Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 40

The 2017 edition of Dance in Vancouver officially kicked off yesterday, which also means that our Dance Histories Project is now cumulatively launched into the world. Natalie Purschwitz's installation has been on glorious display for a while now, but to this in the Faris studio lobby we've now added our gesture video and sound installation. Even the turn-down trivia for DiV presenters successfully found its way to Holiday Inn hotel staff. And several t-shirters and gesturers were in evidence in the audience yesterday for the roundtable organized by DiV guest curator Adam Hayward on "Why Shrink the World?"

Ostensibly about the idea of working locally but thinking globally (in one's artistic, curatorial and social practice), the roundtable showcased the work of three New Zealand/Aotearoa artists: Jack Gray (also presenting alongside his Native American collaborator Dakota); Julia Harvie; and Claire O'Neil. I very much enjoyed hearing about all of their practices, but the session ran rather long, and there wasn't really much time for any back and forth with the audience. Still, the session, following upon a studio showing by Olivia C. Davies (one of our Dance Histories interviewees), did importantly emphasize the parallel IndigeDiV focus of this year's biennial--a dance and conversation series organized by Raven Spirit Dance that focuses on Indigenous artistic creation and expression on these unceded Coast Salish Territories.

I didn't stick around for the reception following the roundtable, nor for that evening's performance (Wen Wei Wang's Dialogue, which I previously wrote about here). In fact, I won't be attending any of DiV's mainstage performances this year: a combination of other stuff competing for my attention and also waiting too long to purchase tickets that I'd wrongly assumed might be extended our way complimentarily as a result of our Dance Histories work (which is, after all, featured in the DiV program). Not a big deal, as I've seen and written about most of the work before. But it does mean that I won't witness how DiV presenters and audiences experience and interact with our "lobby animation," as it's officially been called.

Nor, for that matter, will Alexa, who beginning tonight will be busy performing in the world premiere of Vanessa Goodman's Wells Hill (which I look forward to seeing Saturday evening). We'll have to rely on Justine to let us know how things go. Indeed, I look forward to the post-DiV debrief. In the meantime, I think this post more or less concludes the on-line documentation of our work on this project. Hard to believe it's been more than two years since we've been working on this (and closer to three for Alexa and Justine). And, of course, it's not finished, nor will it ever be finished. Figuring out where we go from here will almost surely be part of our debrief conversations.

P

Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 39

In addition to commissioning Natalie Purschwitz's amazing installation (now on full glorious display in the lobby of The Dance Centre), one of our more inspired ideas for how we would disperse and animate aspects of the interviews that we collected for our Dance Histories Project during the upcoming Dance in Vancouver biennial was to pull quotes from each of our interviewees and, with their permission, iron them on to T-shirts that also had that their name and interview number on the back, like so:

That's the front of Deanna Peters' T-shirt, and the back of Jane Osborne's, carefully decaled into place at an ironing party that Justine and Alexa and I had at my house last Monday morning. Over the rest of that week, I completed the rest of the 53 total T-shirts (in my earlier summary of the folks we'd interviewed, listed here, I left out Kelly McInnes and Olivia Shaffer, both of whom Alexa interviewed, but whose videos she hadn't been able to upload to our shared Dropbox folder from her phone). Yesterday Alexa and Kate Franklin and I distributed about half of them to the current students of Modus Operandi following their Sunday hip-hop class at The Dance Centre:

For the second half of this part of the project is that we're asking volunteers to wear one of the T-shirts during the week of DiV, and also to learn three shared gestures, and however many additional ones they'd also like to embody--all culled from our video interviews with Vancouver dance artists; whenever they're at The Dance Centre, or wherever else they might be in the city, our T-shirt-wearing volunteers are then invited to either slip these gestures covertly into routine conversations and interactions, or else to deliberately interrupt and/or open up a space through the repetition of the gestures. In this way, the discursive histories we've captured through our interviews will be reembodied and redistributed through this double act of transfer.

The Modus students all seemed eager to participate, and also proved amazingly adept at learning some very complicated gestures. Next Monday we'll have a further T-shirt and gesture distribution session at The Dance Centre with a bunch of dance artists (including several of our interviewees) who are keen to participate. Together with the sound and video installations we're also planning, it will hopefully be a lively complement to the regular DiV programming.

Everything kicks off on November 22nd. You can check out the full schedule here.

P.

Dance in Vancouver: Marta Marta Productions' Speaking in Ligeti

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

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

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

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

P.

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

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

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

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

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

P.

 

Edge 1 at DOTE

Shit happens. We all know this, but perhaps no one knows it better than a performing arts festival producer. So it was that yesterday afternoon’s audience for the Edge 1 mixed program at this year’s Dancing on the Edge Festival learned from Donna Spencer during her curtain speech that Brazil’s Paulo Lima was unable to make it to Vancouver (for the second time, I believe). However, we also learned that Sarah Chase and Andrea Nann, already on the program with their collaboration a crazy kind of hope, had together gone into the studio just a couple of days before and created a new duet, which they would share with us in place of Lima’s work.

A crazy kind of hope, which I first saw at last November’s Dance in Vancouver Biennial (and which I wrote about here), is built around Chase’s trademark overlaying of mathematically precise gestural patterns with lyrical storytelling. In this case Nann’s narrative builds from a funny anecdote about her Uncle Wayne transporting a carp purchased in Chinatown back to Hornby Island (and building a pond for it when he discovered it was still alive) to a moving account of the death of her first child, and how she is able to bring together her dead daughter with the brother she never knew. This is accomplished by Nann interweaving two looping arm phrases—seven gestures performed with her left arm representing her son, and eleven gestures performed with her right arm representing her daughter.

Chase has done an amazing amount of research on the brain and the relationship between kinesthesia and cognition (some of which she shared as part of a plenary panel with Tara Cheyenne Friendenberg that I had the pleasure of moderating this past Wednesday as part of the Canadian Society for Dance Studies’ bi-annual conference at SFU Woodward’s, “Embodied Artful Practices”); her interest in combining complexly countable movement loops with talk stems from the theory that motion affects memory, especially emotional memory, and that people become more eloquent—in their speech and in their bodies—if they tell a story while repeating linked movement patterns. Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated for me yesterday than when Nann—already such a gorgeous and graceful dancer—repeats the arm loop combination described above 99 times while singing “Mr. Tambourine Man.” I could see this piece performed 1,001 times and I’d still be utterly captivated by its magic.

Coincidentally, 1,001 is the number at the heart of the duet Epilogue Study—Tribune Bay that Chase and Nann put together as a coda to the Edge 1 program. It begins with Chase explaining that as part of her daily practice on the beach at her home on Hornby Island, she repeats a series of movement patterns. She often starts with seven leg movements (which she demonstrates for us); she’ll then follow with eleven arm movements; and finally she puts both together, repeating each combination thirteen times while moving horizontally across the beach for a total of 1,001 gestures. As she says, this can take upwards of an hour and, depending on whether she’s practicing at low or high tide, the traces she made in the sand with her legs at the beginning might be washed away when she finishes. Fortunately for us, that inside story into Chase’s creative process is not the finish of this piece. Instead, Chase is joined on stage by Nann, with both dancers repeating separate phrases while moving towards a meeting point centre stage. Once there, they sync up their arm movements in a way that suggests those bodily trompe l’oeils of multi-armed Indian deities. Except there is nothing camp or kitsch about the resulting image. Instead, there is a definite logic and pattern to the repetition of the movement. And part of the joy in watching the work—as with the underlying beauty of mathematics—is discerning the pattern.

Also on the Edge 1 program—in fact, leading it off—was Michelle Olson and Raven Spirit Dance’s Northern Journey. I have long been a fan of Olson’s choreography; however, hitherto I have only seen it performed in a work of theatre (most recently as part of the Yvette Nolan’s 2009 restaging of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe). In this piece, set upon the very talented dancers Jeanette Kotowich and Brian Solomon, and with music (including live drumming) by Wayne Lavallee, Olson draws on a traditional First Nations caribou story in order to explore not so much the idea of the buried “animal-within” as the becoming “animal-without.” What makes the work so compelling is that Olson eschews depicting any of this in overly mimetic movement; Kotowich and Solomon aren’t “playing” caribou. Instead, Olson explores time-based structures of shape and support and rhythm and breath that suggest ways of being in the world other than—or supplementary to—the purely human.

That one of those ways is a form of ambulation that eschews mono-verticality in favour of a more grounded and distributed method of counter-balance is captured in two striking movement images from the piece. In the first, Kotowich and Solomon, each bent at the hips and dragging themselves along the floor with their arms, shuffle towards each other, offering their legs as ballast and their backs as surfaces from which to move successively to an upright position. Once there, however, they need their arms to support each other, demonstrated most strikingly for me in the tableau of the two dancers leaning their heads on each other’s shoulders, locking their upraised arms, and then propelling each other horizontally across the stage. Any route across the land, Olson seems to be saying, depends on remaining rooted in the land--something we would all do well to remember.

P.

Jacques and James at the Firehall

Local dance artist James Gnam, Co-Artistic Director of the plastic orchid factory, and Montreal-based Jacques Poulin-Denis, of Grand Poney, star in two paired talking dance solos at the Firehall Arts Centre through this Saturday evening.

Gnam and Poulin-Denis have been collaborating for the past couple of years on a new work called The Value of Things--which, according to Deborah Meyers in the Vancouver Sun yesterday, will premiere in Montreal in January. However, they've briefly taken some time away from that project to revisit in this program two earlier works from their solo repertoires.

In James, last seen at the 2011 Dance in Vancouver Biennial, Gnam uses his personal (and working) relationship with The Nutcracker (which he has danced more than 300 times) as the starting point to explore the institutional ideology of classical ballet training more generally. Working with battery opera's Lee Su-Feh, and combining spoken text and movement, Gnam weaves an autobiographical tale that moves from memories of his first 10-year-old walk-on part as one of dozens of skipping children from the National Ballet of Canada School to behind-the-scenes anecdotes about adult roles as a fill-in Cavalier in a 2008 semi-professional production in North Vancouver and his first time playing the Prince as a member of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. Particularly in these last two sequences Gnam and Lee strip away the romanticism of ballet--and the sugar-coated fantasy of The Nutcracker, especially--revealing the economic and bodily labour, or work-time, that goes into the "timeless" execution of these familiar, and apparently effortless, steps.

For example, we learn that Gnam took the North Vancouver job following the collapse into financial insolvency of Ballet BC, of which he was then a member. Needing a job, he took the part of the Cavalier, whose main task is to accompany the Sugar Plum Fairy in the penultimate sequence of Act 2, a classically gendered scene of ballet partnering that is here recreated by having Gnam reproduce, to the strains of Tchaikovsky's music, various poses of male structural support, holding his invisible teenage partner's waist as he first moves her into a penchée and then dips her into an arabesque. However, in the studio there wasn't time to rehearse the Cavalier's solo variation that is meant to follow this pas de deux, and so as Gnam explains, when the music for said variation came on in performance he simply remained immobile, as he had nothing prepared to display.

Similarly, Gnam's debut as the Nutcracker Prince was a far less starry-eyed experience than one might at first expect. Suffering from food poisoning, weak with fatigue, and having dragged himself to class for the first time in more than a week, a still shaky Gnam is informed by the rehearsal director at the barre that he'll be going on as the Prince that night because the company member with whom he was sharing the part had broken his foot. This scene--and the piece as a whole--ends with Gnam repeating the sequence where the toy Prince, having magically come to life before Clara, steps from fifth position into a plié, before executing an explosive tour en l'air that is mean to end with the dancer landing on one knee, extending the other leg forward as he bows deeply before Clara. In that original Montreal performance, Gnam tells us, with his recent illness still lingering in his body, he had to extend a hand to the floor on the landing. But here, as he then goes on to show us, the wobble is allowed to become, in this retrospective excavation of dance memory, a signature part of the movement, with Gnam repeating it over and over again until he gets a smile from the statuary Drosselmeyer perched atop the Stahlbaums' clock.

In this moving and conceptually rich talking solo, Gnam and Lee have created a work that stands alongside the talking dance portraits of Jérôme Bel (particularly Véronique Doisneau and Cédric Andrieux), in which speech is used to ex-pose (in the double sense of presenting through exposition and decentering through arrested, suspended, and fragmented movement) the conceit of technical virtuosity, revealing in turn (quite literally in this case) the material conditions which always circumscribe moving bodies on stage. (The overlaps with Bel were confirmed in conversation with Natalie Lefebvre Gnam in the Firehall lobby, whose own material labour as a dance artist hovers over this presentation of James, her husband informing us at the start of his solo that but for an injury to Natalie's knee that he was accidentally responsible for, she would have been dancing on the program alongside him.) And, on that note, I'll just end by mentioning that it is a deconstructed port-de-bras phrase that serves as the choreographic refrain of the piece, one that links the various classic scenes from The Nutcracker that Gnam recreates for us. Perhaps the simplest move in ballet from an audience perspective, it is actually one over which the dancer labours intensely in order to make it seem effortlessly graceful.

Poulin-Denis' Cible de Dieu begins similarly to James, with the dancer striding boldly on stage and addressing the audience directly. We learn that the piece we are about to see is as a result of Poulin-Denis' recent training in circus techniques, particularly balancing acts. However, we are also told that the chair on stage is not the one Poulin-Denis normally works with, and so tonight things might not necessarily go according to plan. Couple that with the fact that Gnam, up in the tech booth, can't seem to get the music to work and, well, things are off to a very rocky start indeed. But the charismatic Poulin-Denis is undaunted and after getting the audience to hum along to the familiar strains of Beethoven's Für Elise, he begins to dance with the chair.

Needless to say, given my fascination with chairs as both aesthetic objects and supports/props for movement (not to mention the fact that Poulin-Denis' chosen chair was a Thonet bentwood knock-off), I was primed with expectation. However, the various feats of balance and physical dexterity that Poulin-Denis goes on to perform notwithstanding, the point here is that this particular substitute chair is not an aid to the dancer's movement, but rather an impediment, and even as we continue to hum the notes to Für Elise as encouragement, Poulin-Denis eventually breaks off in frustration. Later he is similarly thrown off by the presence of someone from his past who is apparently in the audience. And on it goes, with Poulin-Denis moving back and forth from issuing abject apologies to the audience for all that is going wrong to stunning feats of choreography in spite of this.

All of which, it gradually becomes clear, is Poulin-Denis' way of addressing by not addressing what should logically be the most insurmountable obstacle to his performance: his prosthetic leg. Indeed, it was only midway through his first sustained sequence with the chair that I even noticed that below his right knee Poulin-Denis wears an artificial limb. And it is only when, a bit later on, it comes off that we realize how conceptually central and practically insignificant the prosthesis is to the dance in this piece. By that I mean that the balancing act Poulin-Denis subsequently performs on one leg--no less virtuosic because, all of a sudden, more visually unassimilable--is meant to challenge our expectations not just of the body who is dancing, but also how that body is dancing.

Sounds an awful lot like the ideological apparatus of ballet itself.

P.

Dance in Vancouver Programs 1 and 2

The 2013 Dance in Vancouver Biennial ended last night at the Dance Centre with a reprise of this year's mainstage programs 1 and 2--only in reverse order from how they played Wednesday evening.

Leading off the 7 pm program was A Crazy Kind of Hope, conceived and directed by Sarah Chase, of Astrid Dance, in collaboration with Toronto-based performer Andrea Nann, Artistic Director of Dreamwalker Dance. Excerpted from a longer work-in-progress, the piece begins with Nann standing on a bench upstage right, looping her arms in a series of graceful arcs as she begins to tell us a story of the Chinatown origins of her Uncle Wayne's carp pond on Hornby Island. This conceit of matching a series of repeated gestures to a gradually unfolding narrative continues with Nann's description of a subsequent trip to Tofino with her husband and daughter, and finally culminates in a stunning loop of ninety-nine arm waves (11 circuits of 9 gestures each) in which Nann brings together the spirit of her daughter, who died very young, with the brother she never knew. The piece unfolds like a beautiful mathematical equation, our delight and wonder increasing as, through the accumulation of repeated gestures, we start to recognize the work's patterns.

Next up was Vancouver stalwart Joe Laughlin's Left. In this iconic work a male dancer (Kevin Tookey) in Elizabethan ruff and cuffs is at once seduced by and himself attempts to woo a teacup, positioned centre stage. And we in turn are seduced not just by Laughlin's precise choreography, as Tookey steps daintily around and gingerly balances with the focalizing piece of china, but also by James Proudfoot's amazing lighting, which expands and contracts the spotlight around (and at one point within) the teacup to dizzying effect.

Following the intermission, Wen Wei Dance Artistic Director Wen Wei Wang unveiled a work in progress called Made in China, co-created and performed with Gao Yanjinzi, Artistic Director of Beijing Modern Dance Company (and seven months pregnant!), Qui Xia He, of the Vancouver-based Silk Road Music ensemble, and the multi-talented video and sound artist (and SFU Contemporary Arts alum) Sammy Chien. The piece uses movement, music, spoken word, and projections to explore the collaborators' common cultural and different personal relationships with China. Seeing Wang, in particular, interact with the black and white palette of Chien's live video projections was mezmerizing, and I look forward to the unveiling of the full piece.

Finally, the evening closed with an excerpt from Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg's Highgate, her intensely theatrical and mordantly funny take on Victorian funerary culture. Very much a work of dance-theatre, in which text and movement are fully coeval, the piece focuses on Mrs. Graves (Friedenberg) and her trio of professional mourners (Alison Denham, Bevin Poole, and Susan Elliott), who are linked not just by their testaments but also by their vestments of mourning. By that I mean that costume designer Alice Mansell's shared skirt for the women plays a starring role in the work, leading to many of the wonders of Friendenberg's choreography as the dancers bend and twist and contort their bodies into various states of lamentation--all to the precise cues of Marc Stewart's richly immersive score. Needless to say, Friendenberg herself is a compelling performer, and her Mrs. Graves will go down with Goggles as one of her most memorable characters yet.

Afterwards I once again led a talkback with the artists from the 9 pm program, and after worrying how I would put Wang's and Friendberg's very different works together, we ended up having a very interesting conversation about compositional process and cross-disciplinary collaboration. All in all it was another great edition of Dance in Vancouver, and I'm so glad I was able to participate in my own small way.

P.

Dance in Vancouver Programs 3 and 4

The 9th Biennial Dance in Vancouver Festival is on at the Dance Centre through this Saturday. Curated this year by the Toronto-based Jeanne Holmes, Artistic Producer of the Canada Dance Festival, DIV 2013's mainstage shows highlight the depth, range, and diversity of contemporary movement expression in this city. Lucky enough to have been asked by Associate Producer Claire French to lead talkbacks after the 9 pm shows last night and on Saturday, I decided to take in the 7 pm presentations as well, thereby getting a chance to see and comment on the full line-up.

First up last night was Ziyian Kwan/dumb instrument Dance's the neck to fall. A virtuosic interpreter of others' work in Vancouver for several decades, the neck is actually Kwan's choreographic debut. It's a piece that announces a major new compositional voice in the city. Inspired by the words of the Canadian modern dancer and somatic instructor Amelia Itcush (who pioneered the teaching of Alexander, Mitzvah and her own Itcush techniques in this country), Kwan's solo combines explosive movement and plosive speech to explore, among other things, the body's relationship to external objects and external commands. One of the most memorable sequences for me was when, near the end of the piece, Kwan lifts up a large cardboard box positioned upstage left to reveal a wooly stool underneath. Eventually turning the stool on its side, Kwan rolls her body with and over it in a series of lyrically graceful waves that make both body and stool extensionally (and elastically) equivalent.

The second work on the 7 pm program was DVOTE, a choreographic and performance collaboration between Vision Impure's Noam Gagnon and Nova Dance's Nova Bhattacharya, a classically trained Bharatanatyam dancer who brings that training to her work in contemporary dance. The work opens with the two dancers, clad all in black and with their faces obscured by masks, in a limb-to-limb tussle/clinch on the upstage right edge of a black square that has been taped down in the middle of the stage. Pulling themselves apart, each proceeds to move in the opposite direction around the perimeter of the square. During this sequence Bhattacharya is mostly vertical, whereas Gagnon's body is more horizontal and oriented to the floor, a visual contrast that establishes not just the different dance idioms being combined in the piece, but also perhaps differences in gender and bodily energies. Eventually, however, those bodies collide, and into the maw of the black square they inevitably tumble. It is not entirely clear to me if this recombining is meant to be harmonious or violent; nor am I sure what to make of the ending of last night's excerpt, which sees the two dancers edge very close to the first row of the audience before the final blackout.

After a 45-minute intermission (long enough to grab a quick glass of wine and a bit of conversation at the pop-up bar DIV 2013 has established at the Vancouver International Film Centre around the corner on Seymour Street), it was time for Program Four. I've written about the plastic orchid factory's _post twice before: here and here. What was interesting this third time was to see how the excerpt from the piece that choreographer James Gnam had chosen to present had been reconfigured for a proscenium stage. Originally, the work had been presented (also at the Dance Centre) in the round, with the audience encircling the dancers, and in the talkback afterwards Gnam commented on the challenge of reconceiving the effects of intimacy and proximity he and his fellow performer-collaborators were striving to achieve in the piece. Nevertheless the conceptual bones (as in the material imprinting of the history of classical ballet upon the body) and the theatrical effects (all of that tulle!) remain as strong as ever.

The evening ended with battery opera's Lee Su-Feh performing her solo Everything. Set to Barry Truax's I Ching-inspired electroacoustic score, the work makes use of Daoist ritual objects--a clutch of ruby red joss sticks, incense, spirit paper--to explore the bodily labour involved in negotiating the chance intersections of history, space and place. By that I mean that, as Lee outlined much more eloquently in our talkback, the work is in part an investigation of what it means for her as an ethnic Chinese immigrant from Malaysia to bring the cultural histories embedded in her body to bear (quite literally) on work she creates in a region where traditional Indigenous territories have been overlain with the history of settler colonialism.

As last night's program attests, Vancouver dance is not just physically experimental, but also intellectually rigorous. I look forward to Saturday.

P.