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.
P
Showing posts with label Karissa Barry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karissa Barry. Show all posts
Friday, July 14, 2017
Sunday, July 5, 2015
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.
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.
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Veritas.trUth and Dance Machine at DOTE
Earlier this afternoon I took in two site-based works as part of the Dancing on the Edge Festival.
The first was Karissa Barry's Veritas.trUth, staged in the SFU Woodward's Cordova Street atrium and made in collaboration with students from the Modus Operandi Training Program. Six dancers, five women and one man, begin in the fetal position on the concrete plinths built into the brick risers leading towards the entrance to the Woodward's building. They are all clad in black and each sports a slash of orange paint down the length of their right arms. As a mix of house music (initially sounding quite Asian-themed) pours from two adjacent speakers, the dancers slowly unfurl their bodies, raising those orange arms skyward and gradually rising to a standing position. Weaving in and out of patrons sitting along the risers, the dancers eventually make their way to the accessible ramp running the length of the building, bopping up and down in a row behind it, almost as if they were in a studio inside practicing at the barre. Mixing hip-hop moves with parkour-inflected athleticism, Barry's choreography makes clever use of the built environment, with all the dancers eventually ending up on a single plinth, looking out into the courtyard and raising those orange arms in what one only imagines is a kind of group salute.
Then it was onto my bike for a quick ride through Strathcona and a final destination of battery opera's Hopbopshop at the foot of McLean Drive at Powell Street. There Lee Su-Feh, in collaboration with architect Jesse Garlick and dance artist Justine Chambers, has installed what she is calling the "beta version" of Dance Machine, a choreographic "environment" consisting of a series of bamboo poles attached to pulleys threaded through a central steel mechanism affixed to the ceiling; below the bamboo, on the floor, is a carpet of cedar boughs. Beginning yesterday and continuing through to the end of the DOTE Festival this Saturday, Lee and and her collaborators have invited several guest artists from the Vancouver dance community to interact with the machine. When I arrived today, the 605 Collective's Josh Martin was wrestling with the poles like a latter-day Samson (minus the hair): gathering them all up into his massive arms like spaghetti about to be thrown in a pot; carefully spreading them out from his back like wings; and bringing them horizontal so that he might wrap his legs around them, like the survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a makeshift raft. The smell of the cedar boughs as Martin trod upon them and ground them into his body while he was on the floor provided an added sensory element to the proceedings, as did the sound of the clinking bamboo, an extra bit of timpani to accompany the background music that was playing.
Chambers (who, incidentally, has an immersive work of her own--Family Dinner--at this year's DOTE Festival) said to me as I was leaving that each of the guest artists has been given some basic principles to work with in relation to the machine; apart from that, they are free to move and interact with it as they see fit. That the room--and consequently those of us inside it as spectators--is also made to move as a result is part of the quintessentially heterodox "dance-making" we have come to expect from Lee and her battery opera collaborators.
I bet, however, it's a pain to disentangle all that bamboo.
P.
The first was Karissa Barry's Veritas.trUth, staged in the SFU Woodward's Cordova Street atrium and made in collaboration with students from the Modus Operandi Training Program. Six dancers, five women and one man, begin in the fetal position on the concrete plinths built into the brick risers leading towards the entrance to the Woodward's building. They are all clad in black and each sports a slash of orange paint down the length of their right arms. As a mix of house music (initially sounding quite Asian-themed) pours from two adjacent speakers, the dancers slowly unfurl their bodies, raising those orange arms skyward and gradually rising to a standing position. Weaving in and out of patrons sitting along the risers, the dancers eventually make their way to the accessible ramp running the length of the building, bopping up and down in a row behind it, almost as if they were in a studio inside practicing at the barre. Mixing hip-hop moves with parkour-inflected athleticism, Barry's choreography makes clever use of the built environment, with all the dancers eventually ending up on a single plinth, looking out into the courtyard and raising those orange arms in what one only imagines is a kind of group salute.
Then it was onto my bike for a quick ride through Strathcona and a final destination of battery opera's Hopbopshop at the foot of McLean Drive at Powell Street. There Lee Su-Feh, in collaboration with architect Jesse Garlick and dance artist Justine Chambers, has installed what she is calling the "beta version" of Dance Machine, a choreographic "environment" consisting of a series of bamboo poles attached to pulleys threaded through a central steel mechanism affixed to the ceiling; below the bamboo, on the floor, is a carpet of cedar boughs. Beginning yesterday and continuing through to the end of the DOTE Festival this Saturday, Lee and and her collaborators have invited several guest artists from the Vancouver dance community to interact with the machine. When I arrived today, the 605 Collective's Josh Martin was wrestling with the poles like a latter-day Samson (minus the hair): gathering them all up into his massive arms like spaghetti about to be thrown in a pot; carefully spreading them out from his back like wings; and bringing them horizontal so that he might wrap his legs around them, like the survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a makeshift raft. The smell of the cedar boughs as Martin trod upon them and ground them into his body while he was on the floor provided an added sensory element to the proceedings, as did the sound of the clinking bamboo, an extra bit of timpani to accompany the background music that was playing.
Josh Martin wrestling with the Dance Machine, The Hopbopshop, July 10, 2014
Chambers (who, incidentally, has an immersive work of her own--Family Dinner--at this year's DOTE Festival) said to me as I was leaving that each of the guest artists has been given some basic principles to work with in relation to the machine; apart from that, they are free to move and interact with it as they see fit. That the room--and consequently those of us inside it as spectators--is also made to move as a result is part of the quintessentially heterodox "dance-making" we have come to expect from Lee and her battery opera collaborators.
I bet, however, it's a pain to disentangle all that bamboo.
P.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
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.
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.
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