Dances for a Small Stage at PAL Studio Theatre

For the latest iteration of Dances for a Small Stage, artistic producer Julie-anne Saroyan has set up shop this weekend at the intimate Performing Arts Lodge Studio Theatre on Cardero Street. The gala program last night was a mix of the classical and the contemporary, both musically and in terms of movement.

The first piece, Flow, paired composer and musician Loscil with burlesque dancer Burgandy Brixx. Loscil played his electronic music live, via a computer and digital console, as various images of the waves and shoreline and the ebb and flow of the tide washed across the upstage screen. Following a brief blackout, Brixx appears on a raised upstage platform, positioned like a mermaid upon a rock. Unfurling her long legs, she moves onto her back and begins a series of bicycle kicks. Before long the black tunic she is wearing comes off, revealing sparkly pasties and a g-string. Brixx then begins an elaborate fan dance that forms a somewhat odd visual juxtaposition to Locsil's hypnotic music. Without the standard sis, boom, bang of the standard bump and grind burlesque score that cues us for the slow tease and reveal of skin, we are left to wonder at the particular erotics of display being invoked here--especially as Brixx's body is interpellated at various points into the screen projections.

Following a longish intermission, Small Stage mainstay Karissa Barry led off the next set with a solo set to a sampled stop-and-start score by the group Venetian Snares; her piece also featured a unique lighting installation. Next up was Vanessa Goodman's Contrapuntus, which uses Bach's "Art of the Fugue"--here transcribed for violin and played live by Meredith Bates--to explore parallel techniques of contrapuntal movement. Dancers Lara Barclay and Bevin Poole begin standing in close proximity, weaving their limbs around each other's bodies in perfect synchronous response, and only rarely touching. In the same way that in the fugue one voice or instrument will begin a musical phrase and then another voice or instrument will come in to match it, but in a different pitch, so here do we see these matchless dancers, so attuned to each other's rhythms, initiating, responding to, and subtly changing the directional flow of their paired movement. Literally opening things up in the second half of this short excerpt, Goodman choreographs a variation on her main theme by having Barclay and Poole face off on a diagonal, almost like toreadors, before bringing them together centre stage for more physical and hands-on partnering. Here I detected some trace phrases from Goodman's Wells Hill, which premiered earlier this year at the Chutzpah! Festival (and which featured Barclay and Poole); afterwards, Goodman confirmed to me that this excerpt will indeed form part of the larger work she is building, which is based on her research into the collaborations between Marshall McLuhan and Glenn Gould, whose "So You Want to Write a Fugue?" is a famously witty take on Bach.

I had a double dose of Le Grand Continental reunion last night; not only was LGC rehearsal director Barclay performing, but rehearsal assistant Caroline Liffman's The Fitzner Sister, a solo for Lina Fitzner, was part of the program. Set to a musical loop by Colin Stetson, the piece sees Fitzner, dressed in an amazing black and red tutu, move in and out of various classical ballet positions and poses, at the heart of which is a series of slowly and precisely executed arabesques. Because, unlike in most classical ballet, Fitzner is moving into her leg extensions without the aid of a male partner to help balance her, and because her poses are slowed down, held for much longer and not tied to set musical cues, what was made most manifest to me in the piece was the sheer physical effort and training that goes into each movement. In a big ballet production we are wont to gloss over such effort because classical technique is premised on the willful erasure of the fleshly corporeality of the dancer's body. As Arlene Croce famously wrote, onstage it is the ballerina's arabesque that is real, not her leg. Precisely because Liffman draws our attention to the realness of Fiztner's legs--which, unlike the typical prima ballerina's, are not stick-thin and sheathed in lyotards--the somatic illusion proffered by Croce is here deconstructed and materially exposed to feminist scrutiny. Which is to say to both Caroline and Lina: right on, sister!

The middle section of the evening concluded with dancer Caitlin Griffin improvising to the live musical stylings of street musician David Morin. I was not all that taken with Griffin's movement riffs, which seemed a bit wan and ho-hum. But Morin's deft use of his looping machine to overlay his guitar licks, vocalizations and finger snaps was most enjoyable.

After the second intermission, we were treated to a "musical intermezzo" featuring Elisa Thorn on harp,  Meredith Bates on violin, and Marina Hasselberg on cello. Apart from Debussy's "Claire de Lune," all the compositions were by Thorn and I was quite taken by the tonal juxtapositions. However, I'm not sure it suited the normally staccato beats of flamenco, which is what we were treated to when dancer Dayna Szyndrowski joined the trio on stage. I wanted to hear more of Szyndrowski's clacking feet, but it was almost as if she was afraid to cut fully loose for fear of drowning out the musicians. I did admire her lovely, blooming floreo, and there were several appreciative ole's at the end of the piece.

P.

Modulating Movement and Music

For the latest edition (number 31) of Dances for a Small Stage, Artistic Producer Julie-anne Saroyan has teamed up with Music on Main's David Pay to curate an evening of music and dance that coincides with the launch of MoM's Modulus Festival. The result is one of the best and most tightly conceived DSS offerings in a long time.

The evening is divided into two halves. In the first, Toronto's Cecilia String Quartet (Min-Jeong Koh and Sarah Nematallah on violin, Caitlin Boyle on viola, and Rachel Desoer on cello) perform Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No. 1 in D Major, Opus 11. Each of the four movements is accompanied by a different dance sequence. In the first, the evening's mute maestro, Billy Marchenski, appears perplexed by the Moderato that he has failed to initiate, but that has gotten away from him nonetheless. This is followed by former Ballet BC star Makaila Wallace dancing to Karissa Barry's delightful interpretation of the Andante section; b-boy Stewart Iguidez popping and locking and dropping and posing to the Scherzo; and, finally, Vanessa Goodman, in a sheer white hoop skirt designed by Deborah Beaulieu, channeling her inner Isadora Duncan to the rousing Finale.

Following an intermission, the second half of the program proceeds as a series of short choreographic riffs on the music of John Oswald, the electro-acoustic composer from Ontario best known for his philosophy and practice of "plunderphonics"--transcribing, adapting, rearranging, collaging and just generally mashing up previously existing recordings. Most of the choreography is provided by Oswald's partner, Holly Small, who was one of Saroyan's dance instructors at York University. This includes an excerpt from Small's award-winning Radiant (2009) that was danced to stunning effect by Sean Ling and Goodman. They are joined by or alternate with Jessica Runge and Small herself for most of the other pieces, although Iguidez returns in the penultimate excerpt to display some of his own stylin' moves to an Oswald rearrangement of a Curtis Lee song. The Cecilia String Quartet also reappears briefly to perform a beautiful piece by Oswald, preLieu (1991), based on Beethoven's B-flat Major quartet.

Interspersed throughout the evening are also some vintage videos, including of Glenn Gould, whose famous humming and vocal accompaniment to his own piano playing becomes another important motif linking the expressivity of sound with that of bodily movement.

P.

Dances for a Small Stage 29

For their 29th incarnation, MovEnt's Dances for a Small Stage decamped from their longtime home at the Legion on Commercial Drive and took up residence this past Thursday through Friday at the Ukrainian Cultural Centre on East 10th. Not only did that mean I could walk to the event secure in the knowledge I would get in (another innovation of Artistic Producer Julie-anne Saroyan coming in the form of advance on-line ticket purchase), but should I have wanted to I could have also purchased a steaming plate of perogies. But as Saroyan announced in her curtain speech, everything else was the same, not least the series' signature 10 X 13-foot stage.

In addition to the dance quotes supplied by emcee James Fagan Tait as mini-entr'actes, props were a theme in last night's offerings, as was the use of voice-over text. Leading things off was Lara Barclay in the first of two excerpts from James Gnam and plastic orchid factory's post_v2.0. I reviewed the first version of the full-length work here. It was interesting to see some of the piece's signature effects reworked, including Barclay's manipulation of piles of tulle in such a confined space, which from my perspective at the back of the auditorium had the uncanny effect of accentuating and extending almost beyond belief the arabesque that she uses at one point to lift the material off of her body. MACHiNENOiSY's Daelik was next up, also with pliable material in tow, in this case several shiny metallic sheets which he proceeded to sculpt into little silver android-like shrubs. Waving a final single sheet in front of himself as he pivoted behind the privet hedge he had fashioned, Daelik eventually laid down upstage and dismantled his work, covering himself in the sheets. Just when I thought things were getting a bit tedious, we got the coup-de-théâtre we'd been waiting for, as Daelik rolled and flipped horizontally across the stage, the metallic sheets flying off of him in a gorgeous shimmery molting.

Dayna Szyndrowski and Elisa Thorn win the award for the most innovative improvisation of the evening, combining tap, live harp music, and recorded voice-over from Nina Simone to create an ode to the freedom of movement (acoustic and kinetic) in open to somebody else. Then it was back to another excerpt from post_v2.0, this one featuring Sammy-Jane Gray, Bevin Poole and Lara Barclay again in Gnam's witty take on the corps de ballet from Swan Lake. In their saucer-like tutus, in or out of unison, whether rising elegantly on demi-point or bending to show us their behinds in a Miley Cyrus-esque twerk, these swans cannot fail to delight. The final piece on the first half of the program was Jean-François Duke's Eva... solo for Jean. The choreography, tied very explicitly to a song by Marie-Jo Thério, was a bit too pantomimic for my liking, but there is no denying that Duke, here from Quebec City in part to learn from and export Saroyan's small stage concept to la belle province, is a gorgeous mover.

First up following intermission was Kirsten Wicklund's Ancient Lace, which started as a fairly conventional pas de deux for Wicklund and partner Hayden Fong--until the gender roles of pursuer and pursued were rather cleverly upended. And, as always, it is eye-opening to see classical ballet lifts transported to such a confined space. Julianne Chapple's sea/unseen is set to an audio loop of voices talking about near-drowning experiences; unfortunately I couldn't see the first half of Chapple's evocation of the watery murk we were hearing about, as it was mostly confined to floor work. She does get vertical near the end, but only after first removing her white shift and underwear and dunking them, along with her long mane of hair, into a bucket of water on the stage. A bit too mimetic, perhaps, but the watery spray coming off of her hair as she then spun about was nicely captured and amplified by the light.

After a quick mopping of the stage came Farley Johansson's in Bipedicularity, which is as apt a title as I can think of for Johansson's explosive mix of contemporary, hip hop, and acrobatic movement. Breaking horizontally, suspending himself vertically, and just generally defying the laws of gravity, Johansson's virtuosic display of sharp, sudden, hyper-fluid energy was a reminder that a small stage doesn't mean you can't think (and do) big. Finally, the evening ended with co-curator Karissa Barry's evocative "the last part of the beginning, starting at the end," a duet for Barry and Jessica Wilkie that had them both in Tara Cheyenne-like goggle and hoodies, confronting the apocalypse with precise unison and non-unison movement.

A rich evening of dance. I look forward to what's in store for number 30.

P.