnecessary.

The evening concluded with a new work, Scenes for Your Consideration, by the always exciting Amber Funk Barton. A trio, the piece begins, like Stroud and Bingham's A Delicate Balance, along the upstage wall. Dancer Elya Grant sits on a stool, moving her hands from her thighs to her knees, and her head to her hands in perfectly controlled counts of eight as a song by Grizzly Bear plays on the soundtrack. Suddenly Andrew Haydock appears from behind the stage right door, inching his way, also in time to the music, to the empty stool beside Grant. Antonio Somero Jr makes a similarly dramatic entrance from the stage left door, and our menage is complete, as over the course of the piece the dancers will form and disperse and regroup in patterns that suggest rivalry and reciprocity, competition and care, friction and friendship.

What is so rewarding to take in is the depth and variety of choreographic skills that Barton employs to stage these scenes. A pleasingly geometric floor sequence involving the overlaying and collapsing of six sets of arms and elbows mixes a bit of unison, canon, and retrograde. Likewise, the influence of being in residence at EDAM registers in the bodily chains and gravity-defying support structures that Barton creates with her dancers. And, refreshingly, she is not afraid of stillness. One of my favourite moments in the piece is when, the music having cut out, Grant sculpts the bodies of Haydock and Somera into an interlocking tableau centre stage. All of these young dancers are on fire in this piece, with the tiny Grant especially watchable as she flings and slides her bodies across the stage floor, or bounces off of the studio walls. Barton also gives us a great ending as, with the lights fading, the dancers move upstage in a series of hugs, but always with one of them on the outside, and thus forced to break up any new relationship that forms. Something to consider, indeed.

P