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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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 32

Yesterday morning Emmalena Fredriksson stopped by my Woodward's office to tell me about her dance history. That history began in Emmalena's native Sweden, specifically in a small town to the west of Stockholm called Örebro. Later, when Emmalena began a three-year program at the prestigious and demanding Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD) she found herself joined by seven other dancers from Örebro, with other members of their cohort asking them what exactly was in the water there to produce so many talented dancers. Emmalena downplayed the specialness of Örebro, but did state that the recreational dance scene in Sweden is very different than in Canada, with robust community programs in every city that are fully funded by the state, and with her high school additionally having a dance program in which students could major.

That said, Emmalena said that when she graduated from high school there was still only one professional dance academy in Sweden, which was located in the north, and which was mainly geared toward the entertainment industry (e.g. training back-up dancers for musicals and the Eurovision song contest). Emmalena dutifully completed the curriculum--comprised solely of jazz, ballet and Cunningham--at said institution, but craving more rigorous contemporary training she subsequently auditioned for and was accepted by SEAD. There, the training couldn't have been more different, focusing as it did on release-based and somatic techniques alongside lots of floor work. Another thing Emmalena had to get used to was that her instructors changed every six weeks and that she and the other dancers were subjected to regular evaluation, with the threat of being kicked out always hovering above them. Nevertheless, she thrived at SEAD, which fostered her choreographic and composition talents, as well as her love of improvisation. Emmalena also recounted a memory of being in a work choreographed by Susan Rethorst that was performed to an empty auditorium, with the audience gathered in an adjoining studio, the door to which each dancer in the piece would pass through briefly only once. Apparently it caused a minor scandal (it was a ticketed performance open to the public), but Emmalena remembers it as an utterly joyful piece that taught her so much about the concept of presence.

It was in 2013 that Emmalena moved to Vancouver to complete her MFA at Simon Fraser University; she was interested in interdisciplinary practice and also knew a friend of Daisy Thompson, who was then also in the program. Gradually she met and began collaborating with other members of the community, including Alexa Mardon, Lexi Vajda, Renée Sigouin, and Ashley Whitehead. Many of these dancers would perform in Emmalena's MFA graduating project, Dance Work/Work Dance (2015), which was my first introduction to Emmalena's choreographic talents, and which has been performed in various gallery spaces around the city. Composer and fellow SFU alum Alex Mah has also become a frequent collaborator, sharing with Emmalena a love of improvisation and live scoring.

To my question about why she has stayed in Vancouver since completing her MFA Emmalena first sighed, explaining that she was in the throes of applying for permanent residency, a particularly fraught and expensive undertaking. Then she said that since graduating high school in Sweden Vancouver has been the longest place she's every stayed (going on four years now) and that notwithstanding the expense and her concerns about her long-term financial sustainability, she finds the dance scene very exciting and inspiring, with friends invested in each other's practices, and with work that she wants to see and support. As long as those things remain in place, and as long as she can restore her soul by heading to the mountains to hike and ski and snowboard, Emmalena has said she'll continue to call Vancouver home.

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Dance Work/Work Dance at the Audain Gallery, SFU

By now there is a long tradition of dance in gallery and museum spaces. The Judson Church artist-choreographers pioneered this concept back in the 1960s. And, more recently, Ralph Lemon curated the series Some sweet day in 2012, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first Judson concert with a series at MoMA that paired works by founding Judson artists like Steve Paxton and Deborah Hay alongside pieces by a younger generation of choreographers, including Jerome Bel and Faustin Linyekula. (Hay's "Blues" created something of a minor scandal with its unexamined racial and gender politics, but that's another story.) Often, however, in jettisoning the concert stage, these artists merely re-erected the proscenium inside the gallery: whether seated on the floor in a storefront space in Soho in 1962 or on tiered chairs in the atrium of MoMA in 2012, the audience continues to be disciplined by the time-specificty of the traditional dance program (first this piece and then this piece, each followed by applause), and so is not encouraged to think very deeply about the relationship between the dance and the institutional politics of the exhibition space.

It is just this kind of thinking that dance artist Emmalena Fredriksson is trying to activate in Dance Work/Work Dance, which she has created in partial fulfillment of her MFA requirements in the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU, and which is on at the Audain Gallery at SFU Woodward's through this Saturday. Fredriksson has composed four durational pieces, each based on an improvisational looping score, which her roster of ten dancers (herself included) performs on a rotating basis over the course of the gallery's opening hours. The works are set in distinct yet proximate sections of the gallery's white cube, and apart from two drawings on the floor in the central exhibition space, a few found objects in one of the adjacent rooms, and a conceptualist map-cum-table of the dancers' scheduled rotations through each piece on the wall facing Hastings Street, no art objects per se are displayed. Visitors to the gallery must actively wander through the exhibition space in order to encounter each work, always aware that however absorbed we become in watching one piece, another is happening nearby--and aware as well that the longer we stay and watch each, the more texture they will gain (by virtue of the different dancers bringing their own distinct physicality and movement vocabulary, not to mention aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities, to each score's set of instructions).

Add to this the fact that we are also watching our fellow spectators watching and that, depending on when and in what manner we enter the exhibition space, we might be wont to mistake a cluster of carefully posed and intent audience bodies as part of the work, and one begins to see just how complex Fredriksson's piece is. (It is not for nothing that one of the books included in the display case at the gallery's entrance is Jacques Ranciere's The Emancipated Spectator.) Shifting our disciplinary frames of reference by placing dance in a gallery setting, Fredriksson is asking us to rethink the ways we have been trained to receive dance as art (the "dance work" part of her title). But, in so doing, she is also confronting us very materially with the labour that goes into making dance dance--as both a noun and a verb. To "work dance" is to call on a repertory set of skills that are intuitive and deeply felt; that have a starting point in time and space but not necessarily any fixed end; that repeat but also respond to variation; that are unique and individual but also fit into a larger pattern. All of this is evident in the written scores Fredriksson has composed for and with her dancers (and which we are provided in the exhibition catalogue), and the cumulative effect of watching the execution of movement last night--both the moments of stillness and the moments of more accelerated energy--was what so often gets obfuscated in traditional concert dance, especially ballet: the time and effort that goes into making dance look timeless and effortless.

That goes for the audience as well. To do justice to the work of Fredriksson and her collaborators, we need to put a requisite amount of time and effort into working through all of the different kinds of dance that are going on, including our own. As Fredriksson writes in the catalogue, "To dance like no one is watching and everything is seen, to watch like no one is dancing and everything is dance."

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Neither Here Nor There at SFU Woodward's

The MFA students at SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts are staging a year-end festival of new work called Neither Here Nor There at SFU Woodward's through this Sunday. Last night I caught a double bill of very intriguing dance pieces.

Stroking the Unknown Dog is a structured improvisation for five dancers and a musician conceived by choreographer Emmalena Fredriksson. Responding to a set of instructions from Fredriksson, to the music (by Alex Mah), to each other, and no doubt to the audience (who sit in the round), the dancers make real-time movement choices of shape, proximity, massing, etc. that, in the words of Fredriksson, reveal "notions of individuality, community and the animals within."

Aril is a collaboration between dancer-choreographer Yves Candau and lighting designer Kyla Gardiner (who was also responsible for the illumination in Stroking the Unknown Dog). Exploring "the interplay between form and function in ... emergent patterns of human locomotion," Candau isolates the drive toward mobility in individual limbs and joints, crafting out of everyday activities like reaching and bending a mesmerizing tapestry of movement. Embroidering and overlaying this tapestry with live lighting projections, Gardiner adds rich visual texture as she alternates her washes of colour from inky pools of blue and black to vibrant splashes of red and wispy swirls of white.

The festival kicked off on Wednesday with a durational five-hour performance installation by Luciana D'Anunciacao called The door is open, please come in. While I could only stay for a brief half hour, it was enough time to take in a gorgeous ritual cleansing sequence involving water, herbs, flower petals and a length of white muslin--into which D'Anunciacao first wrapped and then extricated her body. Additional installation elements included a large looping video projection at one end of the studio (wrapped around the corner of the wall and showcasing D'Anunciacao's trademark play with perspective), a hammock in another corner, ripe mangos laid out on the floor, and an immersive sound score by Alex Mah. The installation was certainly a feast for the senses. I only wished I could have stayed longer.

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