The Mars Hotel and Kwan Yin at The Firehall

This week marks the return of Ziyian Kwan and dumb instrument Dance to The Firehall Arts Centre, this time in a presentation of Kwan's first full evening of dance. Included as part of the program is the return of The Mars Hotel, a piece based on a work of flash fiction by writer P.W. Bridgman that premiered on the same stage at the 2015 Dancing on the Edge Festival. An exuberant, whimsical, muscular and ultimately joyous ode to and deconstruction of that biggest of cliches, love, the work's many strange and delightfully askew set-pieces (including the deflating and blowing up of a giant white love ball) are structured around a duet Kwan performs with Vision Impure's Noam Gagnon.

In Gagnon Kwan has found her impish and physically fearless dance soulmate and I think this work remains such a hit with audiences in part because of the obvious improvisatory chemistry between both performers. Then, too, there is the crackerjack three piece musical ensemble, Handmade Blade, that accompanies the dancers on stage, including Aram Bajakian on electric guitar, JP Carter on trumpet, and the incomparable Peggy Lee on cello. You wouldn't normally think that a trio made up of these instruments would work, but their jamming last night (following a bit of a technical issue at intermission) was fantastic, the hypnotic admixture of sound contributing to the overall dreamlike quality of the piece. Indeed, if anything I think this work has gotten even tighter and more sharply focused since its premiere (about which I wrote at more length here); some bits have gone by the wayside and some bits have been added, but the unique combination of movement, music, text, and visual and costume design which remains Kwan's signature continues to offer so many different and rewarding ways into the piece. Not that all went according to original plan on the latter front last night, about which I will have more to say in a moment.

But before that let me mention the first and newest work on last night's program. Kwan Yin is a twenty-minute duet that Kwan has created with her 77-year old father, Lihuen Kwan. Wanting to explore the idea of patience via the heart sutra of the Chinese Buddhist Bodhisattva who gives the piece its title, Kwan decided to work with the person with whom she is most often impatient. What has resulted is a tender father-daughter exploration of the "colour of emptiness," again accompanied by the live on-stage cello stylings of Lee. The piece begins with the three performers in separate moons of half-light; Lihuen Kwan, sitting on a chair, is the furthest downstage. His daughter, whom he will come to identify as his shadow, slowly advances towards him, taking first one and then the other arm before letting each drop, the weightless thud of Lihuen Kwan's hands on his thighs at this point signalling how far apart these two yet remain. But the pair will eventually come together, including in some very moving bits of unison and partnering late in the piece. It is a testament to the reserves of patience Kwan ended up finding and drawing upon in the making of this piece that, in these sequences, she let's her father (who is certainly a spry mover) take the lead.

Last night's audience was filled with local high school students, who were very engaged and attentive throughout these two challenging works of contemporary dance. And while none of them stayed for the talkback that I was invited to lead after the performance, a concession that Kwan was asked to make in relation to their presence became the focus of some conversation. To be specific: there is a moment in The Mars Hotel when Kwan, clad only in black panties and pumps, inserts an industrial strength inflater into the love ball and lets loose. It's an image that calls up and simultaneously subverts any number of gendered stereotypes around sexuality and power. However, last night Kwan was asked by Firehall Artistic Producer Donna Spencer to cover her breasts in deference to the attending high school students. After much consideration, Kwan decided to comply, but also posted about the decision on Facebook. The response, she said during the talkback, generated a lot of debate, some of which carried over into our conversation last night--and which, to Kwan's credit, she refused to characterize as a simple matter of an artist being censored or having to compromise her feminist principles. As she has since put it to me in an email message about the matter, there were other, equally important, issues at play. And so I will end by quoting Ziyian herself, because she states things so eloquently: "This is what I want to share, after performing to a sold out house of 60% high school students. My dilemma about censorship was secondary. The schools were Magee and Templeton – representing the Vancouver East Side and Shaughnessy, two conversely different neighbourhoods in terms of perceived demographics. It was a small sacrifice to alter my costume so that I could share my work with this audience. What a gift to have these people witnessing Noam and Ken kiss, watching my dad dance, listening to the wild and poetic sounds of Handmade Blade. The students held my work in their gaze and felt to me, ageless. Fully present as much as they wanted to be, they infused the performance with energy and the night was magical. What more could I ask? They didn’t stay for the talk back but they stayed to receive the work. They stayed to share the beautiful transparency of their eyes and to see what they saw. This resonates with me and eclipses my questions that were founded in the politics of gender and power. At the end of the day, the reciprocal nature of art is boundless. It is love."

P

Edge 1 at DOTE

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

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

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

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

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

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

P.