Last night DanceHouse's 2017/18 season concluded with a triple bill by Dorrance Dance, the award-winning tap company overseen by the choreographer and artistic director Michelle Dorrance. I was a bit dubious about sitting through 75 minutes of continuous tap, my usual threshold for the form being a few minutes of thematically juxtapositional razzle-dazzle within an otherwise rigorously contemporary work (as in DanceHouse's previous presentation of Betroffenheit), or else the paced out show-stopping routines of classic musical theatre (e.g. 42nd Street). But it seems that Dorrance's MacArthur Genius Grant is well-earned. Her aesthetic is one that marries deep respect for tap's history and traditions with a desire to push the form technically and conceptually.
This means, among other things, challenging the notion that it is only the soles of a tap shoe that can produce sound. In the opening number on last night's program, Jungle Blues, I was absolutely floored (the metaphor seems appropriate) when one of the company dancers first dragged the tops of their shoes along the parquet floor, producing a noise like a needle scraping across a vinyl record, and sending a corresponding shiver of delight down my spine. In this ensemble piece, set to a classic song by Jelly Roll Morton, the dancers alternate between unison choreography and character-based solo improvisations, with Dorrance herself playing up a gangly white-girl persona, all ungraceful angles and splayed knees. But my eyes were mostly on everyone's feet, watching how long someone's remained on demi-point (and sometimes full-on point), how often another's buckled over onto their sides, and so on.
If classic tap is all about the syncopated relationship between rhythm and gravity, such that we are made to marvel at how a person doing a freewheeling, double wing step, with both arms likewise windmilling the air, is able to remain upright, Dorrance is not afraid to push those limits--literally floorward. Her tap choreography is most interesting when it explores the off-axis and when, in doing so, it traces a genealogy between tap and a more contemporary form like break-dancing. This came to the fore especially in the concluding piece on the program, Myelination, which is an anatomical term that refers to the maturation and sheathing of nerve cells, allowing nerve impulses to travel more quickly. One can see how this applies to the hyper-kineticism of tap, but in this 30 minute piece with live music Dorrance also demonstrates its relevance to B-boying. Two of her dancers alternate between tap shoes and high tops, and some of the most innovative choreography relates to a sequence of intertwined prone legwork between this pair.
In between these pieces, Dorrance programmed a short but deeply affecting trio, Three to One, featuring herself and dancers Byron Tittle and Matthew "Megawatt" West. It begins with the three dancers, dressed in matching black cloth garments, standing side by side in a rectangle of downstage white light. Dorrance, wearing tap shoes, is positioned between the two men, who are both barefoot. As Dorrance begins to shuffle and click her feet together, almost like Dorothy seeking to return to Kansas from Oz, the men also start to move, sometimes falling into step with Dorrance, at other times breaking into quick, darting contraction and release movements of the hips and torsos and legs that are reminiscent of traditional African dance. Indeed, it is hard--especially once the two men exit the stage and Dorrance continues with a virtuosic solo that sees her alternate between retreating into the darkness of upstage and reemerging into the downstage light--not to read this work as an express comment on the specific African-American lineage of tap, as well as of so much American social dance more generally (from jive to hip hop).
This is hardly surprising coming from a choreographer as intelligent as Dorrance, who in addition to her years of tap training also designed her own undergraduate curriculum at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. According to Wikipedia, her courses focused on concepts of race in America in relation to democratic culture. If you're going to devote your life to reclaiming and celebrating tap as a form, this makes total sense.
P
Showing posts with label DanceHouse Vancouver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DanceHouse Vancouver. Show all posts
Sunday, April 15, 2018
Sunday, March 18, 2018
Betroffenheit at the Playhouse
Betroffenheit, co-created by Kidd Pivot's Crystal Pite and Electric Company Theatre's Jonathon Young, was first presented as part of the Panamania Festival accompanying Toronto's Pan Am and Para Pan Am Games back in the summer of 2015. It's been touring the world to acclaim ever since. Like most in Vancouver, I first saw the show when it was presented by DanceHouse at the Vancouver Playhouse in February 2016 (you can read my original impressions here). Now, just before it embarks on the final leg of its three-year world tour, DanceHouse has brought the show back to the same venue. I was there once again last night.
In part this was practical: I've updated an essay I've written about Pite and Kidd Pivot to include a discussion of Betroffenheit; and I'll also be speaking about the work at the University of Stockholm in May. So I wanted to ensure that I hadn't made any egregious errors in my representation of the work, particularly with respect to its complex distribution of the human voice. But really I just wanted to be swept up once again by the amazing on-stage world that Pite and Young have created, and to revel in the sublime movement of the performers. On both counts I was not disappointed. Christopher Hernandez, replacing Bryan Arias (who I think is premiering a new work of his own in New York), fits into the ensemble seamlessly. Hernandez is about double the size of Arias, and so this does change the partnering with Cindy Salgado somewhat; but his solo that opens Act 2 is still a marvel of off-axis lightness and grace. Otherwise, all of the other performers seem to have grown more deeply into and with their parts; none of the movement felt mechanical or marked, and there were new expressive details in the choreography that I had the pleasure of discovering--such as the little foot wiggles that Tiffany Tregarthen does at one point when she's turned upside down in her role as the devilish monkey on Young's character's back in Act 1. Ditto David Raymond's incredibly controlled staccato work with his arms and fingers during the therapist scene. And what I'll call Salgado's breathing solo in Act 2 was deeply affecting, the simple inflation and deflation of her shoulders speaking volumes about the bodily manifestations of grief.
As the blue silk suited co-hosts of our show-within-a-show, Young and Jermaine Spivey are by now expertly attuned to each other's rhythms, both in terms of the movement and the lipsynched dialogue that they share. I remain amazed by Young's technical facility with Pite's complex choreography, but it was Spivey whom I couldn't take my eyes off of. If anything, it seems like his body and limbs have grown even more elastic and liquid; the flipping of his legs backwards over the arm of Young, or later their wave-like rippling along the floor, seems absolutely of a piece with Young's floppy manipulations of his puppet stand-in. Likewise, the speed and precision of Spivey's turns and the air he catches while flipping his body through space seem to defy the laws of physics. Needless to say, the solo by Spivey that concludes the work remains a devastatingly gorgeous summation of the archive of grief and trauma that has been passed from body to body in the preceding two hours.
Of course there were aspects of the work that I'd forgotten about, mostly relating to the text and how personally self-accusatory it is. Betroffenheit both is and isn't Young's story, but in abstracting his and his family's tragedy onto this fictional world he hasn't spared himself a nightly real-time examination pertaining to his grief and guilt. Mostly this comes in the form of subtle repetitions of phrases that are inflected with telling pronouns ("Is he at fault?," "I know she...," "They're in there," "They're in this"). But there are also just incredibly raw and open displays of pain, and the failing of others that is a consequence of this pain--as with the phone call from Mom. Somehow I'd also forgotten the desperately uncomprehending solo that Tregarthen performs in Act 2, her final pose--arms bent in front of her, as if cradling an absent child--giving me new context as to why her character is Young's chief tormenter in Act 1.
For all of the very real sorrow upon which Betroffenheit is built, the work is also filled with joy. To me, the piece is the danced equivalent of one of my favourite poems, Hart Crane's "Chaplinesque." There Crane writes about how, in the wake of all the torment and unhappiness the world throws at us, no matter how the game of life smirks at us, "we make our meek adjustments," we find "our random consolations." Because "what blame to us if the heart live on"? And it does. That was clear last night during the curtain calls. The love on stage, in the audience, and between the two was physically palpable.
What's more, everyone gets to renew the affair next year when Pite, Young, the dancers, and virtually the entire Betroffenheit creative team return to the DanceHouse stage with the world premiere of a new work of dance-theatre, Revisor. I spoke briefly with composer Owen Belton while exiting the theatre, and he said they have already been workshopping the piece at Banff. It will apparently be something of a political satire. Given the new Cold War we suddenly find ourselves in, it should be timely.
P
In part this was practical: I've updated an essay I've written about Pite and Kidd Pivot to include a discussion of Betroffenheit; and I'll also be speaking about the work at the University of Stockholm in May. So I wanted to ensure that I hadn't made any egregious errors in my representation of the work, particularly with respect to its complex distribution of the human voice. But really I just wanted to be swept up once again by the amazing on-stage world that Pite and Young have created, and to revel in the sublime movement of the performers. On both counts I was not disappointed. Christopher Hernandez, replacing Bryan Arias (who I think is premiering a new work of his own in New York), fits into the ensemble seamlessly. Hernandez is about double the size of Arias, and so this does change the partnering with Cindy Salgado somewhat; but his solo that opens Act 2 is still a marvel of off-axis lightness and grace. Otherwise, all of the other performers seem to have grown more deeply into and with their parts; none of the movement felt mechanical or marked, and there were new expressive details in the choreography that I had the pleasure of discovering--such as the little foot wiggles that Tiffany Tregarthen does at one point when she's turned upside down in her role as the devilish monkey on Young's character's back in Act 1. Ditto David Raymond's incredibly controlled staccato work with his arms and fingers during the therapist scene. And what I'll call Salgado's breathing solo in Act 2 was deeply affecting, the simple inflation and deflation of her shoulders speaking volumes about the bodily manifestations of grief.
As the blue silk suited co-hosts of our show-within-a-show, Young and Jermaine Spivey are by now expertly attuned to each other's rhythms, both in terms of the movement and the lipsynched dialogue that they share. I remain amazed by Young's technical facility with Pite's complex choreography, but it was Spivey whom I couldn't take my eyes off of. If anything, it seems like his body and limbs have grown even more elastic and liquid; the flipping of his legs backwards over the arm of Young, or later their wave-like rippling along the floor, seems absolutely of a piece with Young's floppy manipulations of his puppet stand-in. Likewise, the speed and precision of Spivey's turns and the air he catches while flipping his body through space seem to defy the laws of physics. Needless to say, the solo by Spivey that concludes the work remains a devastatingly gorgeous summation of the archive of grief and trauma that has been passed from body to body in the preceding two hours.
Of course there were aspects of the work that I'd forgotten about, mostly relating to the text and how personally self-accusatory it is. Betroffenheit both is and isn't Young's story, but in abstracting his and his family's tragedy onto this fictional world he hasn't spared himself a nightly real-time examination pertaining to his grief and guilt. Mostly this comes in the form of subtle repetitions of phrases that are inflected with telling pronouns ("Is he at fault?," "I know she...," "They're in there," "They're in this"). But there are also just incredibly raw and open displays of pain, and the failing of others that is a consequence of this pain--as with the phone call from Mom. Somehow I'd also forgotten the desperately uncomprehending solo that Tregarthen performs in Act 2, her final pose--arms bent in front of her, as if cradling an absent child--giving me new context as to why her character is Young's chief tormenter in Act 1.
For all of the very real sorrow upon which Betroffenheit is built, the work is also filled with joy. To me, the piece is the danced equivalent of one of my favourite poems, Hart Crane's "Chaplinesque." There Crane writes about how, in the wake of all the torment and unhappiness the world throws at us, no matter how the game of life smirks at us, "we make our meek adjustments," we find "our random consolations." Because "what blame to us if the heart live on"? And it does. That was clear last night during the curtain calls. The love on stage, in the audience, and between the two was physically palpable.
What's more, everyone gets to renew the affair next year when Pite, Young, the dancers, and virtually the entire Betroffenheit creative team return to the DanceHouse stage with the world premiere of a new work of dance-theatre, Revisor. I spoke briefly with composer Owen Belton while exiting the theatre, and he said they have already been workshopping the piece at Banff. It will apparently be something of a political satire. Given the new Cold War we suddenly find ourselves in, it should be timely.
P
Sunday, November 26, 2017
Wells Hill at SFU Woodward's
It's been almost three years since Richard and I saw the first excerpt of Vanessa Goodman's Wells Hill at the Chutzpah! Festival. We've been following the progress of the piece ever since and last night we joined a capacity audience at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre for the world premiere of the full length piece. In a unique partnership between DanceHouse, SFU Woodward's Cultural Programs and the School for the Contemporary Arts (of which Goodman is an alumna), Goodman and her creative team have been in residence at Woodward's this past summer, and then again for the past month and a half rehearsing in the actual Wong space. Including Thursday night's preview, the piece is getting four instead of the usual (for DanceHouse) two performances, and a whole suite of cognate discursive events relating to Goodman's subjects of Marshall McLuhan and Glenn Gould have been curated by Richard.
Vanessa also commissioned me to write an essay on the piece for its premiere, which you can find on her Action at a Distance company website. I won't repeat what I had to say there, and will instead concentrate on my experience of some of the changes and refinements to the work since I last experienced a run-through back in the summer. One of the biggest things I noticed was the tightening of the overall structure. Goodman has divided the work into two clear parts, which she sees as corresponding to our pre- and post-Internet ages. Both are marked by the appearance of talismanic glass icon in the shape of an upside-down pyramid. At the start of the show, as Lara Barclay performs a sinewy and graceful solo to one of Gould's Goldberg Variations, the curve and extension of her long limbs accentuated by the shimmery translucent shift designed for her by Diane Park, the rest of the ensemble stares blankly at the empty pyramid, which we might in this instance read as a stand in for a television set. The glass pyramid returns at the start of the second half of the piece, but this time projected into it is a holographic image of McLuhan talking about the effects of media, with the conceit of Goodman's dancers (and, to be sure, us in the audience) now staring into rather than at or through the glass container, combined with McLuhan's quasi-3D animation, signalling the more immersive and interactive media environment heralded by the advent of the Internet. That this shift has both connected us and atomized us in unprecedented ways as social beings is wonderfully brought out in the conclusion to the piece. Structurally we are returned to the beginning with the musical reprise of Gould's solo piano refrain. This time, however, while five of the dancers sit downstage right, Bevin Poole and Bynh Ho perform a soft and slow duet that in its fluidity and seeming bonelessness recalls Barclay's opening solo. At the same time, the fact that Poole and Ho, dancing side by side and clearly responding to the directional force and energy of each other's movements, never touch leaves us to question how truly connected to each other we are in today's wired world.
As I say at greater length in my essay, Goodman's overall goal in making this piece has never been to explain or illustrate concepts from McLuhan and Gould through dance. Instead, she has taken what I've called the "'homely' coincidence" of growing up in the house once owned by McLuhan, and where the two men had lengthy conversations, to explore how dance, as an embodied medium, is contiguous with, rather than separate from, other kinds of media technologies. To this end, one of McLuhan's concepts that Goodman is most taken with is that media are themselves extensions of our bodies, even becoming part of our nervous systems to the extent that they act upon us as much as we act upon them (her example during last night's pre-show talk about our Pavlovian response to the buzzing or dinging of our various devices captures this best). In Wells Hill, Goodman explores this idea not just through the choreography, but also through the creation of a total media environment that feels uncannily immersive. That is, last night my own spectating body was not just stimulated by the sight of a twitchily hyper-kinetic Alexa Mardon buzzing about the stage like a computer cursor gone rogue as the rest of the group walks robotically this way or that; or by Arash Khakpour and Dario Dinuzzi breaking out of the latter formation to either throw themselves horizontally to the floor or shimmy vertically towards the ceiling; or even by the unexpected surprise of Karissa Barry, clad in an illuminated body suit of the sort worn for motion capture or digital character modelling in gaming and computer animation, pulsing and swaying on the other side of the footlights, right in front of the first row of the audience. My senses were also triggered by the throb of the respective sound compositions of Gabriel Saloman and Scott Morgan (Loscil), by the pixelated and increasingly accelerated wash of the projections designed by Goodman, Ben Didier and Milton Lim, and by the amazing lighting design by James Proudfoot, which uses the distinctive flash and jump in current that accompanies the turning on and off of flourescent tubes to terrific effect. In other words, despite its traditional proscenium staging, Wells Hill is a piece where the audience definitely feels part of the feedback loop of communication, in which the output from the stage most definitely affects our individual sensual experience, but in which the collective processing of that experience is likewise put back into the system of the show.
While this ideally describes the special interactive experience of any live performance, and while I cannot pretend to be unbiased about the merits of this show, I do believe that Wells Hill is that rare work where the abundant ideas informing its creation do not get in the way of its in-the-moment physical enjoyment. It is especially wonderful to see Goodman making this work here, drawing from the abundant talents of such gifted local dancers and designers. And now here's hoping it has a long and robust touring life.
P
Vanessa also commissioned me to write an essay on the piece for its premiere, which you can find on her Action at a Distance company website. I won't repeat what I had to say there, and will instead concentrate on my experience of some of the changes and refinements to the work since I last experienced a run-through back in the summer. One of the biggest things I noticed was the tightening of the overall structure. Goodman has divided the work into two clear parts, which she sees as corresponding to our pre- and post-Internet ages. Both are marked by the appearance of talismanic glass icon in the shape of an upside-down pyramid. At the start of the show, as Lara Barclay performs a sinewy and graceful solo to one of Gould's Goldberg Variations, the curve and extension of her long limbs accentuated by the shimmery translucent shift designed for her by Diane Park, the rest of the ensemble stares blankly at the empty pyramid, which we might in this instance read as a stand in for a television set. The glass pyramid returns at the start of the second half of the piece, but this time projected into it is a holographic image of McLuhan talking about the effects of media, with the conceit of Goodman's dancers (and, to be sure, us in the audience) now staring into rather than at or through the glass container, combined with McLuhan's quasi-3D animation, signalling the more immersive and interactive media environment heralded by the advent of the Internet. That this shift has both connected us and atomized us in unprecedented ways as social beings is wonderfully brought out in the conclusion to the piece. Structurally we are returned to the beginning with the musical reprise of Gould's solo piano refrain. This time, however, while five of the dancers sit downstage right, Bevin Poole and Bynh Ho perform a soft and slow duet that in its fluidity and seeming bonelessness recalls Barclay's opening solo. At the same time, the fact that Poole and Ho, dancing side by side and clearly responding to the directional force and energy of each other's movements, never touch leaves us to question how truly connected to each other we are in today's wired world.
As I say at greater length in my essay, Goodman's overall goal in making this piece has never been to explain or illustrate concepts from McLuhan and Gould through dance. Instead, she has taken what I've called the "'homely' coincidence" of growing up in the house once owned by McLuhan, and where the two men had lengthy conversations, to explore how dance, as an embodied medium, is contiguous with, rather than separate from, other kinds of media technologies. To this end, one of McLuhan's concepts that Goodman is most taken with is that media are themselves extensions of our bodies, even becoming part of our nervous systems to the extent that they act upon us as much as we act upon them (her example during last night's pre-show talk about our Pavlovian response to the buzzing or dinging of our various devices captures this best). In Wells Hill, Goodman explores this idea not just through the choreography, but also through the creation of a total media environment that feels uncannily immersive. That is, last night my own spectating body was not just stimulated by the sight of a twitchily hyper-kinetic Alexa Mardon buzzing about the stage like a computer cursor gone rogue as the rest of the group walks robotically this way or that; or by Arash Khakpour and Dario Dinuzzi breaking out of the latter formation to either throw themselves horizontally to the floor or shimmy vertically towards the ceiling; or even by the unexpected surprise of Karissa Barry, clad in an illuminated body suit of the sort worn for motion capture or digital character modelling in gaming and computer animation, pulsing and swaying on the other side of the footlights, right in front of the first row of the audience. My senses were also triggered by the throb of the respective sound compositions of Gabriel Saloman and Scott Morgan (Loscil), by the pixelated and increasingly accelerated wash of the projections designed by Goodman, Ben Didier and Milton Lim, and by the amazing lighting design by James Proudfoot, which uses the distinctive flash and jump in current that accompanies the turning on and off of flourescent tubes to terrific effect. In other words, despite its traditional proscenium staging, Wells Hill is a piece where the audience definitely feels part of the feedback loop of communication, in which the output from the stage most definitely affects our individual sensual experience, but in which the collective processing of that experience is likewise put back into the system of the show.
While this ideally describes the special interactive experience of any live performance, and while I cannot pretend to be unbiased about the merits of this show, I do believe that Wells Hill is that rare work where the abundant ideas informing its creation do not get in the way of its in-the-moment physical enjoyment. It is especially wonderful to see Goodman making this work here, drawing from the abundant talents of such gifted local dancers and designers. And now here's hoping it has a long and robust touring life.
P
Saturday, May 13, 2017
Ballet BC's Program 3 at the Queen E
Ballet BC concluded its 2016/17 season with a mixed program of three works that I was hoping would challenge and engage me more than they did. For reasons of time and general polemicizing I will concentrate mostly on the first piece in this response.
The evening opened with the world premiere of Israeli-born and Paris-based Emmanuel Gat's LOCK. Like compatriot Ohad Naharin (also on the program), Gat started dancing relatively late (at age 23), but seems to have been similarly (and preternaturally) gifted, soon founding his own company in Tel Aviv before decamping for France and accruing a steady wave of major international commissions. Also like many contemporary Israeli choreographers (including Sharon Eyal and her partner Gai Behar, whose Bill, we learned, will be receiving a Ballet BC remount next season), Gat exercises full creative control over the composition and design of his work, in this case providing the music and lighting for LOCK in addition to the choreography. That said, the piece's first section begins in silence. On a square of white Marley Andrew Bartee, distinguished from the rest of the grey shorts and t-shirts clad company by his green pants and black top, accompanies Kristen Wicklund (I think) in an extended floor sequence. The two dancers crab-crawl backwards and forwards, extend their legs horizontally over each other's supine torsos, and variously step into, over and on each other's limbs as the rest of the performers watch from either side of the stage. Eventually, as the music is haltingly introduced--a screech of horns here, a droning guitar lick there, some intermittent bass--so too do the other dancers make their way onto the Marley, each seeming to improvise a personal repertoire of moves: from the tiny beating of a breast to a whole body sway and shimmy to the floor. It is clear, especially in moments when the dancers come to stillness, pause to look at each other, and then launch into another sequence of gestures and movement phrases, that there is a score that's being followed. However, I confess that it often felt like I was watching a rehearsal warm-up or an improv class, and I longed for a clearer conceptual and kinetic through-line to connect what I was seeing. That came, briefly, after a faux blackout when the dancers formed into two groups and began a counterpoint of unison movement, one group rounder and lope-ier in the swaying of their torsos and weighting of their lower bodies, the other's leg extensions more precise and angular. But this didn't last for long and soon it was back to trying to make sense of the central muddle into which Gat very literally thrusts his dancers. In this respect I hazard to say that my frustrations with LOCK are one of the potential pitfalls of a company like Ballet BC chasing after star international choreographers for new commissions to add to their repertoire. With only a limited time to create the work, and perhaps over-extended in terms of ideas for a new work, the default starting point becomes the dancers and their process--as Gat himself acknowledges in his program note. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, especially if the company is as talented as Ballet BC; however, I question the wisdom of making process the product in the context of a full company piece for a ballet company (even one as adventurously contemporary as this one) without a rigorous embedding within the work of the reasons for this. Otherwise it feels, as has been the case with other recent Ballet BC commissions from jet-setting international choreographers, that I am watching a bunch of talented dancers show me some interesting moves rather than a dance that is interesting because of how those moves cohere in a meaningful way. Here I come back to the figure of Bartee, around whom the other dancers are apparently pivoting, but who never gets his expected solo--except, arguably, in a brief flourish and then hasty retreat at the end.
The second piece on the program was Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar's newest work, Keep Driving, I'm Dreaming. A commission from the National Arts Centre (where it premiered last month) as part of their ENCOUNT3RS project, which paired three Canadian choreographers with three Canadian composers to create new works set to original music, Molnar's piece features a big, bold and lushly jazzy score by Nicole Lizée. It also has a fantastic, Hollywood-style lighting design by Jock Munro, with six follow spots combining and dividing over the course of the work in a way that suggested the glamorously over-the-top illumination of a 1940s studio soundstage. Into these spots run and slide a succession of eight dancers, the momentary catching of themselves in the floodlights prompting a vision of who or where else they might be through brief bursts of movement. In this, there is a way in which the choreography, together with the music, the lighting design, and the costumes by Kate Burrows, suggests a romantic dreamworld that incorporates both a fantasy future and a nostalgic past, much in the vein of the recent La La Land. I will admit, however, that this trope, along with all the running more generally, started to wear on me. I much preferred when Molnar slowed things down a bit and made the movement more contained and precise, as with a pair of mirrored duets in which, for example, the time lag of non-unison unison succinctly telegraphed the idea of watching your life unfold before you like a movie. Also successful was the closing image of the piece, in which the dancers, staggered horizontally, take turns running toward the lip of the stage and leap into the air--and, it almost seems, out over the first rows of the audience--before retreating back upstage and starting over again. As a representation of the work's dialectical backwards-forwards temporality and the desire to break through the artificial frame separating spectator and performer this closing tableau played out beautifully.
The evening concluded with the company's presentation of Minus 16, a kind of greatest hits of excerpts from some of Batsheva choreographer Naharin's most celebrated works. These include the driving and explosive chair canon set to the traditional Israeli folksong Echad Mi Yodea; the gorgeous duet from Mabul (1992), set to Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus and featuring the male dancer entering bent at the waist, his arms extended in supplication or prayer, gently nudging the female dancer across the stage, until she grabs his hands and places his arms about her waist; and the audience participation favourite in which the dancers invite spectators up onto to the stage to dance with them. It was a lot of fun and I can see why dance companies the world over are anxious to have something by Mr. Gaga in their repertoires. But the fact that I'd seen versions of most of these works in 2009 as part of DanceHouse's presentation of Batsheva in another Naharin touring compilation, Deca Dance, meant that I largely knew what was coming. No complaints on that front, but in terms of the rousing, crowd-pleasing finish that this work--and the evening as a whole--builds to, it does seem like Ballet BC, in this instance, is a little late to the party.
P
The evening opened with the world premiere of Israeli-born and Paris-based Emmanuel Gat's LOCK. Like compatriot Ohad Naharin (also on the program), Gat started dancing relatively late (at age 23), but seems to have been similarly (and preternaturally) gifted, soon founding his own company in Tel Aviv before decamping for France and accruing a steady wave of major international commissions. Also like many contemporary Israeli choreographers (including Sharon Eyal and her partner Gai Behar, whose Bill, we learned, will be receiving a Ballet BC remount next season), Gat exercises full creative control over the composition and design of his work, in this case providing the music and lighting for LOCK in addition to the choreography. That said, the piece's first section begins in silence. On a square of white Marley Andrew Bartee, distinguished from the rest of the grey shorts and t-shirts clad company by his green pants and black top, accompanies Kristen Wicklund (I think) in an extended floor sequence. The two dancers crab-crawl backwards and forwards, extend their legs horizontally over each other's supine torsos, and variously step into, over and on each other's limbs as the rest of the performers watch from either side of the stage. Eventually, as the music is haltingly introduced--a screech of horns here, a droning guitar lick there, some intermittent bass--so too do the other dancers make their way onto the Marley, each seeming to improvise a personal repertoire of moves: from the tiny beating of a breast to a whole body sway and shimmy to the floor. It is clear, especially in moments when the dancers come to stillness, pause to look at each other, and then launch into another sequence of gestures and movement phrases, that there is a score that's being followed. However, I confess that it often felt like I was watching a rehearsal warm-up or an improv class, and I longed for a clearer conceptual and kinetic through-line to connect what I was seeing. That came, briefly, after a faux blackout when the dancers formed into two groups and began a counterpoint of unison movement, one group rounder and lope-ier in the swaying of their torsos and weighting of their lower bodies, the other's leg extensions more precise and angular. But this didn't last for long and soon it was back to trying to make sense of the central muddle into which Gat very literally thrusts his dancers. In this respect I hazard to say that my frustrations with LOCK are one of the potential pitfalls of a company like Ballet BC chasing after star international choreographers for new commissions to add to their repertoire. With only a limited time to create the work, and perhaps over-extended in terms of ideas for a new work, the default starting point becomes the dancers and their process--as Gat himself acknowledges in his program note. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, especially if the company is as talented as Ballet BC; however, I question the wisdom of making process the product in the context of a full company piece for a ballet company (even one as adventurously contemporary as this one) without a rigorous embedding within the work of the reasons for this. Otherwise it feels, as has been the case with other recent Ballet BC commissions from jet-setting international choreographers, that I am watching a bunch of talented dancers show me some interesting moves rather than a dance that is interesting because of how those moves cohere in a meaningful way. Here I come back to the figure of Bartee, around whom the other dancers are apparently pivoting, but who never gets his expected solo--except, arguably, in a brief flourish and then hasty retreat at the end.
The second piece on the program was Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar's newest work, Keep Driving, I'm Dreaming. A commission from the National Arts Centre (where it premiered last month) as part of their ENCOUNT3RS project, which paired three Canadian choreographers with three Canadian composers to create new works set to original music, Molnar's piece features a big, bold and lushly jazzy score by Nicole Lizée. It also has a fantastic, Hollywood-style lighting design by Jock Munro, with six follow spots combining and dividing over the course of the work in a way that suggested the glamorously over-the-top illumination of a 1940s studio soundstage. Into these spots run and slide a succession of eight dancers, the momentary catching of themselves in the floodlights prompting a vision of who or where else they might be through brief bursts of movement. In this, there is a way in which the choreography, together with the music, the lighting design, and the costumes by Kate Burrows, suggests a romantic dreamworld that incorporates both a fantasy future and a nostalgic past, much in the vein of the recent La La Land. I will admit, however, that this trope, along with all the running more generally, started to wear on me. I much preferred when Molnar slowed things down a bit and made the movement more contained and precise, as with a pair of mirrored duets in which, for example, the time lag of non-unison unison succinctly telegraphed the idea of watching your life unfold before you like a movie. Also successful was the closing image of the piece, in which the dancers, staggered horizontally, take turns running toward the lip of the stage and leap into the air--and, it almost seems, out over the first rows of the audience--before retreating back upstage and starting over again. As a representation of the work's dialectical backwards-forwards temporality and the desire to break through the artificial frame separating spectator and performer this closing tableau played out beautifully.
The evening concluded with the company's presentation of Minus 16, a kind of greatest hits of excerpts from some of Batsheva choreographer Naharin's most celebrated works. These include the driving and explosive chair canon set to the traditional Israeli folksong Echad Mi Yodea; the gorgeous duet from Mabul (1992), set to Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus and featuring the male dancer entering bent at the waist, his arms extended in supplication or prayer, gently nudging the female dancer across the stage, until she grabs his hands and places his arms about her waist; and the audience participation favourite in which the dancers invite spectators up onto to the stage to dance with them. It was a lot of fun and I can see why dance companies the world over are anxious to have something by Mr. Gaga in their repertoires. But the fact that I'd seen versions of most of these works in 2009 as part of DanceHouse's presentation of Batsheva in another Naharin touring compilation, Deca Dance, meant that I largely knew what was coming. No complaints on that front, but in terms of the rousing, crowd-pleasing finish that this work--and the evening as a whole--builds to, it does seem like Ballet BC, in this instance, is a little late to the party.
P
Sunday, April 9, 2017
Compagnie Hervé Koubi at the Vancouver Playhouse
DanceHouse closed out its 2016/17 season with the Vancouver premiere of Compagnie Hervé Koubi's Ce que le jour doit à la nuit. The piece takes its title, and draws inspiration, from the 2008 novel by Yasmina Khadra, about the coming of age of a young Algerian boy, Younes, pre- and post-independence from France (the book was made into a film in 2012). Younes is raised by his pharmacist uncle and his uncle's French wife, and it is likely this plot point that carried special resonance for choreographer Koubi, because as we learned in the pre-show talk--and as Koubi additionally announced from the stage just before the raising of the curtain--it was at age 25 that Koubi, who also studied to be a pharmacist and having till that point always believed his ancestry was French through and through, learned that both his maternal and paternal great-grandparents were Algerian.
This revelation prompted a trip to the North African country and former French colony in 2009. Koubi wished to research his roots, but also to audition local dancers for a piece he was developing. Through word of mouth and social media, news of the audition spread and eventually 250 people showed up (249 of whom were men). The twelve dancers eventually chosen (11 Algerian and one from Burkina Faso) were trained neither in traditional Algerian folk dance nor in western contemporary dance; rather, they were mostly street dancers, with a range of self-taught skills drawn from hip hop, capoeira, acrobatics and martial arts. These "found brothers," as Koubi now refers to them, have cohered into a tight unit whose ripped bodies will be unleashed in astonishing and gravity-defying acts of individual athleticism: head spins, back flips, and one-arm cartwheels that in catching air seem to suspend the dancers' bodies for longer than seems physically possible. And yet for all that, no one dancer stands apart from or above the whole group, and the piece is very much about tracing the lines of connection between each body, and the histories shared between them--which, as Koubi indicates in his program notes, includes a history of Orientalist fantasy.
To that end, the piece begins with the dancers (reduced here to ten, about which I will explain in a moment) huddled in a clump, their bodies naked to the waist and wearing dervish-like skirts. Haze floods the stage and as oud-heavy Arabic/Berber music begins to play and the dancers start swaying and undulating their bodies any number of (homoerotic) images of men languishing in hamams, or kasbahs, or hash dens come to mind. Later, when several of the dancers spin on their heads this signature breakdance move simultaneously becomes an upside-down evocation of Sufi whirling courtesy of the side panels of the men's white costumes billowing out horizontally. At the same time, Koubi interrupts such associations with some expressly Christian imagery. For example, twice in the piece one of the dancers, having scrambled to the upstretched arms of two of his confrères, will fall backwards into the awaiting embrace of the rest of the company, the accompanying music from Bach's St. Matthew's Passion reminding one of the entangled legacy of French colonial history in Algeria.
Before introducing Koubi at the start of last night's performance, DanceHouse producer Jim Smith noted that what we were about to see was not in fact the piece as originally conceived by the choreographer and normally performed by the dancers. That is because three company members had been denied travel visas (the company's visit to Vancouver is bracketed by tour dates in Hawai'i and along the west coast of the US. As a result, the work had to be hastily reset, with the nine remaining dancers joined at the last-minute by another performer familiar with the work. It was impossible for me to detect where any re-stitching had occurred, in part I suspect because the piece has its own internal dream-like rhythm, in which the dancers, move-to-move and also between larger group sequences, will often pause, point and thereby re-set the work's perceptual flow--here fast and pounding unison floor drops, there a canon of floating vertical suspensions or partnered leaps and catches. Nevertheless, it was also impossible not to carry Jim's announcement in one's head throughout the show, the "new reality" as we have all too quickly learned to label this post-Trump moment actually a very old and ongoing extension of the colonial project.
P
This revelation prompted a trip to the North African country and former French colony in 2009. Koubi wished to research his roots, but also to audition local dancers for a piece he was developing. Through word of mouth and social media, news of the audition spread and eventually 250 people showed up (249 of whom were men). The twelve dancers eventually chosen (11 Algerian and one from Burkina Faso) were trained neither in traditional Algerian folk dance nor in western contemporary dance; rather, they were mostly street dancers, with a range of self-taught skills drawn from hip hop, capoeira, acrobatics and martial arts. These "found brothers," as Koubi now refers to them, have cohered into a tight unit whose ripped bodies will be unleashed in astonishing and gravity-defying acts of individual athleticism: head spins, back flips, and one-arm cartwheels that in catching air seem to suspend the dancers' bodies for longer than seems physically possible. And yet for all that, no one dancer stands apart from or above the whole group, and the piece is very much about tracing the lines of connection between each body, and the histories shared between them--which, as Koubi indicates in his program notes, includes a history of Orientalist fantasy.
To that end, the piece begins with the dancers (reduced here to ten, about which I will explain in a moment) huddled in a clump, their bodies naked to the waist and wearing dervish-like skirts. Haze floods the stage and as oud-heavy Arabic/Berber music begins to play and the dancers start swaying and undulating their bodies any number of (homoerotic) images of men languishing in hamams, or kasbahs, or hash dens come to mind. Later, when several of the dancers spin on their heads this signature breakdance move simultaneously becomes an upside-down evocation of Sufi whirling courtesy of the side panels of the men's white costumes billowing out horizontally. At the same time, Koubi interrupts such associations with some expressly Christian imagery. For example, twice in the piece one of the dancers, having scrambled to the upstretched arms of two of his confrères, will fall backwards into the awaiting embrace of the rest of the company, the accompanying music from Bach's St. Matthew's Passion reminding one of the entangled legacy of French colonial history in Algeria.
Before introducing Koubi at the start of last night's performance, DanceHouse producer Jim Smith noted that what we were about to see was not in fact the piece as originally conceived by the choreographer and normally performed by the dancers. That is because three company members had been denied travel visas (the company's visit to Vancouver is bracketed by tour dates in Hawai'i and along the west coast of the US. As a result, the work had to be hastily reset, with the nine remaining dancers joined at the last-minute by another performer familiar with the work. It was impossible for me to detect where any re-stitching had occurred, in part I suspect because the piece has its own internal dream-like rhythm, in which the dancers, move-to-move and also between larger group sequences, will often pause, point and thereby re-set the work's perceptual flow--here fast and pounding unison floor drops, there a canon of floating vertical suspensions or partnered leaps and catches. Nevertheless, it was also impossible not to carry Jim's announcement in one's head throughout the show, the "new reality" as we have all too quickly learned to label this post-Trump moment actually a very old and ongoing extension of the colonial project.
P
Sunday, February 26, 2017
BJM at the Vancouver Playhouse
Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal's (BJM) return visit to Vancouver hasn't revised my opinion about the company. When DanceHouse programmed them in 2013, I found the repertoire to be mostly flash, with very little substance, and often reinforcing some very troubling gender dynamics (I wrote about that performance here). To give the venerable 44-year old company its due: it is comprised of a roster of incredibly talented and technically accomplished dancers, whom Artistic Director Louis Robitaille astutely showcases via a successful formula of fast-paced, physically demanding commissions from an array of celebrated international choreographers. But judging from last night, Robitaille also appears to give very little thought to the representational politics of the work.
Chief case in point is the first piece on the program, Rouge. Choreographed by Rodrigo Pederneiras, the director of the Brazilian company Grupo Corpo (also a DanceHouse favourite), the piece features an original score by the German electronic duo The Grand Brothers that references Inuit throat singing, among other Indigenous musical influences. Indeed, Rouge is meant, according to the program note, to be "an ode to resilience, a discreet tribute to Indigenous peoples and their musical and cultural legacy." However, that it features a mostly white company clad in buckskin costumes (complete with fringe), wearing war paint on their faces, and with several dancers' hair styled into 80s-era faux-hawks, tells you something about the completely tone-deaf aesthetic and cultural ideologies governing the piece. (Co-extensive with these ideologies is the fact that the one dancer of colour in the ensemble is cast as an unleashed force of libidinal energy, at one point bending star dancer Céline Cassone at the waist and thrusting her forward across the stage from behind.) Not only is there no discernible nod to any specific Indigenous tribal dance traditions (save for a troubling sequence in which the dancers, alternately expiring and reviving themselves on the floor, perform a kind of Ghost Dance), but arguably Pederneiras' deracinated contemporary dance vocabulary does further violence by refusing to acknowledge that Indigenous dance and song is tied to cultural property. There are specific protocols around sharing that property across different First Nations, let alone among predominantly settler-colonial performers, presenters, and audiences. Which brings me to my main question about Rouge and its programming. Instead of inviting Robitaille to present Pederneiras' take on Indigenous dance traditions, why not ask a local First Nations dance company to be part of a DanceHouse season? As Dancers of Damelahamid Artistic and Executive Director Margaret Grenier put it in an article in the Vancouver Sun yesterday relating to the start next week of the tenth edition of the Coastal First Nations Dance Festival, more dance presenters need to get on board with the fact that Indigenous dance companies are also contemporary dance companies, just ones with different and far older movement vocabularies--and with a very specific story to tell about their connection to the land and identity. Given that DanceHouse acknowledges in its program that its performances take place on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, one would have thought that greater care might have been given to how a piece like Rouge might read here.
I freely admit that my negative reaction to Rouge ended up influencing my reception of the other two pieces on last night's program. That said, Israeli choreographer Itzik Galili's Mono Lisa, set to a score of typewriter sounds, and danced by Cassone and Alexander Hille, was a largely acrobatic exercise in traditional partnering, with Cassone, now in point shoes and looking decidedly nonplussed, once again being thrust into successive poses that demonstrated her hyper-mobility and impressive extension. Kosmos, by Greek choreographer Andonis Foniadkis, was a large group piece that featured some amazing sequences. However, I felt it went on far too long and that it failed to cohere around a central choreographic idea, with the final trick of lighting appearing as a somewhat gimmicky summation of a concept of worlding and galactic interconnection that had previously failed to register.
P
Chief case in point is the first piece on the program, Rouge. Choreographed by Rodrigo Pederneiras, the director of the Brazilian company Grupo Corpo (also a DanceHouse favourite), the piece features an original score by the German electronic duo The Grand Brothers that references Inuit throat singing, among other Indigenous musical influences. Indeed, Rouge is meant, according to the program note, to be "an ode to resilience, a discreet tribute to Indigenous peoples and their musical and cultural legacy." However, that it features a mostly white company clad in buckskin costumes (complete with fringe), wearing war paint on their faces, and with several dancers' hair styled into 80s-era faux-hawks, tells you something about the completely tone-deaf aesthetic and cultural ideologies governing the piece. (Co-extensive with these ideologies is the fact that the one dancer of colour in the ensemble is cast as an unleashed force of libidinal energy, at one point bending star dancer Céline Cassone at the waist and thrusting her forward across the stage from behind.) Not only is there no discernible nod to any specific Indigenous tribal dance traditions (save for a troubling sequence in which the dancers, alternately expiring and reviving themselves on the floor, perform a kind of Ghost Dance), but arguably Pederneiras' deracinated contemporary dance vocabulary does further violence by refusing to acknowledge that Indigenous dance and song is tied to cultural property. There are specific protocols around sharing that property across different First Nations, let alone among predominantly settler-colonial performers, presenters, and audiences. Which brings me to my main question about Rouge and its programming. Instead of inviting Robitaille to present Pederneiras' take on Indigenous dance traditions, why not ask a local First Nations dance company to be part of a DanceHouse season? As Dancers of Damelahamid Artistic and Executive Director Margaret Grenier put it in an article in the Vancouver Sun yesterday relating to the start next week of the tenth edition of the Coastal First Nations Dance Festival, more dance presenters need to get on board with the fact that Indigenous dance companies are also contemporary dance companies, just ones with different and far older movement vocabularies--and with a very specific story to tell about their connection to the land and identity. Given that DanceHouse acknowledges in its program that its performances take place on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, one would have thought that greater care might have been given to how a piece like Rouge might read here.
I freely admit that my negative reaction to Rouge ended up influencing my reception of the other two pieces on last night's program. That said, Israeli choreographer Itzik Galili's Mono Lisa, set to a score of typewriter sounds, and danced by Cassone and Alexander Hille, was a largely acrobatic exercise in traditional partnering, with Cassone, now in point shoes and looking decidedly nonplussed, once again being thrust into successive poses that demonstrated her hyper-mobility and impressive extension. Kosmos, by Greek choreographer Andonis Foniadkis, was a large group piece that featured some amazing sequences. However, I felt it went on far too long and that it failed to cohere around a central choreographic idea, with the final trick of lighting appearing as a somewhat gimmicky summation of a concept of worlding and galactic interconnection that had previously failed to register.
P
Sunday, October 30, 2016
Jessica Lang Dance at The Playhouse
DanceHouse's 2016/17 season launched this past weekend with the Vancouver premiere of Jessica Lang Dance. Not to be confused with the American actress of American Horror Story fame, Lang is a New York-based choreographer (and former Twyla Tharp dancer) who established her eponymous company in 2011 and has since been gaining international notice, having been most recently commissioned by American Ballet Theatre.
For her Vancouver visit Lang offered audiences a mixed repertoire of five pieces. The first was Lines Cubed, from 2012, a Mondrian-like riff on pathways through space that was made up of four colour-coded sections--black, red, yellow, and blue--plus a concluding coda that brought all the different patterns (grids, circles and spirals) together. It was an interesting conceit and the steps were well-executed but I was never emotionally invested. It also felt to me that if Lang was going to be so rigorously formal in her conception of the piece then she shouldn't have introduced dancers in black into the duet she had constructed for the blue section. I get that they were meant to be impediments to the successful completion of the duet, but the unfurling and furling back up of the black crepe paper on stage struck me as altogether unnecessary.
The Calling was a short excerpt from Lang's Splendid Isolation II (2006); it featured company member Julie Fiorenza sheathed in an elegant white dress, the extended length of which spilled about her like flower petals or a rippling moonlit pond on the stage. Working on pointe (I'm assuming), Fiorenza would rise vertically and then sink down at the knees, an effect that because of the dress momentarily gave the illusion that she was sinking through rather than merely into the floor. The short piece ends with the dancer doing a succession of micro-turns, gathering the dress's material inward around her legs like she is a beautiful butterfly going back into its cocoon. Again, it was pretty to look at but did not really engage me in a profound way.
Things got more interesting in Thousand Yard Stare (2015), which I gather was made in consultation with veterans suffering from PSTD. Lang sends her ensemble out on stage in army fatigues, their slow horizontal march backwards and forwards across the stage in formation every now and then arrested mid-movement when one of the dancers holds a raised leg off the floor. Other canon formations evoke images of soldiers burrowing through tunnels or falling against each other in battle. As fascinated as I was by the different bodily structures of support that Lang seemed to be investigating in the context of war, it struck me that the very precision with which she was creating them worked against the idea that in such situations one cannot possibly know at every moment what to do or how to react.
The fourth piece on the program, White (2011), was actually a film. Overlaying different images of bodies moving through space, and using different film speeds, Lang--working with director of photography Shinichi Maruyama and editors Tetsushi Wakasugi and Jackson Notier--was able to convey a sense of kinaesthetic immersion through this work. It segued seamlessly into the final work on the program: i.n.k. (2011) is another collaboration between Lang and Maruyama and Wakasugi and Notier. As washes and droplets of india ink traverse the upstage screen the dancers interact with them, ducking beneath or jumping over them, for example, and through their additional movement across the stage extending the dance that is also happening on the screen. This last piece was by far the most successful of the evening, but even here the concept felt somewhat programmatic. Lang is clearly a choreographer of abundant ideas; I just wish the work was more emotionally involving.
P
For her Vancouver visit Lang offered audiences a mixed repertoire of five pieces. The first was Lines Cubed, from 2012, a Mondrian-like riff on pathways through space that was made up of four colour-coded sections--black, red, yellow, and blue--plus a concluding coda that brought all the different patterns (grids, circles and spirals) together. It was an interesting conceit and the steps were well-executed but I was never emotionally invested. It also felt to me that if Lang was going to be so rigorously formal in her conception of the piece then she shouldn't have introduced dancers in black into the duet she had constructed for the blue section. I get that they were meant to be impediments to the successful completion of the duet, but the unfurling and furling back up of the black crepe paper on stage struck me as altogether unnecessary.
The Calling was a short excerpt from Lang's Splendid Isolation II (2006); it featured company member Julie Fiorenza sheathed in an elegant white dress, the extended length of which spilled about her like flower petals or a rippling moonlit pond on the stage. Working on pointe (I'm assuming), Fiorenza would rise vertically and then sink down at the knees, an effect that because of the dress momentarily gave the illusion that she was sinking through rather than merely into the floor. The short piece ends with the dancer doing a succession of micro-turns, gathering the dress's material inward around her legs like she is a beautiful butterfly going back into its cocoon. Again, it was pretty to look at but did not really engage me in a profound way.
Things got more interesting in Thousand Yard Stare (2015), which I gather was made in consultation with veterans suffering from PSTD. Lang sends her ensemble out on stage in army fatigues, their slow horizontal march backwards and forwards across the stage in formation every now and then arrested mid-movement when one of the dancers holds a raised leg off the floor. Other canon formations evoke images of soldiers burrowing through tunnels or falling against each other in battle. As fascinated as I was by the different bodily structures of support that Lang seemed to be investigating in the context of war, it struck me that the very precision with which she was creating them worked against the idea that in such situations one cannot possibly know at every moment what to do or how to react.
The fourth piece on the program, White (2011), was actually a film. Overlaying different images of bodies moving through space, and using different film speeds, Lang--working with director of photography Shinichi Maruyama and editors Tetsushi Wakasugi and Jackson Notier--was able to convey a sense of kinaesthetic immersion through this work. It segued seamlessly into the final work on the program: i.n.k. (2011) is another collaboration between Lang and Maruyama and Wakasugi and Notier. As washes and droplets of india ink traverse the upstage screen the dancers interact with them, ducking beneath or jumping over them, for example, and through their additional movement across the stage extending the dance that is also happening on the screen. This last piece was by far the most successful of the evening, but even here the concept felt somewhat programmatic. Lang is clearly a choreographer of abundant ideas; I just wish the work was more emotionally involving.
P
Sunday, April 3, 2016
Companhia Urbana de Dança at the Playhouse
The latest season of DanceHouse concluded last night at the Playhouse with a presentation of two works by the Rio-based company Companhia Urbana de Dança--in their Canadian debut no less. Led by Artistic Director and choreographer Sonia Destri Lie (who, judging by the final moments of the pre-show talk, is a force of nature), the company combines hip-hop with contemporary and Afro-Brazilian social dance forms, creating a hybrid style that is reflective of the mixed backgrounds of its eight core members, all of whom have grown up in the favelas of Rio.
The evening opened with ID: Entidades, which in its structure, isolation of individual movement patterns, and sparse use of music, almost struck me as a formalist study of the fusion of hip hop and contemporary dance technique. The piece begins with the eight dancers (seven men and one woman) sitting on the floor in a line upstage, elbows on knees, like they are on a break in the studio and waiting to be called upon to try out some new combination of choreography. One of them gets up and advances towards a waist-high beam of soft light emanating from the wings; he begins to slowly undulate his head and torso as he moves horizontally across the stage. Because it is hard to see the lower half of his body, it is as if he is floating magically in space, or bobbing on the surface of water. Eventually the other dancers will arise from their sedentary positions and advance toward the audience, each of them also showcasing what impossibly fluid things they can do with their apparently boneless bodies: an arm wave that ripples back and forth like a snapped elastic band; a slow back bend in which the dancer's head almost reaches the floor before an elbow emerges for support; a handstand and leg freeze that is held for what feels like a full minute. Suspension has always been a key element of hip hop--the ability of b-boys and girls, in the midst of their pyrotechnic freestyle routines to hold a position for just a beat longer than seems humanly possible, or to pop, float, slide and glide their liquid limbs and bodies as if attached to invisible strings. But in slowing things down even further, Destri Lie also shows how such moves overlap with many release-based currents in postmodern dance, the troubling of poles between verticality and low-to-the-ground, balance and asymmetry being common to both styles. Indeed, at moments during several of the partnering sequences in ID I was almost reminded of contact improvisation. And in perhaps my favourite section of the entire work, a deconstructed trio featuring explosive unison downrock footwork punctuated by the occasional hand spin, airflare and leg freeze, the dancers' turned backs during the occasional pauses in the routine suggested to me a similar eschewing of a virtuosic presentational style in much contemporary dance.
Not that Companhia Urbana de Dança isn't above shamelessly playing to its audience, as was demonstrated by the second piece on the program, Na Pista. This work, which the program note explains was born from each dancer's investigation of his or her roots, begins with several members of the company entering from the audience, all nattily dressed, exuberantly shouting at each other, and seemingly pumped to party. On stage, which is open to the back safety wall and wings, a cluster of chairs is positioned in the centre, underneath a disco ball. One of the dancers calls to the DJ for some music and the men begin busting some moves in a circle around the chairs. The music stops suddenly and everyone scrambles to find a seat, with one in their lot laughingly out of luck. He removes one of the chairs and himself upstage and the game of musical chairs continues in this manner until there are only two dancers and one chair remaining. Except our expectation that a winner will emerge from this pair is thwarted when, after some cat and mouse house jiving around the chair that begins to escalate in the scale of displayed power moves, the rest of the crew, cheering from the sidelines, decides to join in and a running circle around the chair begins. It's at this point that the lone female member of the company emerges from the wings, joins the circle and, of course, secures ownership of the chair when the music finally stops. Na Pista takes its joyful energy and ethos from the idea of what it means to be part of a dance crew, in which cooperation and competition go hand in hand. Thus, the dancers work together seamlessly from the upstage chorus line of chairs to create amazing unison movement (which includes perfectly synchronized breaks to sip from their water bottles). But they also get to bust out individually to showcase their own signature styles, or to have friendly dance offs in pairs. It's a combination that is hard to resist and at the conclusion of the piece the audience was instantly on its feet, a mutual love fest that was rewarded with a bonus bit of b-boying as the company took its bows.
P.
The evening opened with ID: Entidades, which in its structure, isolation of individual movement patterns, and sparse use of music, almost struck me as a formalist study of the fusion of hip hop and contemporary dance technique. The piece begins with the eight dancers (seven men and one woman) sitting on the floor in a line upstage, elbows on knees, like they are on a break in the studio and waiting to be called upon to try out some new combination of choreography. One of them gets up and advances towards a waist-high beam of soft light emanating from the wings; he begins to slowly undulate his head and torso as he moves horizontally across the stage. Because it is hard to see the lower half of his body, it is as if he is floating magically in space, or bobbing on the surface of water. Eventually the other dancers will arise from their sedentary positions and advance toward the audience, each of them also showcasing what impossibly fluid things they can do with their apparently boneless bodies: an arm wave that ripples back and forth like a snapped elastic band; a slow back bend in which the dancer's head almost reaches the floor before an elbow emerges for support; a handstand and leg freeze that is held for what feels like a full minute. Suspension has always been a key element of hip hop--the ability of b-boys and girls, in the midst of their pyrotechnic freestyle routines to hold a position for just a beat longer than seems humanly possible, or to pop, float, slide and glide their liquid limbs and bodies as if attached to invisible strings. But in slowing things down even further, Destri Lie also shows how such moves overlap with many release-based currents in postmodern dance, the troubling of poles between verticality and low-to-the-ground, balance and asymmetry being common to both styles. Indeed, at moments during several of the partnering sequences in ID I was almost reminded of contact improvisation. And in perhaps my favourite section of the entire work, a deconstructed trio featuring explosive unison downrock footwork punctuated by the occasional hand spin, airflare and leg freeze, the dancers' turned backs during the occasional pauses in the routine suggested to me a similar eschewing of a virtuosic presentational style in much contemporary dance.
Not that Companhia Urbana de Dança isn't above shamelessly playing to its audience, as was demonstrated by the second piece on the program, Na Pista. This work, which the program note explains was born from each dancer's investigation of his or her roots, begins with several members of the company entering from the audience, all nattily dressed, exuberantly shouting at each other, and seemingly pumped to party. On stage, which is open to the back safety wall and wings, a cluster of chairs is positioned in the centre, underneath a disco ball. One of the dancers calls to the DJ for some music and the men begin busting some moves in a circle around the chairs. The music stops suddenly and everyone scrambles to find a seat, with one in their lot laughingly out of luck. He removes one of the chairs and himself upstage and the game of musical chairs continues in this manner until there are only two dancers and one chair remaining. Except our expectation that a winner will emerge from this pair is thwarted when, after some cat and mouse house jiving around the chair that begins to escalate in the scale of displayed power moves, the rest of the crew, cheering from the sidelines, decides to join in and a running circle around the chair begins. It's at this point that the lone female member of the company emerges from the wings, joins the circle and, of course, secures ownership of the chair when the music finally stops. Na Pista takes its joyful energy and ethos from the idea of what it means to be part of a dance crew, in which cooperation and competition go hand in hand. Thus, the dancers work together seamlessly from the upstage chorus line of chairs to create amazing unison movement (which includes perfectly synchronized breaks to sip from their water bottles). But they also get to bust out individually to showcase their own signature styles, or to have friendly dance offs in pairs. It's a combination that is hard to resist and at the conclusion of the piece the audience was instantly on its feet, a mutual love fest that was rewarded with a bonus bit of b-boying as the company took its bows.
P.
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Betroffenheit at the Playhouse
Betroffenheit, the much-anticipated dance-theatre collaboration between Kidd Pivot and the Electric Company Theatre, finally arrived in Vancouver this past weekend following its acclaimed debut during the PanAm Games in Toronto last summer. Given how widely the personal backstory to the piece's development is known in the local performance community, and given as well the professional pedigrees of its two primary collaborators, Jonathon Young and Crystal Pite, the stakes around what the work would deliver were extremely high. Happily, Betroffenheit, which was presented by DanceHouse, more than measures up, both in constellating with such intelligence and artistic rigour ideas and concepts and emotions that are more than the sum of Young's personal tragedy, and in signalling an exciting new turn in Pite's career not just as a choreographer, but as a stage director.
As Young noted in conversation with Pite at a public forum earlier in the day, the seeds of Betroffenheit came from the compulsive writing he was doing in an attempt to gain some control over the traumatic loss of his daughter. He showed these pages to Pite, hoping that she might agree to stage them. The title comes from Ann Bogart's And Then, We Act, and refers to a state of bewildered shock in the wake of an event, a space that exposes the limits of language to make sense of experience, a space of "fertile and palpable silence" where, in Bogart's words, "everything is up for grabs." A space, in other words, of theatrical imagination--one where social reality can be explored in an other, more heightened register. And, indeed, it was only after the two artists had begun collaborating that they discovered that the story they were telling was about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and related issues of addiction.
In the world of Betroffenheit these issues are translated, initially, into the hollowed out world of an empty sound stage that but for the electrical cables retreating like garden snakes before our eyes soon after the curtains part could double for an antiseptic psych ward (the amazing set is by Jay Gower Taylor). Our protagonist, Young, cowers in a corner; soon we hear him--or rather sometimes him and sometimes him in voiceover--having a conversation with himself about what he is not to do: that he shouldn't respond; a system is in place; the user only gets used. Young's interlocutors multiply, his voice distributed across any number of objects on stage--including, most compellingly, a HAL-like amplifier whose mechanical responses to Young's questions seem oddly comforting. Eventually, the narrative voice of Young's text gets distributed across other bodies as well, with Jermaine Spivey first showing up in a blue leisure suit and face paint to take over the amplifier's side of the conversation through the embodied technique of lipsynching, a choreographing of the voice that in Pite's hands is as precise and accomplished as the gestural phrasing and orchestration of dancers' limbs that accompanies it.
Spivey plays Young's alter ego; his, we might say, is the voice of Young's subconscious, or perhaps more properly, altered consciousness. For it is Spivey's role to lure Young back to the razz-ma-tazz world of "showtime," the imagined variety show that is Young's drug of choice and out of which Pite conjures spectacular tap and salsa sequences that wonderfully showcase the additional dance talents of Out Innerspace's David Raymond and Kidd Pivot regulars Bryan Arias and Cindy Salgado, respectively. Young and Spivey also engage in a charming vaudeville-style double act, the patter of their lipsynched conversation as diverting and seemingly harmless as their accompanying soft-shoe routine. However, in conversation earlier in the afternoon Pite also commented that it was important for her to make this world of showtime not just a pleasurable and joyful release--for us as much as for Young's character--but also dangerous. To this end, we get Tiffany Tregarthen, who plays a devilish and (quite literally) explosive imp, and whose fantastically physical and entangled duet with Young (who is revealed over the course of the entire piece to be a virtuosic mover) leads to what, in this "disordered system" of the stage, is the equivalent of an overdose. It takes all of the combined efforts of the other five performers to revive Young for his climactic solo number, a moving song of longing and regret that is of course not a solo at all--because his voice is lifted by a chorus of bodies, a corps, who in forming a chain of support illustrates through dance the network of sustaining relations in life that lets us know, no matter the claims we make upon them, that they have our back, that they will make sure we make it safely back down to the ground. And on this front it's been a while since I've responded so enthusiastically to Pite's penchant for tethering her group movement at the wrist. Whereas in the past the accordion-like unfurling and contraction of bodily bellows in her work has sometimes seemed like an exercise in momentum without direction, here the chains of movement seem to hint both at sequentiality (events unfolding over time) and obligation (how we are fettered together by those events)--as when, for example, the group slumps in succession against the stage right set wall, a submission to fate and to gravity that, combined with Young's song, made my heart catch in my throat.
Act 3 of Betroffenheit, which begins after a brief intermission, follows the pattern Pite has established in previous works like Dark Matter and The Tempest Replica. The ensemble, having traded in their sparkly "showtime" costumes for standard issue rehearsal sweats, deconstructs much of the action of the previous acts through pure movement. It begins with a spectacular off-axis solo for Arias, in which he spins his body around violently, like he is trying to exorcise a demon. Later he and Salgado will partner in a ghostly echo of their "showtime" salsa steps, only this time on their knees and in a desperately vertiginous bid to right themselves and prevent the other from falling over. Young, in the afternoon conversation, likened this section to the experience of withdrawal, and Pite supplemented this idea by saying that she was interested in staging various micro-scenes of rescue (a favourite theme of hers). To this end, I was very affected by the duet between Salgado and Tregarthen, who helped convey a sense of shared pain through a simple bit of gestural unison, moving their hands from knees to hips to elbows to heads through a sequence of facings, but also interrupting the cycle at different moments to place a solicitous hand on the other's body. As compelling was when all five dancers were on their hands and knees, their arms twitching uncontrollably--as if they are being collectively wracked by the DTs, or a horrible night sweat. The movement only stops when they slide a hand across to the person next to them, applying a different kind of physical pressure to still the mental anguish. If one of Pite's greatest concerns was figuring out how to distribute the narrative voice of trauma across the piece's entire ensemble, a consequent result has been how she has likewise shown how the physical symptoms of trauma can spread and be shared across different bodies.
To this end, after a couple of chimeric glimpses of showtime's lingering traces (a curtain reproduction of the set and a mysterious reappearance of a self-ambulating magician's box), the piece concludes with a reprise of Young and Spivey's earlier duet. This time, however, to echo both the voiceover (which has also returned) and the conversation between Young and Pite from earlier in the afternoon, we are made to realize that there will be no epiphany. There can only be the slow and painful practice of learning how to reengage with the world. And that starts, as Spivey demonstrates for us, by standing up on one's own, finding one's legs, putting one of those legs in front of the other, and beginning to move uncertainly into the future--a future that doesn't try to leave behind the past, but that accepts (and not without some measure of comfort) that it will always be present.
P.
As Young noted in conversation with Pite at a public forum earlier in the day, the seeds of Betroffenheit came from the compulsive writing he was doing in an attempt to gain some control over the traumatic loss of his daughter. He showed these pages to Pite, hoping that she might agree to stage them. The title comes from Ann Bogart's And Then, We Act, and refers to a state of bewildered shock in the wake of an event, a space that exposes the limits of language to make sense of experience, a space of "fertile and palpable silence" where, in Bogart's words, "everything is up for grabs." A space, in other words, of theatrical imagination--one where social reality can be explored in an other, more heightened register. And, indeed, it was only after the two artists had begun collaborating that they discovered that the story they were telling was about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and related issues of addiction.
In the world of Betroffenheit these issues are translated, initially, into the hollowed out world of an empty sound stage that but for the electrical cables retreating like garden snakes before our eyes soon after the curtains part could double for an antiseptic psych ward (the amazing set is by Jay Gower Taylor). Our protagonist, Young, cowers in a corner; soon we hear him--or rather sometimes him and sometimes him in voiceover--having a conversation with himself about what he is not to do: that he shouldn't respond; a system is in place; the user only gets used. Young's interlocutors multiply, his voice distributed across any number of objects on stage--including, most compellingly, a HAL-like amplifier whose mechanical responses to Young's questions seem oddly comforting. Eventually, the narrative voice of Young's text gets distributed across other bodies as well, with Jermaine Spivey first showing up in a blue leisure suit and face paint to take over the amplifier's side of the conversation through the embodied technique of lipsynching, a choreographing of the voice that in Pite's hands is as precise and accomplished as the gestural phrasing and orchestration of dancers' limbs that accompanies it.
Spivey plays Young's alter ego; his, we might say, is the voice of Young's subconscious, or perhaps more properly, altered consciousness. For it is Spivey's role to lure Young back to the razz-ma-tazz world of "showtime," the imagined variety show that is Young's drug of choice and out of which Pite conjures spectacular tap and salsa sequences that wonderfully showcase the additional dance talents of Out Innerspace's David Raymond and Kidd Pivot regulars Bryan Arias and Cindy Salgado, respectively. Young and Spivey also engage in a charming vaudeville-style double act, the patter of their lipsynched conversation as diverting and seemingly harmless as their accompanying soft-shoe routine. However, in conversation earlier in the afternoon Pite also commented that it was important for her to make this world of showtime not just a pleasurable and joyful release--for us as much as for Young's character--but also dangerous. To this end, we get Tiffany Tregarthen, who plays a devilish and (quite literally) explosive imp, and whose fantastically physical and entangled duet with Young (who is revealed over the course of the entire piece to be a virtuosic mover) leads to what, in this "disordered system" of the stage, is the equivalent of an overdose. It takes all of the combined efforts of the other five performers to revive Young for his climactic solo number, a moving song of longing and regret that is of course not a solo at all--because his voice is lifted by a chorus of bodies, a corps, who in forming a chain of support illustrates through dance the network of sustaining relations in life that lets us know, no matter the claims we make upon them, that they have our back, that they will make sure we make it safely back down to the ground. And on this front it's been a while since I've responded so enthusiastically to Pite's penchant for tethering her group movement at the wrist. Whereas in the past the accordion-like unfurling and contraction of bodily bellows in her work has sometimes seemed like an exercise in momentum without direction, here the chains of movement seem to hint both at sequentiality (events unfolding over time) and obligation (how we are fettered together by those events)--as when, for example, the group slumps in succession against the stage right set wall, a submission to fate and to gravity that, combined with Young's song, made my heart catch in my throat.
Act 3 of Betroffenheit, which begins after a brief intermission, follows the pattern Pite has established in previous works like Dark Matter and The Tempest Replica. The ensemble, having traded in their sparkly "showtime" costumes for standard issue rehearsal sweats, deconstructs much of the action of the previous acts through pure movement. It begins with a spectacular off-axis solo for Arias, in which he spins his body around violently, like he is trying to exorcise a demon. Later he and Salgado will partner in a ghostly echo of their "showtime" salsa steps, only this time on their knees and in a desperately vertiginous bid to right themselves and prevent the other from falling over. Young, in the afternoon conversation, likened this section to the experience of withdrawal, and Pite supplemented this idea by saying that she was interested in staging various micro-scenes of rescue (a favourite theme of hers). To this end, I was very affected by the duet between Salgado and Tregarthen, who helped convey a sense of shared pain through a simple bit of gestural unison, moving their hands from knees to hips to elbows to heads through a sequence of facings, but also interrupting the cycle at different moments to place a solicitous hand on the other's body. As compelling was when all five dancers were on their hands and knees, their arms twitching uncontrollably--as if they are being collectively wracked by the DTs, or a horrible night sweat. The movement only stops when they slide a hand across to the person next to them, applying a different kind of physical pressure to still the mental anguish. If one of Pite's greatest concerns was figuring out how to distribute the narrative voice of trauma across the piece's entire ensemble, a consequent result has been how she has likewise shown how the physical symptoms of trauma can spread and be shared across different bodies.
To this end, after a couple of chimeric glimpses of showtime's lingering traces (a curtain reproduction of the set and a mysterious reappearance of a self-ambulating magician's box), the piece concludes with a reprise of Young and Spivey's earlier duet. This time, however, to echo both the voiceover (which has also returned) and the conversation between Young and Pite from earlier in the afternoon, we are made to realize that there will be no epiphany. There can only be the slow and painful practice of learning how to reengage with the world. And that starts, as Spivey demonstrates for us, by standing up on one's own, finding one's legs, putting one of those legs in front of the other, and beginning to move uncertainly into the future--a future that doesn't try to leave behind the past, but that accepts (and not without some measure of comfort) that it will always be present.
P.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Compagnie Käfig at the Playhouse
DanceHouse ended its 2014-15 season in a rousing fashion last night with the Vancouver premiere of Compagnie Käfig, a hybrid, polyglot evening of hip hop featuring a company of eleven amazing male dancers from Brazil, with artistic direction by the Algerian-French choreographer Mourad Merzouko (of Centre Choréographique de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne) and choreographic contributions by three other French and one other Brazilian artists. In this case, many cooks definitely makes for a steamy, sexy pot.
The piece opens with the dancers clumped together against a backlit scrim positioned upstage. Slowly a hand emerges, extends upwards, and spreads its fingers in a fluid sequence vaguely reminiscent of voguing. Eventually, as one of the members accompanies the rest of the company on what I took to be a traditional samba instrument, while also vocalizing a succession of beats, the men spread--or rather, glide--across the dance floor, toprocking in a fast and rhythmically compelling coordination of steps and arm waves before heading down to the floor to bust various individual power moves (back and shoulder spins, headstands, swipes, acrobatic flips) and freezes.
Indeed, what was so fascinating about last night's performance was the thoroughly intertwined mix of freestyle elements and clearly choreographed unison movement. These men are eminently watchable even when they are just bobbing their heads together. But add in differences in tempo, spatial configuration and lightning-quick changes in the quality of movement--in which the dancers switch from poeticism to power in the space of a few beats--and one sees just how much work has gone into this collaboration of styles.
Of course it helps that the company is very easy on the eyes. At the start of the piece the dancers are all properly--even somewhat formally--attired in dress shirts and ties. By the end, however, they are shirtless, their torsos glistening with sweat as they display their well-toned abs. That alone was worth the standing ovation they received--even before they treated us to a short freestylin' encore.
In his curtain speech before the show, DanceHouse producer Jim Smith announced next season's line-up, which includes a visit by another Brazilian company, Companhia Urbana de Dança. Also on tap is the Hofesh Schechter Company and the Vancouver premiere of Crytal Pite's newest work, Betroffenheit, a collaboration between her company Kidd Pivot and Electric Company Theatre that will premiere later this summer in Toronto as part of the cultural component of the Pan Am Games. It's a shorter season that normal for DanceHouse (only three shows instead of the usual four), but with Schechter and Pite as part of the schedule, it should be memorable.
P.
The piece opens with the dancers clumped together against a backlit scrim positioned upstage. Slowly a hand emerges, extends upwards, and spreads its fingers in a fluid sequence vaguely reminiscent of voguing. Eventually, as one of the members accompanies the rest of the company on what I took to be a traditional samba instrument, while also vocalizing a succession of beats, the men spread--or rather, glide--across the dance floor, toprocking in a fast and rhythmically compelling coordination of steps and arm waves before heading down to the floor to bust various individual power moves (back and shoulder spins, headstands, swipes, acrobatic flips) and freezes.
Indeed, what was so fascinating about last night's performance was the thoroughly intertwined mix of freestyle elements and clearly choreographed unison movement. These men are eminently watchable even when they are just bobbing their heads together. But add in differences in tempo, spatial configuration and lightning-quick changes in the quality of movement--in which the dancers switch from poeticism to power in the space of a few beats--and one sees just how much work has gone into this collaboration of styles.
Of course it helps that the company is very easy on the eyes. At the start of the piece the dancers are all properly--even somewhat formally--attired in dress shirts and ties. By the end, however, they are shirtless, their torsos glistening with sweat as they display their well-toned abs. That alone was worth the standing ovation they received--even before they treated us to a short freestylin' encore.
In his curtain speech before the show, DanceHouse producer Jim Smith announced next season's line-up, which includes a visit by another Brazilian company, Companhia Urbana de Dança. Also on tap is the Hofesh Schechter Company and the Vancouver premiere of Crytal Pite's newest work, Betroffenheit, a collaboration between her company Kidd Pivot and Electric Company Theatre that will premiere later this summer in Toronto as part of the cultural component of the Pan Am Games. It's a shorter season that normal for DanceHouse (only three shows instead of the usual four), but with Schechter and Pite as part of the schedule, it should be memorable.
P.
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
PuSh 2015: Louise Lecavalier
Even standing on her head, Louise Lecavalier is mesmerizing. With her long platinum blonde dreadlocks, bulging biceps and quads, and trademark mid-air barrel rolls, Lecavalier seared herself into the collective consciousness of both dance and pop culture audiences in the 1980s as the principal dancer for Édouard Lock's La La La Human Steps and the star of music videos by David Bowie. Now in her mid-50s, and following major hip surgery several years ago, Lecavalier and her company Fou Glorieux are in town with So Blue, a co-presentation of the PuSh Festival, DanceHouse and SFU Woodward's 149 Arts Society. Sixty minutes of non-stop, full-out movement set to a pulsating electronic score by Mercan Dede, the piece is a testament to Lecavalier's unique and undiminished gifts: her fearless sense of risk; her disciplined technique; her ferocious energy; and, above all, her commanding rapport with the audience.
So Blue's Vancouver premiere is a treat for another reason, for it marks Lecavalier's debut, as it were, as a solo choreographer. Lecavalier formed Fou Glorieux in 2006 as a means to work, as a mature dancer, with artists whose vision aligned with hers, collaborating with choreographers like Benoît Lachambre, Crystal Pite, Tedd Robinson, the late Nigel Charnock, and even her former partner Lock on a series of solos and duets that have toured North America and Europe (a double bill of Charnock's Children and Lock's A Few Minutes of Lock was presented by DanceHouse here in Vancouver in 2011). While Lecavalier was very much an active partner in the creation of these works, with So Blue the concept and choreography are all her own. And what they reveal is a dance artist fully attuned to just how far beyond our imagined limits she can push her body in time and space.
The work begins with the houselights up. Lecavalier enters discreetly, almost surreptitiously, upstage right and takes a seat on a chair. Her hair, still bright blonde, is shorter now, cut into an asymmetrical bob; she is much tinier than I remember in my imagination. At a certain point, she gets up and moves downstage into a square of light that frames a jagged bit of tape on the floor; she leans into a lunge, the music starts, and then she is off. Her feet shuffle back and forth, left and right, sending her across the stage as if on an invisible conveyor belt. A single leg pulses and shakes for what seems like a full minute before alighting almost weightlessly on the stage floor. Hips twist, arms rotate, knees bend, the head bobs: during this opening sequence Lecavalier's whole body is in constant motion, as if the music has entered her like an electric current and she will not stop moving until she has expended every last ounce of this surplus kinetic energy. It was a force that could be palpably felt in the audience, as for the first ten minutes of the piece, while Lecavalier is moving frenetically, but also with incredibly virtuosity, across the stage, it seemed as if we had all taken a collective inhalation of breath, which we only let out once Lecavalier paused and dropped to the floor.
Which brings me to that headstand. It comes as such an unexpected but gratefully received gift as, from a crouched position on the floor, Lecavalier slowly raises first one and then the other of her legs into full and perfectly ramrod verticality. And there she remains, the headstand less a look-at-me/look-at-what-I-can-do stunt than a moment of rest and syncopated connection between performer and audience. By that I mean that with the music having cut out at this point, and with Lecavalier's t-shirt having fallen down around her shoulders to reveal her bare torso, we become transfixed by the convex and concave pulsing of her famously chiseled abdomen as she breathes in and out, in and out, revealing to us that dance is as much about the internal rhythms of the body as it is about the external expression of those rhythms. Not that Lecavalier remains stock still throughout this sequence. Towards the end, she begins to slowly move her legs back and forth, while still balancing on her head, a statue brought back to life.
The second half of So Blue comprises a series of "failed" duets with Frédéric Tavernini, an incredibly tall and long-limbed dancer who arrives on stage almost as a provocation to Lecavalier (he even has a similar haircut), the two of them shimmying back and forth in rectangles of light centre stage, coming closer and closer, but never fully connecting--almost like positive and negative charges of energy. It's only after Tavernini's second appearance that we get some actual partnering between the dancers--but even here this is preceded by a deliberately awkward sequence in which Lecavalier and Tavernini mime confusion about who is supposed to embrace and lead, or spin, or be lifted by whom. Featuring some vaguely Lock-like quick turns, I read this bit as witty nod to Lecavalier's early career and the way in which her androgyny and physicality challenged entrenched gendered norms of modern dance.
Whether this was intentional or not, the piece as a whole is a triumph and confirms that Lecavalier's iconicity as a dance artist is complete: this uncompromising and unparalleled mover is now also a choreographer of extraordinary talent. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.
P.
So Blue's Vancouver premiere is a treat for another reason, for it marks Lecavalier's debut, as it were, as a solo choreographer. Lecavalier formed Fou Glorieux in 2006 as a means to work, as a mature dancer, with artists whose vision aligned with hers, collaborating with choreographers like Benoît Lachambre, Crystal Pite, Tedd Robinson, the late Nigel Charnock, and even her former partner Lock on a series of solos and duets that have toured North America and Europe (a double bill of Charnock's Children and Lock's A Few Minutes of Lock was presented by DanceHouse here in Vancouver in 2011). While Lecavalier was very much an active partner in the creation of these works, with So Blue the concept and choreography are all her own. And what they reveal is a dance artist fully attuned to just how far beyond our imagined limits she can push her body in time and space.
The work begins with the houselights up. Lecavalier enters discreetly, almost surreptitiously, upstage right and takes a seat on a chair. Her hair, still bright blonde, is shorter now, cut into an asymmetrical bob; she is much tinier than I remember in my imagination. At a certain point, she gets up and moves downstage into a square of light that frames a jagged bit of tape on the floor; she leans into a lunge, the music starts, and then she is off. Her feet shuffle back and forth, left and right, sending her across the stage as if on an invisible conveyor belt. A single leg pulses and shakes for what seems like a full minute before alighting almost weightlessly on the stage floor. Hips twist, arms rotate, knees bend, the head bobs: during this opening sequence Lecavalier's whole body is in constant motion, as if the music has entered her like an electric current and she will not stop moving until she has expended every last ounce of this surplus kinetic energy. It was a force that could be palpably felt in the audience, as for the first ten minutes of the piece, while Lecavalier is moving frenetically, but also with incredibly virtuosity, across the stage, it seemed as if we had all taken a collective inhalation of breath, which we only let out once Lecavalier paused and dropped to the floor.
Which brings me to that headstand. It comes as such an unexpected but gratefully received gift as, from a crouched position on the floor, Lecavalier slowly raises first one and then the other of her legs into full and perfectly ramrod verticality. And there she remains, the headstand less a look-at-me/look-at-what-I-can-do stunt than a moment of rest and syncopated connection between performer and audience. By that I mean that with the music having cut out at this point, and with Lecavalier's t-shirt having fallen down around her shoulders to reveal her bare torso, we become transfixed by the convex and concave pulsing of her famously chiseled abdomen as she breathes in and out, in and out, revealing to us that dance is as much about the internal rhythms of the body as it is about the external expression of those rhythms. Not that Lecavalier remains stock still throughout this sequence. Towards the end, she begins to slowly move her legs back and forth, while still balancing on her head, a statue brought back to life.
The second half of So Blue comprises a series of "failed" duets with Frédéric Tavernini, an incredibly tall and long-limbed dancer who arrives on stage almost as a provocation to Lecavalier (he even has a similar haircut), the two of them shimmying back and forth in rectangles of light centre stage, coming closer and closer, but never fully connecting--almost like positive and negative charges of energy. It's only after Tavernini's second appearance that we get some actual partnering between the dancers--but even here this is preceded by a deliberately awkward sequence in which Lecavalier and Tavernini mime confusion about who is supposed to embrace and lead, or spin, or be lifted by whom. Featuring some vaguely Lock-like quick turns, I read this bit as witty nod to Lecavalier's early career and the way in which her androgyny and physicality challenged entrenched gendered norms of modern dance.
Whether this was intentional or not, the piece as a whole is a triumph and confirms that Lecavalier's iconicity as a dance artist is complete: this uncompromising and unparalleled mover is now also a choreographer of extraordinary talent. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.
P.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
L-E-V is in the (Dance)House
Local dance artist Vanessa Goodman lead the pre-show talk with sound designer Ori Lichtik before last night's performance of House, by the new Israeli company L-E-V. She mentioned that company co-founder (along with Gai Behar) and choreographer, Sharon Eyal, would be performing in the piece, improvising a series of three solos. This was an exciting surprise, as Eyal's name was not listed along with the other six dancers in the program; I was eager to catch a glimpse in the flesh of the choreographer, long renowned for her work with Ohad Naharin's Batsheva Dance Company, who was behind the stand-out performance of Corps de Walk by the Norwegian company Carte Blanche as part of last year's DanceHouse season.
House, the work presented by L-E-V, opens with Eyal, in a skin-tight black bodysuit, shimmying across the stage to Lichtik's music. We recognize grooves derived from Tel Aviv's legendary club scene, but also traces of Naharin's famous gaga method; however, Eyal combines these into a language all her own via her interest in holding a pose just a second or two past the music's beat, and in finding new patterns within deconstructed movement.
As Eyal exits upstage, the rest of the company emerges, all clad in flesh-coloured bodysuits reminiscent of the ones worn by the Carte Blanche dancers in Corps de Walk. As in that work, about which I blogged here, this first main section of House begins with the six L-E-V dancers in a circle, each bending into a deep plié and swaying side to side with mechanical precision. Eventually, however, one of the dancers breaks free from the circle, moving horizontally across the stage in a style reminiscent of voguing--which, along with the obvious musical associations, is to a certain extent signaled by the work's title. But unlike the house walkers in Harlem made famous by Jenny Livingston's Paris is Burning (and whose moves were then hijacked by Madonna), Eyal's dancers, in "leaving things on the floor," paradoxically remain resolutely vertical.
Following a second solo interlude by Eyal, she is joined by the rest of the dancers. Three of the four men are now dressed in black, like Eyal, and additionally the tallest of these men sports high heels (as does one of the other female dancers). I frankly couldn't take my eyes off of this dancer (which is saying something, given that his confrère stage right was impressively shirtless); with his beard and ball cap, imposing lithe frame, and hoof-like heels, he looked like a giant satyr. And, indeed, this section, in its mixing of images of sexual fetishism and animality, comes across very much as a dark and dreamlike exploration of various kinds of taboo.
Finally, after a third solo by Eyal, House concludes with an electrifying display of unison movement, in which Eyal takes the phrases explored by her dancers in the previous sections and builds them into a "singular sensation" of chorus line effects, complete with high kicks and jumps. It's a rousing, spectacular finish that's hard to resist, the rhythmic entrainment of the music and the movement designed to make audiences leap to their feet--which most did last night. I confess, however, that I was more compelled by the less easily assimilable (thematically and choreographically) bits from the previous sections.
P.
House, the work presented by L-E-V, opens with Eyal, in a skin-tight black bodysuit, shimmying across the stage to Lichtik's music. We recognize grooves derived from Tel Aviv's legendary club scene, but also traces of Naharin's famous gaga method; however, Eyal combines these into a language all her own via her interest in holding a pose just a second or two past the music's beat, and in finding new patterns within deconstructed movement.
As Eyal exits upstage, the rest of the company emerges, all clad in flesh-coloured bodysuits reminiscent of the ones worn by the Carte Blanche dancers in Corps de Walk. As in that work, about which I blogged here, this first main section of House begins with the six L-E-V dancers in a circle, each bending into a deep plié and swaying side to side with mechanical precision. Eventually, however, one of the dancers breaks free from the circle, moving horizontally across the stage in a style reminiscent of voguing--which, along with the obvious musical associations, is to a certain extent signaled by the work's title. But unlike the house walkers in Harlem made famous by Jenny Livingston's Paris is Burning (and whose moves were then hijacked by Madonna), Eyal's dancers, in "leaving things on the floor," paradoxically remain resolutely vertical.
Following a second solo interlude by Eyal, she is joined by the rest of the dancers. Three of the four men are now dressed in black, like Eyal, and additionally the tallest of these men sports high heels (as does one of the other female dancers). I frankly couldn't take my eyes off of this dancer (which is saying something, given that his confrère stage right was impressively shirtless); with his beard and ball cap, imposing lithe frame, and hoof-like heels, he looked like a giant satyr. And, indeed, this section, in its mixing of images of sexual fetishism and animality, comes across very much as a dark and dreamlike exploration of various kinds of taboo.
Finally, after a third solo by Eyal, House concludes with an electrifying display of unison movement, in which Eyal takes the phrases explored by her dancers in the previous sections and builds them into a "singular sensation" of chorus line effects, complete with high kicks and jumps. It's a rousing, spectacular finish that's hard to resist, the rhythmic entrainment of the music and the movement designed to make audiences leap to their feet--which most did last night. I confess, however, that I was more compelled by the less easily assimilable (thematically and choreographically) bits from the previous sections.
P.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Le Grand Continental: Rehearsal 3
Yesterday was the start of Group A's second week of rehearsals for Le Grand Continental. Arriving early to take advantage of the extra practice time made available to us, I was surprised to discover how many others were already there working with Sylvain and each other on the "India" section we had learned last week. Clearly we are taking this seriously!
What is also fascinating to witness is how spontaneously and organically we fall into small working groups during these practice sessions. Two or three people will be in the middle of a sequence over in the corner and the next new arrival will join them mid-step, quickly picking up the rhythm and inspiring the rest in the group to be just that much more fluid in their movements and kinaesthetically aware in their bodies. Such was the case with me last night, and already I feel like I've formed an important collaborative bond with several of my fellow dancers. I'm not sure I'll get to know, let alone talk to, all 80 of the participants in the piece; but I do sincerely feel like we all already have a sense of being in this thing--whatever it is--together.
I'm also curious about Sylvain's continued investment in this project. He is such a genial man and patient teacher. He's been through this process nearly a dozen times now, but clearly he continues to derive some pleasure and freshness from teaching the same choreography to each new group of community dancers. And, indeed, on some level it must be quite satisfying to watch a mostly untrained and amorphous mass of bodies come together as a well-oiled dance machine over the course of eight weeks of rehearsal. None of is ever going to be a great technician (although there are some amazing movers in the group), but neither is Sylvain letting us just go through the motions. Getting the steps right and hitting our marks is one thing; but Sylvain is just as concerned with the crispness and bigness of our hand gestures and, looking ahead, to the emotional connection we will ideally be making with our audience.
There was new work to be learned last night--specifically the "Ima" section that leads into "India." The linear thinker in me was dismayed to discover we were learning the choreography out of sequence, but when we put both sections together at the end of last night's rehearsal and it wasn't a total disaster I was somewhat relieved. The choreography in "Ima" is slower and more flowing, and there is also a bit of unstructured partnering involved that requires a careful listening to the music. I'll need to watch the video again to refresh my memory before tomorrow, but I am certainly gaining confidence as we go along. Plus it's super fun.
And on Saturday we have the big reveal when Groups A and B, who have until now been rehearsing separately, come together at the Vancouver Opera rehearsal spaces on McLean Drive. I was originally going to miss this rehearsal, but now I've decided to skip my conference in Iowa City.
Which also means I get to see the DanceHouse presentation of L-E-V this weekend, the brand new company of Batsheva alum Sharon Eyal and her partner Gai Behar, who together wowed Vancouver last year with the show Corps de Walk.
But before that is PuSh's 2015 Festival Launch Party at the Vogue Theatre tomorrow night at 8 pm, showcasing a performance of The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, a "live documentary" by Sam Green and featuring the music of Yo La Tengo. I'll have to miss it, because I'll be in rehearsal! But YOU can buy your tickets here.
P.
What is also fascinating to witness is how spontaneously and organically we fall into small working groups during these practice sessions. Two or three people will be in the middle of a sequence over in the corner and the next new arrival will join them mid-step, quickly picking up the rhythm and inspiring the rest in the group to be just that much more fluid in their movements and kinaesthetically aware in their bodies. Such was the case with me last night, and already I feel like I've formed an important collaborative bond with several of my fellow dancers. I'm not sure I'll get to know, let alone talk to, all 80 of the participants in the piece; but I do sincerely feel like we all already have a sense of being in this thing--whatever it is--together.
I'm also curious about Sylvain's continued investment in this project. He is such a genial man and patient teacher. He's been through this process nearly a dozen times now, but clearly he continues to derive some pleasure and freshness from teaching the same choreography to each new group of community dancers. And, indeed, on some level it must be quite satisfying to watch a mostly untrained and amorphous mass of bodies come together as a well-oiled dance machine over the course of eight weeks of rehearsal. None of is ever going to be a great technician (although there are some amazing movers in the group), but neither is Sylvain letting us just go through the motions. Getting the steps right and hitting our marks is one thing; but Sylvain is just as concerned with the crispness and bigness of our hand gestures and, looking ahead, to the emotional connection we will ideally be making with our audience.
There was new work to be learned last night--specifically the "Ima" section that leads into "India." The linear thinker in me was dismayed to discover we were learning the choreography out of sequence, but when we put both sections together at the end of last night's rehearsal and it wasn't a total disaster I was somewhat relieved. The choreography in "Ima" is slower and more flowing, and there is also a bit of unstructured partnering involved that requires a careful listening to the music. I'll need to watch the video again to refresh my memory before tomorrow, but I am certainly gaining confidence as we go along. Plus it's super fun.
And on Saturday we have the big reveal when Groups A and B, who have until now been rehearsing separately, come together at the Vancouver Opera rehearsal spaces on McLean Drive. I was originally going to miss this rehearsal, but now I've decided to skip my conference in Iowa City.
Which also means I get to see the DanceHouse presentation of L-E-V this weekend, the brand new company of Batsheva alum Sharon Eyal and her partner Gai Behar, who together wowed Vancouver last year with the show Corps de Walk.
But before that is PuSh's 2015 Festival Launch Party at the Vogue Theatre tomorrow night at 8 pm, showcasing a performance of The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, a "live documentary" by Sam Green and featuring the music of Yo La Tengo. I'll have to miss it, because I'll be in rehearsal! But YOU can buy your tickets here.
P.
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Wayne McGregor/Random Dance
UK choreographer Wayne McGregor was back with his company Random Dance four years after DanceHouse first presented his Entity at the Playhouse. This weekend, to open their seventh season, DanceHouse presented FAR; the title is an acronym for Roy Porter's Flesh in the Age of Reason, a history of Enlightenment-era investigations into the connections between the mind and the body. Right up McGregor's alley, who has frequently collaborated with cognitive and neuro-scientists, and whose distinctive movement vocabulary is all about short circuiting the standard proprioceptive impulses sent between brain and body.
FAR is full of McGregor's trademark moves: arms and legs jerking and twitching; ribs jutting out from the torso; limbs extended at awkward angles or tilted away from the body's natural centre of gravity; lightning quick changes of direction. However, the piece begins and ends with two fairly traditional duets. In the first, a couple dances to Cecilia Bartoli's rending take on Giacomelli's aria "Sposa son disprezzata" (the same lament that plays in the episode of The Sopranos when Carmela is shown touring the Met after learning of Tony's infidelity). The dancers are surrounded by four torch bearers, and we might be forgiven for thinking we were being transported back to the late 17th century.
However, when following this prelude we start hearing Ben Frost's industrial music and the 3,200 LED lights on the giant circuit board that comprises the set's backdrop start pulsating, we know we are firmly in the here and now--or else some soon to unfold future of total sensory stimulation. In this world, bodies strut and pose and collide, fitting their bodies together in ways that at first seem strange and decidedly awkward, but that have the paradoxical effect of highlighting the dancers' incredible technique. Indeed, for all of McGregor's circumambulation in finding new pathways into a move, once there the dancers' lines remain gorgeous to behold.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the abundant partnering that provides the structural through-line to the piece. Dancers race aggressively toward each other, or else tear one another from existing group formations; but faced with the new idea of how to work together they set about solving the problem in endlessly inventive--and thoroughly supportive--variations. The closing duet is downright tender.
It was interesting watching Random Dance in FAR after having seen Ballet Preljocaj's Empty Moves. Although their styles and produced works couldn't be more different, both McGregor and Preljocaj are deconstructionist choreographers who understand that to take something apart (i.e. ballet) you first need to know how it works.
P.
FAR is full of McGregor's trademark moves: arms and legs jerking and twitching; ribs jutting out from the torso; limbs extended at awkward angles or tilted away from the body's natural centre of gravity; lightning quick changes of direction. However, the piece begins and ends with two fairly traditional duets. In the first, a couple dances to Cecilia Bartoli's rending take on Giacomelli's aria "Sposa son disprezzata" (the same lament that plays in the episode of The Sopranos when Carmela is shown touring the Met after learning of Tony's infidelity). The dancers are surrounded by four torch bearers, and we might be forgiven for thinking we were being transported back to the late 17th century.
However, when following this prelude we start hearing Ben Frost's industrial music and the 3,200 LED lights on the giant circuit board that comprises the set's backdrop start pulsating, we know we are firmly in the here and now--or else some soon to unfold future of total sensory stimulation. In this world, bodies strut and pose and collide, fitting their bodies together in ways that at first seem strange and decidedly awkward, but that have the paradoxical effect of highlighting the dancers' incredible technique. Indeed, for all of McGregor's circumambulation in finding new pathways into a move, once there the dancers' lines remain gorgeous to behold.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the abundant partnering that provides the structural through-line to the piece. Dancers race aggressively toward each other, or else tear one another from existing group formations; but faced with the new idea of how to work together they set about solving the problem in endlessly inventive--and thoroughly supportive--variations. The closing duet is downright tender.
It was interesting watching Random Dance in FAR after having seen Ballet Preljocaj's Empty Moves. Although their styles and produced works couldn't be more different, both McGregor and Preljocaj are deconstructionist choreographers who understand that to take something apart (i.e. ballet) you first need to know how it works.
P.
Sunday, April 6, 2014
The Brothers Rocco: Boxing and/as Dancing
DanceHouse ended its 2013-14 season last night at the Playhouse with the final performance of Rocco, choreographed by Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten of ICKamsterdam. The work is loosely inspired by the Luchino Visconti film Rocco e i suoi Fratelli, in which the recently demobilized title character (Alain Delon) and his boxer brother, Simone (Renato Salvatori), having moved to Milan from the south with the rest of their family in search of a better life, come to blows over their mutual love for the beautiful prostitute Nadia (Annie Girardot). Not that you need to know any of this to appreciate Rocco as a work of dance-theatre.
That's because Greco and Scholten use the metaphor and the movement vocabulary of boxing to explore not just the themes of comradeship and competition between brothers, but also the physical parallels between the pugilistic and the virtuosic dancing body. In both cases, it would seem, one must always be on one's toes.
This was certainly the case with our four performers last night (Dereck Cayla, Quentin Dehaye, Christian Guerematchi, and Arnaud Macquet). As the audience files into the theatre, two of them are already in their respective corners (red and blue) of the boxing ring that dominates the stage, legs splayed wide on their chairs as they smoke herbal cigarettes and attempt to stare down their opponent. Additional on-stage seating allowed select members of the audience a more intimate view of the proceedings, which begin with a countdown and then the sound of a bell. However, the men in the ring don't immediately move. Instead, two additional dancers, clad all in black and sporting boxing gloves and giant mouse masks descend from the two house aisles, punching the air and skipping their feet and occasionally pausing to spar with a spectator or two. Eventually these two "shadow boxers" climb into the ring, meet in the centre and promptly collapse onto the mat without even throwing a single punch.
Another bell rings and round two begins. This is the cue for the dancers in the red and blue corners to now engage each other. It is in this sequence, which unfolds in a slowly widening circle under a single spotlight that gradually expands its visual reach, that Greco and Scholten anatomize (quite literally) the kinesthetic links between dancing and boxing. What surprised me, however, was not the expected focus on fast footwork and virtuosic timing; rather, it was when the choreography was slowed down and the dancers, often with their backs to each other, carefully and precisely extended a leg and let it pulse on the floor, that I was able to see dancing's and boxing's shared bodily language of preparation, extension, and release.
Our shadow boxers come back in round three, in which the stakes are raised choreographically and conceptually. Gradually shedding their masks, their gloves, and their outer black costumes, the dancers enjoin each other in ever more complex unison movement and ever tighter clinches. I confess that after the surprising lack of direct bodily contact in round two between the dancers in the red and blue corners (remedied somewhat by the witty gender play that accompanies a later lipsynched musical duet), I was waiting for some explicit partnering to take place. We get that in abundance in this final section of the piece, and as the dancers whipped each other around with lightning speed, the sweat flying off their glistening torsos, I was reminded of two things: first, that boxing, among the most "macho" of sports, requires of its participants a bodily intimacy that necessarily approaches the eroticism of dance; and second, that at the end of a boxing match and at the end of a dance piece, all the physical training and mental preparation essentially boil down to one thing: endurance.
This last point applies, as well, to the audience. At the end of Rocco I was both exhausted and elated.
P.
That's because Greco and Scholten use the metaphor and the movement vocabulary of boxing to explore not just the themes of comradeship and competition between brothers, but also the physical parallels between the pugilistic and the virtuosic dancing body. In both cases, it would seem, one must always be on one's toes.
This was certainly the case with our four performers last night (Dereck Cayla, Quentin Dehaye, Christian Guerematchi, and Arnaud Macquet). As the audience files into the theatre, two of them are already in their respective corners (red and blue) of the boxing ring that dominates the stage, legs splayed wide on their chairs as they smoke herbal cigarettes and attempt to stare down their opponent. Additional on-stage seating allowed select members of the audience a more intimate view of the proceedings, which begin with a countdown and then the sound of a bell. However, the men in the ring don't immediately move. Instead, two additional dancers, clad all in black and sporting boxing gloves and giant mouse masks descend from the two house aisles, punching the air and skipping their feet and occasionally pausing to spar with a spectator or two. Eventually these two "shadow boxers" climb into the ring, meet in the centre and promptly collapse onto the mat without even throwing a single punch.
Another bell rings and round two begins. This is the cue for the dancers in the red and blue corners to now engage each other. It is in this sequence, which unfolds in a slowly widening circle under a single spotlight that gradually expands its visual reach, that Greco and Scholten anatomize (quite literally) the kinesthetic links between dancing and boxing. What surprised me, however, was not the expected focus on fast footwork and virtuosic timing; rather, it was when the choreography was slowed down and the dancers, often with their backs to each other, carefully and precisely extended a leg and let it pulse on the floor, that I was able to see dancing's and boxing's shared bodily language of preparation, extension, and release.
Our shadow boxers come back in round three, in which the stakes are raised choreographically and conceptually. Gradually shedding their masks, their gloves, and their outer black costumes, the dancers enjoin each other in ever more complex unison movement and ever tighter clinches. I confess that after the surprising lack of direct bodily contact in round two between the dancers in the red and blue corners (remedied somewhat by the witty gender play that accompanies a later lipsynched musical duet), I was waiting for some explicit partnering to take place. We get that in abundance in this final section of the piece, and as the dancers whipped each other around with lightning speed, the sweat flying off their glistening torsos, I was reminded of two things: first, that boxing, among the most "macho" of sports, requires of its participants a bodily intimacy that necessarily approaches the eroticism of dance; and second, that at the end of a boxing match and at the end of a dance piece, all the physical training and mental preparation essentially boil down to one thing: endurance.
This last point applies, as well, to the audience. At the end of Rocco I was both exhausted and elated.
P.
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Tempest Replica Redux
Last night, at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Theatre, was a chance to revisit Crystal Pite's Tempest Replica, the most recent of her works for her company Kidd Pivot. I had first seen the piece in 2012 when it was staged at the Playhouse by DanceHouse. After touring the work to the US and Europe, Pite took a year's sabbatical; now she is back, relaunching Kidd Pivot with another mini-tour of The Tempest Replica, one that will take her to Sadler's Wells in London, where Pite has just been appointed an Associate Artist, and for whom she will be choreographing a large-scale work later this year.
The good news, however, is that despite such high-profile commissions--and multiple offers to lead major companies elsewhere--Pite has made the decision to remain in Vancouver and to use the city (and, I gather from SFU Cultural Programs Director Michael Boucher, SFU Woodward's) as her base to make new work for Kidd Pivot. That work will now have to be project-to-project based, as the stable multi-year funding she enjoyed from Frankfurt between 2010-2012 is not possible here (the latest tour has been partially subvented by an Indiegogo campaign). Still, Pite seems determined to make a go of it, and we are the luckier for it. To have such an internationally renowned dance artist making work here, in Vancouver, and mentoring local performers and choreographers is extraordinary.
As I have already blogged at length about the 2012 Vancouver production of The Tempest Replica, I won't elaborate on too much more here. I mostly wanted to see if the archive of my memory of that earlier performance matched Pite's repertory re-enactment of the piece--not least as I have an article coming out shortly in Dance Research Journal (46.1) on Pite's work and so wanted to ensure that my description of the piece was more or less accurate. As far as I can tell, Pite has made only minor adjustments, tightening up a movement transition here, tweaking a sound or light cue there. I don't recall there being as much projected text from Shakespeare's play in the second half as I witnessed last night, but that may just be a trick of memory. Ironically, it is Pite's use of text (projected, narrated, etc.) that is partly the focus of my article.
The movement is as compelling and complex as ever, and it is always a pleasure to see how Pite's amazingly gifted dancers incarnate that balance--or pivot--between technical precision and fluid organicity that her choreography requires. This remains most kinesthetically affecting to me in the duets that structure the second half--with the lush and ethereal pairings between Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) and Ariel (Sandra Marín Garcia), and Ferdinand (Peter Chu, filling in for Jermaine Spivey) and Miranda (Cindy Salgado), a counter-weight (quite literally) to the more tough and muscular ones between Antonio (Yannick Matthon) and Sebastian (David Raymond, replacing Jiří Pokorný), and Prospero and Caliban (Bryan Arias).
The Tempest Replica is Pite's most fully realized Gesamtkuntswerk to date, a piece in which movement and text and sound and visual design are seamlessly integrated. The contributions of Pite's Vancouver collaborators (composer Owen Belton, sound designers Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe, lighting designer Robert Sondergaard, set designer Jay Gower Taylor, projection maestro Jamie Nesbitt, and costumers Nancy Bryant and Linda Chow) are central to this. That Pite has made the decision to continue working with this local community of virtuosic talent is her gift to this city. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.
P.
The good news, however, is that despite such high-profile commissions--and multiple offers to lead major companies elsewhere--Pite has made the decision to remain in Vancouver and to use the city (and, I gather from SFU Cultural Programs Director Michael Boucher, SFU Woodward's) as her base to make new work for Kidd Pivot. That work will now have to be project-to-project based, as the stable multi-year funding she enjoyed from Frankfurt between 2010-2012 is not possible here (the latest tour has been partially subvented by an Indiegogo campaign). Still, Pite seems determined to make a go of it, and we are the luckier for it. To have such an internationally renowned dance artist making work here, in Vancouver, and mentoring local performers and choreographers is extraordinary.
As I have already blogged at length about the 2012 Vancouver production of The Tempest Replica, I won't elaborate on too much more here. I mostly wanted to see if the archive of my memory of that earlier performance matched Pite's repertory re-enactment of the piece--not least as I have an article coming out shortly in Dance Research Journal (46.1) on Pite's work and so wanted to ensure that my description of the piece was more or less accurate. As far as I can tell, Pite has made only minor adjustments, tightening up a movement transition here, tweaking a sound or light cue there. I don't recall there being as much projected text from Shakespeare's play in the second half as I witnessed last night, but that may just be a trick of memory. Ironically, it is Pite's use of text (projected, narrated, etc.) that is partly the focus of my article.
The movement is as compelling and complex as ever, and it is always a pleasure to see how Pite's amazingly gifted dancers incarnate that balance--or pivot--between technical precision and fluid organicity that her choreography requires. This remains most kinesthetically affecting to me in the duets that structure the second half--with the lush and ethereal pairings between Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) and Ariel (Sandra Marín Garcia), and Ferdinand (Peter Chu, filling in for Jermaine Spivey) and Miranda (Cindy Salgado), a counter-weight (quite literally) to the more tough and muscular ones between Antonio (Yannick Matthon) and Sebastian (David Raymond, replacing Jiří Pokorný), and Prospero and Caliban (Bryan Arias).
The Tempest Replica is Pite's most fully realized Gesamtkuntswerk to date, a piece in which movement and text and sound and visual design are seamlessly integrated. The contributions of Pite's Vancouver collaborators (composer Owen Belton, sound designers Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe, lighting designer Robert Sondergaard, set designer Jay Gower Taylor, projection maestro Jamie Nesbitt, and costumers Nancy Bryant and Linda Chow) are central to this. That Pite has made the decision to continue working with this local community of virtuosic talent is her gift to this city. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.
P.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Getting a Sense of Wen Wei Dance
There were some truly sublime moments in the second half of last night's performance of Wen Wei Dance's 7th Sense, presented by DanceHouse at the Vancouver Playhouse: Ballet BC alum Alyson Fretz being pushed and pulled and nudged and nestled by the other dancers at the outset, before leading them in a series of gorgeous sequential line movements that evoked images of Chinese dragons undulating and being shaken at a New Year's parade; choreographer Wen Wei Wang and performer Brett Taylor in a moving duet in the middle that featured stunning lifts and spins; and the closing duet between Taylor and Jung-Ah Chung (a tiny powerhouse of a mover) that ended memorably with Taylor on all fours and Chung perched on his back, both staring out at the audience.
However, the precision and control of these sequences were in sharp contrast to the general shapelessness of the group improvisations in between, with the inchoateness of the individual dancers' movements and their at times mystifying explorations of scenic space (in which one body might be firmly positioned in front of another, thereby obscuring the latter's movements) reading to me as too much filler. I get, from Wang's program note, that such contrasts were part of the exploratory process of building the work. And yet, while by no means do I think dialectical oppositions always need to result in synthesis, Hegelian that I am, I do prefer there to be some sort of sense-connection (cognitive and kinetic) between them that leads to a new form of perception.
Which is why I am also at a loss in figuring out how the first half of the work fits with the second. A compact 20 minutes, 7th Sense's first act appears to take its cue from Wang's efforts to infiltrate or insert himself between the rest of the group of dancers, massed to begin with upstage left. Oblivious at first, the dancers eventually turn on Wang (quite literally), encircling and threatening him with a series of cartoonish martial arts moves. A metaphor, perhaps, for the choreographic process. Whatever the case, I did learn at intermission that this opening was relatively new, Wang having scrapped his original concept after feeling dissatisfied with it at the work's premiere in Edmonton in February.
I am sure Wang will continue to refine the rest of the work as well, and I look forward to revisiting it again in the future--when I have no doubt my sense of what it will have become by then, and what it was now, will have changed.
P.
However, the precision and control of these sequences were in sharp contrast to the general shapelessness of the group improvisations in between, with the inchoateness of the individual dancers' movements and their at times mystifying explorations of scenic space (in which one body might be firmly positioned in front of another, thereby obscuring the latter's movements) reading to me as too much filler. I get, from Wang's program note, that such contrasts were part of the exploratory process of building the work. And yet, while by no means do I think dialectical oppositions always need to result in synthesis, Hegelian that I am, I do prefer there to be some sort of sense-connection (cognitive and kinetic) between them that leads to a new form of perception.
Which is why I am also at a loss in figuring out how the first half of the work fits with the second. A compact 20 minutes, 7th Sense's first act appears to take its cue from Wang's efforts to infiltrate or insert himself between the rest of the group of dancers, massed to begin with upstage left. Oblivious at first, the dancers eventually turn on Wang (quite literally), encircling and threatening him with a series of cartoonish martial arts moves. A metaphor, perhaps, for the choreographic process. Whatever the case, I did learn at intermission that this opening was relatively new, Wang having scrapped his original concept after feeling dissatisfied with it at the work's premiere in Edmonton in February.
I am sure Wang will continue to refine the rest of the work as well, and I look forward to revisiting it again in the future--when I have no doubt my sense of what it will have become by then, and what it was now, will have changed.
P.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Ways of Walking
DanceHouse's fifth season ended last night with an energetic walk on the wild side of contemporary dance. Carte Blanche, the Bergen-based Norwegian National Company of Contemporary Dance, presented Corps de Walk, by red-hot Israeli duo Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar (she is resident choreographer for Batsheva Dance Company and he is an in-demand video, music, and performance artist). Set to a driving electronic score by DJ Ori Lichtik, this relentless 60-minute pushing of the limits of unison is as high on concept as it is on technique.
Using a "system of walks" as the architectural basis for her movement vocabulary, Eyal is clearly referencing in the title of the piece the traditional corps de ballet, the army of anonymous dancers who don't get to electrify with their virtuosic jumps and pirouettes and lifts, but without whose expert execution of the "simpler" steps a work would be unrecognizable as classical ballet. Those steps require a strong inner body core (a grounded pelvic floor combined with an elongated spine), and from the opening tableau of the Carte Blanche ensemble standing in a circle, arms stretched above their heads like tree branches, to the patterned use of deep pliés throughout the work, Eyal is drawing our attention--almost in a Labanesque, eukinetic way--to the very bodily mechanics of walking, on or off the stage. Finally, in terms of puns on the word "corps," there's the ghosted "e" we are wont to append to the end, not least as Eyal and Behar send the Carte Blanche dancers out on stage clad uniformly in flesh-toned, skin-hugging lyotards, their hair likewise painted white, and, most eerily, sporting white contact lenses. Combined with the deliberately robotic movement patterns--the precise head turns, foot pivots, hip thrusts, finger splays, elbow bends, pelvic tilts--that keep repeating at a steady pace as the dancers move into and out of different group formations (often initiated by shouted commands by one or another of them), at times it's almost as if we're watching an episode of The Walking Dead.
And yet as much as the costumes and choreography emphasize sameness over difference (the hallmark of any great ballet dancer being the ability to perform flawlessly the same steps over and over again), for me the absolute indexicality of these dancing bodies (and pointing with index fingers becomes an important recurrent motif throughout the piece) broke down the longer the piece went on. All thirteen Carte Blanche dancers are on stage for almost the entire duration of the piece, and the longer we look at them moving together the more we are able to see how they likewise move apart. And I'm not just referring to the fact that the dancers are different shapes and sizes, that, for example, one of the male dancers is black, another bald, and one has a mustache. Rather, I refer to the fact that one of the things that remains so entrancing about a corps de ballet, like the ballet performed every day by hundreds of pedestrians crossing a busy intersection, is that while we may all be moving with the same purpose and intention, even in something as habitual as walking one cannot help but distinguish personality in form.
P.
Using a "system of walks" as the architectural basis for her movement vocabulary, Eyal is clearly referencing in the title of the piece the traditional corps de ballet, the army of anonymous dancers who don't get to electrify with their virtuosic jumps and pirouettes and lifts, but without whose expert execution of the "simpler" steps a work would be unrecognizable as classical ballet. Those steps require a strong inner body core (a grounded pelvic floor combined with an elongated spine), and from the opening tableau of the Carte Blanche ensemble standing in a circle, arms stretched above their heads like tree branches, to the patterned use of deep pliés throughout the work, Eyal is drawing our attention--almost in a Labanesque, eukinetic way--to the very bodily mechanics of walking, on or off the stage. Finally, in terms of puns on the word "corps," there's the ghosted "e" we are wont to append to the end, not least as Eyal and Behar send the Carte Blanche dancers out on stage clad uniformly in flesh-toned, skin-hugging lyotards, their hair likewise painted white, and, most eerily, sporting white contact lenses. Combined with the deliberately robotic movement patterns--the precise head turns, foot pivots, hip thrusts, finger splays, elbow bends, pelvic tilts--that keep repeating at a steady pace as the dancers move into and out of different group formations (often initiated by shouted commands by one or another of them), at times it's almost as if we're watching an episode of The Walking Dead.
And yet as much as the costumes and choreography emphasize sameness over difference (the hallmark of any great ballet dancer being the ability to perform flawlessly the same steps over and over again), for me the absolute indexicality of these dancing bodies (and pointing with index fingers becomes an important recurrent motif throughout the piece) broke down the longer the piece went on. All thirteen Carte Blanche dancers are on stage for almost the entire duration of the piece, and the longer we look at them moving together the more we are able to see how they likewise move apart. And I'm not just referring to the fact that the dancers are different shapes and sizes, that, for example, one of the male dancers is black, another bald, and one has a mustache. Rather, I refer to the fact that one of the things that remains so entrancing about a corps de ballet, like the ballet performed every day by hundreds of pedestrians crossing a busy intersection, is that while we may all be moving with the same purpose and intention, even in something as habitual as walking one cannot help but distinguish personality in form.
P.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
BJM at 40
Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal, now simply known as BJM, is celebrating its 40th anniversary as a company. Currently touring the country in celebration of that milestone, the troupe (which since 1998 has been under the artistic direction of Louis Robitaille) arrived in Vancouver this weekend as part of DanceHouse's current season, presenting a mixed program that roused last night's audience to an ecstatic standing ovation, but that frankly left me nonplussed.
Much has been made of BJM's evolution, over the course of its history, from a ballet to a contemporary dance company. And yet what the three pieces presented last night most demonstrated to me was a surprisingly tenacious adherence to some pretty basic classical conventions, especially with respect to the gendered dynamics of partnering. From what I could see, in BJM's world, female dancers mostly exist to be lifted and male dancers to do the lifting.
Indeed, in Cayetano Soto's Fuel, which opened the evening, when the women aren't being pushed and pulled by the men, they are reduced to animatronic dolls, spinning robotically in place. Things got mildly interesting for me when, near the end of the piece, the strict opposite sex partnering that had dominated to that point is interrupted by an intense and athletic male-male duet. But otherwise I kept finding myself staring into the bright lights directed at the audience from an industrial massing at the back of the stage.
Next up was Closer, a pas de deux choreographed by Benjamin Millepied (aka Mr. Natalie Portman) for BJM dancer Céline Cassone, here partnered by the sturdy Alexander Hille. Cassone, with her shock of reddish-pink hair, is certainly a captivatingly graceful dancer, but she is hardly ever out of Hille's arms. And while the steps are both pretty and technically accomplished (proving that Millepied might not actually be such a surprising choice to head an institution like the Paris Opéra Ballet), the lack of expressiveness and emotional connection between the dancers (I saw Hille more than once look away from Cassone and out over the audience, as if wondering, like me, when Philip Glass's piano score would ever end) left me cold.
The evening concluded with Barak Marshall's Harry, a 40-minute dance-theatre piece composed expressly for the BJM company. Ostensibly the story of the eponymous title character's complicated love life, it actually begins with his death. The leitmotif of returning to Harry's graveside to offer spoken word commentary, which under most other circumstances would get me tremendously excited (the combining of text and movement being a focus of mine), ended up reinforcing my overall frustrated response to Robitaille's programming. That's because these scenes always devolved into couples bickering, the piece's overwhelming heteronormativity being just one of the obstacles to my enjoyment of it. Another was the jarring clash of tones, with scenes abruptly careening from whimsical to sombre as a war theme is suddenly introduced (the piece is loosely framed as a postmodern take on Greek drama, complete with capricious Gods manipulating events, but as with the sudden and bizarre allusion to Les Misérables, these winking references didn't always work). Don't get me wrong: there was some stunning dancing on display here, particularly to the Israeli folk songs that formed part of the eclectic score.
I just wasn't as wild about Harry--and the program of which it was a part--as everyone else seemed to be.
P.
Much has been made of BJM's evolution, over the course of its history, from a ballet to a contemporary dance company. And yet what the three pieces presented last night most demonstrated to me was a surprisingly tenacious adherence to some pretty basic classical conventions, especially with respect to the gendered dynamics of partnering. From what I could see, in BJM's world, female dancers mostly exist to be lifted and male dancers to do the lifting.
Indeed, in Cayetano Soto's Fuel, which opened the evening, when the women aren't being pushed and pulled by the men, they are reduced to animatronic dolls, spinning robotically in place. Things got mildly interesting for me when, near the end of the piece, the strict opposite sex partnering that had dominated to that point is interrupted by an intense and athletic male-male duet. But otherwise I kept finding myself staring into the bright lights directed at the audience from an industrial massing at the back of the stage.
Next up was Closer, a pas de deux choreographed by Benjamin Millepied (aka Mr. Natalie Portman) for BJM dancer Céline Cassone, here partnered by the sturdy Alexander Hille. Cassone, with her shock of reddish-pink hair, is certainly a captivatingly graceful dancer, but she is hardly ever out of Hille's arms. And while the steps are both pretty and technically accomplished (proving that Millepied might not actually be such a surprising choice to head an institution like the Paris Opéra Ballet), the lack of expressiveness and emotional connection between the dancers (I saw Hille more than once look away from Cassone and out over the audience, as if wondering, like me, when Philip Glass's piano score would ever end) left me cold.
The evening concluded with Barak Marshall's Harry, a 40-minute dance-theatre piece composed expressly for the BJM company. Ostensibly the story of the eponymous title character's complicated love life, it actually begins with his death. The leitmotif of returning to Harry's graveside to offer spoken word commentary, which under most other circumstances would get me tremendously excited (the combining of text and movement being a focus of mine), ended up reinforcing my overall frustrated response to Robitaille's programming. That's because these scenes always devolved into couples bickering, the piece's overwhelming heteronormativity being just one of the obstacles to my enjoyment of it. Another was the jarring clash of tones, with scenes abruptly careening from whimsical to sombre as a war theme is suddenly introduced (the piece is loosely framed as a postmodern take on Greek drama, complete with capricious Gods manipulating events, but as with the sudden and bizarre allusion to Les Misérables, these winking references didn't always work). Don't get me wrong: there was some stunning dancing on display here, particularly to the Israeli folk songs that formed part of the eclectic score.
I just wasn't as wild about Harry--and the program of which it was a part--as everyone else seemed to be.
P.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
A Tempest Worth Replicating
Last night's performance of Kidd Pivot's The Tempest Replica at the Playhouse concluded what had to have been the city's most highly anticipated dance event of the fall season. Pite's latest, and most explicit, exploration of narrative in dance, the piece is also the result of her first time working with a pre-existing script.
The work begins with long-time company member Eric Beauchesne, who plays Prospero, sitting cross-legged downstage right, in front of a large shimmery and billowing silver cloth. He is intently folding sheet after sheet of white paper into perfect origami sail boats, which he promptly lines up in a row. It's another kind of kinesthetic labour that is as precise and elegant as classical dance,. Additionally, it not only telegraphs for those in the audience unfamiliar with Shakespeare's play (or who haven't bothered to read Pite's careful synopsis of the action in the program) the famous opening high seas storm, but in the number and colour and scale of the boats' replication recalls one of Pite's explanations for the inspiration for the faceless, all-white fencing-like costumes worn by all the other dancers in the first part of her work: they are meant to recall the replica human figures used in architectural models.
Manipulating one of the boats in the same way that he will soon manipulate the bodily figures occupying his own island, Prospero speaks aloud the word "shipwreck," and then promptly calls the spirit Ariel (Sandra Garcia), the real architect of his designs. Ariel does not look particularly pleased by the summons, a reminder that she has not chosen to do Prospero's bidding, something captured in two simple movements repeated here that will become signature gestures for her throughout the work: a fluttering of her hands over her heart; and an elbow thrust akimbo out from her side, as reflex response perhaps to a phantom wing that has been clipped or tamped down by her master. Taking the paper boat from Prospero, Ariel places it in her mouth and starts to chew, which is the signal for the storm to begin.
Pite has said in past conversations about the work that it began with the notion of incorporating a shipwreck in a dancer's body. But she has also said that she was excited about the theatrical possibilities--lighting and sound effects--of representing a storm on stage. She marries these two ideas in the next sequence, in which we witness pre-recorded digital images of Ferdinand's (Jermaine Spivey) Act Two shipwreck solo projected onto the stage left portion of the scrim, which are then overlain with pelting rain, and with which the live, white-costumed body of the Act One Ferdinand interacts behind the scrim. It's an uncanny doubling, supplemented by Alonso (Bryan Arias) and Sebastian (Jiří Pokorný) and Antonio (Yannick Matthon) rolling on the floor upstage right.
This was the first of the night's surprises: not just Pite's sophisticated use of projections, but the amount of movement contained within them, and the extent to which they merged with the shadow outline of live movement on stage via lighting effects in front of and behind the piece's two cloth scrims (the first downstage one is pulled down after the storm by Prospero, to reveal a second upstage one). Other projections, such as Prospero's explanation to Miranda (Cindy Salgado) following the shipwreck of how they came to find themselves on the island as a result of Antonio's usurpation of Prospero's dukedom in Milan, are more clearly cinematic (often expressionistically so). This makes sense given Pite's explanation for her complementary method of conveying the major plot points of Shakespeare's play in successive bodily tableaux during the first part of the piece: she has called it a movement-based equivalent of storyboarding.
But even here there was another surprise--just how dancey many of these tableaux were. I hadn't witnessed but a few of these scenes as part of Pite's open rehearsals at SFU Woodward's in September, and so while I was prepared for Prospero's marionette-like manipulations of Miranda as she witnesses the storm, I did not expect the exuberant jive that she and Ferdinand break into once Prospero releases the prince from his Sisyphean labours and consents to letting the young lovers wed. Cinematic and kinesthetic narrative combine most successfully in the first half of the work in the sequence when we're first introduced to Caliban (Arias again), who slithers across the stage on all fours, led by Prospero and towards Miranda, seated stage left, as the projections economically telegraph (in the same direction) how the monster came to be enslaved by Prospero. Equal in visual effect is the banquet conjured by Ariel for Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian.
Text in this first part mostly comes in the form of projected surtitles providing act and scene numbers, and a brief, one-line synopsis of the action. Occasionally, however, key words are projected onto unexpected surfaces: "daughter" onto Miranda's raised skirt, for example, and "doubt" onto one of Prospero's unfurled paper boats, held up by an unidentified, white-cloaked avatar in the final Act 5 sequence, which crucially has no textual synopsis accompanying its projected surtitle, and which, as crucially, displaces the play's epilogue, cuing the transition into the second half of Pite's piece as Prospero, clearly in need of new magic, calls aloud for Ariel once again.
Her arrival, now dressed in regular street clothes, begins the process of replaying in more pure dance form key scenes that were storyboarded for us in the first half. To paraphrase Pite, now that we know who everyone is, and the nature of their relationships to one another, we can concentrate on how the movement intensifies the emotions behind those relationships. Although all the dancers get brief solo moments during these sequences--and none more stunning than Spivey's live reproduction of the bodily shipwreck that we had previously witnessed digitally--Pite's basic architecture during the second half is the duet: between Prospero and Ariel; Prospero and Miranda; Antonio and Sebastian, Prospero and Caliban; and finally Miranda and Ferdinand. This is some of Pite's most complex and stunningly original partnering, giving a physical form to the degrees of indebtedness and obligation, choice and constraint, power and reciprocity, that mark both the connection and the distance between different characters. Thus, for example, the opening duet between Prospero and Ariel is notable for its gorgeous lifts; but the striving for flight that we intuit in Ariel's impossibly fluid leg extensions especially is counterbalanced by arms that remain locked with and pinned down by Prospero's. Similarly, Caliban remains in a hammer-lock for much of his duet with Prospero, and even when he does break free and stands up straight and smoothes down the suit jacket he is wearing as a sop to his wounded dignity and pride, he is just as quickly forced back down to the ground by the unrelenting Prospero, and must propel himself about the stage via his sits bones and knees.
Interestingly, Caliban is the only character/dancer other than Prospero who speaks while moving, in this case uttering, despite Prospero's best attempts to stifle his voice, his famous oath: "You taught me language; and my profit on't/ Is, I know how to curse." Otherwise, text in the second half comes mostly in the form of key projected lines that explicate further the movement sequences we see taking shape before us, or else layered in voice-over as part of the dense soundscape designed by Meg Roe and Alessandro Juliani to complement Owen Belton's electronic score.
The Tempest Replica ends with the epilogue that was forestalled in the first half, with Prospero, having given up magic, now being shadowed and eventually overwhelmed by the four other male dancers, now also back in their all-white costumes. In the final tableau, Prospero has been placed prone on the floor in a position akin to the one in which we first encounter Miranda at the start of the work; the other dancers stand over the stilled creator, silently clapping as the the lights fade to black. The image alludes, of course, to Prospero's concluding speech, in which he asks to be released from his own creative bondage via the audience's applause, and which most critics read as a self-reflexive comment, in this his final play, on Shakespeare's setting aside of his writing quill.
Given Pite's own longstanding concerns with the dialectic of creation and destruction, and taken together with her announcement that following this tour of The Tempest Replica she plans to take a year's sabbatical, it is hard not to interpret this as simultaneously a farewell of sorts for a choreographer who does not know in what form--or even if--her company will reconstitute itself. In her pre-show talk Pite stated that she hoped, following their break, that the company would be back, and ideally with its current full and full-time employed complement of dancers--all of whom, it must be said, were on fire last night. But Pite also stated that such an arrangement would depend on finding a replacement for the funding from Frankfurt that in essence has allowed the company to create and tour for the past two years. I hope the cultural power brokers in this city were listening and that they throw all available resources her way.
P.
The work begins with long-time company member Eric Beauchesne, who plays Prospero, sitting cross-legged downstage right, in front of a large shimmery and billowing silver cloth. He is intently folding sheet after sheet of white paper into perfect origami sail boats, which he promptly lines up in a row. It's another kind of kinesthetic labour that is as precise and elegant as classical dance,. Additionally, it not only telegraphs for those in the audience unfamiliar with Shakespeare's play (or who haven't bothered to read Pite's careful synopsis of the action in the program) the famous opening high seas storm, but in the number and colour and scale of the boats' replication recalls one of Pite's explanations for the inspiration for the faceless, all-white fencing-like costumes worn by all the other dancers in the first part of her work: they are meant to recall the replica human figures used in architectural models.
Manipulating one of the boats in the same way that he will soon manipulate the bodily figures occupying his own island, Prospero speaks aloud the word "shipwreck," and then promptly calls the spirit Ariel (Sandra Garcia), the real architect of his designs. Ariel does not look particularly pleased by the summons, a reminder that she has not chosen to do Prospero's bidding, something captured in two simple movements repeated here that will become signature gestures for her throughout the work: a fluttering of her hands over her heart; and an elbow thrust akimbo out from her side, as reflex response perhaps to a phantom wing that has been clipped or tamped down by her master. Taking the paper boat from Prospero, Ariel places it in her mouth and starts to chew, which is the signal for the storm to begin.
Pite has said in past conversations about the work that it began with the notion of incorporating a shipwreck in a dancer's body. But she has also said that she was excited about the theatrical possibilities--lighting and sound effects--of representing a storm on stage. She marries these two ideas in the next sequence, in which we witness pre-recorded digital images of Ferdinand's (Jermaine Spivey) Act Two shipwreck solo projected onto the stage left portion of the scrim, which are then overlain with pelting rain, and with which the live, white-costumed body of the Act One Ferdinand interacts behind the scrim. It's an uncanny doubling, supplemented by Alonso (Bryan Arias) and Sebastian (Jiří Pokorný) and Antonio (Yannick Matthon) rolling on the floor upstage right.
This was the first of the night's surprises: not just Pite's sophisticated use of projections, but the amount of movement contained within them, and the extent to which they merged with the shadow outline of live movement on stage via lighting effects in front of and behind the piece's two cloth scrims (the first downstage one is pulled down after the storm by Prospero, to reveal a second upstage one). Other projections, such as Prospero's explanation to Miranda (Cindy Salgado) following the shipwreck of how they came to find themselves on the island as a result of Antonio's usurpation of Prospero's dukedom in Milan, are more clearly cinematic (often expressionistically so). This makes sense given Pite's explanation for her complementary method of conveying the major plot points of Shakespeare's play in successive bodily tableaux during the first part of the piece: she has called it a movement-based equivalent of storyboarding.
But even here there was another surprise--just how dancey many of these tableaux were. I hadn't witnessed but a few of these scenes as part of Pite's open rehearsals at SFU Woodward's in September, and so while I was prepared for Prospero's marionette-like manipulations of Miranda as she witnesses the storm, I did not expect the exuberant jive that she and Ferdinand break into once Prospero releases the prince from his Sisyphean labours and consents to letting the young lovers wed. Cinematic and kinesthetic narrative combine most successfully in the first half of the work in the sequence when we're first introduced to Caliban (Arias again), who slithers across the stage on all fours, led by Prospero and towards Miranda, seated stage left, as the projections economically telegraph (in the same direction) how the monster came to be enslaved by Prospero. Equal in visual effect is the banquet conjured by Ariel for Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian.
Text in this first part mostly comes in the form of projected surtitles providing act and scene numbers, and a brief, one-line synopsis of the action. Occasionally, however, key words are projected onto unexpected surfaces: "daughter" onto Miranda's raised skirt, for example, and "doubt" onto one of Prospero's unfurled paper boats, held up by an unidentified, white-cloaked avatar in the final Act 5 sequence, which crucially has no textual synopsis accompanying its projected surtitle, and which, as crucially, displaces the play's epilogue, cuing the transition into the second half of Pite's piece as Prospero, clearly in need of new magic, calls aloud for Ariel once again.
Her arrival, now dressed in regular street clothes, begins the process of replaying in more pure dance form key scenes that were storyboarded for us in the first half. To paraphrase Pite, now that we know who everyone is, and the nature of their relationships to one another, we can concentrate on how the movement intensifies the emotions behind those relationships. Although all the dancers get brief solo moments during these sequences--and none more stunning than Spivey's live reproduction of the bodily shipwreck that we had previously witnessed digitally--Pite's basic architecture during the second half is the duet: between Prospero and Ariel; Prospero and Miranda; Antonio and Sebastian, Prospero and Caliban; and finally Miranda and Ferdinand. This is some of Pite's most complex and stunningly original partnering, giving a physical form to the degrees of indebtedness and obligation, choice and constraint, power and reciprocity, that mark both the connection and the distance between different characters. Thus, for example, the opening duet between Prospero and Ariel is notable for its gorgeous lifts; but the striving for flight that we intuit in Ariel's impossibly fluid leg extensions especially is counterbalanced by arms that remain locked with and pinned down by Prospero's. Similarly, Caliban remains in a hammer-lock for much of his duet with Prospero, and even when he does break free and stands up straight and smoothes down the suit jacket he is wearing as a sop to his wounded dignity and pride, he is just as quickly forced back down to the ground by the unrelenting Prospero, and must propel himself about the stage via his sits bones and knees.
Interestingly, Caliban is the only character/dancer other than Prospero who speaks while moving, in this case uttering, despite Prospero's best attempts to stifle his voice, his famous oath: "You taught me language; and my profit on't/ Is, I know how to curse." Otherwise, text in the second half comes mostly in the form of key projected lines that explicate further the movement sequences we see taking shape before us, or else layered in voice-over as part of the dense soundscape designed by Meg Roe and Alessandro Juliani to complement Owen Belton's electronic score.
The Tempest Replica ends with the epilogue that was forestalled in the first half, with Prospero, having given up magic, now being shadowed and eventually overwhelmed by the four other male dancers, now also back in their all-white costumes. In the final tableau, Prospero has been placed prone on the floor in a position akin to the one in which we first encounter Miranda at the start of the work; the other dancers stand over the stilled creator, silently clapping as the the lights fade to black. The image alludes, of course, to Prospero's concluding speech, in which he asks to be released from his own creative bondage via the audience's applause, and which most critics read as a self-reflexive comment, in this his final play, on Shakespeare's setting aside of his writing quill.
Given Pite's own longstanding concerns with the dialectic of creation and destruction, and taken together with her announcement that following this tour of The Tempest Replica she plans to take a year's sabbatical, it is hard not to interpret this as simultaneously a farewell of sorts for a choreographer who does not know in what form--or even if--her company will reconstitute itself. In her pre-show talk Pite stated that she hoped, following their break, that the company would be back, and ideally with its current full and full-time employed complement of dancers--all of whom, it must be said, were on fire last night. But Pite also stated that such an arrangement would depend on finding a replacement for the funding from Frankfurt that in essence has allowed the company to create and tour for the past two years. I hope the cultural power brokers in this city were listening and that they throw all available resources her way.
P.
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