Betroffenheit at the Playhouse

Betroffenheit, co-created by Kidd Pivot's Crystal Pite and Electric Company Theatre's Jonathon Young, was first presented as part of the Panamania Festival accompanying Toronto's Pan Am and Para Pan Am Games back in the summer of 2015. It's been touring the world to acclaim ever since. Like most in Vancouver, I first saw the show when it was presented by DanceHouse at the Vancouver Playhouse in February 2016 (you can read my original impressions here). Now, just before it embarks on the final leg of its three-year world tour, DanceHouse has brought the show back to the same venue. I was there once again last night.

In part this was practical: I've updated an essay I've written about Pite and Kidd Pivot to include a discussion of Betroffenheit; and I'll also be speaking about the work at the University of Stockholm in May. So I wanted to ensure that I hadn't made any egregious errors in my representation of the work, particularly with respect to its complex distribution of the human voice. But really I just wanted to be swept up once again by the amazing on-stage world that Pite and Young have created, and to revel in the sublime movement of the performers. On both counts I was not disappointed. Christopher Hernandez, replacing Bryan Arias (who I think is premiering a new work of his own in New York), fits into the ensemble seamlessly. Hernandez is about double the size of Arias, and so this does change the partnering with Cindy Salgado somewhat; but his solo that opens Act 2 is still a marvel of off-axis lightness and grace. Otherwise, all of the other performers seem to have grown more deeply into and with their parts; none of the movement felt mechanical or marked, and there were new expressive details in the choreography that I had the pleasure of discovering--such as the little foot wiggles that Tiffany Tregarthen does at one point when she's turned upside down in her role as the devilish monkey on Young's character's back in Act 1. Ditto David Raymond's incredibly controlled staccato work with his arms and fingers during the therapist scene. And what I'll call Salgado's breathing solo in Act 2 was deeply affecting, the simple inflation and deflation of her shoulders speaking volumes about the bodily manifestations of grief.

As the blue silk suited co-hosts of our show-within-a-show, Young and Jermaine Spivey are by now expertly attuned to each other's rhythms, both in terms of the movement and the lipsynched dialogue that they share. I remain amazed by Young's technical facility with Pite's complex choreography, but it was Spivey whom I couldn't take my eyes off of. If anything, it seems like his body and limbs have grown even more elastic and liquid; the flipping of his legs backwards over the arm of Young, or later their wave-like rippling along the floor, seems absolutely of a piece with Young's floppy manipulations of his puppet stand-in. Likewise, the speed and precision of Spivey's turns and the air he catches while flipping his body through space seem to defy the laws of physics. Needless to say, the solo by Spivey that concludes the work remains a devastatingly gorgeous summation of the archive of grief and trauma that has been passed from body to body in the preceding two hours.

Of course there were aspects of the work that I'd forgotten about, mostly relating to the text and how personally self-accusatory it is. Betroffenheit both is and isn't Young's story, but in abstracting his and his family's tragedy onto this fictional world he hasn't spared himself a nightly real-time examination pertaining to his grief and guilt. Mostly this comes in the form of subtle repetitions of phrases that are inflected with telling pronouns ("Is he at fault?," "I know she...," "They're in there," "They're in this"). But there are also just incredibly raw and open displays of pain, and the failing of others that is a consequence of this pain--as with the phone call from Mom. Somehow I'd also forgotten the desperately uncomprehending solo that Tregarthen performs in Act 2, her final pose--arms bent in front of her, as if cradling an absent child--giving me new context as to why her character is Young's chief tormenter in Act 1.

For all of the very real sorrow upon which Betroffenheit is built, the work is also filled with joy. To me, the piece is the danced equivalent of one of my favourite poems, Hart Crane's "Chaplinesque." There Crane writes about how, in the wake of all the torment and unhappiness the world throws at us, no matter how the game of life smirks at us, "we make our meek adjustments," we find "our random consolations." Because "what blame to us if the heart live on"? And it does. That was clear last night during the curtain calls. The love on stage, in the audience, and between the two was physically palpable.

What's more, everyone gets to renew the affair next year when Pite, Young, the dancers, and virtually the entire Betroffenheit creative team return to the DanceHouse stage with the world premiere of a new work of dance-theatre, Revisor. I spoke briefly with composer Owen Belton while exiting the theatre, and he said they have already been workshopping the piece at Banff. It will apparently be something of a political satire. Given the new Cold War we suddenly find ourselves in, it should be timely.

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Tara Cheyenne Performance and Kidd Pivot in Rehearsal

Yesterday was a pretty special day. I got to sit in on rehearsals by two amazing Vancouver dance artists who will be premiering new work in July. And while very different in scale and tone, it was interesting for me to note that both works are consciously being constructed as dance-theatre performances, not least in their combining of text and movement. The pieces also share the distinction of having well-known local actors move (quite literally) outside their traditional comfort zones on stage, partnering with professional dancers to tell a story via kinaesthetic as well as narrative means.

The first rehearsal was of Tara Cheyenne Performance's How to Be, which will play the Firehall as part of the Dancing on the Edge Festival in three weeks. TCP Artistic Director and choreographer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg is working with the amazingly talented Kate Franklin, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, Kim Stevenson, and Marcus Youssef on what will be her second group show after the highly successful Highgate. However, this current work--a scaled down excerpt of which Friedenberg showed as part of Boca del Lupo's Micro-Performance Series at the Anderson Street Space earlier this spring--eschews Highgate's overt theatricality in favour of a deliberately toned down, non-spectacular and process-oriented exploration of themes of subjectivity, authenticity and relationality. The performers, all playing versions of themselves, are modelling for us in their individual movement styles and ways of being in their very different bodies, as well as in the coming together--sometimes harmoniously, sometimes more fractiously--of those styles and bodies, how all of us as human subjects must move through this world at once singly and as part of a larger collective.

All of this makes for some amazing comic set pieces (which I won't spoil before the piece opens), but also moments of truly poignant intimacy and vulnerability--what Friedenberg described as "hilarious heartbreak." It was also such a privilege to watch Friendenberg, who is not dancing in this iteration of the piece, work with her performers, at one point trying out three different spatial configurations of a sequence with Poole before very naturally and organically landing on what felt like the right fit. And all of this while keeping up a steady stream of witty banter and trademark one-liners. I know from experience what a joy it is to work with Friendeberg, and this studio visit (to Stevenson's shiny new space, The Happening, on Fraser at 39th) only confirmed that fact. I look forward to the DOTE show, as well as the full-scale version of the piece at the Cultch that Friendeberg is working towards for April 2017.

The second rehearsal visit took place at Progress Lab 1422 on William Street, where Kidd Pivot's Crystal Pite was working on a sequence from her new work-in-progress Betroffenheit. A co-production with PL 1422 co-tenants Electric Company Theatre, the piece will have its world premiere in Toronto at the end of July as part of the Panamania Festival that runs in conjunction with the PanAm and ParaPanAm Games. Vancouver audiences have to wait until next February to see the finished work; however, the presenters of that staging, DanceHouse, arranged yesterday's sneak peek as a perk for subscribers and donors. What we saw was an excerpt of a complex and highly physical duet between actor, ECT founding member and Betroffenheit co-creator Jonathon Young and dancer Tiffany Tregarthen. Betroffenheit is one of those composite German words that manages to encompass a complexity of meaning that seems inexpressible in anything other than a full sentence in English; in this case, it refers to the state of shock and bewilderment that befalls one in the wake of a disaster. It is, I am assuming, just such a state that Young's character finds himself in when he encounters the creature played by Tregarthen. It's not clear whether this creature is a magical being from another dimension or a product of Young's character's imagination; whatever the case, both Young and Tregarthen appear to be simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by each other, and the part of the duet we witnessed unfolds as at once a solicitous sharing of each other's bodily proximity and weight and as a desire to extricate oneself from the other's potentially threatening grip.

All of this results in some pretty acrobatic partnering, with Tregarthen at one point poised in the air over Young's prone body as she balances her knees on his raised hands and her own arms on his forehead. From this position she must then somersault backwards, while somehow also managing to pull herself and Young up to sitting position, so that they are both facing each other with legs extended and intertwined. It was fascinating to watch Pite work this particular bit over and over again, making minor adjustments (like having Tregarthen grab a bit of Young's shirt or getting Young to help out with momentum by giving Tregarthen a little shove) in order to refine the timing. Equally interesting to me was Young's running commentary as all of this was going on, bringing an actor's characterological "motivation" for his actions (e.g. "I have to get this thing off of me") to the specific physical tasks he needed to perform.

I couldn't stick around afterwards to mingle as I had to dash to the last of my Mountain View Solstice rehearsals. But a perfect day became even more special as I was exiting because I ran into Pite, who was ducking out to get a bit of air. I reminded her of who I was ("that annoying academic who wrote the article about your work"), and she was so gracious, saying how much she appreciated my interpretation of her work, and suggesting that we work together some day (!!!). Even if that never happens, it's enough of an ego-boost just thinking about the possibility. And all of Vancouver is richer for Pite's decision to pursue her career from here.

P.

Compagnie Käfig at the Playhouse

DanceHouse ended its 2014-15 season in a rousing fashion last night with the Vancouver premiere of Compagnie Käfig, a hybrid, polyglot evening of hip hop featuring a company of eleven amazing male dancers from Brazil, with artistic direction by the Algerian-French choreographer Mourad Merzouko (of Centre Choréographique de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne) and choreographic contributions by three other French and one other Brazilian artists. In this case, many cooks definitely makes for a steamy, sexy pot.

The piece opens with the dancers clumped together against a backlit scrim positioned upstage. Slowly a hand emerges, extends upwards, and spreads its fingers in a fluid sequence vaguely reminiscent of voguing. Eventually, as one of the members accompanies the rest of the company on what I took to be a traditional samba instrument, while also vocalizing a succession of beats, the men spread--or rather, glide--across the dance floor, toprocking in a fast and rhythmically compelling coordination of steps and arm waves before heading down to the floor to bust various individual power moves (back and shoulder spins, headstands, swipes, acrobatic flips) and freezes.

Indeed, what was so fascinating about last night's performance was the thoroughly intertwined mix of freestyle elements and clearly choreographed unison movement. These men are eminently watchable even when they are just bobbing their heads together. But add in differences in tempo, spatial configuration and lightning-quick changes in the quality of movement--in which the dancers switch from poeticism to power in the space of a few beats--and one sees just how much work has gone into this collaboration of styles.

Of course it helps that the company is very easy on the eyes. At the start of the piece the dancers are all properly--even somewhat formally--attired in dress shirts and ties. By the end, however, they are shirtless, their torsos glistening with sweat as they display their well-toned abs. That alone was worth the standing ovation they received--even before they treated us to a short freestylin' encore.

In his curtain speech before the show, DanceHouse producer Jim Smith announced next season's line-up, which includes a visit by another Brazilian company, Companhia Urbana de Dança. Also on tap is the Hofesh Schechter Company and the Vancouver premiere of Crytal Pite's newest work, Betroffenheit, a collaboration between her company Kidd Pivot and Electric Company Theatre that will premiere later this summer in Toronto as part of the cultural component of the Pan Am Games. It's a shorter season that normal for DanceHouse (only three shows instead of the usual four), but with Schechter and Pite as part of the schedule, it should be memorable.

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Tempest Replica Redux

Last night, at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Theatre, was a chance to revisit Crystal Pite's Tempest Replica, the most recent of her works for her company Kidd Pivot. I had first seen the piece in 2012 when it was staged at the Playhouse by DanceHouse. After touring the work to the US and Europe, Pite took a year's sabbatical; now she is back, relaunching Kidd Pivot with another mini-tour of The Tempest Replica, one that will take her to Sadler's Wells in London, where Pite has just been appointed an Associate Artist, and for whom she will be choreographing a large-scale work later this year.

The good news, however, is that despite such high-profile commissions--and multiple offers to lead major companies elsewhere--Pite has made the decision to remain in Vancouver and to use the city (and, I gather from SFU Cultural Programs Director Michael Boucher, SFU Woodward's) as her base to make new work for Kidd Pivot. That work will now have to be project-to-project based, as the stable multi-year funding she enjoyed from Frankfurt between 2010-2012 is not possible here (the latest tour has been partially subvented by an Indiegogo campaign). Still, Pite seems determined to make a go of it, and we are the luckier for it. To have such an internationally renowned dance artist making work here, in Vancouver, and mentoring local performers and choreographers is extraordinary.

As I have already blogged at length about the 2012 Vancouver production of The Tempest Replica, I won't elaborate on too much more here. I mostly wanted to see if the archive of my memory of that earlier performance matched Pite's repertory re-enactment of the piece--not least as I have an article coming out shortly in Dance Research Journal (46.1) on Pite's work and so wanted to ensure that my description of the piece was more or less accurate. As far as I can tell, Pite has made only minor adjustments, tightening up a movement transition here, tweaking a sound or light cue there. I don't recall there being as much projected text from Shakespeare's play in the second half as I witnessed last night, but that may just be a trick of memory. Ironically, it is Pite's use of text (projected, narrated, etc.) that is partly the focus of my article.

The movement is as compelling and complex as ever, and it is always a pleasure to see how Pite's amazingly gifted dancers incarnate that balance--or pivot--between technical precision and fluid organicity that her choreography requires. This remains most kinesthetically affecting to me in the duets that structure the second half--with the lush and ethereal pairings between Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) and Ariel (Sandra Marín Garcia), and Ferdinand (Peter Chu, filling in for Jermaine Spivey) and Miranda (Cindy Salgado), a counter-weight (quite literally) to the more tough and muscular ones between Antonio (Yannick Matthon) and Sebastian (David Raymond, replacing Jiří Pokorný), and Prospero and Caliban (Bryan Arias).

The Tempest Replica is Pite's most fully realized Gesamtkuntswerk to date, a piece in which movement and text and sound and visual design are seamlessly integrated. The contributions of Pite's Vancouver collaborators (composer Owen Belton, sound designers Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe, lighting designer Robert Sondergaard, set designer Jay Gower Taylor, projection maestro Jamie Nesbitt, and costumers Nancy Bryant and Linda Chow) are central to this. That Pite has made the decision to continue working with this local community of virtuosic talent is her gift to this city. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.

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Ate9 dANCEcOMPANY and Donald Sales/Project20 at Chutzpah!

In the as yet still young history of 21st-century contemporary dance, someone will surely have to write a study on the world-wide influence of Ohad Naharin. Already at this year's Chutzpah Festival, courtesy of LA's excellent BODYTRAFFIC company, we have seen the choreography of two well-known Bathsheva alums, Barak Marshall and Hofesh Shechter, on the Norman and Annette Rothstein stage. Last night it was the turn of Danielle Agami's Ate9 dANCEcOMPANY, also based in LA (where they seem to be found of majuscule letters).

Agami is an acclaimed teacher of Naharin's Gaga method, and it shows in her choreography, which is as physically contortionist as it is conceptually rigorous. Mouth to Mouth, which Chutzpah! audiences are getting a sneak peek at in advance of its official LA premiere in April, features backwards crab crawls, hip-to-head leg extensions while hopping across the stage on the opposite foot, convulsive floor works, and all manner of double and triple-jointedness. Each of the dancers is mesmerizing, not least as a result of their unusual costumes, which include bolero jackets paired with underwear, a version of leather lederhosen, and a burgundy jersey dress deconstructed before our eyes via two sets of sewing shears at the outset of the piece.

At the centre of the action is Agami herself, distinctive in her shaved head and so wonderfully dextrous in demi-point. There is a moment, near the end, when Agami pauses to receive a kiss from each of her dancers. Far from obeisance, however, I interpreted the gesture--especially in light of the work's palindrome-like title--as a representation of the always mutually sustaining relationship between choreographer and performers, the dancers and the dance. And the fact that post-performance I saw Crystal Pite in animated conclave with Bryan Arias and Yanick Matthon, two of the dancers in her company Kidd Pivot (preparing for the remount of The Tempest Replica at SFU Woodward's next week) more or less confirmed this.

The second piece on last night's double bill was gR33N, a new work by Donald Sales' Project20 Company. The former Ballet BC star (alongside Pite) is also on stage throughout the piece; however, unlike Agami, he is mostly sedentary, dressed in a hospital gown and confined to a leg cast and chair positioned upstage. Three nurse-orderlies--Sarah Brinson, Katie Cassady, and Rebecca Margolick--do the bulk of the movement, dancing singly and in unison, in sequences of structured improvisation and overt pantomime, to a varied sound score built around original music by local composer (and Pite favourite) Owen Belton.

The colour green's associations with illness--signaled most materially by the bright lime backlighting that accompanies the exchanges between Sales and his doctor (Fred Middleton)--are juxtaposed with sequences that explore, mostly playfully, other feelings linked to this particular palette, including envy, greed, and innocence. Overall, the work itself feels a bit young and not fully ripened at this stage; it could definitely do with some editing. And one, of course, wishes that Sales, in his brief ambulatory forays downstage, would occasionally join his three muses in some more physically locomotive movement.

At the same time, I was also fascinated to watch Sales watching his own choreography being performed. Here's hoping he liked what he saw.

P.

Back to the Moon

Last night Richard and I were at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's for a sold-out performance of Robert Lepage's Far Side of the Moon, a co-production with Théâtre la Seizième, who together with the now departed Playhouse first brought the show to Vancouver back in 2003. That was, I believe, Lepage's first visit to the city since he toured here in the 1980s with The Dragon's Trilogy, but he's since been back with The Andersen Project (2005) and, most recently, The Blue Dragon, which was also mounted at SFU Woodward's as part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2010. And if the rumours are true of him buying a condo here, we may be seeing a whole lot more of him.

It was by no means certain that last night's performance would go ahead as scheduled. SFU is in the midst of labour disputes with two separate unions, CUPE (representing staff) and TSSU (representing sessional instructors and TAs), and picketing of the downtown campuses over the weekend had forced the cancellation of at least two performances of Yves Jacques' performances. A campus-wide picket had been called for yesterday. But with Lepage himself taking over the role starting this Tuesday, Michael Boucher, Director of Cultural Programs at SFU Woodward's, and the man most responsible for bringing the show back to Vancouver, was anxious to avoid further disturbances if at all possible. To that end, Ex Machina Producer Michel Bernatchez read a prepared statement from CUPE in advance of the performance indicating that, in fact, no further picketing of SFU Woodward's would take place for the duration of Far Side's run.

This was as much a relief to those of us at the PuSh Festival as it no doubt was to Boucher. For PuSh is a community partner on this production and last night's performance was a special "PuSh night," which in addition to allowing us to secure discounted seats for our loyal Festival patrons, also saw us distributing our 2013 Festival program guides to all members of the audience in advance of their official release throughout the city today. Great publicity for us, and for our own ongoing SFU Woodward's presence, which Executive Director Norman Armour rightly highlighted in his portion of the curtain speech.

And now onto the performance itself. Far Side has always struck me as one of Lepage's more successful solo shows, in part because its images and theatrical conceits are so stunning (a washing machine door that becomes a portal to space), and in part because it is so personal (about the relationship between two brothers, Philippe and André, in the wake of their mother's death, the play was written just after the death of Lepage's own mother). The play was also turned into a very successful film by Lepage, one that, if it--as it seems--remains his last, will stand as an excellent synthesis of several recurring themes in his work (a focus on doubles and Oedipal family dynamics, symbolic use of colour, screens-within-screens, etc.). Indeed, this current production of the play has, if memory serves correctly, been changed to accommodate several new scenes that come directly from the film and, as is increasingly the case with any new Lepage stage production (witness The Blue Dragon), projected credits at the top of the show emphasize the cinematic feel of this piece of theatre.

And yet, for all the various projected film excerpts of the American and Soviet space race and the high-tech mechanics of the set, some of the most effective bits in the play still come when Lepage reverts to the basics of theatre-making, as with the frequent use of puppets, or when he turns a simple prop like an ironing board into a gym bench press in one instance and a scooter in another. In these moments Lepage understands that in the theatre, unlike in the cinema, the audience needs to work with the performer to create the illusion.

Would that Lepage worked just a little bit harder with us to create the same kind of shared emotional intimacy. The man has always been a cool, almost affectless performer. No doubt this anti-spectacular acting style allows the spectacle of his staging to stand out. But in a show like this one--which is, after all, partly about grief--I longed for just a bit more intensity and, dare I say, energy. However, I certainly can't fault Lepage for the effort he puts into the amazing final scene, which combines all the best elements of his theatre into a singularly stunning, almost balletic image.

And speaking of ballet, Lepage will be in conversation with choreographer Crystal Pite at SFU Woodward's this evening, beginning at 5 pm. The two have collaborated on Lepage's staging of the opera of The Tempest, currently on at the Met in New York. Pite's own dance version of the Shakespeare play, The Tempest Replica, opens tomorrow at the Playhouse, the second show in DanceHouse's current season. And, as it happened, I was sitting beside Kidd Pivot dancer Sandra Garcia last night. She graciously let me gush about my admiration for the entire company's work. Which I look forward to immersing myself in once again this Saturday.

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In the Rehearsal Studio with Kidd Pivot

Yesterday was one of those goose-bump inducing days when you just have to marvel at the amazing opportunities afforded you. In this case the source of wonder was attending an open rehearsal with Crystal Pite and her company Kidd Pivot, who are in residence at SFU Woodward's for the next two weeks while they get ready to remount her latest evening-length work, The Tempest Replica. In conjunction with DanceHouse, who will be presenting the piece at the Playhouse in November, Pite invited members of the public into the studio for an hour of danced excerpts and talk as she took us through aspects of her (re)conceptualization of the piece.

The Tempest Replica premiered last year in Germany, but as Pite told us yesterday evening she was never entirely satisfied with the piece. And so the present rehearsals have turned into something of a radical rethink not just of different aspects of the choreography, but also of sound (which they were having a bit of trouble with) and design. Combined with the addition of a few new company members who are learning the piece for the very first time, and following a two-month hiatus from dancing for the rest of the company, we were warned that what we would be witnessing was very rough and exploratory. If that's the case, then judging from what I saw--which was frankly stunning--come November the superlatives will be unrestrained.

Conceptually and structurally, The Tempest Replica is in the same vein as Pite's earlier Dark Matters. Both works are structured in two parts, with the first part in each case laying out the "story" in more consciously theatrical ways as a prelude to the pure dance sequences then elaborated in the second halves. The black-clad supernumeraries/shadow puppets from Dark Matters are here replaced by all-white (including fencing-style masks) stand-ins for the main characters from Shakespeare's play, who telegraph, or "storyboard" in Pite's words, the key plot points in various tableaux. From what I could gather yesterday, the movement here is deliberately contained, with Pite gradually developing the outline of the gestural language that she will elaborate more fully and complexly in the all-dance sequences of the second half, or what she referred to as the "real" world. So, for example, in an early scene from the first part, we witness Miranda (Cindy Salgado) being manipulated (almost like the marionette from Dark Matters) by her father Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) into watching the storm that he has conjured to shipwreck Ferdinand (Jermaine Spivey), Antonio (Yannick Matthon), Sebastian (Jiří Pokorný) and the rest of the crew from Milan. In the second half of The Tempest Replica, we see the same scene replayed, with Miranda's desperation at having to witness the suffering of those on the ship translated into a series of quick pivots and staccato movements that viscerally convey both her panic at what's happening and her horror that her father has made it happen. All the caveats about rustiness aside, the dancers yesterday were superb, and it was such an amazing gift to be able to see them work there magic up close. The duet between Prospero and Ariel (Sandra Garcia) was especially breath-taking, because the lifts that magically send the enslaved sprite flying are less than ten feet away from you.

The Tempest Replica continues Pite fascination with combining text and movement, this time having lines from the play both repeated and manipulated acoustically on the sound score (created by Meg Roe and Alessandra Juliani in conjunction with composer and longtime Pite collaborator Owen Belton) and, as Pite herself conjured for us, projected onto the back wall of the stage. I got to ask Pite about her fondness for text in a Q&A session after the rehearsal, and her remarks were very helpful in relation to my own current research on dance-theatre, of which her work forms an important part. Hopefully I'll be able to continue that conversation with her at some point in the future. In the meantime, I thank her and her dancers for their generosity yesterday in giving us a glimpse of their working process. And, of course, I look forward to seeing the finished piece when it comes back to the city in November.

P.

Kidd Pivot's Kinesthetics

At the talk-back session following last night’s performance of Kidd Pivot’s The You Show at the Cultch (which I reviewed in its Shadbolt Centre workshop phase back in October), Crystal Pite brought up once again the notion of kinesthetic empathy that she has been using in most press around the show to explain why she cast the four duets that make up the evening-length presentation in the second person. As Pite explained, when her dancers reach their arms behind them, or torque their bodies backward, or fall onto the floor, she is hypothesizing that, in witnessing those actions, we will feel something similar in our own bodies, whether as a result of our own storehouse of corporeal memories the dancers’ movements trigger, or by virtue of imaginatively simulating those movements ourselves. In the first and last pieces (“A Picture of You Falling” and “A Picture of You Flying,” respectively) she provides additional verbal cues in the form of spoken text that, through direct address, invites a further layer of identification of what we are watching.

Needless to say, this “resonated” quite powerfully with me, especially as I have just finished reading Susan Leigh Foster’s Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (2011) in connection with similar physical and affective processes at work in dance-theatre generally, and Pina Bausch’s repertoire more specifically. Drawing on Foster (whose work I’m convinced Pite has read), I’m interested in asking what the relationship is between physical motion, emotion, and social movements. I pose this question not just in the ideal terms of what action-oriented group formations and mobile politics the choreographed display of the first two terms in the equation might conspire to incite, but also, on a quite literally pedestrian level, in how the corporeal foundations of dance and theatre can get us to think more muscularly about the ways we move beside each other in the world.

In this regard, I find singularly instructive the research of Foster, who in tracing the parallel and entwined histories of kinesthesia and empathy (in neurobiology, psychology, aesthetic theory, and dance criticism) from the eighteenth century to the present suggests that choreographed dance (and movement-based performance more generally) is an especially useful critical and cultural lens through which to discuss a—by no means fixed, unmediated, or transhistorical—notion of fellow-feeling. From the influential modern dance critic John Martin’s early theories of “kinesthetic sympathy” and the spectator’s inductive muscular transference of the emotional intention of a dancer’s movement (what he first termed “metakinesis” and later “inner mimicry”) to Vittorio Gallese’s recent influential research on “mirror neurons” and the mutually resonant physical and emotional relationship between enacting, observing, and simulating movement, Foster considers the ways choreographed dance makes all the more apprehendable a notion of kinesthetic empathy that Gallese, for one, sees as foundational to human social interaction.

Foster poses the relevance of such inquiries not just to the politics of the body, but to the larger body politic, at the outset of her book: “Are there ways in which a shared physical semiosis might enable bodies, in all their historical and cultural specificity, to commune with one another?” Like Foster, I do not yet have an answer to that question, but I do think dance-theatre as emotionally and physically complex as that composed by Pite might help us reflect upon it.

P.

You Are Here

Last night at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby Crystal Pite presented her company Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM in a Mixed Repertoire of works in progress. It was a rare opportunity to see the acclaimed local dancer-choreographer not just talking about, but actively soliciting feedback on, four pieces she's currently building as part of a full-length evening of dance called The You Show. That show will premiere next month at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, which has stepped in where no Canadian institution or government agency has, and provided Pite and her company with a two-year residency to create new work. Thereafter, the show will tour, eventually ending up back in Vancouver at The Cultch in May.

But audiences this week at the Shadbolt were treated to a sneak peek in an intimate studio setting. Even better, a visibly pregnant Pite was on hand to chat with the audience and welcome commentary on the work in between pieces.

Pite introduced the evening's program by saying that the idea behind The You Show was to think about how one would compose works of dance in the second person, and how this might in turn enable audience members to locate themselves in a dancer's movements, and see their own stories and conflicts and losses reflected in the physically embodied language on stage. Her basic architecture for each piece is the duet, and the evening began with the only previously performed piece in the repertoire, "A Picture of You Falling," created in 2008 for Anne Plamondon and Peter Chu. Both dancers were back together on stage last night, and as precise and articulate as ever in their telegraphing not just of Pite's deconstructionist choreography, but of the narrated text (written by Pite) to which that movement is con-/dis-joined: "This is a picture of you falling--knees, hip, hands, elbows, head." Continuing Pite's fascination with the body's marionette-like qualities, the collapsings and strivings of which we are not always the agent (see Dark Matters, which also featured Chu as the puppet-master who comes to be controlled by his creation), the work establishes the leitmotif for the evening, which Pite has elsewhere described as a "kinesthetics of rescue," and which we might translate here as finding the you in me (and vice-versa).

That process can involve a descent to some very dark places, as the second piece in the program demonstrated. Going back and forth for the time being between two possible titles--"The Brother You Thought You'd Lost" or "The Other You"--Pite paired longtime collaborator Eric Beauchesne with new company member Jiří Pokorný in a study of increasingly high stakes brinksmanship and animal aggression that culminates in a surprisingly tender pas de deux to Moonlight Sonata. Afterwards, Pite said that she had no idea she would end up choreographing to that piece of music, but that when it became clear she would, she felt the prelude to it had to be even darker, in order to "earn," in her words, the romantic climax.

Then came an untitled work for Cindy Salgado and Yannick Matthon that began with an image of shattering glass, to which Pite then asked longtime musical collaborator Owen Belton to compose a score. Intensely physical and featuring an amazing lighting design by Robert Sondergaard, this was the one work of the evening that Pite herself labelled still unfinished. In the feedback she solicited, I couldn't help much with the movement, but I did, as per her instructions, suggest a title: "Pieces of You" is perhaps a bit kitschy and cliched, but she promised to write it down.

Finally, the evening concluded with the longest work, "A Picture of You Flying." It begins with dancer Jermaine Spivey sitting on a chair (!) talking to the audience about sacrifice, strength, endurance, the body's armor, and the physical and mental toll exacted by his line of work. At first you think this is a bit of self-reflexive commentary on his profession as a dancer, especially when he mentions the drawbacks of wearing tights. But then he lifts his pant leg to reveal a bit of red lycra underneath. And then dancer Sandra Garcia picks a bit of red cloth up from the floor and wraps it around Jermaine's neck, like a cape. When he mentions flying, you know he's talking about being a superhero, not a dancer. But then, as this piece (and others by Pite) reveals, what precisely is the difference?

In this 35-minute work, Pite has a great deal of fun playing with various iconic poses and movement imagery associated with comic book superheroes, and their related pop culture offspring. There's a lot of slow motion "ka-pow!" sequences and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger moves. And the highlight is the Transformer-esque duet between Spivey and Garcia, these two friend-foes and possible lovers raised aloft, their arms and legs and heads shielded and manipulated by other company members as they dance/fight to the death--or sheer exhaustion. But, again, as Pite's work repeatedly suggests, what's the difference?

All in all, a thrilling evening of dance. I can't wait to see the finished work next May.

P.

The Dark Matter of Dance Creation: Kidd Pivot at the Playhouse

In astronomy, dark matter is undetectable to the human eye, contains no atoms, and emits no electromagnetic radiation. Yet it is thought to exert a gravitational pull on visible matter. And, according to the Big Bang Theory, it is believed to make up the vast majority of our universe.

Local choreographer Crystal Pite taps into this fathomless paradox for her latest full-length dance creation for her company Kidd Pivot. Dark Matters, a co-production of Dance Victoria, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, and Montreal's L'agora de la danse, played the Vancouver Playhouse last night (and the Friday before) as part of DanceHouse's second season, and as a showcase event of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad. In Pite's work, dark matter becomes a metaphor both for the unconscious and for the wellsprings--and the recesses--of creative imagination. As Pite and her dancers demonstrate in this piece--and as she herself has talked about in print in relation to her own uncertainty about where and when ideas will come to her for new work--bursts of inspirational energy can just as quickly turn to a paralyzing abyss.

The 100-minute piece is structured in two parts, with the first operating as a quasi-theatrical dumb show (and, in fact, a stage dummy does make a crucial appearance at the very end) to the more pure dance explorations of the second. To this end, the curtain opens upon a makeshift set. A man (Peter Chu) sits at a table filled with paper, cloth, scissors, thread, clearly experiencing some sort of blockage. Out of this pile he pulls two marionette legs, crafting a little dance with them centre stage. Suddenly the creative juices are flowing again and over the course of a few quick blackouts (which are used most effectively throughout the first half) we are eventually introduced to his creation, a benign-looking puppet attached to wires manipulated by the rest of the Kidd Pivot company, clad all in black like the traditional puppeteers in Bunraku theatre. Our puppet is far from benign, however, and combining references to Frankenstein, Pinocchio, Coppélia (the story by Hoffman and the ballet by Saint-Léon), The Wizard of Oz, and Freud's Ego and the Id, among other texts, Pite tells the familiar story of creature rising up against creator (as in the best of Chekhov's plays, those scissors are on stage for a reason).

Except, wily creative artist that she herself is, Pite renders the familiar strange once the inevitable climax has occurred and the puppet, having stabbed his creator/amanuensis, and with nowhere left to channel his energy, himself expires. It is at this point that the black clad supernumeraries--the literal dark matter in this show--take centre stage, their previously discrete yet no less precise manipulations of the restless puppet (and it is truly a marvel to see how Pite transposes her choreographic vocabulary onto the startlingly life-like movements of the puppet, which I can only imagine required immense rehearsal time and coordination from her dancers) now unleashed in a riot of acrobatic and martial-arts like movements as they rush about, clearly discombobulated by the acts they just witnessed and abetted. Pite is having fun here, and her cultural touchstones during these sequences are as much Spider-Man and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger as they are the high art works of Shelley and Hoffmann. All of this energy culminates in an inexorable gravitational pull being exerted on the visible matter before us on stage, i.e., the set, and when this comes crashing down--as, of course, it must--Pite literally reveals to us, in the form of the Playhouse's black back stage wall, the "invisible" scaffolding of the theatrical deus ex machina: what we take to be fate is in fact just fake (as one of her supernumerary's brandished signs reminds us).

The dummy that is tossed amid all of this detritus at the end of Act I provides the visual segue to the start of Act II, as the lights come up on a single, lonely supernumerary sprawled on the bare stage. Pite plays this role herself, at once plainly disguising and making plainly visible her own creative energies as an artist . That is, in the 55 minutes that follow, and in which we witness the rest of the company (Chu, joined by Eric Beauchesne, Yannick Matthon, Cindy Salgado, and Jermaine Spivey) "animate" her trademark choreography--which is itself all about the reanimation of bodies and/in movement--we are also witnessing (although not without careful concentration) the black-clad Pite rushing about the stage moving lights, doing things behind scrims, popping up in unexpected places (including emerging from the orchestra pit at the very lip of the stage), and finally inserting herself within the other dancers' bodily chains to provide them with an added force, or a change of direction (remember her company name has "pivot" in the title), in their deliberately uncertain movements.

Pite's work has always been intensely self-referential, and this certainly feels like her most deeply personal work, mining her own creative process to reveal to her audience the at times self-shattering stitching behind any work of art. In this regard, the piece ends with Pite, alone on stage, facing the inevitable abyss of loss (for performer and audience) that comes with the end to any show, removing her black costume and sitting down on the stage in her underwear in a single pool of light, exhausted and spent. The animator herself now needs to be reanimated, and this is the cue for Chu to return for a final very moving pas de deux in which he and Pite reciprocally exchange the roles of choreographer/dancer, puppeteer/puppet, creator/doll.

I haven't done justice to all of the other wonderful dancing in the second half of Dark Matters, but one thing I did want to reference before closing is that this piece once again fully displays how amazingly original and adept Pite is at choreographing for men, especially in group and partnering sequences. The four-man striving and collapsing routine from Lost Action is referenced here at key moments, but what lingers most with me from last night is the extraordinary partnering that takes place midway through Act II between Yannick Matthon (who also appeared in Lost Action) and Jermaine Spivey. They do things alone and together with their bodies over the course of three minutes or so that had me gaping in amazement.

All in all a truly amazing evening: despite the fact I was stuck behind a very tall man and had to lean forward for most of the performance; and despite having to negotiate the crazy Olympics crowds afterwards in our hour-long journey home. The only somewhat sour note is the news that Pite and Kidd Pivot have recently accepted a two-year residency in Frankfurt. While Pite will continue to remain connected to Vancouver and the west coast, Frankfurt is able to offer her sufficient resources to create new works and pay her dancers full-time, resources that just aren't available in the current fiscal climate in BC. This is distressing mostly for the message it sends to the world at a time when we are supposed to be showcasing our artists to the world: namely that we don't really care about our own.

How dark a matter is that?

P.

DanceHouse Launches Second Season

DanceHouse's second season got off to an explosive start at the Vancouver Playhouse this weekend, with two works from the red-hot choreographer and composer Hofesh Shechter.

Uprising begins with rock-star lighting flooding the stage. Seven men emerge from the shadows and adopt a static pose reminiscent of classical ballet: right foot bent to left knee and arms stretched in a port-de-bras. But with Schecter's furiously percussive score (he composes his own music) pounding away in the background, such passive gentility will not hold, and soon enough the dancers' legs slip, their backs and heads slouch forward, and their arms--still touching--now start to break from side to side in time to the beat.

A study in martial masculinities, Uprising, while an all-around kinesthetic marvel that makes excellent use of its dancers' physical virtuosity, focuses much movement and meaning into the men's arms. At times they are held aloft, fists clenched, pounding at the air (and presumably an invisible enemy--the piece ends, as per its title, with a witty visual allusion to Jean Valjean and his comrades at the barricades in one of the more iconic images from Les Miserables). At other times those arms are turned against each other in combat, or offered in embrace. And then there's the pose that's lingered with me most powerfully, an inverse of the opening port-de-bras: the men's arms, at separate times, stretched behind them like a bird's wings as they run, seemingly off-balance, and yet in full control, across the stage.

Several of the same arm gestures recur in the second piece on the program, In your rooms, which is performed by a mixed company of 11 dancers, and with live musicians on stage recreating Shechter and collaborator Nell Catchpole's combination chamber-hip hop score. The piece actually begins (and then begins again) in fits and starts, with a voice-over (Shechter's perhaps?) ruminating on order and chaos, and with spots fading quickly in and out on the entire company worrying their arms before them while sitting with legs outstretched on the floor, and then on break-out clusters of dancers improvising more frenzied whole body movements. A seeming rumination on both the pleasures and perils of group identity, the 40-minute piece is filled with amazing mass choreography and more intimate encounters.

Shechter danced under Ohad Naharin at the Batsheva Dance Company in Israel before relocating to London to pursue a solo music and choreographic career. One can definitely see the similarities in their styles, and DanceHouse organizers Barb Clausen and Jim Smith certainly knew what they were doing in programing each of these men's work in launching their first two seasons. Talk about high-energy dance!

Next up in the DanceHouse season is Vancouver's own Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot, with the new piece Dark Matters at the end of February. It's a bit of a wait, so for those craving a dance fix in the interim, consider the Surfacing event programmed by the still-struggling Ballet BC for next weekend. Featuring new work by Rob Kitsos, Joe Laughlin, Simone Orlando, and Donald Sales, it takes place at the Dance Centre from Nov 13-14.

Finally, the Vancouver International Dance Festival is on a critical fundraising drive this month, hoping to raise $10,000 in order to offset losses due to cuts in BC Gaming funds that have imperiled so many companies throughout the province. Please consider donating through the link they've set up at the Vancouver Foundation.

P.