DOTE 2018: Edge Seven at The Firehall + Transverse Orientation at 395 Alexander Street

The 30th anniversary edition of the Dancing on the Edge Festival concluded last night with a 9 pm replaying of the Edge Seven program, a suitable study in contrasts featuring two distinctive approaches to movement and sound.

My colleague Rob Kitsos, together with collaborators Yves Candau and Martin Gotfrit, lead things off with their Real-Time Composition Study. Based on their shared interest in improvisation, the performers compose our perceptual environment in the moment, moving their bodies and sound through the space in response to each other, and to shifting geometric patterns of light that play across an upstage screen. While lighting designer Kyla Gardiner is in the booth overseeing all of this, much of the manipulation of light also happens from the stage, with Rob repositioning and partially shuttering and unshuttering a series of small LED spots in order to frame different areas of bodily focus. The result produces some uncanny trompe l'oeil effects, in which the shadows cast by the performers merge in such a way as to make one doubt whose limb is whose. Likewise, sound is often made to travel through space in a what initially appears to be an "unsourced" or acousmatic way, with Martin--and sometimes Rob--starting to play an instrument offstage that one thinks one can identify, only to emerge with something percussive or stringed or wind-based that totally upends such expectations.

The second piece on the program was Pathways, by Vision Impure's Noam Gagnon. Reworking a series of past solos into a large ensemble creation that Noam has set on eight young dancers whose ranks collectively represent some of the best talent to emerge from Vancouver's three main pre-professional dance programs (at Arts Umbrella, Modus Operandi, and SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts), the piece is performed to a pounding industrial score by Guillaume Cache. Clad all in black, and wearing matching knee-pads, the dancers hover outside the taped-off square of the main stage space, eyeing each other up and down like they are gladiators--or professional wrestlers. And, sure enough, once Eowynn Enquist (who has certainly been busy this festival) takes a running start and throws herself diagonally across the square, sliding to a stop on the other side, we are off on a non-stop contest of pure physicality. This is classic Gagnon choreography from his Holy Body Tattoo days: extreme, high energy, and punishingly visceral. We register the speed and impact of every body roll, the repeated jolts of limbs being thrown over and over again into the air (that five of the six women have long loose tresses that Noam shakingly exploits gives everything that much more of a rock and roll feel). The relentless kinetic and aural assault on our senses is almost overwhelming, but at a certain moment Noam shifts registers, with the dancers who seemed previously to be in competition, or just trying to run away from each other, now seeking each other out in a series of duets whose vocabulary of bodily climbing suggests that in this world even intimacy and tenderness can only be expressed in a similarly intense way.

Following some mixing with friends and artists in the community at DOTE's closing party, Richard and I (and several others circulating throughout the Firehall lobby and on its patio) headed north a few blocks to a warehouse space in Railtown owned by designer Omer Arbel to take in a midnight showing of Transverse Orientation, a new work of dance by Rachel Meyer. This is the second work of original choreography from the former Ballet BC dancer, who has only recently come back from maternity leave, looking impossibly lithe and limber. Based on the flight patterns of moths, and in particular how those patterns are oriented by and towards different natural and artificial sources of light, Transverse Orientation features: fellow Ballet BC alum Christoph von Riedemann as a lone moth-man figure, whose slow, calendrically-marked progress down a vertical runway frames the beginning and end of the piece (we move from watching his initial improvisations in a pre-show anteroom to the main playing space, from which we can track his progress towards us through a canny use of lighting and mirrors); Stéphanie Cyr, Ria Girard and Maya Tenzer as a trio of moths whose various bodily metamorphoses--from bumpy, fluttery proximity to grander, more swooping arcs of circular movement--are tracked through accompanying costume changes; and Meyer herself as a kind of queen moth figure (if I'm not mixing my insect metaphors), whose oversight of the proceedings progresses, transversally one might say, from semi-removed metteur-en-scène to fully engaged primum mobile, around which the others now must move--including violinist Janna Sailor, whose live playing is a key ingredient of the piece, and also eventually von Riedemann, who joins Meyers for a concluding duet that read a little too obviously as a mating dance.

For a self-produced show, Transverse Orientation has certainly spared no expense (including on its programs). Rigging up the lighting (by James Proudfoot) and configuring the set design (by Meyer herself) requires ample resources, and the apple budget alone must have been significant. As per the dramaturgical function of those apples, Meyer certainly has some sharp choreographic instincts. Fragments of the piece are individually compelling, particularly when Meyer is working with smaller, almost micro-movements: I'm thinking especially of von Riedemann's opening gestural sequence, and also Meyer's own fluttering responses to Sailor's improvised plucking and bowing--the way she can pulse a single shoulder blade, or infinitesimally shift the position of a bone in her foot is kind of amazing. That said, the fragments don't add up to a coherent whole and in seeking to interpret different aspects of moths' behaviours (why, for example, in their nocturnal attraction to artificial light, they frequently end up bumping against transparent surfaces, leaving a trail of dust from their wings), the movement comes across as mostly mimetic. I think the piece as it stands is also too long. But just as I always looked forward to what Meyer could do as a singularly virtuosic dancer on the Queen E stage, so do I anticipate great things from her in her new career as a choreographer.

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DOTE 2018: Volcano at The Firehall

In the spring of 2010 an Icelandic volcano with an intimidatingly Norse-sounding name, Eyjafjallajökull, erupted, spewing ash and billowing smoke all over Europe. The resulting flight cancellations and delays constituted the largest disruption of air travel since World War II. This is the background to Liz Kinoshita's Volcano, a 2014 work of dance-theatre conceived and directed by the Canadian-born and Belgian-based choreographer that is receiving its Canadian premiere at this year's Dancing on the Edge Festival.

Created and performed by Kinoshita and fellow dancers Salka Ardal Rosengren, Justin F. Kennedy, and Clinton Stringer, the piece is structured as an intricate investigation into the vocal and movement-based rhythms shared by popular musical and dance idioms from the middle of the twentieth century, in particular bebop and tap. As with Mascall Dance's OW (also playing this year's DOTE, and which I blogged about here), Kinoshita and her fellow performers have had to learn two fully integrated scores, cycling through a songbook's worth of co-composed a cappella numbers (a print copy of which is available upon exiting the theatre) alongside fifty minutes worth of almost non-stop soft shoe syncopation. The voices of all four performers are extraordinary, pitch-perfect and harmonically rich, handling changes in tempo and the complex asymmetrical phrasings that blend in and out of different melodies with as much virtuosity as they move through their different unison and non-unison tap routines. It all starts with a bit of freestyle scatting to a classic horizontal shuffle-toe-bang formation. Thereafter the songs self-reflexively address the mechanisms of performance itself, from pre-show routines to the pressures of time to the machinery of touring, including negotiating the security line at the airport: in a number called "Wall" that fittingly unfolds against the Firehall's exposed backstage, and which sees the dancers take turns passing each other over its surface via a series of proffered limbs on which to climb or lean against for support. This section of the piece culminates in an ode to the audience that sees the four performers wading into our ranks, each seeking out a different spectator to serenade (I was one of the lucky chosen ones).

The beginning of the second half of the piece is signalled by the one song that addresses Eyjafjallajökull by name; it starts with a haunting atonal sounding of the volcano's multiple syllables before melding into an elegant four-part harmony. This then leads into an extended floor sequence, in which the dancers' silent and slowed down diagonal dragging of their tired bodies, heavy limb over heavy limb, across the stage serves as a seductive visual and kinetic contrast to the faster tempo of the rest of the work--and to the accelerated pace of daily living more generally. "I am being propelled" is the refrain we hear most often throughout Volcano--and it comes back especially here in a solo number sung by Ardal Rosengren. But what might it mean to "suspend momentum," even just for a minute?

Answering this question, Kinoshita uses the occasion of a volcano's "untimely" eruption to create a smart and rhythmically embracing work of art that shows us all that can and does happen when time is out of our control.

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DOTE 2018: Mascall Dance's OW at St. Paul's Anglican Church

Yesterday evening I trekked to the West End to take in one of Dancing on the Edge's "Edge Off" presentations, that is, works not taking place at the Firehall or Dance Centre. The piece was Mascall Dance's latest ensemble creation, OW, created by Jennifer Mascall in collaboration with 20 (yes, that's right, 20!) incredible dancer-performers, and presented as always at Mascall Dance's home base at St. Paul's Anglican Church on Jervis Street.

OW is a study of the relationship between sound and the body. Working from a libretto made up of vocalized syllables, cries, noises, and utterances that are deliberately non-sensical--similar to improvised scat singing in jazz music--the piece is made up of a series of interconnected vignettes that explore how, why and from where our bodies produce sound, and how that additionally reverberates in movement. (The vocal coach for OW is DB Boyko, and additional musical composition is provided by Stefan Smulovitz.) While Mascall takes pains in her brief program note to explain that OW is non-narrative, structurally it is styled like a work of musical theatre, at least in its groupings of dancers (the soundtrack playing before the start of the work is also a clue).

Our would-be romantic principals are Billy Marchenski and Molly McDermott, although the mostly hissing sounds that emanate from their mouths when they are near each other, and their wary circling of each other on the in-the-round stage floor--not to mention the way Molly climbs over Billy's body during their climactic duet--mostly suggests a tonal dynamic of repulsion rather than attraction. Comic relief comes by way of a quartet comprised of Anne Cooper, Walter Kubanek, Vanessa Goodman, and Eloi Homer, who banter back and forth with each other in an exuberantly demonstrative phonetic glossolalia, their strung-together plosives and fricatives and diphthongs and glottal stops accompanied by a range of popular dance styles, from a virtuosic tap sequence to a chest- and shoe-thumping folk dance circle in which the dancers' vocal communication is now filtered through kazoos.

Finally, there is a large chorus of younger dancers whose mostly unison and canon choreography is complemented by an enunciated score of call and response: with each other, and also with the other groups of dancers. Here, especially, it was fascinating to take note of the ways in which certain sounds seem intuitively to call forth distinctive styles of physical expression, with harsher noises (guttural cries and shouts) often accompanied by more martial movements (marching and foot stomping), whereas softer sounds (coos and whistles) seem to produce kinetic ripples that are more flowing and undulating. On this front, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the impressive cameo appearance made by Eowynn Enquist, who together with Molly McDermott and Vanessa Goodman forms a gorgeous trio, one whose sinuous arm waves and buffeting back and forth in space of each other's bodies is held aloft through a softly sung three-part harmony. (That Enquist thereafter becomes a kind of avenging angel, moving between different chorus members and miming a series of eye plucks that produce from each a version of the work's title is a whole other matter.)

Watching OW, and how much fun the dancers seemed to be having (despite the obvious complexity of having to learn two different scores), I was reminded of those moments of pure kinetic joy one experiences on a dance floor, when the feeling of being transported by the energy and rhythm of movement and music can only be answered by a whoop of delight. Kudos to Jennifer Mascall and her entire ensemble for reminding us so brilliantly and blissfully of the somatic connection between sound and movement.

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DOTE 2018: Edge 2 at The Firehall

Dancing on the Edge's second mixed program, Edge 2, serves as a showcase for a powerful group of strong women dancers in Vancouver.

The first piece is by Lesley Telford/Inverso Productions. Lesley first presented IF in Vancouver at The Dance Centre in April 2017, and I have previously blogged about the work here. An exploration of the triangulated relationships between three identically clad dancers (Karin Ezaki, Ria Girard, and Eden Solomon, all excellent), the piece operates through a dynamic of displacement/replacement, with different bodies' successive occupations of a lone chair positioned stage right suggesting not just a redistribution of space but the sedimentation of time. Key to this is the exchange of looks that is sustained by the dancers as they repeat a circular pattern that serves as the work's structuring movement phrase, with one dancer passing in front of her seated other just as she is about to be upended from the chair by a third dancer moving towards her from upstage: the act of watching someone watching herself being watched completes a feedback loop of physical presence in which the conditions of existence are reduced to basic matters of proximity and distance. One difference in this iteration of IF is that it is being performed without the text by Anne Carson that originally accompanied it (long story). Lesley mentioned to me before the performance that she was very worried about how the work would now read, but afterwards I assured her that this version had succeeded in supplanting my own previous memories of how text and movement had played off each other. In so doing, it actually focused my attention away from the more sedentary action involving the chair and towards the bolder physicality that gets played out in a series of solos and duos that unfold stage left.

Amber Funk Barton's For You, For Me is a solo she has composed as a gift to DOTE on the occasion of its 30th anniversary. Amber arrives on the bare and fully illuminated Firehall stage in black shorts and top, and wearing a pair of runners. She looks around the space, taking it in, and then registers how it reverberates in her body kinetically. She reaches a hand out into space, traces a line along the floor, tests her balance by leaning over the sides of her shoes to the left before falling to the ground. Part of the joy of this piece comes from watching Amber remember all that she has done on this stage, and also what she can still do. When she lifts one leg above her head in full extension and then pivots 360 degrees on the other, a smile of "wow" lights up her face and it is instantly contagious. As is how Amber mixes the different movement vocabularies that reside in her body, a pirouette and jeté, or a walking line on demi-pointe, contrasted--sometimes instantly--with a body roll or a bit of floating and flying. Even the way she rearranges her top from front to back through a quick and dextrous shifting of her arms is utterly captivating. Amber performs all of this without music. All we hear is the squeak of her shoes and her breathing, effort here being another of Amber's gifts to us and this space. Hence her perfect ending. Bending backwards to the floor as the intensely bright lights slowly fade to black she moves the square she has formed with the thumb and forefinger of one hand from her heart centre to the ground beside her: everything she has, she has left on the floor.

Wen Wei Wang's Ying Yun is also performed mostly in silence. A tribute to the memory of the choreographer's mother, this excerpt from a larger work-in-progress features five incredibly talented young female dancers: Eowynn Enquist, Sarah Formosa, Ria Girard, Daria Mikhaylyuk, and Stéphanie Cyr. At the top of the piece they are clumped together as a group centre stage, rocking from side to side as they breathe audibly and in unison in and out, like they are a single lung. Following a brief blackout, we next find the dancers with their backs to us in a staggered formation upstage. They hold this pose for a time before suddenly, and on Enquist's split-second cue, shifting their weight backwards onto one leg and twisting their torsos slightly. This move is repeated and then added to, Wang building a repertoire of strong, heroic poses--a reach to the heavens with both hands, a deep plié, a lunge and calf grab to the side--that the dancers start to cycle through at a faster and faster rate. Mixed in with this looping score are also more gestural phrases that the dancers count through together, always stopping on the seventh beat. The exquisite unison is completely beguiling, and as a study in virtuosic synchronicity I could have watched these patterns repeat forever. However, Wang slowly builds in a counterpoint to the unison by having each of the dancers break off at certain points into solos, all of which showcase the unique talents and physicalities of these exceptional young dancers. This shift is also accompanied by the introduction of music composed by Amon Tobin. It's not clear to me at this point how these two aspects of the work fit together, and while I appreciated the note on which this current version of the work ends--a return to one of the signature poses from the beginning--the way it was arrived at felt a bit awkward. That said, I very much look forward to how the rest of this work unfolds.

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Edge 7 at DOTE

Dancing on the Edge Festival's Edge 7 program is made up of two works-in-progress that, in their full iterations, should be back at the Firehall soon. UNTITLEDdiSTANCE is a collaboration between dance artists Emmalena Fredriksson and Arash Khakpour. Based on their common, but also very different, immigrant experiences, the work opens with the artists addressing the audience in Swedish and Farsi, respectively, before segueing into the mutual instruction and execution of a floor sequence that provides them--and us--with an entree into a shared language of movement. That language is largely contact-based and in between giving and taking each other's weight and limbs in the next section, they each narrate their experiences of being othered--because of the way they look, or how they speak--in their adopted home of Vancouver. Not that the work is all about warm and fuzzy support. Indeed, the rest of the piece plays out as a series of increasingly high stakes games in which, for example, one performer, seated in front of a computer, will ask the other an impossible to answer question ("Do you feel more eastern or western?" "Would you kill a cat for a million dollars?") that s/he must respond to during an improvised solo, the movement choices of which are then interpreted and projected for us by the seated interlocutor through Google translate. In this way, and throughout the piece more generally, Fredriksson and Khakpour cannily combine language and movement to show that no matter how we position ourselves, we must always negotiate that position in relation to others--and also that, as in this case, part of that negotiation is developing a shared sense of trust.

An excerpt from Contes Cruels, by Les Productions Figlio's Serge Bennathan, was the second piece on the program. A full-length version of the work will premiere at the Firehall next May and seems to build on Bennathan's earlier Just Words. As in that work, Contes Cruels combines poetic text by the choreographer with original music by Bertrand Chénier to work through a near-death experience. However, here Bennathan has expanded his roster of dancers, with Josh Martin and Molly McDermott joining Hilary Maxwell and Karissa Barry in a quartet that sometimes moves in regimented response to and ethereally against the choreographer's onstage commands. Bennathan's repeated prompts of "Blackout" and "Lights up" late in the piece serve as an especially apt metaphor not just for a physical resurrection, but also for artistic reinvention. In this respect, Martin, who takes over some of the text early in the piece, is clearly meant to be Bennathan's dance double, or avatar, and the women his trio of muses, with their frequent blind but powerhouse leaps into space, or their held poses and offstage looks into the distance, incarnating for us what it means to embrace the unknown.

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Edge 2 at DOTE

Last evening's Edge 2 program at the Dancing on the Edge Festival was an immensely satisfying mix of very different, but equally strong, short works. Natasha Bakht's Blessed Unrest, a solo danced by Monica Shah, led things off. Bakht, who just happens to have a side gig as an associate professor of law at the University of Ottawa (!), is trained in bharatannatyam, and in this work she gives the classical Indian form a contemporary twist, not least through her choice of music. In the first and most extended section, Shah's intricate footwork, knee bends and hand gestures are performed to a bracingly fast piano composition by Alexander MacSween, and are additionally set against a projected backdrop of the blankly white looped end of a film reel. However, at a certain point the piano music cuts out, an inky black projection of what looks like a river bed comes up, and Shah slows things way down. Indeed, this section begins with the dancer splaying the toes on her right foot in such an unhurried yet utterly compelling way that I would have been content to watch this one gesture for the rest of the piece. In this fusion of tempos and tones, Bakht shows that contemporary Indian dance is as exciting and complexly varied as any western concert dance form.

An excerpt from Jennifer Mascall's work-in-progress, Quartet, was shown next. Mascall, subbing for Vanessa Goodman, served as on-stage intermediary for the audience, announcing from a downstage right stool that what we were watching was a lecture-demonstration about a process concerning what we know, and what we don't know. An exploration of voice as much as movement, dancers Anne Cooper, Eloi Homier and Walter Kubanek sing, grunt, breathe, and speak with varying degrees of intelligibility, while simultaneously and/or in counterpoint interposing their bodies between or alongside each other. Within these circuits of vocal and kinetic communication, the performers are variously in and out of sync with each other, Homier's off-beat syncopation in a tap sequence, for example, or his slightly different tonal inflections in a virtuoso grunting session with Cooper and Kubanek, indicative of the ways in which sense-making is inherently sensual. As slyly funny as it is sharply intelligent, this excerpt is hopefully the first of many iterations of Quartet.

Finally, demonstrating that she can go compositionally maximalist when she wants to, Yvonne Ng, whose spare autobiographical solo is also included in this year's Edge 1 program, serves up a boldly expressive (and even expressionist) trio with her excerpt of Zhōng Xīn. Superbly danced by Mairéad Filgate, Irvin Chow and Luke Garwood to a booming score by Max Richter, the work plays out, on one level, as a love triangle in which none of the points can connect. Indeed, it was surprising to me just how little actual partnering there was in the piece. Instead, like sub-atomic particles colliding in space, the dancers are as repelled as they are attracted by each other's energy, and the moments that registered most powerfully for me were the ones in which each performer obsessively repeated a gestural or movement pattern in his or her own isolated world: Filgate, otherwise standing still, windmilling her arms wildly in the air; Chow running from point to point on the floor like he is playing tag with himself; and Garwood, at both the top and the end of the show, waving his hands in front of his face. As with the excerpt from Quartet, what Ng showed here only wets one's appetite for more.

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Edge 1 at DOTE

The offerings in the 2017 Dancing on the Edge Festival's first mixed program, Edge 1, were, well, mixed. Reversing the order in the printed program, the first piece presented was local choreographer Chick Snipper's Phasmida & Scorpiones: a study. Performers Jess Ames and Julianne Chapple wear matching coral-coloured lyotards with cross-hatched stitching on the backs, and also black leggings. While one of the dancers lies supine on the floor upstage right, with one hand stretched above her head, the other moves out of a lunge she is holding centre stage and into a deep plie, the first phase in her own eventual trajectory floorwards. Here she will begin a series of crawling patterns across the stage, her body low to the floor, her arms outstretched and bent at the elbows, feet flexed: in other words, an approximation of the morphology of the predatory arachnids in Snipper's title. By contrast, the other dancer's orbit is upwards, her physical vocabulary and locomotion more vertical, with her limbs tending towards a series of extensions: and thus do we discover (with the aid of a bit of post-show Googling) that phasmida are a class of stick-like insects. Of course, arachnid and insect must meet, and in Snipper's study they do so twice: once on the floor, rolling onto and over each other in some contact-inspired phrasing; and once while standing, leaning into each other's chests, entwining their arms, syncing two of their knees together, and beginning an approximation of a slow, three-legged walk upstage. I'm not sure if this meant that the scorpion wins out over the phasmid, but it did register to me as one more way in which this piece was a bit too literal and representational in the physical phrasing it was deploying.

Representational gestures also figured in Yvonne Ng's Weave ... part one, a solo in which she tells the story of her mother's complicated patrimony through speech and movement. However, for every rocking back and forth of Ng's arms to indicate a swaddling baby there was also a through-line bodily grammar of more formally repetitive and non-expressive gestural sequences, the patterning of Ng's limbs, when combined with her talk, putting me in mind of the mathematically-inflected work of Sarah Chase. Additionally layered over top of this is a meta-commentary in which every so often Ng will comment on either the appropriateness or the ridiculousness of the particular movement she is executing. The approach works, and not just because the petite Ng, artistic director of the Toronto-based tiger princess dance projects, is such a charismatic performer. The combination of deconstructed formalism and emotional lyricism captures the complicated story of Asian feminine identity that Ng is trying to tell, which we discover is as much about finding an anchor for herself where her mother had none.

Last on the program was Tedd Robinson's Logarian Rhapsody, a commission for the Winnipeg-based dance artist Alexandra Elliott. A duet that Elliott dances with Ian Mozden, it begins with the performers whispering offstage. Eventually they enter, their eyes rimmed in black kohl, and dressed like lounge singers from the 1970s in white leisure suits. Mozden appears to be holding some orb-like object in one hand. That object turns out to be a green apple and via snippets of the live whispering of the dancers, and also via the voiceover that eventually joins this whispering, we learn that both dancers wish to eat the apple. However, it takes a very long time for either of them to do so, and first we must cycle through a series of anticipatory tableaux: Mozden coming downstage to show us the apple and comment on how desirously delicious it looks; Elliott placing the apple on Mozden's shoulder for them and us to admire, or be in fearsome awe of; Elliott and Mozden trading the apple back and forth; Elliott rolling the apple on the floor; and so on. We go through variations of this sequence many, many times, and while I normally find Robinson's conceptual imagination highly engaging, here the conceit felt tedious. Adam and Eve: we get it. Just someone please bite the apple already. Spoiler alert: they both eventually do so, and the choreographic effect is decidedly anti-climactic. There is, however, a final saving grace: a fantastic lighting cue to end the piece.

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Beijing Modern Dance Company at DOTE

The 29th edition of the Dancing on the Edge Festival (DOTE) kicked off last night with the Canadian premiere of Beijing Modern Dance Company's Oath--Midnight Rain. The company's artistic director and the choreographer of the piece, Gao Yanjinzi, has been to Vancouver--and DOTE--before, having previously collaborated with Wen Wai Wang and Sammy Chien (who translated for her from the stage) on Made in China. The piece she presented for us last night, which first showed at the 2006 Venice Biennale, explores concepts associated with the Buddhist wheel of life, or Samsara, a temporal cycle of suffering that encompasses death and rebirth, but also the liminal or threshold spaces linking binary pairings of night and day, black and white, ending and beginning.

Gao investigates these spaces of transformation through a series of linked movement studies in which four male and one female dancers incarnate, in turn, a flower, a blade of grass, a fish, a mosquito, and a bird. For example, in an opening sequence which put me in mind of Anna Pavlova's dying swan, a male dancer sits centre stage amid a swath of blue tulle, which he will eventually gather up around and then over his head, spreading his arms out to the sides to effect a kind of blooming. But he also shows us the stem of the flower by rolling over from the floor onto his shoulders and raising his bare legs to the ceiling in a series of developpés. With the exception of the winged dancer caught in a web of cloth and dripping a beard of blood (and also a whole lot of talcum powder), I confess it was not always clear to me which of the aforementioned non-human figures or elements the dancers were personifying. Were we meant to see the swaying in the wind of a blade of grass in the second dancer's snaking on the floor and through the air her horse-hair wand? The darting of a fish through water in the third dancer's gracefully flowing arm sleeves? And the rest and flight of a bird in the coquettish poses and oscillating swaying of the fifth dancer on a swing descended from the rafters? In the end, I was glad that the choreography eschewed overt mimeticism, with Gao clearly incorporating some of the abstract gestural vocabulary of classical Chinese opera into each section (and also, it seemed, some of its gender-bending conventions with the costuming and make-up of three of the male dancers).

However, in the movement of the sixth dancer, a kind of hungry ghost figure veiled in red who serves to link each section and also occasionally interacts with the other dancers, I detected some traces of classical Indian dance. The music in these sections may have also contributed to this sensation, but it's also a reminder that the idea of Samsara (a Sanskrit word) crosses various Eastern religions, including Hinduism. At the very least, the mix of classical and modern traditions in Oath (including in the utterly mesmerizing sound score) can be seen as another way in which Gao is exploring this idea of liminal transformation.

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Edge 3 at DOTE

Last night's Edge 3 program at the Dancing on the Edge Festival was made up of three solos by three Vancouver artists/companies who like to explore the porous boundaries between dance, theatre and performance/installation art.

First up was dumb instrument Dance's Ziyian Kwan, remounting the neck to fall, which she first presented at Dance in Vancouver in 2013, and which I have previously written about here. The piece's movement has changed over time, as has Kwan's costume (I recall a black suit and heels from the premiere). But the core set of objects with which Kwan interacts remain; these include two cardboard boxes, one small and one large, two sets of chopsticks, a large plastic bag into which she sinks her head and body, and a furry stool, upon which Kwan at one point mimes a virtuosic cello solo, an ode to composer Peggy Lee's wonderful musical score. Each object anchors a set of external commands (delivered by a recorded Asian female voice) against which Kwan struggles to adapt her body, the piece being as much a rumination on perceptions of racialized and gendered comportment as it is a tribute to the pioneering work of somatic practitioner Amelia Itcush.

The second piece on the program was The Biting School's Helmeat. To the pounding beat of the classic song "War: What Is It Good For?," the curtain opens upon Aryo Kkakpour kneeling at the downstage edge of a red-taped square; he wears a red jumpsuit reminiscent of prison garb and wrapped around his head is a turban of tinfoil. At a certain point Khakpour unplugs the cable of the speaker to his right and the music stops; he begins to methodically lay out tiny squares of tin foil in a grid just on the other side of the downstage edge of the red tape. Retreating upstage and calling for the lights to dim, the next thing we see is Khakpour rolling about the stage, crushing the tinfoil atop his head into a face-masking silvery balaclava, minus the eye and mouth holes; thus blinded our hero staggers about his enclosure, feeling his way from object to object (two stacks of wrapped helmets upstage, a full-length mirror, a shopping cart, and that speaker) via the tape on the floor. However, the signature moment in the piece must surely be the extended bit of coitus that Khakpour engages in with the shopping cart, grinding his pelvis into its handle as he slowly positions it in front of the mirror. Climbing in, he takes out a kazoo and proceeds to hum out the tune to "The Ride of the Valkyries." The piece concludes with Khakpour turning over an actual helmet to reveal a mess of hamburger meat inside. Telling us that this is what we've been waiting for, he then proceeds to roll the ground beef into individual meatballs, which he slowly and deliberately places upon the squares of tinfoil from the top of the show. While this is happening, Arash Khakpour--Aryo's brother and the other half of The Biting School--emerges from the wings and begins striking the set. The link established by the two brothers between consumerism, petroleum products and war might seem a bit obvious were it not for the charisma of Aryo as a performer. He commits utterly to everything he does and so is eminently watchable. In turn, the strangeness of the world that he and Arash create, in which everyday objects and tasks are turned into exceptional and even alienating phenomena, reminds us of how thoroughly we have internalized war into our daily diet.

Finally, the evening concluded with a short excerpt from Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg's work-in-progress, I can't remember the word for I can't remember, a collaboration with local actor/writer/director John Murphy. Loping on stage on all fours like a chimpanzee, Friedenberg opens her big expressive eyes wide and blinks blankly out at the audience before climbing into the lap of one front-row spectator and proceeding to pick invisible gnats out of his hair. Already we are putty in her hilarious hands. After a short blackout, Friedenberg stands fully upright centre stage in a square of white light. She launches into a monologue, or at least one side of two potential dialgogues, about how she can't remember with whom she was having a conversation. This theme of waning memory, linked closely by Friedenberg to our current age of multiple electronic devices, social media and general information overload (who can remember anyone's phone number anymore, she asks), alternates with the piece's other big concern, namely the categorical boxes into which we slot different people, and into which we in turn are slotted (or slot ourselves). On the one hand, Friedenberg seems to be suggesting, there is the forgetting that happens as a result of benign neglect--that is, because we have ceded the task of remembering to software and big data. And then there is the more wilful forgetting we do, the things (or people) we put into boxes and then hide away at the back of our closets or underneath our beds. There's no suggestion at this point which kind of amnesia is more harmful, although (to go back to her opening entrance) Friedenberg does hint that both are evolutionary processes. And that each has bodily effects--which she ably demonstrates through a series of physical scores that accompany her text. I look forward to how text and movement evolve together in this piece as Friedenberg and Murphy continue with its development.

P

The Outliner at DOTE

One of two indoor Dancing on the Edge shows not taking place at the Firehall this year is MascallDance's The Outliner, a compilation of pieces that choreographer Jennifer Mascall has made over the years in dialogue with different material objects, and that the company is presenting at its home base, The Labyrinth studios in St. Paul's Anglican Church on Jervis Street in the West End. An expertly curated and imaginatively staged evening of five short dances that brilliantly showcases the talents of a diverse array of dancers and designers, and featuring music by Stefan Smulovitz and lighting by John McFarlane (both colleagues in Contemporary Arts at SFU), The Outliner quite literally takes audiences on a ride they won't soon forget.

For one of the conceits of the show is that audience members sit on wooden pews that have been placed atop moveable platforms. As one piece transitions into the next we are wheeled about The Labyrinth's white Marleyed floor by an army of stagehands standing at the ready behind us; they move us into different geometrical and spatial configurations as the dictates of each work's choreography--and the shape and dimension of each set of objects--demand. But in so doing Mascall and her creative team have also cannily choreographed a sixth piece, the audience's quixotically sedentary movement with the pews constituting yet another dance between humans and objects.

At the top of the show the pews are facing each other in two diagonal rows. Between them the great Robin Poitras, her arms and waist and legs entwined in a series of circular wooden rings designed by Nathan Wiens, moves with delicacy and grace, advancing the length of the diagonal in the first part of We Are an Unfinished World, the only piece on the program receiving its premiere. Poitras and her rings will return three more times over the course of the evening: first as a magically moving conical triangle that completely obscures Poitras's body hiding underneath; then as an inverted bowl, with the top of Poitras's head just visible; and finally back to the deconstructed rings encircling different limbs.

Profilo Eterno, from 2011, features Elissa Hanson as a grounded skydiver, or a space traveler from another planet trying to make it back home. Racing onto the stage wearing a black vest from which I was half expecting a parachute to emerge, Hanson dons a helmet adorned with three plumes of bendy white plastic. Over the course of the piece, which features text by Susan McKenzie, Hanson will afix additional strips of plastic to her body via the vest she wears, metamorphosing into a multi-antennaed insect or satellite dish depending on one's perspective (the design is by Elliot Neck, after a concept by Catherine Hahn). Either way, there is no denying the force of the signals Hanson is both receiving and sending out.

Kaspar is the earliest work on the program. It dates from 1984 and in this iteration features Ballet BC's wonderful Gilbert Small wielding two sets of branches like truncheons against an invisible enemy. It begins with Small on demi point, one leg behind the other, his back arched, but with the weight of his upper body shifted forward and his arms in front of him clutching the stems of the branches, the tops of which graze the floor. Slowly he begins to undulate his torso, rounding and arching his back as he begins a slow forward walk, his head every now and then shifting suddenly from side to side, alert to potential threats. It was quite thrilling to see Small up close like this, especially when he steps up the tempo and begins flying through the air like he's Solor in La Bayadère, the branches slicing through the air like so many blades cutting into enemy flesh (though I am aware, as is often the case with the roles in which Small is cast, how this image reinforces tropes of the exotic other).

Next up was The Politics of Meaning (2010), a witty duet featuring the young dancers Ewoynn Penny-Hugeot and Amy Donnelly about the mechanics of writing (Alan Storey is the design engineer on this one) that also doubles as an allegory about dance notation and physical versus linguistic scores. Finally, the evening concludes with Graft, a 1991 solo featuring an arachnid-like fan of plastic poles designed by Ines Ortner (from a concept by Susan Berganzi), and here expertly manipulated by the gorgeous dancer Renee Sigouin.

All of this unfolded in just under an hour, and I could have easily sat through a half dozen more such vignettes. The Outliner is truly exceptional in its conceptual rigour and technical execution, a multi-disciplinary study in the myriad ways we dance with things.

P

Thus Spoke... at DOTE

I've had a dance crush on Frédérick Gravel ever since the multi-talented choreographer, musician and performer brought Usually Beauty Fails to town in January 2014 in a co-presentation between the PuSh Festival and DanceHouse. So I was super excited to see that he was going to be back in town as part of this year's Dancing on the Edge Festival. Thus Spoke... is a collaboration between Gravel and Montreal-based playwright Étienne Lepage. At the top of the show, a dapperly dressed and hipsterly bearded Gravel, who has been hanging about on stage with his fellow performers (Frédéric Lavallée, Marilyn Perreault, and Anne Thériault) as spectators file into the Firehall auditorium, stands before the microphone positioned centre stage and tells us that now it seems the categories between dance and theatre have become hopelessly muddled, with folks who go to his shows expecting to see dance calling it theatre, and vice-versa. It's a not so subtle warning that what follows will be heavily dominated by Lepage's text, as well as a formal philosophical apology, in the manner of Plato's defence of Socrates or Nietzsche writing in Ecce Homo, of the singular artist's right to present the work he believes in without worrying about labels or fearing judgment (a theme that will return later on in the show).

For, indeed, as its title suggests, this piece is very much an homage to the German philosopher with whom Gravel shares a first name, from the choreographer's opening monologue about how "privileged" we are to waste our time watching this show to its circular structure enacting Nietzsche's concept of the "eternal recurrence of the same." In between, the other performers discourse on assassinating the premier of Québec, gross capital accumulation, and not being bothered by either the benign existence or potentially malignant beliefs and behaviour of other people--among many other topics. Occasionally, the various monologues are accompanied by a bit of movement: simple but sharply executed group unison, as with the step dance that is attached to Gravel's increasingly rapid fire account of the mercantile relationship between the salaryman who spends his days photocopying and the contractor whom he hires to fix his house; and idiosyncratic solos that showcase the performers' obvious kinetic talents alongside their verbal dexterity. My favourite in the latter category is Lavallée's gleeful demonstration of the transformational potential of altering one's world view by moving in "backwards mode," his slow reversing towards the upstage wall, thrusting one leg behind him and then reaching blindly into the unknown, seeming to crystallize and coalesce in a succinct yet compelling way the suitably Nietzschean idea of turning traditional morality and metaphysics (or just plain physics) on their heads.

Would that the piece had ended there. Instead, out of the blackout that ensues Perreault's voice emerges, launching into a long rumination on how many "shitty shows" she has seen in her lifetime and lamenting that all she needs to ignite her interest is "one simple idea" to latch onto. This section gets a lot of laughs, but it's also hard not to read it, along with a subsequent and much more serious speech by Perreault about the violent game of justice, as a somewhat obvious and unnecessary attempt to forestall any potential criticism that might get levelled against this show. And on that front let me say that my critique is not that Gravel and Lepage have failed to produce a single compelling idea out of their collaboration; it's that they've paradoxically produced too many. Which is to say that the text is so dominant, dense and wide-ranging in its allusions that it is hard, beyond the formal structural nod to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, to get a purchase on a through-line uniting each of the sections. But, then again, maybe this is just me seeking to impose a narrative the creators want to resist. As with the truss of band style backlights that, along with the microphone and stand passed from performer to performer, constitutes the main nod to scenography in the piece, perhaps we should approach this work like a rock concert rather than a concept album, revelling in individual moments rather than looking for the governing logic that connects them.

P

Edge 1 at DOTE

On a cold and rainy Thursday in Vancouver, with no cab in the city to be found, Richard and I made it to the Firehall a minute before curtain. This year's Dancing on the Edge Festival kicked off with an eclectic line-up: three very different pieces that offered up a mix of kinetic pleasures and conceptual challenges over the course of a somewhat too long evening.

Leading off was Here on the ground, a collaboration between Julia Carr and Meghan Goodman, of Body Narratives Collective, and Hornby Island choreographer Sarah Chase. The piece tells the story of Carr and Goodman's friendship through some of the surprising coincidences in their life histories and careers: both are longtime company members of the aerial dance company Aeriosa (performing a site-specific work in Stanley Park as part of DOTE this coming Wednesday and Thursday); both are new moms (plaster body casts of each woman's pregnant belly figure at a certain point and there is a very sweet moment near the top of the show in which each performer races to pack up the baby-related items needed for a day out in the park); and both have several family members who tend to share the same name. All of this is related to us through Chase's trademark cross-lateralizing of verbal speech with different combinations of physical gestures, which the dancers cycle through as they tell their stories. At different points in the piece, Carr and Goodman even let us in on the system by which the individual gestures are chosen and paired with different parts of speech: as she did with SFU's rep dancers during her Iris Garland residency in the School for the Contemporary Arts earlier this spring, Chase will pair a word or sometimes just a syllable with a gesture in whose articulation there will be embedded some physical or verbal mnemonic. For example, the wiping of invisible "slime" off of one's thigh will be cued to a word that rhymes with it, like "time." Knowing this, when the dancers then go on to repeat the gesture phrases, whether silently or while singing a John Denver song, we concentrate more intently, which fits with Chase's theory that the combining of verbal and physical scores in performance makes audience members as lucid in their reception as performers become in their expression. In a similar way, Carr and Goodman later show us some of the technique that underscores a few of the named moves they use in their aerial dancing (e.g. "Superman" or "The Bird"). It was fascinating to see what normally would be happening off the side of a building, with the dancers' harnessed bodies tilted 90 degrees and with our gazes tilted up, translated to a traditional proscenium setting: at the very least it was a reminder that aerial dancing is in fact dancing, and that just as we come to recognize the patterns of a story, so are we able, over time, to discern those that send--and keep--a body in flight.

Following a pause, we were treated to a solo by MOVE: the company's Josh Beamish. A choreographic collaboration with Toronto's Ame Henderson, Radios sees Beamish enter upstage left. He wears a baggy black jacket over a loose blue shirt and black skirt (with silvery shorts underneath); on his feet are green socks and black trainers. With bored nonchalance, Beamish slowly begins to move, folding one foot in on itself, then slowly lifting it up and letting it hover in the air before bending the other leg, twisting his torso and extending the raised leg in an off-axis and flexed arabesque that is as much a study in durational posing as it is an exercise in balance. The piece continues in this way, with Beamish slowly moving horizontally in front of the upstage white backdrop as he tests different movement possibilities: dropping suddenly to the floor with his legs splayed precariously behind him; or slowly arching his back and extending one arm behind his head, then letting the same arm upon its return first graze and then lazily drape along the back of his neck, fingers unconsciously tickling the fuzz of his buzzed hair. Mostly this is done in silence, but occasionally industrial-style rock fades in from what at first appears to be a speaker positioned in the wings. All of this suggests a club kid practising in his basement or his bedroom, and the pauses between the different poses, in which Beamish displays absolute indifference to his audience, frequently turning his back to us, were just as watchable as the Trajal Harrell-styled voguing riffs I was put in mind of by Beamish's pop preening and slow studied traversing of the stage. Near the end of the piece a stagehand wheels on that hidden speaker from the wings and the music returns; this is the cue for Beamish to ramp up his physicality and to become much more presentational in his movement, his now hyper-kinetic dancing veering suddenly towards more recognizably balletic technique, as if he and Henderson felt obliged to foreground the classical training underscoring a movement narrative they had previously seemed to be deconstructing. Even the speaker is revealed to be a chimera, with Beamish retrieving a small clock radio from his jacket pocket at the conclusion of the work and silencing the sound emanating from it.

Following the second pause I was getting restless. And it didn't help that the last piece on the program was a long conceptual work that in its durational slowness and repetitiveness tested my patience. Isaac y Diola, directed, choreographed and interpreted by Belgian artists German Jauregui and Anita Diaz, begins with the two dancers lying naked, one on top of the other, downstage right. In the shadows upstage are a number of overturned chairs. Juaregui begins to drag his (and, by proxy, Diaz's) body in the direction of the chairs. Eventually Diaz is discarded, like a second skin, and Juaregui begins the slow process of retrieving his clothes and then righting and rearranging the chairs about the stage. While he is doing this, Diaz starts crawling backwards to the chair positioned upstage left, upon which are draped her clothes. Quotes by Marguerite Duras, Jacques Lacan, George Orwell and Ayn Rand, among others, play in voiceover while all of this is happening. Only after this prolonged set-up do we get to the most interesting part of the piece: two paired solos that play off of the materiality and animacy of the chairs as objects of kinetic sculpture. That is, as Juaregui begins sawing the two front legs off of the chair upon which he is standing upstage centre, Diaz begins a gorgeous solo on her back. Then, after Juaregui tumbles to the floor, Diaz begins piling the remaining chairs into a stacked tower downstage left; following her delicate placement of the last chair, Juaregui begins his own solo. To the driving beat of a drum score, he throws himself about the stage in a remarkable off-balance and mostly backwards series of knee squats, at the end of which he places the final broken chair at the top of the ziggurat Diaz has made. Maybe because we did something similar in my play The Objecthood of Chairs, or maybe because I was just super-hungry by this point, I found this architectural culmination to the evening less impressive than it was clearly meant to be--at least judging by the response of the rest of the audience.

P

Edge 6 at Dancing on the Edge

Last night, as part of the Edge 6 program at this year's Dancing on the Edge Festival, I got a chance to revisit--and enjoy all over again--two works I had previously seen in earlier incarnations. A version of Tara Cheyenne Performance's how to be, which TCP AD and choreographer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg has been developing with collaborators Justine Chambers, Susan Elliott, Kate Franklin, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, Kim Stevenson, and Marcus Youssef since last fall, was showcased as part of Boca del Lupo's Micro-Performance Series earlier this spring. I wrote about that performance, a trio featuring Friedenberg, Franklin and Stevenson, and very much tailored to the tight confines of the Anderson Street Space on Granville Island where it was performed, here. For this iteration, which I was privileged to witness being partially built as part of a studio visit last month, Friedenberg has taken herself out of the dancing equation for the first time in her company's history. Instead, she has constructed from the abundant raw materials of movement and spoken text that are her stock in trade a series of vignettes for Stevenson, Franklin, Martin, Poole and Youssef that focus on what I will call the "doing of being," asking what it means when we materialize our aspirational or compensatory or competitive thoughts about who or what we wish to be as physical enactments of struggle or mimicry or synchronicity or incongruity.

For Youssef, a theatre artist, this means dealing with his anxiety about performing as a dancer in this piece, something Friedenberg showcases right at the top of the show. Just as Firehall AD and DOTE producer Donna Spencer is finishing her curtain speech, Youssef, nattily attired in suit jacket and tie, descends to the stage from where he had been sitting in the audience. He places a notebook before him on the floor, consults it briefly, and then begins to assume various ballet positions with his feet, eventually ending up in third--and demonstrating a fantastic turn-out in the process! More consultation of the book follows, and then an attempt at an arabesque. Next we get a bit of tap and step-dancing. And, finally, the big finish: a double pirouette with planted jazz hands. Consult, repeat: just as Youssef starts to win us over with his efforts, the other dancers--also surreptitiously embedded in the audience, and similarly attired in jackets and ties--descend one by one to the stage, with Stevenson (who happened to be sitting beside me) bringing up the rear. Forming a quartet upstage right, they cycle fluidly and in unison through the steps Youssef has been trying to master, and which he now seeks to match with ever increasing desperation to their rhythms. This sequence culminates with Youssef taking to the chair that has been positioned downstage centre, the other dancers clustered around him as he begins to talk to an off-stage analyst about his relationship with his father and an older sibling he never knew he had. The psychology of the group is still in play, however, as the other performers variously mimic and mock Youssef behind his back; whenever he turns around, they pretend to be engaged in some other activity: we hear the tail-end of a joke being told by Martin; or else Poole has launched herself into an energetic round of charades. In both cases, Youssef is clearly positioned as being on the outside of the group and amidst this at once proximate and separate relation of bodies before us we see how the principle of inclusion and exclusion is central to identity formation in our culture.

Each of the other performers experiences her or his own moment of separateness within the group, and to the extent that I read this piece as an attempt on Friedenberg's part to explore the question of dance ontology within a larger spectrum of ways of being in the world, it was fascinating to watch these amazingly talented but also very different movers explore the dialectic of coming together as an ensemble while also holding on to their individual expressiveness. This is a tension for any freelance dance artist performing in someone else's work, but throw in the fact that in this case the choreographer is known for her highly charismatic solo dance-theatre performances, and one can perhaps see why Friedenberg chose to absent herself from the stage in this case. Instead, the role of comic cut-up is here taken over by Stevenson, who in a virtuosic spoken word sequence demonstrates her mastery of faux-sincerity in praising the talents of her fellow performers in relation to herself, all the while simultaneously masquerading and revealing in her gestures the violence such comparisons are doing to her own psyche. Franklin is utterly compelling in a section in which she is literally straining to make herself seen and heard while being forcibly constrained by three of the other dancers. Poole makes Michael Bolton's power ballad "How Can We Be Lovers" utterly her own, despite the opprobrium of the others. And Martin has a hilarious Magic Mike moment in which we witness the uber B-boy give way to his inner Beyonce, swinging his hips, shaking his ass, and vogueing like there's no tomorrow. There's also a terrific duet between Stevenson and Franklin that turns (again, quite literally) on the often fine line between affection and aggression, as the two attempt to trade ever more physical kisses and caresses while also tossing out compliments that start to sound like personal indictments.

Before Stevenson and Franklin come to actual blows, Martin and Poole intervene, and the piece concludes with two couples waltzing to Prince's "Purple Rain." Youssef watches from the sidelines, the non-dancer yet again excluded from the group. Until, following a brief blackout, we see him centre stage, busting a set of grooves that, to refer back to his opening attempts to follow a choreographic score, suggests that sometimes to be part of a structure you just have to improvise.

Structured improvisation is the basis for Mutable Subject/Deanna Peters' NEW RAW. I first saw the piece as part of EDAM's fall choreographic series in 2013, and wrote briefly about that premiere here. Following a second outing in Edmonton in 2014, we are now getting, at DOTE 2015, version 3.0.

The piece begins with dancer Molly McDermott slouched in a chair downstage right, her head thrown back. She is illuminated from above by a soft spot. Peters stands beside her, in the half-light; her back is turned towards us, a sliver of which we can see courtesy of the suit jacket she is wearing back-to-front. As McDermott begins to twist and contort the lower half of her body in the chair, her toes somehow always in demi-pointe, Peters rests her right hand just above McDermott's right shoulder, as if seeking to calm or still or comfort her--or maybe just to prevent her movements from getting too out of control (a point to which I will return). At a certain point the chair begins to move, pulled backwards by an unseen Alexa Mardon, who is crouched behind it. By the time the chair comes to a stop upstage, McDermott's movements have become a riot of frenetic tics and crooked shapes and the chair starts to take on more ominous associations--as something to which McDermott's body has been tied or strapped, for example, and from which she is seeking to free herself (in which case that hovering hand of Peters is perhaps not so benevolent after all, and maybe that open slit from the backwards suit jacket starts to look like one we'd see on a standard issue hospital gown). Then, too, as an object that encodes and scripts an entire history of sedentary gendered behaviour, the chair carries associations of decorous bodily comportment (women don't usually get to manspread) against which McDermott might be rightly rebelling.

McDermott does eventually escape the chair's confines, and after she and Mardon exit the stage, Peters, still with her back too us, turns turntablist, putting on an old 45 and cranking up the volume. There follows a most compelling floor solo, in which Peters moves her body across the stage in a series of sexily languorous poses, exposing the gorgeous curves and silhouette of her back to us as the suit jacket falls about her head, but always keeping her face from us. Indeed, one of the things that is most interesting about the opening of NEW RAW is how consciously Peters has herself and her fellow female dancers avoid the (presumptively male) gaze of the audience: Peters dances with her back to us; McDermott, while in the chair, has her head cast upward to the ceiling; and Mardon in the opening sequence is completely invisible behind the chair. A little later on, following an amazingly physical duet between Mardon and McDermott in which the former aggressively "manhandles" (the word seems appropriate in this context) the latter, these three will perform an improvised trio of walking with album covers held in front of their faces. And when the fourth dancer in the group, Elissa Hanson, finally appears she does so by shimmying on stage on all fours, her ass in the air--and defiantly in our noses.

Hanson's delayed appearance is the prelude to the thumping climax of NEW RAW, in which the four dancers move from avoiding the potentially objectifying gaze of the audience to actively soliciting and even owning that gaze--of being quite explicitly in our faces. This begins when Hanson eventually stands upright and turns around, her acknowledgement of us and what we want prompting her to tease us with a catalogue of provocative poses culled from the catwalk and beauty pageants and striptease; a highlight during this sequence is when the flirty little moue Hanson begins to make with her mouth grows bigger and bigger, turning into a gaping open maw that functions simultaneously as a silent scream at the indignity of our presence before her. Thereafter, as the music gets louder and louder, the women improvise a series of forward and backward movement lines, their accelerations towards and retreats from us operating like a taunt. Yes, here we are dancing in front of you. But that doesn't mean we are dancing for you. It's a cheeky dance slap in the face. And it feels amazing.

P.

Edge 4 at Dancing on the Edge

Now in the homestretch of this year's Dancing on the Edge Festival, yesterday evening at the Firehall saw the debut of the Edge 4 program. Halifax-based Mocean Dance led off with Body Abandoned, a trio choreographed by Sara Coffin and danced by Coffin, Jacinte Armstrong, and Rhonda Baker. The piece continues Coffin's explorations in live digital motion capture. Cameras record the dancers' movements, with the ghosted, quasi-holographic images then projected--sometimes simultaneously, sometimes with a significant delay--on two scrims positioned, one in front of the other, upstage left. The effect can be quite haunting, as when, following an opening solo prelude by Coffin, the dancers emerge together from the stage left wings, moving horizontally between the two scrims in a tight formation, a statue of the three graces come to life, as the white negative outline of their bodies appears behind them. A similar outline would have appeared before them as well, but for the fact that someone had forgotten to remove the lens cap from the camera stationed at the lip of the stage, and so the downstage scrim initially functioned simply as a sheer canvas screen.

That problem solved, the rest of the dance unfolded without any technological hitches, and as a study in the kinaesthetic relations between the live and its digital archive, the piece was conceptually fascinating. The motion capture, focusing at times on one dancer or all three, recording their entire bodies or discarnating certain limbs, functions at once as an instant dance score and as a form of performance documentation, the trace digital outline of a given movement phrase as it floats onto and recedes from the scrims answering the paradox of dance's disappearance with an incitement to its repertory repetition. That said, I didn't find the choreography itself all that interesting, nor the individual and collective relationships between the dancers in the trio clearly defined. I understand that some of the movement was obviously composed with its video afterlife in mind; however, as there are long stretches of the piece where nothing is being projected on the scrims, what we are witnessing live on stage needs more dynamic force and tension. Are these women, all clad in white, as much physical avatars of one another as their respective digital images are of each of them individually? The ending of the piece hints at some kind of connection along these lines between the live dancing bodies on stage, but up until that point I was frankly more interested in the lines of connection on screen.

After a brief intermission, the audience settled in for the second piece on the program, The Mars Hotel, a duet choreographed by Ziyian Kwan, of dumb instrument Dance, for herself and Vision Impure's Noam Gagnon. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I have been following Ziyian's progress in the studio as she has been building this piece, and so part of my interest here is in accounting for how she and dramaturg Maiko Bae Yamamoto have tackled certain conceptual and technical issues that arose in the creation process.) A commission by the writer P.W. Bridgman, the piece takes its impetus from a similarly titled work of flash fiction that Bridgman wrote for his wife, and that is helpfully included as an insert with our programs. Reading Bridgman's prose, one discovers that he has condensed a lifetime's journey toward love into a couple's romantic and inevitable rendez-vous in Paris. Kwan--here collaborating with composer Peggy Lee, who performs the cello live on stage alongside trumpet player JP Carter and guitarist Aram Bajakian--has wisely chosen not to interpret Bridgman's words at face value. Instead, she has taken them as creative license to tackle head-on some of the bigger cliches surrounding that grossly overdetermined word we call LOVE.

Among other things, this means that following Carter's entrance from the Firehall's foyer and his pause to survey the audience with mild disdain, like an aloof lounge singer, before the closed stage curtains that lighting designer James Proudfoot has lavishly bathed in a velvety reddish-purple hue, the first thing we see after the curtains part is Gagnon, lying supine on the floor. A giant white, partially inflated air ball with the word LOVE in black letters on it is positioned atop of him. As the band launches into the first of its improvisatory riffs, Kwan emerges from the wings, pauses to quizzically survey Gagnon underneath the love ball (designed by Wendy Williams Watt, and available for purchase on-line), before retrieving an air pump from behind said ball and beginning to play/dance with it in a haphazard, almost mechanical manner. Clearly we are in a surreal, dreamlike space, one from which Gagnon, still underneath the ball, attempts to awaken Kwan. When his verbal entreaties won't work, he gets up and flings the love ball at her. This is the cue for the band to launch into a faster, louder and altogether more aggressive register, and for Kwan and Gagnon to physically launch themselves into a duet that matches the music in its propulsive energy. The dancers march across the stage--Kwan along a vertical axis, Gagnon along a horizontal one--narrowly missing each other before flinging their bodies to the floor, doing a series of side-by-side leapfrog jumps, and coming together in a succession of embraces and collisions that literally knock them both off their feet. LOVE as a delicate waltz of courtship this is not; this is love as competition, as contest--one that, for the moment, sees Gagnon winning, as this section culminates in him performing a frenzied air guitar solo to Bajakian's actual accompaniment while Kwan languishes dazed and confused on the floor against the air ball.

Later on in the piece Kwan and Gagnon will partner each other much more tenderly, the companionate besideness of their bodies--first one, then the other taking the lead or falling back in a charming shuffle-walk pattern, or else both offering their heads and backs as ballast for the transfer of weight--additionally textured by the lush notes of Lee and her bandmates, and in the process offering a portrait of danced intimacy based on another kind of coupling and mutual support. Bracketing these two duets there are also moments when Gagnon and Kwan separately address, and make themselves vulnerable before, the audience: Gagnon first whistles and then sings a bit of Dean Martin's famous "Birds and Bees" song, strategically changing the gender of one of the words in the second verse; and Kwan offers a catalogue of responses from friends and intimates based on her appeal for their personal one-word definitions of LOVE. She ends with her husband's response of "amateur," which as she tells us first flummoxed her, until her husband supplied a dictionary definition that contextualized the word as referring to one who practices an art, and especially a fine art, not for professional or financial reasons, but purely for the love of it.

In these and other vignettes that make up the piece what stood out most for me (and for my partner Richard, who was beside me in the audience last night) was how Kwan set about "queering" the (hetero)normative conventions of romantic love. Sometimes this is overt, as when Kwan wades into the audience to retrieve Gagnon's boyfriend; the two men share a long and steamy kiss while Kwan, having put on high heels and stripped to her black panties, leans over seductively at the waist to pick up the coat and dress she had to that point been wearing. Asymmetries of gender and sexuality are further played up when Kwan, still topless, is handed an industrial-strength blower by Gagnon, which she promptly inserts into the flaccid air ball's opening, pumping it up to maximum inflation in a parody of so many cultural symbols of masculine tumescence.

But really what I mean by Kwan's queer take on love in The Mars Hotel is that she is interested in exploring its tropes in a manner that is deliberately askew, one that resists any totalizing grand narrative in favour of a slow accretion of episodes that are consistently off-kilter, that keep us off-balance and throw us off-course. Like that big love ball that she and Gagnon fling across the stage at each other near the end of the piece. Indeed, like LOVE itself. Kwan even extends this principle to her treatment of Bridgman's source text, an excerpt of which she reads out only at the very conclusion of the piece, following a final interaction with that retrieved air pump. Thus displaced, and with the air having literally been let out of the dance, the text becomes one element in the work's overall score--a score that is unapologetically promiscuous, polymorphous and perverse--rather than this sacred thing to which the choreographer's vision must somehow be faithful.

It's a risky move, especially if the writer is sitting in the audience. But when Kwan brought him on stage to take a bow, it was clear that Bridgman loved it.

P.

Edge 3 at Dancing on the Edge

Two legendary Vancouver dance artists. Two one-word titles. Two additional firecracker performers. You couldn't ask for a better line-up as part of the Edge 3 program at this year's Dancing on the Edge Festival.

First up was Oxygen, choreographed by Kokoro Dance's Jay Hirabayashi as a commission for dancer Billy Marchenski, and set to the industrial "no wave" music of the Swans. The twenty-minute piece unfolds on a single vertical plane, beginning with Marchenski in a crouch justly slightly up of centre stage. He slowly unfurls his body to standing, pointing skyward with one index finger, before collapsing to the ground and beginning the phrase again, this time extending the opposite finger. The movement is simple but in its execution anything but pedestrian, with the strain in Marchenski's calves attesting to the effort required to unfold and bend, unfold and bend in such a controlled manner, such that the slight suspension with the pointed index finger at full verticality feels like time itself is being suspended, forced to conform to the rhythms of Marchenski's body, his breath, rather than the other way around. No doubt Barbara was after something similar with the statue poses that started off our Wreck Beach Butoh piece this past weekend, but I can say that after last night I for one still have much work to do when it comes to slowing down time through movement.

Eventually Marchenski begins his slow butoh walk downstage: legs bent, torso forward with heart centre open, an invisible orchid cupped in his throat. Arching his body backwards, Marchenski descends to the floor for a series of weight-transferring poses on elbows and knees, but never on all four at one time. Next, he stands upright with his back towards us. Slowly he begins to shake: first just his buttocks, then his hips and legs, finally his torso and arms and head, until a succession of tremors ripple like waves up and down his entire body. Again, what is so fascinating to watch about this is how the shaking accumulates in intensity over time, with Marchenski not so much becoming possessed by the gradually distributed movement as choosing to possess it from the beginning and redistribute it at will.

So, too, with how the piece ends, which sees Marchenski incorporating a series of arm waves and jumps into a hypnotic score that had me straining to register their trajectories via the trace visual residue of their arcing flights through the air. And such was the power of the choreography that it wasn't a strain at all to believe that the dancer before me really was flying.

The second piece on the program was Trickster, a collaboration between Karen Jamieson and the San Francisco-based bouffon artist Nathaniel Justiniano. The piece began as a Brief Encounters pairing back in 2013. So successful was that early version that Jamieson and Justiniano decided to develop the piece further, this time inviting Stefan Smulovitz to perform the viola live with them on stage.

Essentially the work unfolds as a structured improvisation, with Jamieson exploring a series of movement phrases anchored in different parts of her body and Justiniano (who wears a traditional bouffon costume, complete with double-sided ass and a hump at his back) burlesquing those explorations both physically and in words--often via hilarious direct address to the audience. However, this conceit would quickly wear thin if the movement itself weren't compelling to watch, with Justiniano matching the precision of Jamieson's classical ballet steps from Giselle, for example, with his own deft and extremely light-on-his-feet traversing of the stage.

Indeed, the piece ends with the two performers arriving at a mutually agreeable rapprochement between their two different physical vocabularies, launching into a final duet that--to reference their own concluding conversation--may not be conceptually "deep," but is nonetheless deeply satisfying to watch.

P.

Edge 1 at Dancing on the Edge

At last year's Dancing on the Edge, Justine Chambers created one of the buzz events of the Festival with her commissioned immersive dance-theatre installation/conceptual performance event/experiment in relational aesthetics, Family Dinner. It involved audience members sitting down as invited guests at a real dinner attended and hosted by some of the most amazing contemporary dance artists in the city. There, amid the passing of wine, the sharing of plates of food, and the animated conversation that attended both, one was able to witness in an intimate and thoroughly implicated manner the social choreography and gestural vocabulary that is a part of this ritual of everyday life: the surprising uses to which cutlery may be put; the different ways that people play with and eat their food; how we sit in our chairs; whether we put our elbows on the table; whether we lean in or sit back when we're talking to our neighbour; what's happening with our feet and legs underneath the table; and how we respond to the unexpected, outsized, or boorish bits of behaviour that test the limits of what we accept to be proper table etiquette.

From this first phase of the project, which I am sad to have missed, Chambers has extracted what she calls a "lexicon" of gestures that emerged from performers and audience members over the course of the dinners. In Family Dinner: The Lexicon, part of the Edge 1 program at this year's DOTE Festival, those gestures are now "re-performed" for us by five artist-collaborators, some of whom were part of the original installation. Stage-right to stage-left, the diners include: Aryo Khakpour, Kate Franklin, Josh Martin, Alison Denham, and Lisa Gelley. When the lights come up, they are all sitting at a long table, each with a plate of food before them. One by one they unfold their napkins, pick up their knives and forks, and taste a bit of their food. In its ritual repetition, the sequence exposes the dialectic of sameness and difference embedded in all repertory acts, including social ones like eating: Khakpour cuts his food with precision; Frankin stabs at hers with force; Martin hoovers his into his mouth, which is about an inch from his plate; Denham keeps turning her plate, taking a bit of each of the different food items in turn; and Gelley just pushes her food around before setting down her fork. From there, the movement gradually builds: a sequence involving the drinking from and filling of water and wine glasses (which neatly combines live sound picked up by two table mics with Nancy Tam's recorded score); bits of mimed conversation; the wiping of mouths with napkins; a wonderful below-the-table section, expertly lit by lighting designer James Proudfoot, that featured a lot of manspreading, including from the women. These and other gestures are sometimes performed in unison or in canon, but more often than not they are presented juxtapositionally, though whether as a structured improvisation or as set choreography I am not sure. If it's the latter--which Chambers' program note hints it might be--then what we saw last night is a marvel of bodily memory, the wholly seated movement as precise and virtuosic in its timing and articulation as any classical ballet. Chambers has called this phase of her project a live "archive of a shared movement vocabulary." Given my own interests in the sensory experience of performance archives, I couldn't have asked for a more stimulating experience.

Also on the program last night were pieces by Karissa Barry, Victoria-based Constance Cooke, and Vanessa Goodman. I'd seen an earlier version of Barry's Submission to Entropy at Dances for a Small Stage. It features Lexi Vajda and Jessica Wilkie as two black hoodie- and goggle-wearing creatures who slink about the stage in a simultaneously languid and alertly curious manner, adapting their movements to their sensory exploration of the space and each's occupation of that space (including a humorous rat-a-tat sequence involving those goggles). Cooke's Liminal: The Space Between is an excerpt from a larger work. What we saw is set on dancer Mark Sawh Medrano, who is a gorgeous mover, with an amazingly sinewy back and fluid arms that, when illuminated by the handheld lighting device of onstage "Shadow Player" Brett Owen, weres especially evocative. I can't say I understood or found especially interesting all of the other scenographic elements in the piece, including the faces that emerged at different times from Owen's projections, or the shower/bed-springy structure that Medrano danced behind.

Goodman's solo Container, a version of which she presented earlier this June at the Magnetic North Festival, showcases what an amazing mover she is. Clad in nude-coloured dance semis and what looked like mini combat boots, and combining hyper-kinetic android-like movements with various club grooves, Goodman reminded me at various points of a cross between Priss from Blade Runner and Miley Cyrus--but without the look-at-me twerking, and with a much more gorgeous silhouette. At one point, early on in the piece, Goodman launches into a deep lunge, arching her back in way that had me wishing I could mimic that pose on the beach. Then, too, there is Goodman's innate musicality, as when she pulses her upper body and arms in simple yet hypnotic time to the electronic sound score by Loscil (the Vancouver-based artist Scott Morgan). To go back to that sci-fi connection I made via the Blade Runner reference, Container ends with Goodman dancing in a single, slowly fading spot upstage (the lighting is again by Proudfoot), her upper body raised to the ceiling as if she is about to be transported to another world, one that is big enough to contain her outsized talents.

P.

Misfit Blues at Dancing on the Edge

The 2015 Dancing on the Edge Festival kicked off last night at the Firehall with the return of Festival favourite Paul-André Fortier, here presenting a new duet, Misfit Blues, that he choreographed for himself and Regina-based dance legend Robin Poitras. The set, designed by Edward Poitras, is comprised of a large white plastic circular tarpaulin that floats like a big glowing moon above the black marley of the stage, and upon which, positioned slightly stage right, there is a bench wrapped in what appeared to be layers of saran wrap or clear packing tape. Around the edges of this space are various props: piles of clothes stage right and left; a large stand-up electric fan upstage right; a closed suitcase on a tabletop with the Latin phrase "pro pelle cutem" written on it (which, after a Google search, I have subsequently learned is the motto of the Hudson's Bay Company, meaning "skin for skin [and/or leather]") upstage left; and, most curiously (and slightly menacingly), another suitcase downstage left, this one open and spilling various fur pelts before the open mouth of a stuffed dog.

Our senses thus primed to anticipate something more theatrical or narrative-based, Fortier and Poitras immediately undercut these expectations, emerging casually from the wings to strike a series of simple conjunctive poses in the middle of the white tarpaulin. There is no music, no fancy lighting: just two bodies silently arcing and torquing their arms and torsos and legs to form a succession of symbiotic tableaux. All we hear is the slight squish of the dancers' shoes (Fortier's black oxfords and Poitras' bright orange trainers) as they shift from position to position. (A bit later Poitras will change her shoes, joining Fortier in making another foot-related sound on the tarpaulin by crawling about on all fours and tapping their toes on the floor.) Eventually the pair moves to the bench, where they resume their sculptural duet, but this time sitting, and mainly shifting the balance and direction and weight of their upper bodies in response to each other. At a certain point Fortier gets up from the bench and moves downstage, bending his legs and extending one arm to the side, beginning a version of a solo that he will repeat throughout the piece, one that builds on his trademark wingspan to trace a series of gestural phrases and semi-indexical hails through the air. Indeed, one of the most compelling things to me about Fortier as a dancer is how he moves his arms: to watch him slide one of these limbs from his side and extend it into space, always punctuating the movement with a clear separation between the fingers, is to share in a sublime moment of kinaesthetic grace.

Not that Poitras is any slouch in the grace department (although it must be said that Fortier has given her a less obviously "dancey" movement vocabulary, and no solo, preferring to carry her around at the beginning like a rag-doll, and later even dancing her body for her). In one of my favourite moments in the piece, Fortier begins "walking" in place, pumping his arms forward and back in a rhythmic motion. Poitras, who has been doing a quick change off to the side, joins him mid-stride, as it were, perfectly coordinating her arms to Fortier's. At a certain point the pair begins a slow turn on the spot, all the while continuing to windmill their arms. Then the pace quickens, to the point where Poitras' arms start to flail off in all directions. But, without missing a beat, she finds the rhythm again, matching Fortier arm for arm, breath for breath. It's such a simple bit of unison choreography, but in its very simplicity reveals something profound about the beauty of two bodies being perfectly in sync.

That said, Misfit Blues, is not merely an abstract exploration of the possibilities of pedestrian movement.  Those props are there for a reason, and Fortier and Poitras, in addition to revealing to us their dancing selves, also take on what I'm going to call clown roles, speaking to each other in pidgin Russian as they enact various scenes of physical buffoonery, starting with an energetic upside down sequence on the bench. These bits are hilarious, but are also filled with magical and truly surprising instances of movement, as when--most wondrously for me--the pair use that aforementioned fan to compete to see whose white tissue can be blown the furthest into space. Here, and elsewhere in the piece, we are shown that dance is not just a sequence of choreographed steps; it is the movement of all things in time and space.

Sometimes that movement is more and sometimes less theatrical; the juxtaposition of the pedestrian and the performative in this piece invites interpretation, to be sure, but it also resists easy synthesis. Just ask that stuffed dog, who, while not speaking, it turns out has been keeping a very close eye on the proceedings.

P.

Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp: Day 5

So it's the end of the first week and I'm still standing. What's more, I've apparently learned an hour's worth of choreography.

At the end of yesterday's session Barbara divided us into ten couples and, together with Jay, taught us the duet that will conclude the piece. I was paired with Molly McDermott, a beautiful professional dancer who has appeared in previous Kokoro pieces (most recently an excerpt from The Book of Love at VIDF), and who will also be performing again in the latest version of Deanna Peters'/Mutable Subject's "New Raw" as part of the upcoming Dancing on the Edge Festival. Dancing with Molly made me a bit nervous at first, as I was supremely conscious of the mistakes I was making. However, she was terrifically accommodating and made things even easier by letting me trust her dancer's body and intellect to solve various problems involving weight and support. I have to climb on top of her second position plie at a certain point, and then later I have to carry her upon my back. In the latter case I had to learn to bend lower to the ground without tilting over, while also drawing her right arm over my shoulder as far as her armpit. This meant that she could essentially just slip onto my back and all I needed to do was stand up and then walk upstage, into what was the imaginary sea.

Barbara has talked about the need for us, over the course of this process, to become an ensemble. Obviously there's still work to do, but after the first 25 hours I feel like we're getting there. Notwithstanding the weekend of epsom salt baths ahead of me, I truly am looking forward to more.

P.

Edge 2 at DOTE

Richard and I ended our 2014 Dancing on the Edge Festival by taking in the final Edge 2 mixed program. Not only were we looking forward to each of the pieces, we were grateful to escape the heat.

First up was Natalie, a solo (of sorts) for plastic orchid factory's Natalie Lefebvre Gnam that serves as a companion piece to the company's earlier James, about husband James Gnam's relationship with The Nutcracker (and about which I have previously blogged here). As Lefevbre Gnam explains via a series of oversized title cards at the top of the piece, in a conceit reminiscent of the famous black and white video of Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues, both works were born out of the detritus of what was to have been a duet choreographed for the couple by Lee Su-Feh. However, when Natalie sustained a knee injury just two weeks prior to the premiere, the work went ahead as the aforementioned solo for James. The plan was then to create a companion piece for Natalie, also choreographed by Lee; however, after a series of delays, Lee eventually dropped out, and the work on the program is now the result of a creative collaboration between husband and wife and brothers Jacques and Gilles Poulin-Denis.

Like James, Natalie adopts a discourse of theatrical representation reminiscent of what we find in the work of Jérôme Bel (especially his [auto]biographical dancer portraits) in order to expose the institutional frames of dance and the dancing life. Also as in James (not to mention Bel's Véronique Doisneau), one of those frames is classical ballet, with the music from Adolphe Adam's Giselle swelling at various moments throughout the piece as, for example, Lefebvre Gnam rounds her arms into first position and demonstrates with her hands and fingers an expert arrondi. Mostly, however, the piece is concerned with the funding institutions that govern--and put limits on--the creativity of contemporary dance artists. A digitally manipulated voiceover loop of emails to Lefebvre Gnam from various government agencies detailing their application, disbursement, and reporting requirements plays throughout the piece, accounting (in more ways than one) for both its form and content. To this end, a series of hula hoops are employed in increasingly clever and comic ways throughout the piece, with Lefebvre Gnam not just jumping through them, but also playing games of hopscotch and pick-up with them, encircling her body with ring after ring in a telling visual metaphor for everything else she is balancing in her life in addition to her creative practice (husband James and son Finn figure at key moments). By the end of the piece, however, Lefebvre Gnam is able to turn this plastic bureaucratic enclosure into something aesthetically beautiful and potentially liberating, the hoops eventually arranged along her arms and back in such a manner as to suggest the fairy wings of Giselle or, even more powerfully, the entire celestial sphere that the Titan Atlas holds up with his shoulders. On such a tiny frame as Lefebre Gnam's, the latter image speaks volumes about how much artists can achieve with so little.

The second piece on the program was Starr Muranko's Spine of the Mother, a solo excerpt from a larger work-in-progress by Starrwind Dance Projects involving Indigenous dance artists in Canada and Peru. The gorgeous and charismatic dancer Tasha Faye Evans begins downstage left, her back to us, and with her right arm stretched out to the wings. No music plays, but we hear a clicking sound, and eventually it is revealed that she holds some talismanic stones in her hand. A source of energy, the stones unleash in Evans a torrent of movement, including an opening series of spiraling turns that I could have watched go on forever. Eventually two of the stones get placed at different points on the stage; a third is offered, at the close of the piece, to an audience member, a gift that via Evans' powerful kinesthetic connection with her audience we are all able to share.

Finally, the evening closed with Ziyian Kwan and dumb instrument Dance's a slow awkward, a duet created in collaboration with James Gnam (who has certainly been busy this DOTE Festival). The piece begins with Gnam entering upstage left, dressed in overalls and carrying an old blue suitcase. He walks towards the centre of the stage on tip toe. There he is met by Kwan, who has emerged from the wings upstage right, also in overalls, but on her knees pushing a bright orange suitcase and, crucially, wearing red high heels. For, among other things, the work is an exploration of gender, one that in the context of danced movement recalls the famous maxim about Ginger Rogers--that she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels.

Not that a slow awkward is so binaristic. When their respective suitcases eventually touch, the contact unleashes in Gnam and Kwan a tsunami of highly physical movement, with each picking up the other on their backs, or rolling about the floor in a style reminiscent of contact improv, or miming the fight and martial arts choreography of action films (there's even a High Noon-like whistle in the sound score and at various moments Kwan and Gnam cock their handss on their hips like guns). Eventually the overalls come off, revealing Kwan in a men's dress shirt and underwear and Gnam in a full-length skirt, a visual conceit that nicely highlights questions of cross-gender embodiment and the mix of masculinity and femininity within us all. Nowhere is this more compellingly staged in the piece than in the moment near the end when Kwan and Gnam step into the same set of overalls, threading their arms through the sleeves and dancing a slow waltz.

There is a final brief coda after this, which repeats an earlier sequence involving the positioning of the suitcases into a chair back, and leading to a tentative embrace (except Kwan is missing from the picture this time). As moving and conceptually integrated as this bit was, I think I would have preferred the work to have ended with that zipped up waltz. Regardless, a slow awkward was one of the highlights of the Festival for me and it's so exciting to see Kwan, such a compelling interpreter of others' work, move into this new phase of her career as a choreographer.

P.