The Vancouver International Dance Festival continued last night at the Roundhouse with a double bill of works by local companies that were linked by themes of memory and reconstruction. The free seven o'clock show in the exhibition hall was choreographed by my colleague Judith Garay, whose company Dancers Dancing celebrates its twentieth anniversary next year. In Confabulation, Garay is joined on stage by former students and DD company members Jane Osborne and Bevin Poole. In them, Garay appears to be watching versions of her former self, and after beginning the piece with a simple gestural hand sequence that somehow managed to combine feelings of both supplication and worry, Garay roams the stage in her long brown coat watching from both the inside and the outside as Osborne and Poole make their progress through space and time. (Garay quotes Tennessee Williams on memory in her program note, and there is definitely a sense in which she is functioning, like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, as both narrator and character in this piece.)
As for the progress of Osborne and Poole, it begins in the upstage left corner of the stage as a gorgeous slow motion and on-the-spot run. To recorded sounds of street noise and muffled conversation and babies crying and the general hubbub of life, the two women--at first together, and then separately--lift one leg and extend it in front of themselves, while the other kicks out behind. Garay has always been meticulous about the technique of her dancers, and one of the pleasures of this simple opening is revelling in the detailed articulation of feet and toes, and the striving, unhurried reach of pumping arms. Much of the rest of the piece operates as a duet for Osborne and Poole, with the similarly dressed dancers working in counterpoint, and often at different vertical and horizontal axes, but also coming together in moments of effortless unison. But Garay does more than just circle the stage. She has a stationary solo that sees her stretching for the sky, and she joins Osborne and Poole on a bench for a highly satisfying reprise and extension of the her opening gestural sequence. Soon after this, Garay exits the stage; but she reappears at the end of the piece in a most unexpected way to offer a final benediction on those whom she has so wisely mentored.
The mainstage show last night spotlighted EDAM and was a mixed program featuring highlights from company director Peter Bingham's choreographic career. It began with Hindsight, from 1995, a duet here featuring company veteran Olivia Shaffer and Kelly McInnes. It is set to songs by Berlioz and Richard Strauss that are sung by Jessye Norman, and begins with the two dancers standing upstage, fluttering their arms up and down like they are birds trying to fly. But thereafter most of the movement takes place on the floor, with an extended opening sequence in which Shaffer and McInness roll back and forth across the stage, simultaneously moving towards and away from each other, and managing to locomote from upstage to downstage by every now and then launching their rolls on a diagonal axis. But it's the coming out of and the pauses in between the rolls that are the most captivating, with the two dancers arresting their momentum with an amazingly graceful placing of their hands on the floor, their bent elbows and bowed heads suggesting a prayer of repair for broken wings. Equally amazing is how Bingham has essentially constructed a non-contact work of contact in this piece. Not that Shaffer and McInness don't eventually come together or make it to vertical (once downstage, positioned against two oppositely placed door frames); but even here the contact is fleeting and the piece ends with McInness back on the floor and Shaffer executing a painfully beautiful series of fluttering changements, desperately willing herself to lift up off the floor and soar through the air for both herself and her partner.
Sinking SuZi is a solo for Ziyian Kwan that was originally commissioned in 2002. It is the perfect showcase for Kwan's technical artistry and compelling stage presence. Beginning upstage left, and with her back to the audience, Kwan moves horizontally across the stage, arcing one arm out from her torso and then upwards into the air. This will be followed by a diagonal series of tilting pirouettes, at first with Kwan's hands resting on her thighs, and then circling about her body. But the most beguiling--and also the most extended--of the repeated movement sequences choreographed by Bingham for Kwan is the one in which she sinks to the floor in a deconstructed lotus position, one leg in front, the other behind, from which she then propels herself upward, turning once around as she lifts one arm upwards in a hail hello and places one foot over the other. I could have watched that one move go on forever.
The final piece on the EDAM program is also the most recent. Engage the Feeling Arms is a trio from 2016 that I first wrote about here. In this iteration Diego Romero (replacing Farley Johansson) joins Shaffer and Walter Kubanek in a dynamic display of virtuosic contact, but one that begins as a quasi-Orientalist shimmer of floating and ever-shifting intertwined arms before exploding into the dynamic physicality of thrown bodies and caught and distributed weight that is Bingham's signature. Watching this work again in combination with the other pieces, and also thinking about the different generations of dancers represented on stage, is to register just how instrumental Bingham and EDAM have been to the dance ecology of this city. Kudos to VIDF for showcasing these contributions in this mixed program.
P
Showing posts with label Kelly McInnes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kelly McInnes. Show all posts
Friday, March 9, 2018
Thursday, December 7, 2017
Shiny at Left of Main
Kelly McInnes' Shiny, on at Left of Main through this Saturday, is a bold and timely work. Given the ongoing fallout of sexual harassment and assault in the entertainment industry that continues to dominate the news, it feels prescient that McInnes should be tackling in this piece the related (although admittedly not new) issue of representational violence perpetuated by the impossible standards of white feminine beauty circulated within glossy women's magazines--and consumed and internalized by readers of all genders. That pages from said magazines are themselves incorporated into the work and very materially structure the movement of bodies within it only helps to make physically manifest the problem of fit between flat images and live bodies that McInnes and her collaborators are trying to draw our attention to.
To this end, we enter the performance space to a striking tableau. McInness sits at a sewing machine stage left, decoupéd and laminated magazine pages covering her private parts, and with what looks like a film strip of more cut out pages hanging above her. Sitting on a stool centre stage is a clothed Maxine Chadburn; her back is to us and she is combing her long shiny mane of hair. In front of her is a lumpy quilt of even more stitched together magazine pages. Occasionally it seems to rise and fall, suggesting a body underneath. Stage right of Chadburn is something even more striking: what looks like a series of body parts, again made out of magazine pages, hanging from a makeshift clothesline. Further to the right there is also the hollowed out frame of a full-length mirror and some kind of body suit on the floor; it is also made out of magazine pages, the finished prototype of what we might assume to be the assembled parts hanging from the clothesline.
Sound cues--almost all of them related to stereotypically female domestic activities--are important in Shiny. Thus, following an opening address to the audience from McInness (to which I will return), when McInnes begins to sew this is the signal for Chadburn to turn around, a winning smile plastered to her face. She starts to disrobe, and then to draw the items on the clothesline towards her. One by one she slips them onto or wraps them around different parts of her body: a shoulder epaulet here; a shin guard there; one half of a breast plate; and then the other. All the while as Chadburn is donning her armour (a fitting image used by McInnes to describe this sequence during the post-performance talkback), her smile never wavers. But, as disturbingly, her movements become stiffer and more constrained: legs and feet have to be shifted and manipulated externally, as if Chadburn has become a mannequin. The effacement of Chadburn's real body is completed when she puts on the last item from the clothesline: a head mask with no visible holes from which to breathe or see, but with several pairs of photographed and airbrushed eyes and lips and noses nevertheless staring eerily back at us. (There is also the fact that this second skin into which Chadburn binds herself, combined with the sound and image of McInnes sewing throughout, put me in mind of the Buffalo Bill character from Silence of the Lambs, who wishes to stitch together a new skin for himself from the flayed corpses of his female victim.)
This sequence ends with Chadburn pulling the quilt on the floor before her towards her lap, attempting to attach it like a skirt with a needle and thread. But there is indeed someone under there, and she is not keen to give up her cover--or, perhaps more properly, to be exposed to our scrutinizing and sexualizing gaze. This is the third performer in the piece, Rianne Svelnis, who does end up losing the fight for the blanket to Chadburn. In exchange, Svelnis takes Chadburn's magazine helmet and places it on her own head, her subsequent blinded movements accompanied by the sound of McInnes using scissors to cut up another magazine. Eventually McInnes turns those scissors on Svelnis, cutting off the cubist montage of newsprint she had been wearing and dressing her in the French maid's outfit we are meant to understand she had been sewing all this time. This image is complete when McInness places a vacuum cleaner beside Svelnis.
The final section of Shiny involves all three performers attempting to reject, only to reincorporate (quite literally in one case), the proscribed images of white femininity to which they have become shackled. McInnes tries to feed the magazine pages hanging above her sewing machine into a paper shredder, but the laminate makes it jam, and so she decides to eat what little detritus she has made instead. Chadburn throws off her amazing technicolour magazine coat in a robust bit of floor thrashing, but ends up trying to tape herself into the abandoned body shell off to the right. Svelnis tries to suck everything up with her vacuum cleaner, including McInnes and Chadburn. The final image is of all three women sitting topless underneath the magazine quilt staring out at us with fake smiles that gradually grow more and more nervous and questioning.
Shiny has been workshopped over the past two years, and that clearly shows within the thoughtfulness and integrity of its dramaturgy. That extends beyond questions of design and mise-en-scene to the careful way McInnes has thought about the vulnerability of her co-performers (both of whom were eloquent in the talkback in elaborating on the physical and emotional demands of the process). My only real critique of the piece has to do with that opening address from McInnes. It comes in the form of an acknowledgement of her own (and her performers') privilege, that as a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered woman she cannot presume to be speaking for or representing in this work the experiences of all women. I get that, but framing the show with this statement has the effect of overdetermining our interpretation of it, something that was confirmed for me by the fact that PuSh Festival Director of Programming Joyce Rosario asked a question about it in the talkback, and then talkback facilitator Ziyian Kwan invited McInnes to repeat it at the end of this post-show conversation. For me, opening with this statement suggests something of a lack of trust in the audience to do the work to arrive on their own at the same conclusion--or perhaps nervousness on the part of the creator that the work won't lead them to this conclusion. At the same time, it betrays the much harder work that the statement is standing in for: including non-white, or trans, or differently abled bodies into the piece itself.
P
To this end, we enter the performance space to a striking tableau. McInness sits at a sewing machine stage left, decoupéd and laminated magazine pages covering her private parts, and with what looks like a film strip of more cut out pages hanging above her. Sitting on a stool centre stage is a clothed Maxine Chadburn; her back is to us and she is combing her long shiny mane of hair. In front of her is a lumpy quilt of even more stitched together magazine pages. Occasionally it seems to rise and fall, suggesting a body underneath. Stage right of Chadburn is something even more striking: what looks like a series of body parts, again made out of magazine pages, hanging from a makeshift clothesline. Further to the right there is also the hollowed out frame of a full-length mirror and some kind of body suit on the floor; it is also made out of magazine pages, the finished prototype of what we might assume to be the assembled parts hanging from the clothesline.
Sound cues--almost all of them related to stereotypically female domestic activities--are important in Shiny. Thus, following an opening address to the audience from McInness (to which I will return), when McInnes begins to sew this is the signal for Chadburn to turn around, a winning smile plastered to her face. She starts to disrobe, and then to draw the items on the clothesline towards her. One by one she slips them onto or wraps them around different parts of her body: a shoulder epaulet here; a shin guard there; one half of a breast plate; and then the other. All the while as Chadburn is donning her armour (a fitting image used by McInnes to describe this sequence during the post-performance talkback), her smile never wavers. But, as disturbingly, her movements become stiffer and more constrained: legs and feet have to be shifted and manipulated externally, as if Chadburn has become a mannequin. The effacement of Chadburn's real body is completed when she puts on the last item from the clothesline: a head mask with no visible holes from which to breathe or see, but with several pairs of photographed and airbrushed eyes and lips and noses nevertheless staring eerily back at us. (There is also the fact that this second skin into which Chadburn binds herself, combined with the sound and image of McInnes sewing throughout, put me in mind of the Buffalo Bill character from Silence of the Lambs, who wishes to stitch together a new skin for himself from the flayed corpses of his female victim.)
This sequence ends with Chadburn pulling the quilt on the floor before her towards her lap, attempting to attach it like a skirt with a needle and thread. But there is indeed someone under there, and she is not keen to give up her cover--or, perhaps more properly, to be exposed to our scrutinizing and sexualizing gaze. This is the third performer in the piece, Rianne Svelnis, who does end up losing the fight for the blanket to Chadburn. In exchange, Svelnis takes Chadburn's magazine helmet and places it on her own head, her subsequent blinded movements accompanied by the sound of McInnes using scissors to cut up another magazine. Eventually McInnes turns those scissors on Svelnis, cutting off the cubist montage of newsprint she had been wearing and dressing her in the French maid's outfit we are meant to understand she had been sewing all this time. This image is complete when McInness places a vacuum cleaner beside Svelnis.
The final section of Shiny involves all three performers attempting to reject, only to reincorporate (quite literally in one case), the proscribed images of white femininity to which they have become shackled. McInnes tries to feed the magazine pages hanging above her sewing machine into a paper shredder, but the laminate makes it jam, and so she decides to eat what little detritus she has made instead. Chadburn throws off her amazing technicolour magazine coat in a robust bit of floor thrashing, but ends up trying to tape herself into the abandoned body shell off to the right. Svelnis tries to suck everything up with her vacuum cleaner, including McInnes and Chadburn. The final image is of all three women sitting topless underneath the magazine quilt staring out at us with fake smiles that gradually grow more and more nervous and questioning.
Shiny has been workshopped over the past two years, and that clearly shows within the thoughtfulness and integrity of its dramaturgy. That extends beyond questions of design and mise-en-scene to the careful way McInnes has thought about the vulnerability of her co-performers (both of whom were eloquent in the talkback in elaborating on the physical and emotional demands of the process). My only real critique of the piece has to do with that opening address from McInnes. It comes in the form of an acknowledgement of her own (and her performers') privilege, that as a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered woman she cannot presume to be speaking for or representing in this work the experiences of all women. I get that, but framing the show with this statement has the effect of overdetermining our interpretation of it, something that was confirmed for me by the fact that PuSh Festival Director of Programming Joyce Rosario asked a question about it in the talkback, and then talkback facilitator Ziyian Kwan invited McInnes to repeat it at the end of this post-show conversation. For me, opening with this statement suggests something of a lack of trust in the audience to do the work to arrive on their own at the same conclusion--or perhaps nervousness on the part of the creator that the work won't lead them to this conclusion. At the same time, it betrays the much harder work that the statement is standing in for: including non-white, or trans, or differently abled bodies into the piece itself.
P
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Induction at EDAM
Friday evening Richard and I enjoyed a lovely walk to the Western Front to take in EDAM's presentation of its latest choreographic series. The fans in the studio were whirling, it was not overly crowded (though the house was more or less full, which was nice to see), and cold wine and beer was for sale by Daelik at the bar: in other words, viewing conditions were just right.
First on the program was Tom Stroud and Peter Bingham's A Delicate Balance, a duet for Delia Brett and Elissa Hansen that builds slowly and subtly, sneaking up on one's senses. Which is only fitting given that it is about memory. The piece begins with the two dancers standing against the upstage wall; their gazes are fixed resolutely outward to the audience. First Brett and then Hansen draws a hand to her face and opens her mouth in a silent scream. In voiceover we hear someone describing her memories of a house she lived in. At a certain point the performers notice each other, and they slide closer to each other along the wall, at first curiously and then more threateningly, the dancers' more or less matching height used to wonderful effect as each alternates in looming over or cowering from the other, a shadow play enfleshed and come to life. Perhaps we are witnessing a battle between the ego and the id over who owns the past (or is enslaved by it); then again, as per the epigraph from Richard Holmes in the program about the muse Mnemosyne needing a twin (one who forgets alongside her remembering), that battle might actually be between two sisters' different recollections of the house they grew up in.
After this prologue, the dancers push away from the wall and advance toward the audience in parallel lines, improvising solo movement phrases as they reach searchingly into the immediate spatial void around them, building corporeal architectures in the absence of ones made of bricks and mortar. Eventually the dancers will cross paths, making contact and, using the vocabulary of that dance form, partnering in the sharing and redistributing of each other's weight--which, in this case, must include the weight of memory. To this end, the piece ends with an uncanny visual trick whereby the two dancers' bodies become one, Brett's initially off-beat and slightly delayed mimicking of Hansen's gestures eventually matching her partner's movements exactly as she slowly moves behind her, the two bodies now a perfect palimpsest as the voiceover intones about rooms and hallways leading to still more rooms. If, as Frances Yates and Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud (among many others) have taught us, memory is essentially an architectural system, then what better medium than dance (whose archive is the body) to incarnate that system.
Following the first intermission longtime EDAM dancer Anne Cooper debuted FormSongs, which if I'm not mistaken might be her first work of original choreography. In the piece Cooper, along with partner Kelly McInnes, alternate between composed and improvised structures, solo and unison phrases, all performed to the live vocal improvisations of the wonderful DB Boyko (recorded music by Veda Hille is also used in the piece). The interplay between movement and voice was frequently fascinating to behold, as when Boyko's long sibilant exhalations of breath sent the dancers swooshing backwards into the distance, or when her staccato clucking had them ricocheting off of the floor and each other. I also appreciated the cross-disciplinary call and response aesthetic embedded into the work, with Cooper and McInnes at times answering Boyko vocally and Boyko likewise getting up from her station stage left to every now and then join the dancers in a bit of movement. On the whole, however, I think the piece went on a bit too long. The bit about the "Lemon Poem" by Pablo Neruda felt especially superfluous and unnecessary.
The evening concluded with a new work, Scenes for Your Consideration, by the always exciting Amber Funk Barton. A trio, the piece begins, like Stroud and Bingham's A Delicate Balance, along the upstage wall. Dancer Elya Grant sits on a stool, moving her hands from her thighs to her knees, and her head to her hands in perfectly controlled counts of eight as a song by Grizzly Bear plays on the soundtrack. Suddenly Andrew Haydock appears from behind the stage right door, inching his way, also in time to the music, to the empty stool beside Grant. Antonio Somero Jr makes a similarly dramatic entrance from the stage left door, and our menage is complete, as over the course of the piece the dancers will form and disperse and regroup in patterns that suggest rivalry and reciprocity, competition and care, friction and friendship.
What is so rewarding to take in is the depth and variety of choreographic skills that Barton employs to stage these scenes. A pleasingly geometric floor sequence involving the overlaying and collapsing of six sets of arms and elbows mixes a bit of unison, canon, and retrograde. Likewise, the influence of being in residence at EDAM registers in the bodily chains and gravity-defying support structures that Barton creates with her dancers. And, refreshingly, she is not afraid of stillness. One of my favourite moments in the piece is when, the music having cut out, Grant sculpts the bodies of Haydock and Somera into an interlocking tableau centre stage. All of these young dancers are on fire in this piece, with the tiny Grant especially watchable as she flings and slides her bodies across the stage floor, or bounces off of the studio walls. Barton also gives us a great ending as, with the lights fading, the dancers move upstage in a series of hugs, but always with one of them on the outside, and thus forced to break up any new relationship that forms. Something to consider, indeed.
P
First on the program was Tom Stroud and Peter Bingham's A Delicate Balance, a duet for Delia Brett and Elissa Hansen that builds slowly and subtly, sneaking up on one's senses. Which is only fitting given that it is about memory. The piece begins with the two dancers standing against the upstage wall; their gazes are fixed resolutely outward to the audience. First Brett and then Hansen draws a hand to her face and opens her mouth in a silent scream. In voiceover we hear someone describing her memories of a house she lived in. At a certain point the performers notice each other, and they slide closer to each other along the wall, at first curiously and then more threateningly, the dancers' more or less matching height used to wonderful effect as each alternates in looming over or cowering from the other, a shadow play enfleshed and come to life. Perhaps we are witnessing a battle between the ego and the id over who owns the past (or is enslaved by it); then again, as per the epigraph from Richard Holmes in the program about the muse Mnemosyne needing a twin (one who forgets alongside her remembering), that battle might actually be between two sisters' different recollections of the house they grew up in.
After this prologue, the dancers push away from the wall and advance toward the audience in parallel lines, improvising solo movement phrases as they reach searchingly into the immediate spatial void around them, building corporeal architectures in the absence of ones made of bricks and mortar. Eventually the dancers will cross paths, making contact and, using the vocabulary of that dance form, partnering in the sharing and redistributing of each other's weight--which, in this case, must include the weight of memory. To this end, the piece ends with an uncanny visual trick whereby the two dancers' bodies become one, Brett's initially off-beat and slightly delayed mimicking of Hansen's gestures eventually matching her partner's movements exactly as she slowly moves behind her, the two bodies now a perfect palimpsest as the voiceover intones about rooms and hallways leading to still more rooms. If, as Frances Yates and Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud (among many others) have taught us, memory is essentially an architectural system, then what better medium than dance (whose archive is the body) to incarnate that system.
Following the first intermission longtime EDAM dancer Anne Cooper debuted FormSongs, which if I'm not mistaken might be her first work of original choreography. In the piece Cooper, along with partner Kelly McInnes, alternate between composed and improvised structures, solo and unison phrases, all performed to the live vocal improvisations of the wonderful DB Boyko (recorded music by Veda Hille is also used in the piece). The interplay between movement and voice was frequently fascinating to behold, as when Boyko's long sibilant exhalations of breath sent the dancers swooshing backwards into the distance, or when her staccato clucking had them ricocheting off of the floor and each other. I also appreciated the cross-disciplinary call and response aesthetic embedded into the work, with Cooper and McInnes at times answering Boyko vocally and Boyko likewise getting up from her station stage left to every now and then join the dancers in a bit of movement. On the whole, however, I think the piece went on a bit too long. The bit about the "Lemon Poem" by Pablo Neruda felt especially superfluous and unnecessary.
The evening concluded with a new work, Scenes for Your Consideration, by the always exciting Amber Funk Barton. A trio, the piece begins, like Stroud and Bingham's A Delicate Balance, along the upstage wall. Dancer Elya Grant sits on a stool, moving her hands from her thighs to her knees, and her head to her hands in perfectly controlled counts of eight as a song by Grizzly Bear plays on the soundtrack. Suddenly Andrew Haydock appears from behind the stage right door, inching his way, also in time to the music, to the empty stool beside Grant. Antonio Somero Jr makes a similarly dramatic entrance from the stage left door, and our menage is complete, as over the course of the piece the dancers will form and disperse and regroup in patterns that suggest rivalry and reciprocity, competition and care, friction and friendship.
What is so rewarding to take in is the depth and variety of choreographic skills that Barton employs to stage these scenes. A pleasingly geometric floor sequence involving the overlaying and collapsing of six sets of arms and elbows mixes a bit of unison, canon, and retrograde. Likewise, the influence of being in residence at EDAM registers in the bodily chains and gravity-defying support structures that Barton creates with her dancers. And, refreshingly, she is not afraid of stillness. One of my favourite moments in the piece is when, the music having cut out, Grant sculpts the bodies of Haydock and Somera into an interlocking tableau centre stage. All of these young dancers are on fire in this piece, with the tiny Grant especially watchable as she flings and slides her bodies across the stage floor, or bounces off of the studio walls. Barton also gives us a great ending as, with the lights fading, the dancers move upstage in a series of hugs, but always with one of them on the outside, and thus forced to break up any new relationship that forms. Something to consider, indeed.
P
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