The first of the MVDH salon conversations is with Kokoro Dance's Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi, whose work I discuss in chapter 3. (Apologies for the feedback/echo; we were sharing two linked devices.)
P
Showing posts with label Kokoro Dance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kokoro Dance. Show all posts
Monday, September 7, 2020
Saturday, February 15, 2020
taker at BoomBox
Never say never, I guess. A couple of weeks ago Billy Marchenski emailed me to see if I'd be interested in writing something about the new butoh-inspired work he and Molly McDermott were working on with their Japanese collaborator Daiichiro Yuyama. Something made me say yes, and so here we are, more than a year after saying goodbye to regular posts about what I was seeing locally in terms of performance, reviving my peculiar take on the scene. Let's hope I still have something interesting to say.
Billy and Molly are, of course, fixtures in the dance community, and have moved memorably together over many years as longtime Kokoro company members. Indeed, it was under those auspices, as part of a trip that Billy and Molly and Kokoro principals Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi took to Japan in 2016 to do a workshop with the butoh company Dairakudakan, that they met Daiichiro. The three hit it off, and decided to come together under the name gigamal to initiate a trans-national creative collaboration.
The result is taker, which was developed collectively in 2018 at the Caravan Farm Theatre, and which has additionally benefitted from the rehearsal direction of Alison Denham and the dramaturgy of Tomoya Tsujisaki. Though not conceived specifically for the space, the work seems particularly well-suited to BoomBox's semi-trailer confines, which I'm embarrassed to say I had not previously visited before last night. But waiting this long to trek down to Great Northern Way to huddle with friends behind a propane heater while sipping a cider sold to me by BoomBox Artistic Producer Diego Romero's mom did come with some benefits. These include the new, portable entrance steps that Diego ushered me up, an enhanced lighting and sound system, and the murals by Chris Bose that now adorn each side of the semi's interior. Reminiscent of cave paintings that leap with added allegorical intensity due to the shadows cast by the propane tank's flames, the decorated walls framed taker's metamorphotic story in particularly apt ways.
That story begins with Billy and Molly arising, as if magically from some primordial ooze, into the open west doorframe of the semi-trailer (a flipping, I was told, of the normal performance/audience configuration of the space). With their painted white faces, their stunned, unblinking eyes, their crouched poses, and the curling inwards of their arms and hands that accompanies their halting physical progress forward, we might think their butoh bodies are summoning for us an image of the first humans. Except that both Billy and Molly are dressed formally, in matching black slacks and white tops, and when they come to stop--Molly posed like an odalisque centre stage, Billy standing gravely behind her--we are arguably presented instead with a grotesque portrait of our contemporary late-capitalist selves, the good-looking couple whose backs are turned on the industrial wasteland that feeds their lifestyle.
That's when, peering into the void behind Billy and Molly, we notice another figure, perched on a mound outside the truck, and slowly starting to sway his body and flap his arms. This is Daiichiro, incarnating some kind of trickster figure, his body painted black (a visually powerful novelty for me, as I've been so trained to expect chalk-white bodies in butoh), his arms adorned with wings made of torn garbage bags, and sporting a red mask and beak. Inserting himself between Molly and Billy, Daiichiro's character moves like an unleashed id, sparking a transformation in our hitherto composed and kinetically contained couple. When, after Daiichiro's exit, Molly and Billy bend down to inspect a bit of plastic detritus left behind, they are hurtled literally backwards in space--and metaphorically in time.
Indeed, when next we see this pair they are clad only in traditional butoh fundoshis, their exposed white-painted bodies, joined by Daiichiro's black-painted one, now rawly attuned to the environment and the harshness of existence. This was represented most effectively for me when all three creators channeled through the language of butoh--already so attuned to states of extremity--various static poses of suffering. For example, lined up in a row with their backs to the audience, the trio at one point adopted different arm gestures that seemed to signify brokenness or confinement: Daiichiro bent at the waist, his arms crossed behind him; Billy's arms crossed above his head as if in crucifixion; and Molly's elbows bent above her mouth, her head thrown back in lamentation or horror. Working together as a single organism during this long middle sequence, the trio also interlaces their arms behind each other's heads, taking turns moving one or another's gaze this way and that as they explore this new strange world they find themselves in. Likewise, when on all fours the ensemble launches into a bit of counterpointed unison, a hand splayed first this way, then a hip that way, it put me in mind of a pack or a herd trying collectively to decide on which direction to move. The key is that this exploration is taking place together, and in relation to the environment, a concept that in the creators' notes on the piece they liken to foraging.
When, however, our trio rises up from the floor--an exquisitely slow and twisted and joint-by-joint vertical stacking of their bodies--something happens to change the dynamic of their relationship, a transition signalled by what appears to be the involuntary throwing of their bodies against the sides of the semi-trailer. Thereafter, they devolve into their own individual movement patterns, a sequence that culminates in another static freeze, but this time with the bodies of our performers at a noticeable remove from each other. This is the cue for Tomoya, who up until this point has been sitting with Diego at the control panel behind me, to make his way to the stage and, in his role as "curator," invite us to get up and inspect as closely as we wish each of the performers' bodies--as if they are anthropological specimens in a museum. Those bodies, however, will not remain frozen in time for us, and whether because of or in spite of our scrutinizing gaze, they once again start to move, making their way to where we had previously been seated, reprising a version of the piece's opening tableau--this time with Molly's odalisque perched on a bench and framed by Billy and Daiichiro hanging off of hooks on each wall.
But by flipping once again the performing and spectating spaces, the conclusion of taker also asks us to consider who, exactly, is on display--who is feeding on, or off, of whom? In terms of the ideas gigamal's team is exploring about humans' transition from foraging to scavenging, from sustaining what we need through environmental co-stewardship to extracting all that we want through individual ownership--here powerfully encapsulated in Billy's character's leaving behind of the prone bodies of Molly and Daiichiro (the woman and the man of colour)--this implicating of the audience in what we are taking away from this experience is one final satisfying moment in what is an incredibly smart and deeply thoughtful performance.
taker continues this evening at BoomBox. It will travel to Kyoto later this year, and we can look forward to a companion piece sometime next year. But maybe don't look forward to another blog post from me for awhile...
P
Billy and Molly are, of course, fixtures in the dance community, and have moved memorably together over many years as longtime Kokoro company members. Indeed, it was under those auspices, as part of a trip that Billy and Molly and Kokoro principals Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi took to Japan in 2016 to do a workshop with the butoh company Dairakudakan, that they met Daiichiro. The three hit it off, and decided to come together under the name gigamal to initiate a trans-national creative collaboration.
The result is taker, which was developed collectively in 2018 at the Caravan Farm Theatre, and which has additionally benefitted from the rehearsal direction of Alison Denham and the dramaturgy of Tomoya Tsujisaki. Though not conceived specifically for the space, the work seems particularly well-suited to BoomBox's semi-trailer confines, which I'm embarrassed to say I had not previously visited before last night. But waiting this long to trek down to Great Northern Way to huddle with friends behind a propane heater while sipping a cider sold to me by BoomBox Artistic Producer Diego Romero's mom did come with some benefits. These include the new, portable entrance steps that Diego ushered me up, an enhanced lighting and sound system, and the murals by Chris Bose that now adorn each side of the semi's interior. Reminiscent of cave paintings that leap with added allegorical intensity due to the shadows cast by the propane tank's flames, the decorated walls framed taker's metamorphotic story in particularly apt ways.
That story begins with Billy and Molly arising, as if magically from some primordial ooze, into the open west doorframe of the semi-trailer (a flipping, I was told, of the normal performance/audience configuration of the space). With their painted white faces, their stunned, unblinking eyes, their crouched poses, and the curling inwards of their arms and hands that accompanies their halting physical progress forward, we might think their butoh bodies are summoning for us an image of the first humans. Except that both Billy and Molly are dressed formally, in matching black slacks and white tops, and when they come to stop--Molly posed like an odalisque centre stage, Billy standing gravely behind her--we are arguably presented instead with a grotesque portrait of our contemporary late-capitalist selves, the good-looking couple whose backs are turned on the industrial wasteland that feeds their lifestyle.
That's when, peering into the void behind Billy and Molly, we notice another figure, perched on a mound outside the truck, and slowly starting to sway his body and flap his arms. This is Daiichiro, incarnating some kind of trickster figure, his body painted black (a visually powerful novelty for me, as I've been so trained to expect chalk-white bodies in butoh), his arms adorned with wings made of torn garbage bags, and sporting a red mask and beak. Inserting himself between Molly and Billy, Daiichiro's character moves like an unleashed id, sparking a transformation in our hitherto composed and kinetically contained couple. When, after Daiichiro's exit, Molly and Billy bend down to inspect a bit of plastic detritus left behind, they are hurtled literally backwards in space--and metaphorically in time.
Indeed, when next we see this pair they are clad only in traditional butoh fundoshis, their exposed white-painted bodies, joined by Daiichiro's black-painted one, now rawly attuned to the environment and the harshness of existence. This was represented most effectively for me when all three creators channeled through the language of butoh--already so attuned to states of extremity--various static poses of suffering. For example, lined up in a row with their backs to the audience, the trio at one point adopted different arm gestures that seemed to signify brokenness or confinement: Daiichiro bent at the waist, his arms crossed behind him; Billy's arms crossed above his head as if in crucifixion; and Molly's elbows bent above her mouth, her head thrown back in lamentation or horror. Working together as a single organism during this long middle sequence, the trio also interlaces their arms behind each other's heads, taking turns moving one or another's gaze this way and that as they explore this new strange world they find themselves in. Likewise, when on all fours the ensemble launches into a bit of counterpointed unison, a hand splayed first this way, then a hip that way, it put me in mind of a pack or a herd trying collectively to decide on which direction to move. The key is that this exploration is taking place together, and in relation to the environment, a concept that in the creators' notes on the piece they liken to foraging.
When, however, our trio rises up from the floor--an exquisitely slow and twisted and joint-by-joint vertical stacking of their bodies--something happens to change the dynamic of their relationship, a transition signalled by what appears to be the involuntary throwing of their bodies against the sides of the semi-trailer. Thereafter, they devolve into their own individual movement patterns, a sequence that culminates in another static freeze, but this time with the bodies of our performers at a noticeable remove from each other. This is the cue for Tomoya, who up until this point has been sitting with Diego at the control panel behind me, to make his way to the stage and, in his role as "curator," invite us to get up and inspect as closely as we wish each of the performers' bodies--as if they are anthropological specimens in a museum. Those bodies, however, will not remain frozen in time for us, and whether because of or in spite of our scrutinizing gaze, they once again start to move, making their way to where we had previously been seated, reprising a version of the piece's opening tableau--this time with Molly's odalisque perched on a bench and framed by Billy and Daiichiro hanging off of hooks on each wall.
But by flipping once again the performing and spectating spaces, the conclusion of taker also asks us to consider who, exactly, is on display--who is feeding on, or off, of whom? In terms of the ideas gigamal's team is exploring about humans' transition from foraging to scavenging, from sustaining what we need through environmental co-stewardship to extracting all that we want through individual ownership--here powerfully encapsulated in Billy's character's leaving behind of the prone bodies of Molly and Daiichiro (the woman and the man of colour)--this implicating of the audience in what we are taking away from this experience is one final satisfying moment in what is an incredibly smart and deeply thoughtful performance.
taker continues this evening at BoomBox. It will travel to Kyoto later this year, and we can look forward to a companion piece sometime next year. But maybe don't look forward to another blog post from me for awhile...
P
Thursday, September 21, 2017
Embryotrophic Cavatina (Part 2) at the Roundhouse
So I guess if you're choreographing a dance to a piece of requiem music that introduces a saxophone in its second half, then that licenses you to shift the movement score pretty radically as well. Back in August I blogged about Kokoro Dance's free showing of the first part of Embryotrophic Cavatina, which was originally created in 1989 and 1990 and set to the opening half of Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner's Requiem for My Friend. Last night at the Roundhouse the company unveiled the new second half to the piece, and it definitely wasn't what I was expecting--which is a good thing.
A shift in tone is first of all effected by the fact that following an exit of the performers (Kokoro co-founders Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi, accompanied by regular dancers Molly McDermott and Billy Marchenski) from the stage and a brief pause, they return wearing long and vibrantly hued shifts designed by Tsuneko Kokubo. The designer's large format paintings of edible and medicinal plants were also projected throughout this final section. While the program note indicates that Kokubo considers these images to be metaphors for "the migration of peoples," when combined with the impetus for the music (Preisner's mourning of the death of his friend, Krzysztof Kieslowski), we might also see them as gesturing toward the migration of souls, each of whose journeys in the afterlife is made singularly and alone.
This in turn perhaps explains the shift in movement. Whereas the first half of the piece was pretty tightly structured around a central quadrant of mostly unison sequences, in the second half the performers appear to be improvising their own individual scores. Eventually, however, we detect that a through-line of shared gestures and movement patterns (many of which I recognized from Barbara's recent morning dance classes at KW Studios) has been distributed throughout the bodies on stage, like an extended or staggered canon, each of the dancers completing the same combinations of spins and thrown arms and collapsed walks, just in radically different sequencings. Well, all of the dancers except Jay, who during this second half mostly stays upstage, repeating echoes of the movement from part one. Near the end, however, he joins the group as the apparent chaos of mass solo improvisation gels into a slow and simple cycling through of a gesture base associated with the senses, the sticking out of the tongue, the cupping of an ear, and the tracing of a hand up an arm continuing to attest to the vital materiality of the body even as the dancers slowly exit the stage.
P
A shift in tone is first of all effected by the fact that following an exit of the performers (Kokoro co-founders Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi, accompanied by regular dancers Molly McDermott and Billy Marchenski) from the stage and a brief pause, they return wearing long and vibrantly hued shifts designed by Tsuneko Kokubo. The designer's large format paintings of edible and medicinal plants were also projected throughout this final section. While the program note indicates that Kokubo considers these images to be metaphors for "the migration of peoples," when combined with the impetus for the music (Preisner's mourning of the death of his friend, Krzysztof Kieslowski), we might also see them as gesturing toward the migration of souls, each of whose journeys in the afterlife is made singularly and alone.
This in turn perhaps explains the shift in movement. Whereas the first half of the piece was pretty tightly structured around a central quadrant of mostly unison sequences, in the second half the performers appear to be improvising their own individual scores. Eventually, however, we detect that a through-line of shared gestures and movement patterns (many of which I recognized from Barbara's recent morning dance classes at KW Studios) has been distributed throughout the bodies on stage, like an extended or staggered canon, each of the dancers completing the same combinations of spins and thrown arms and collapsed walks, just in radically different sequencings. Well, all of the dancers except Jay, who during this second half mostly stays upstage, repeating echoes of the movement from part one. Near the end, however, he joins the group as the apparent chaos of mass solo improvisation gels into a slow and simple cycling through of a gesture base associated with the senses, the sticking out of the tongue, the cupping of an ear, and the tracing of a hand up an arm continuing to attest to the vital materiality of the body even as the dancers slowly exit the stage.
P
Sunday, August 20, 2017
Embryotrophic Cavatina, Part 1 at SFU Woodward's and Vines Art Festival at Trout Lake
I couldn't attend yesterday's counter-demonstration protesting the gathering organized by the Worldwide Coalition Against Islam at City Hall because I had committed to previous plans. However, it seemed appropriate, given the WCAI organizers' base dissembling that their quarrels with Islam were cultural and not racist, that my plans involved an engagement with different forms of free cultural expression that were in direct dialogue with their environments.
My first stop was the atrium at SFU Woodward's. There, starting at 2 pm (and then again at 3 pm), Kokoro Dance presented a free showing of the first half of their reworked Embryotrophic Cavatina, which will have its full-length premiere at the Roundhouse September 20-29. The genesis of the piece dates back to 1998, when Kokoro founders Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi created the first iteration of the work for themselves and dancers Ziyian Kwan and Michael Whitfield. They then reworked it a year later into a shorter 30-minute piece that was performed at Dancing on the Edge with the same company; this version featured as a musical score the first half of Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner's Requiem for My Friend, written as a tribute to the filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski, with whom Preisner had collaborated on the Three Colours trilogy. Last year, Barbara and Jay remounted this second version of EC on twenty dancers from Danza Teatro Retazos in Havana. It was at that time that they got the idea to revisit the piece a fourth time, choreographing a new second half that would accompany the remainder of Preisner's album.
We'll have to wait until September to see what that looks like. But yesterday interested audience members were offered a glimpse of the original 1999 version of EC, with dancers Molly McDermott and Billy Marchenski joining Bourget and Hirabayashi to round out the quartet. Performed in the circle of the basketball court between London Drugs and Nester's Market, and with Preisner's music issuing clearly and pristinely from two speakers, the piece seemed expressly designed for this space. Likewise the match between choreography and music. In its elegiac tempo, simple harmonies and showcasing of the soprano voice, Preisner's Requiem put me in mind of fellow Polish composer Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Except whereas Górecki's work is a slow and steady build to a haunting emotional lament, Preisner's work features more tonal peaks and valleys. Bourget and Hirabayashi play with this in terms of the way they contrast bodies crumpling in on themselves (splayed knees and twisted lower legs; bent backs; hands thrust backwards between thighs) with movement that extends horizontally and vertically into space (a simple reach outward from the torso of one arm and the tracing of the other up the length of this proffered limb; or the joyous leap into and catching of air that comes with Kokoro's trademark ecstasy jumps). The intervals between the Requiem's movements, and especially the soprano parts (e.g. from the Kyrie Eleison to the Dies Irae), also give the dancers ample opportunity to explore that quintessential butoh element of ma, the gap or pause or negative space between different structural parts. Kokoro is expert at expanding our sense of time: by sustaining our interest in a held pose (the opening butoh-at-rest position: bent knees, shoulders soft, eyes staring off into the distance); by forcing a perceptual recalibration through a barely registered shift in our attention (when, in the course of said pose, four heads slowly start to turn to the left); by isolating our focus on the seemingly smallest part of a dancer's body (for me it was a wagging index finger near the end of this showing). All of these actions that look like inaction, these doings that simultaneously undo our expectations about what should happen next, or what even constitutes movement, encourages even greater contemplation in the audience. To the point that despite all the to-ing and fro-ing happening all around me in the Woodward's atrium, my attention was never less than riveted on the dancers in front of me.
After the Kokoro performance I hopped on my bike and cycled over to Trout Lake to take in some of the main "earthstage" shows at this year's Vines Art Festival. The festival was started by Artistic Director Heather Lamoureux in 2015 with two aims: to make contemporary performance more accessible by siting it in a public park (and making it free); and to promote environmental awareness by showcasing work that responds to its natural setting and that is engaged with themes of climate activism and sustainability. The 2015 festival, a one-day event in Trout Lake, mounted with a budget raised solely through door-to-door fundraising by Heather, was a huge success. In 2016 the festival not only attracted major corporate and government sponsors, but it also expanded to four days and multiple sites, with events taking place at Hadden Park in Kits Beach, Pandora Park on the East Side, Maclean Park in Strathcona, and its mainstage site of Trout Lake. This year Heather has grown the festival even further, expanding events to ten days and spreading them across seven Vancouver parks.
However, the main event continues to be the culminating day-long series of performances, workshops and installations at Trout Lake Park. Unfortunately, this year my timing was not so great. I arrived too late to take in Robert Leveroos and Isabelle Kirouac's Alien Forms, and only caught the tail end of Meegin Pye's Boxed In (which seemed to be about homelessness and housing affordability). I did catch the Blue Cedar Stage set of the Son Bohemio trio, who were back again this year with their mix of Argentinian folk songs. And I stuck around long enough to see and hear A Complicated Intelligence, a collaborative sound installation-cum-interactive performance by Stefan Smulovitz, Lara Amelie Abadir, Dave Biddle and beekeeper Andrew Scott. Learning about how bees communicate with each other (by vomiting into each other's mouths) and deal with genetic diversity (by cannibalizing eggs deemed insufficiently heterogeneous) was all I needed as a capstone to how art can trump the rhetoric of white supremacy.
P
My first stop was the atrium at SFU Woodward's. There, starting at 2 pm (and then again at 3 pm), Kokoro Dance presented a free showing of the first half of their reworked Embryotrophic Cavatina, which will have its full-length premiere at the Roundhouse September 20-29. The genesis of the piece dates back to 1998, when Kokoro founders Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi created the first iteration of the work for themselves and dancers Ziyian Kwan and Michael Whitfield. They then reworked it a year later into a shorter 30-minute piece that was performed at Dancing on the Edge with the same company; this version featured as a musical score the first half of Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner's Requiem for My Friend, written as a tribute to the filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski, with whom Preisner had collaborated on the Three Colours trilogy. Last year, Barbara and Jay remounted this second version of EC on twenty dancers from Danza Teatro Retazos in Havana. It was at that time that they got the idea to revisit the piece a fourth time, choreographing a new second half that would accompany the remainder of Preisner's album.
We'll have to wait until September to see what that looks like. But yesterday interested audience members were offered a glimpse of the original 1999 version of EC, with dancers Molly McDermott and Billy Marchenski joining Bourget and Hirabayashi to round out the quartet. Performed in the circle of the basketball court between London Drugs and Nester's Market, and with Preisner's music issuing clearly and pristinely from two speakers, the piece seemed expressly designed for this space. Likewise the match between choreography and music. In its elegiac tempo, simple harmonies and showcasing of the soprano voice, Preisner's Requiem put me in mind of fellow Polish composer Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Except whereas Górecki's work is a slow and steady build to a haunting emotional lament, Preisner's work features more tonal peaks and valleys. Bourget and Hirabayashi play with this in terms of the way they contrast bodies crumpling in on themselves (splayed knees and twisted lower legs; bent backs; hands thrust backwards between thighs) with movement that extends horizontally and vertically into space (a simple reach outward from the torso of one arm and the tracing of the other up the length of this proffered limb; or the joyous leap into and catching of air that comes with Kokoro's trademark ecstasy jumps). The intervals between the Requiem's movements, and especially the soprano parts (e.g. from the Kyrie Eleison to the Dies Irae), also give the dancers ample opportunity to explore that quintessential butoh element of ma, the gap or pause or negative space between different structural parts. Kokoro is expert at expanding our sense of time: by sustaining our interest in a held pose (the opening butoh-at-rest position: bent knees, shoulders soft, eyes staring off into the distance); by forcing a perceptual recalibration through a barely registered shift in our attention (when, in the course of said pose, four heads slowly start to turn to the left); by isolating our focus on the seemingly smallest part of a dancer's body (for me it was a wagging index finger near the end of this showing). All of these actions that look like inaction, these doings that simultaneously undo our expectations about what should happen next, or what even constitutes movement, encourages even greater contemplation in the audience. To the point that despite all the to-ing and fro-ing happening all around me in the Woodward's atrium, my attention was never less than riveted on the dancers in front of me.
After the Kokoro performance I hopped on my bike and cycled over to Trout Lake to take in some of the main "earthstage" shows at this year's Vines Art Festival. The festival was started by Artistic Director Heather Lamoureux in 2015 with two aims: to make contemporary performance more accessible by siting it in a public park (and making it free); and to promote environmental awareness by showcasing work that responds to its natural setting and that is engaged with themes of climate activism and sustainability. The 2015 festival, a one-day event in Trout Lake, mounted with a budget raised solely through door-to-door fundraising by Heather, was a huge success. In 2016 the festival not only attracted major corporate and government sponsors, but it also expanded to four days and multiple sites, with events taking place at Hadden Park in Kits Beach, Pandora Park on the East Side, Maclean Park in Strathcona, and its mainstage site of Trout Lake. This year Heather has grown the festival even further, expanding events to ten days and spreading them across seven Vancouver parks.
However, the main event continues to be the culminating day-long series of performances, workshops and installations at Trout Lake Park. Unfortunately, this year my timing was not so great. I arrived too late to take in Robert Leveroos and Isabelle Kirouac's Alien Forms, and only caught the tail end of Meegin Pye's Boxed In (which seemed to be about homelessness and housing affordability). I did catch the Blue Cedar Stage set of the Son Bohemio trio, who were back again this year with their mix of Argentinian folk songs. And I stuck around long enough to see and hear A Complicated Intelligence, a collaborative sound installation-cum-interactive performance by Stefan Smulovitz, Lara Amelie Abadir, Dave Biddle and beekeeper Andrew Scott. Learning about how bees communicate with each other (by vomiting into each other's mouths) and deal with genetic diversity (by cannibalizing eggs deemed insufficiently heterogeneous) was all I needed as a capstone to how art can trump the rhetoric of white supremacy.
P
Sunday, July 23, 2017
Wreck Beach Butoh 2018
Owing to unexpected summer teaching commitments, I was unable to participate in Kokoro Dance's annual Wreck Beach Butoh process. This was disappointing, as I had hoped to make it three years in a row. That said, I did drop in on a couple of free morning classes down at KW Studios over the past two weeks, and so I got a glimpse of what Barbara and Jay were putting together this year. I also got to say hello to some of WBB's returning crew: Tuan and Keith and Bronwyn and Leslie and Noriko and Yvonne. It was a kick to be dancing in KW's new atrium studio, as we had a built-in audience from everyone who happened to be hanging out or wandering through the basketball courts at SFU Woodward's.
This morning, I made my way to Wreck Beach to see the weekend's final performance. I'd told Barbara that I would volunteer to carry one of Kokoro's red donation buckets, and also to police anyone trying to take photos. I proved to be a surprisingly good enforcer on both counts. Otherwise, I just generally enjoyed being a spectator, which I admit meant indulging in some relief at not having to go into and (even worse) get out of the water this year: though the sun was out and things got progressively warmer as the performance went on, there was a strong wind throughout.
There was some repeat choreography that I recognized: the pirate laughs and the tick tock walk and the ecstasy jumps, for example. But the core of this year's work was a central section that involved the dancers torquing their torsos toward the sun and gently turning in the breeze, and then drawing one arm up the other and across the face in a sequence that initiates a danced exploration of the senses. It was quite moving and tender to watch, especially in the way that the dancers moved into and out of unison. However, there was also some cheekiness--quite literally--as Barbara led the dancers in a group ass grab and wiggle directed at the audience.
The start of each WBB is always memorable, and this year I was struck by the fact that the slow and sensuously gestural unison walk toward the water by the clustered group of white painted dancers was accompanied by a chorus of sounds. Various other whoops and caws recurred throughout the piece, but this opening sequence of movement and sound was especially unique.
One final thing I noted was the way in which I was able to anticipate the directional flow of much of the choreography. To be sure, Barbara and Jay generally begin with a southward trajectory along the beach following the dancers' emergence from the water, before doubling back on themselves. However, I also think my instinctive knowledge of when and where to walk contained within it residual kinetic memories of having danced in previous WBB performances. Whatever the case, it was a nice feeling to have.
P
This morning, I made my way to Wreck Beach to see the weekend's final performance. I'd told Barbara that I would volunteer to carry one of Kokoro's red donation buckets, and also to police anyone trying to take photos. I proved to be a surprisingly good enforcer on both counts. Otherwise, I just generally enjoyed being a spectator, which I admit meant indulging in some relief at not having to go into and (even worse) get out of the water this year: though the sun was out and things got progressively warmer as the performance went on, there was a strong wind throughout.
There was some repeat choreography that I recognized: the pirate laughs and the tick tock walk and the ecstasy jumps, for example. But the core of this year's work was a central section that involved the dancers torquing their torsos toward the sun and gently turning in the breeze, and then drawing one arm up the other and across the face in a sequence that initiates a danced exploration of the senses. It was quite moving and tender to watch, especially in the way that the dancers moved into and out of unison. However, there was also some cheekiness--quite literally--as Barbara led the dancers in a group ass grab and wiggle directed at the audience.
The start of each WBB is always memorable, and this year I was struck by the fact that the slow and sensuously gestural unison walk toward the water by the clustered group of white painted dancers was accompanied by a chorus of sounds. Various other whoops and caws recurred throughout the piece, but this opening sequence of movement and sound was especially unique.
One final thing I noted was the way in which I was able to anticipate the directional flow of much of the choreography. To be sure, Barbara and Jay generally begin with a southward trajectory along the beach following the dancers' emergence from the water, before doubling back on themselves. However, I also think my instinctive knowledge of when and where to walk contained within it residual kinetic memories of having danced in previous WBB performances. Whatever the case, it was a nice feeling to have.
P
Saturday, March 11, 2017
Crumbling at KW Studios
There is a new venue being used for select performances during this year's Vancouver International Dance Festival. Alongside familiar spaces like the Roundhouse and the Vancouver Playhouse, VIDF co-producers Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi have added the new KW Production Studio to their roster of performance sites. KW is the former city-owned cultural amenity space that belonged to W2 Media Arts in the Woodward's complex at Abbott and West Hastings. In 2015 Bourget and Hirabayashi's Kokoro Dance, together with VIDF, Vancouver Moving Theatre, and Raven Spirit Dance were given the nod to take over the vacated space, which included a suite of offices on the second floor of the tower above TD Bank, a ground-level space that opens onto the atrium and basketball court (and which W2 had used as a cafe), and a subterranean concrete shell which I had only previously seen host meetings and book launches.
Bourget and Hirabayashi have spent the last year and a half overseeing renovations of these latter two spaces, with the aim to turn both into rehearsal, teaching and performance venues for dance and music (there is now a new recording studio adjacent the basement space). It has been a slow and arduous process working with city contractors, and with a great many complex things (like converting a concrete floor into something you can dance on) needing to happen in a specific sequence (e.g. the lighting grid needing to be installed before drywall can be put up). And while the spaces are still not completely finished, Bourget and Hirabayashi were determined to open them up during this year's VIDF to show the public that they did in fact exist, and to introduce those who were interested to their special intimacy.
All of which explains what I was doing at 4:45 pm yesterday afternoon hanging out after a School meeting at the eastern end of the Woodward's atrium. A half dozen of us had gathered there for VIDF's presentation of Crumbling, a solo choreographed by Bourget for the Toronto-based dancer Matthew Romantini. Soon Bourget arrived and led us down the labyrinthine staircase and hallway that leads to the underground KW Production Studio (one of the challenges moving forward in terms of usage of the space will be public access, as presently Bourget can only let us in and out with her magnetized fob). I had been given a tour of the venue late last summer, when it was still very much in mid-construction; Bourget's caveats about what still has to be done notwithstanding, the transformation of the space to date is nothing short of remarkable. A very real material obstacle to both performance and spectatorship in KW is the fact that its ceiling is supported by two giant concrete pillars. There are a few different configurations that can be used to work around this and yesterday's solution was to conscript the pillars into a quasi-proscenium, with chairs for audience members placed in contiguous alignment with them. This means that the stage space is very shallow, but for yesterday's performance that worked to our benefit as it meant we were that much closer to Romantini, who is a very expressive performer.
Crumbling was a doubly uncanny spectating experience for me. Not only was I sitting in this new black box space with the memory of its former concrete shell still fresh in my mind, but the solo being performed by Romantini also evoked very real kinetic memories in my own body. To explain: Bourget set portions of Crumbling on those of us who participated in Kokoro's 2015 Wreck Beach Butoh performance. And so when to the sounds of the haunting and eerie music by George Crumb Romantini begins his slow butoh walk, extending his right arm across his chest and turning to look to his left I couldn't help but flash back to the EDAM Studios at the Western Front when Bourget first taught the movement to us (and more often than not told us we were doing it wrong). It was a strange experience anticipating what was coming next movement-wise, but also wanting to concentrate on how Romantini was executing that movement in the present. Bourget took inspiration for the piece from a poem about Icarus by Yukio Mishima, and the work is filled with moments of striving upwards towards flight, which are invariably followed by earth-bound collapses. One of the most compelling things for me yesterday was to watch how Romantini would contract his body inward in the moments immediately preceding these falls. It seemed to happen bone by bone, vertebra by vertebra. And the landings were always so soft, like he was indeed a bird.
Of course there was much in the performance that was new, as we had only learned a portion of the solo in 2015. For example, the poem by Mishima that Bourget had given us as inspiration for our execution of the movement Romantini actually speaks. And an image at the end that perfectly encapsulates the dialectic of creation and destruction at the heart of this work (and the myth of Icarus more generally) elicited a gasp of surprise from my closest neighbour in the audience. It involves Romantini scooping up a baby, or maybe an injured bird, from the ground and then cradling it in his arms, before biting off the head of the swaddling creature and picking out bits of imaginary bone from the back of his throat. Perhaps this is Romantini now as Daedalus eating his young, a comment by Bourget on what has to be consumed to make great art. Whatever the case, it put a memorable stamp on a performance piece that I have come to know quite well, and on a performance space that I look forward to revisiting many times in the future.
P
Bourget and Hirabayashi have spent the last year and a half overseeing renovations of these latter two spaces, with the aim to turn both into rehearsal, teaching and performance venues for dance and music (there is now a new recording studio adjacent the basement space). It has been a slow and arduous process working with city contractors, and with a great many complex things (like converting a concrete floor into something you can dance on) needing to happen in a specific sequence (e.g. the lighting grid needing to be installed before drywall can be put up). And while the spaces are still not completely finished, Bourget and Hirabayashi were determined to open them up during this year's VIDF to show the public that they did in fact exist, and to introduce those who were interested to their special intimacy.
All of which explains what I was doing at 4:45 pm yesterday afternoon hanging out after a School meeting at the eastern end of the Woodward's atrium. A half dozen of us had gathered there for VIDF's presentation of Crumbling, a solo choreographed by Bourget for the Toronto-based dancer Matthew Romantini. Soon Bourget arrived and led us down the labyrinthine staircase and hallway that leads to the underground KW Production Studio (one of the challenges moving forward in terms of usage of the space will be public access, as presently Bourget can only let us in and out with her magnetized fob). I had been given a tour of the venue late last summer, when it was still very much in mid-construction; Bourget's caveats about what still has to be done notwithstanding, the transformation of the space to date is nothing short of remarkable. A very real material obstacle to both performance and spectatorship in KW is the fact that its ceiling is supported by two giant concrete pillars. There are a few different configurations that can be used to work around this and yesterday's solution was to conscript the pillars into a quasi-proscenium, with chairs for audience members placed in contiguous alignment with them. This means that the stage space is very shallow, but for yesterday's performance that worked to our benefit as it meant we were that much closer to Romantini, who is a very expressive performer.
Crumbling was a doubly uncanny spectating experience for me. Not only was I sitting in this new black box space with the memory of its former concrete shell still fresh in my mind, but the solo being performed by Romantini also evoked very real kinetic memories in my own body. To explain: Bourget set portions of Crumbling on those of us who participated in Kokoro's 2015 Wreck Beach Butoh performance. And so when to the sounds of the haunting and eerie music by George Crumb Romantini begins his slow butoh walk, extending his right arm across his chest and turning to look to his left I couldn't help but flash back to the EDAM Studios at the Western Front when Bourget first taught the movement to us (and more often than not told us we were doing it wrong). It was a strange experience anticipating what was coming next movement-wise, but also wanting to concentrate on how Romantini was executing that movement in the present. Bourget took inspiration for the piece from a poem about Icarus by Yukio Mishima, and the work is filled with moments of striving upwards towards flight, which are invariably followed by earth-bound collapses. One of the most compelling things for me yesterday was to watch how Romantini would contract his body inward in the moments immediately preceding these falls. It seemed to happen bone by bone, vertebra by vertebra. And the landings were always so soft, like he was indeed a bird.
Of course there was much in the performance that was new, as we had only learned a portion of the solo in 2015. For example, the poem by Mishima that Bourget had given us as inspiration for our execution of the movement Romantini actually speaks. And an image at the end that perfectly encapsulates the dialectic of creation and destruction at the heart of this work (and the myth of Icarus more generally) elicited a gasp of surprise from my closest neighbour in the audience. It involves Romantini scooping up a baby, or maybe an injured bird, from the ground and then cradling it in his arms, before biting off the head of the swaddling creature and picking out bits of imaginary bone from the back of his throat. Perhaps this is Romantini now as Daedalus eating his young, a comment by Bourget on what has to be consumed to make great art. Whatever the case, it put a memorable stamp on a performance piece that I have come to know quite well, and on a performance space that I look forward to revisiting many times in the future.
P
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 24
After interviewing Kokoro Dance's Barbara Bourget on Tuesday, I returned to the company's offices at Woodward's yesterday to interview Jay Hirabayashi. Beginning, as usual, with our "when" question (i.e. when dance/when Vancouver), I learned that, remarkably, Jay only began dancing at age 30 and, even more extraordinarily, he was invited to join his first company after only nine months of study. To explain.
Jay had come to Vancouver in 1973 to do graduate work in Buddhist Studies at UBC. He had no connection to dance at that time, but he had been a competitive downhill skier. As a result of an accident at the Canadian national championships in Whistler a few years earlier (a fascinating story in and of itself), Jay had blown out one of his knees; after consulting the physician to the BC Lions, he underwent corrective surgery, a long and painful process in those pre-orthoscopic days. Around the same time, Jay and his first wife had enrolled their daughter in dance class, and had chosen the Paula Ross dance studio. Noting that Paula offered beginner adult classes, and thinking that dance would help with rehabilitating his knee, Jay signed up for a class. He liked it, and soon he was taking three classes a day. It wasn't too long before Paula, liking what she saw, offered Jay a scholarship to pay for full-time dance studies. And then, after less than a year of training, came the invitation to join her company.
Jay danced for Paula from 1978-80, during which time he met Barbara. Jay and Barbara both separately confirmed to me that while Paula was an amazing choreographer, she was a volatile person, with a habit of firing people. After one episode in which she kicked everyone out of the studio, telling them not to come back unless they were willing to work twice as hard, Jay and Barbara quit. Two years later, and after a brief stint working with Mountain Dance, the initial seeds of EDAM began to take shape. Jay filled in some additional detail on how this happened by explaining Karen Jamieson's crucial role in hiring most of the eventual EDAM co-founders to dance in her piece Coming Out of Chaos. Having gotten to know each other as a result of that process, the idea for a collective was born. And that idea, as Jay also confirmed, was at base altruistic: share a studio and dance in each other's work in order to save money and be as creative as possible. But differences in style and training, combined with seven strong personalities, meant that things were a struggle from the get-go. There was also the issue of management, which Jay said they tried to resolve by appointing an individual AD for each project, and then eventually by hiring a company manager. But it was what both Jay and Barbara described as the Expo 86 debacle of presenting an early multi-media and immersive piece called Bach to the Future that was the straw that broke the camel's back for the two of them. They left EDAM after that show and established Kokoro shortly thereafter.
Jay, noting that Kokoro's approach to butoh evolved through a combination of self-instruction through research and workshops with visiting companies, and eventually trips to Japan (where Jay studied with Kazuo Ohno in 1995), said that the company's style is beholden to no particular tradition of butoh (e.g. the Ohno versus Tatsumi Hijikata traditions). It is easier for them to say that their movement is influenced by butoh rather than to call themselves a butoh company per se. This was offered in the context of Jay's discussion of some favourite and memorable performances over the years, including Episode in Blue, which was a musical based on Nabokov's retelling of the Faust story in The Master and Margarita, and which employed 16 mm film projections (on which Jay appeared as the devil) and audience participation. It was a critical disaster though to this day Jay insists it was brilliant and ahead of its time in its combining of different media. Then there was the story of Jay passing out during a performance of Bats, in which Jay is suspended upside down by his feet. On this particular performance he had tied the ropes that secure him around his chest too tightly, and he began to have trouble breathing, eventually losing consciousness. He woke himself up with a sneeze, and realizing he couldn't get anyone's attention, he concentrated on breathing very shallowly until the end of the performance and someone came to cut him down.
At the end of our time together, when I asked the "why" question--as in, why do this, why keep going, especially in Vancouver--Jay said he never really thinks of stuff like that. He just thinks about getting through the work to be done one day at a time. He admitted that he has never really been practical and strategic about that work, that running two organizations (Kokoro and VIDF), and now having taken over the management of KW Studios, is somewhat absurd given they have no real full-time staff apart from he and Barbara. But what motivates Jay is, in his words, that there "are always things that are yet to be done that need to be done." And so he keeps on doing.
P
Jay had come to Vancouver in 1973 to do graduate work in Buddhist Studies at UBC. He had no connection to dance at that time, but he had been a competitive downhill skier. As a result of an accident at the Canadian national championships in Whistler a few years earlier (a fascinating story in and of itself), Jay had blown out one of his knees; after consulting the physician to the BC Lions, he underwent corrective surgery, a long and painful process in those pre-orthoscopic days. Around the same time, Jay and his first wife had enrolled their daughter in dance class, and had chosen the Paula Ross dance studio. Noting that Paula offered beginner adult classes, and thinking that dance would help with rehabilitating his knee, Jay signed up for a class. He liked it, and soon he was taking three classes a day. It wasn't too long before Paula, liking what she saw, offered Jay a scholarship to pay for full-time dance studies. And then, after less than a year of training, came the invitation to join her company.
Jay danced for Paula from 1978-80, during which time he met Barbara. Jay and Barbara both separately confirmed to me that while Paula was an amazing choreographer, she was a volatile person, with a habit of firing people. After one episode in which she kicked everyone out of the studio, telling them not to come back unless they were willing to work twice as hard, Jay and Barbara quit. Two years later, and after a brief stint working with Mountain Dance, the initial seeds of EDAM began to take shape. Jay filled in some additional detail on how this happened by explaining Karen Jamieson's crucial role in hiring most of the eventual EDAM co-founders to dance in her piece Coming Out of Chaos. Having gotten to know each other as a result of that process, the idea for a collective was born. And that idea, as Jay also confirmed, was at base altruistic: share a studio and dance in each other's work in order to save money and be as creative as possible. But differences in style and training, combined with seven strong personalities, meant that things were a struggle from the get-go. There was also the issue of management, which Jay said they tried to resolve by appointing an individual AD for each project, and then eventually by hiring a company manager. But it was what both Jay and Barbara described as the Expo 86 debacle of presenting an early multi-media and immersive piece called Bach to the Future that was the straw that broke the camel's back for the two of them. They left EDAM after that show and established Kokoro shortly thereafter.
Jay, noting that Kokoro's approach to butoh evolved through a combination of self-instruction through research and workshops with visiting companies, and eventually trips to Japan (where Jay studied with Kazuo Ohno in 1995), said that the company's style is beholden to no particular tradition of butoh (e.g. the Ohno versus Tatsumi Hijikata traditions). It is easier for them to say that their movement is influenced by butoh rather than to call themselves a butoh company per se. This was offered in the context of Jay's discussion of some favourite and memorable performances over the years, including Episode in Blue, which was a musical based on Nabokov's retelling of the Faust story in The Master and Margarita, and which employed 16 mm film projections (on which Jay appeared as the devil) and audience participation. It was a critical disaster though to this day Jay insists it was brilliant and ahead of its time in its combining of different media. Then there was the story of Jay passing out during a performance of Bats, in which Jay is suspended upside down by his feet. On this particular performance he had tied the ropes that secure him around his chest too tightly, and he began to have trouble breathing, eventually losing consciousness. He woke himself up with a sneeze, and realizing he couldn't get anyone's attention, he concentrated on breathing very shallowly until the end of the performance and someone came to cut him down.
At the end of our time together, when I asked the "why" question--as in, why do this, why keep going, especially in Vancouver--Jay said he never really thinks of stuff like that. He just thinks about getting through the work to be done one day at a time. He admitted that he has never really been practical and strategic about that work, that running two organizations (Kokoro and VIDF), and now having taken over the management of KW Studios, is somewhat absurd given they have no real full-time staff apart from he and Barbara. But what motivates Jay is, in his words, that there "are always things that are yet to be done that need to be done." And so he keeps on doing.
P
Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 23
Yesterday I had lunch with Barbara Bourget and then interviewed her for our Vancouver Dance Histories project. Barbara's long and distinguished career started with tap lessons at age four, before she switched full-time to ballet five years later--although not before creating her first work of choreography to Elvis Presley's "Stuck on You" at eight years old. Barbara's first ballet teacher in Vancouver was Miss Mara McBirney, who had taught Lynn Seymour, and who was also friends with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's Arnold Spohr. It was through the latter connection that Barbara was invited to join the RWB at 16 as a scholarship student, getting to study with and dance in works by such pioneering American women choreographers as Pauline Koner and Agnes de Mille.
From the RWB, and following a brief stint in Banff, Barbara moved on to Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, just missing Judith Marcuse, who had left the company the previous year. Fernand Nault cast Barbara as the original Sally Simpson in Les Grands Ballets' highly successful rock ballet of The Who's Tommy. But despite great success with the company, Barbara, at age 22, became disillusioned with dance. She wanted a boyfriend, and as she put it to me in her inimitably frank way, she took a look at the men in the company (most of them gay) and quickly realized that wasn't going to happen here. A family crisis also necessitated Barbara's return to Vancouver, and so in 1974 she found herself back in the city.
However, Barbara's retirement from dance didn't last long, and she soon found herself dancing for the fledgling Mountain Dance Theatre Company, under the direction of local legends Mauryne Allan and Iris Garland. From there, and following the birth of her first child and also the dissolution of her first marriage, Barbara went on to the Paula Ross Dance Company, which along with Anna Wyman Dance Theatre and the Pacific Ballet Theatre (the forerunner of Ballet BC) was one of the preeminent local companies in the 1970s. It was while dancing for Ross that Barbara met Jay Hirabayashi, which began a personal and professional relationship that has lasted 38 years and counting.
Jay and Barbara began creating work together in 1979, working out of the Western Front. And it was there, of course, that they met Peter Bingham, Lola MacLaughlin, Jennifer Mascall, Peter Ryan and Ahmed Hassan, all of whom would come together to create EDAM in 1982. Barbara told me that with such strong personalities all vying to create new work, the collective was doomed to failure; she said they would have meetings that lasted seven hours--just to decide what kind of cash box to buy! And then there was the fact that their styles and dance vocabularies were so different. Barbara, who says she can barely stand to be touched by anyone other than Jay, described to me doing contact improv and it was hilarious. But at the same time Barbara was proud of the amazing work that EDAM had created (none of it, unfortunately, captured on video), and said that audiences ate it up. And of course there is no denying the legacy of that work and how it has continued to shape the local dance community.
Kokoro Dance was born in 1986, its post-butoh aesthetic shaped by a performance by the Tamano brothers that Barbara and Jay had seen in the basement theatre of the VAG in 1982. Several hundred choreographed works later the company is still going strong, with so many folks in this city having been affected by the work, whether as spectators or as performer-collaborators. In my case, it's been both, and the combustible creative process that is Barbara and Jay's partnership is certainly something unique to behold; but what results is almost always an amazing experience.
Of course Barbara and Jay have helped shaped the Vancouver dance landscape in so many other ways: through the establishment of the Vancouver International Dance Festival; through their longtime teaching at Harbour Dance (which just came to an end this summer); and, most recently, through their founding of KW Studios, the new rehearsal, performance, and administrative space at Woodward's that Kokoro and VIDF shares with Vancouver Moving Theatre and Raven Spirit Dance. Barbara gave me a tour of the space before we went to lunch, and while there remains much to do, and while I know this weighs heavily upon both her and Jay, I also know from class that Barbara's tiredness contains within in it reserves of energy that the rest of us could only hope to one day harness.
P
From the RWB, and following a brief stint in Banff, Barbara moved on to Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, just missing Judith Marcuse, who had left the company the previous year. Fernand Nault cast Barbara as the original Sally Simpson in Les Grands Ballets' highly successful rock ballet of The Who's Tommy. But despite great success with the company, Barbara, at age 22, became disillusioned with dance. She wanted a boyfriend, and as she put it to me in her inimitably frank way, she took a look at the men in the company (most of them gay) and quickly realized that wasn't going to happen here. A family crisis also necessitated Barbara's return to Vancouver, and so in 1974 she found herself back in the city.
However, Barbara's retirement from dance didn't last long, and she soon found herself dancing for the fledgling Mountain Dance Theatre Company, under the direction of local legends Mauryne Allan and Iris Garland. From there, and following the birth of her first child and also the dissolution of her first marriage, Barbara went on to the Paula Ross Dance Company, which along with Anna Wyman Dance Theatre and the Pacific Ballet Theatre (the forerunner of Ballet BC) was one of the preeminent local companies in the 1970s. It was while dancing for Ross that Barbara met Jay Hirabayashi, which began a personal and professional relationship that has lasted 38 years and counting.
Jay and Barbara began creating work together in 1979, working out of the Western Front. And it was there, of course, that they met Peter Bingham, Lola MacLaughlin, Jennifer Mascall, Peter Ryan and Ahmed Hassan, all of whom would come together to create EDAM in 1982. Barbara told me that with such strong personalities all vying to create new work, the collective was doomed to failure; she said they would have meetings that lasted seven hours--just to decide what kind of cash box to buy! And then there was the fact that their styles and dance vocabularies were so different. Barbara, who says she can barely stand to be touched by anyone other than Jay, described to me doing contact improv and it was hilarious. But at the same time Barbara was proud of the amazing work that EDAM had created (none of it, unfortunately, captured on video), and said that audiences ate it up. And of course there is no denying the legacy of that work and how it has continued to shape the local dance community.
Kokoro Dance was born in 1986, its post-butoh aesthetic shaped by a performance by the Tamano brothers that Barbara and Jay had seen in the basement theatre of the VAG in 1982. Several hundred choreographed works later the company is still going strong, with so many folks in this city having been affected by the work, whether as spectators or as performer-collaborators. In my case, it's been both, and the combustible creative process that is Barbara and Jay's partnership is certainly something unique to behold; but what results is almost always an amazing experience.
Of course Barbara and Jay have helped shaped the Vancouver dance landscape in so many other ways: through the establishment of the Vancouver International Dance Festival; through their longtime teaching at Harbour Dance (which just came to an end this summer); and, most recently, through their founding of KW Studios, the new rehearsal, performance, and administrative space at Woodward's that Kokoro and VIDF shares with Vancouver Moving Theatre and Raven Spirit Dance. Barbara gave me a tour of the space before we went to lunch, and while there remains much to do, and while I know this weighs heavily upon both her and Jay, I also know from class that Barbara's tiredness contains within in it reserves of energy that the rest of us could only hope to one day harness.
P
Monday, July 4, 2016
Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Sunday Performance
Bronwyn was right. I was actually awakened by the sound of the wind, which at first I mistook for pouring rain. By the time Dana and I gathered at Molly's, the sun was shining and it was pleasantly warm--but definitely very breezy. And by the time the three of us plus Irene got to the top of the stairs at Trail 4 we could hear not just the wind, but the crashing waves. Half-way down we saw the whitecaps, which were pretty high and moving fast--so fast that they propelled an adventurous (and presumably well wet-suited) windsurfer back and forth across the horizon multiple times as we stared out at the waters, mouths agape. Meanwhile, a kayaker had apparently had enough, depositing his boat just at the mouth of the pathway on the beach we use to descend toward the water (where it remained throughout our performance--at the very least I hoped he stayed to watch given the visual interruption his vessel caused). One benefit of the powerful surf was that our pathway had been more or less swept clean of rocks; but also laying across it there was now a massive log, washed ashore by the waves, and forming a natural proscenium arch for our performance.
We were the first to arrive on the beach and as more and more people gathered there was one question: would we still be going in the water to swim at the beginning? When Barbara and Jay arrived they very generously confirmed that we would not start in the water, simply running instead to where we begin the dragging and rolling sequence at the south end of the beach, crawling to our respective positions once we neared the spot. A sigh of relief went through the ensemble when we heard this news, as to have begun the piece wet and shivery would have been distinctly unpleasant. Instead, having the sun shine on us while we were moving about the sand was actually quite pleasant, and during Sunday's performance I felt I could finally let go of the mechanics of the movement and really get into the experience of my body merging with the beach, so much so that I really let things rip during the super-fast rolls back and forth. Likewise, with the teeter-totter step that moves (quite literally) from the end of Jay's section into the beginning of Barbara's, I stopped counting and overthinking the steps leading into the leg swing and just went with the momentum generated by my off-axis body--and I think what resulted was perhaps the best I've ever done that move.
Not that everything was perfect. Just before this, Barbara forgot the eight fast pivoting hand claps between partners following the "picking-up-a-seed-and-putting-it-back-on-the-tree" sequence. I wasn't going to remind her about this, and so we were way ahead of everyone in motoring down the beach. And our interior circle went in the wrong direction with our rooster walk, which I'm sure caused the outer circle more than a little confusion as they reoriented themselves for our cross on the backwards crab walk. But I'm sure the audience, which was a lot bigger than Saturday's, didn't notice.
We did still go in the water at the end of the piece, but by that time I was ready for some cooling-off, and some help in washing the sand off my body, and just generally being buffeted by the waves.
Then it was time for a group picnic and reflective decompressing after two weeks of extremely intense work. Brie and Michael and Yvonne, who were doing WBB for the first time, all said it was an amazing experience and that, time permitting, they would definitely consider coming back next year. For me, partly as a result of the choreography this year and partly because of the storehouse of embodied and environmental knowledge I had retained from last year, I felt more than ever how truly unique WBB is as a work of site-specific dance: because of its sustained investigation of a singular but ever-changing site; because of the reciprocal material exchange between performers and site embedded into each iteration; and because of how much kinetic awareness (and locomotive energy) it also demands of its audience.
Then, too, Barbara and Jay, in their own inimitable tough-love way, give us through this process a lesson in what it means to come together as an ensemble. So, after all the hours of rehearsal, all the stairs descended and climbed, all the white paint applied and (imperfectly) removed, all the sweaty clothes and wet towels washed and dried (none of which I will miss any time soon), here's to us in before and after shots:
Left to right: Yvonne; Peter; Keith; Brie; Jay, Dana; Bronwyn; Molly; Irene; Michael; Tuan; Henry; with Barbara kneeling in front.
Look, even Barbara is smiling this time!
P
We were the first to arrive on the beach and as more and more people gathered there was one question: would we still be going in the water to swim at the beginning? When Barbara and Jay arrived they very generously confirmed that we would not start in the water, simply running instead to where we begin the dragging and rolling sequence at the south end of the beach, crawling to our respective positions once we neared the spot. A sigh of relief went through the ensemble when we heard this news, as to have begun the piece wet and shivery would have been distinctly unpleasant. Instead, having the sun shine on us while we were moving about the sand was actually quite pleasant, and during Sunday's performance I felt I could finally let go of the mechanics of the movement and really get into the experience of my body merging with the beach, so much so that I really let things rip during the super-fast rolls back and forth. Likewise, with the teeter-totter step that moves (quite literally) from the end of Jay's section into the beginning of Barbara's, I stopped counting and overthinking the steps leading into the leg swing and just went with the momentum generated by my off-axis body--and I think what resulted was perhaps the best I've ever done that move.
Not that everything was perfect. Just before this, Barbara forgot the eight fast pivoting hand claps between partners following the "picking-up-a-seed-and-putting-it-back-on-the-tree" sequence. I wasn't going to remind her about this, and so we were way ahead of everyone in motoring down the beach. And our interior circle went in the wrong direction with our rooster walk, which I'm sure caused the outer circle more than a little confusion as they reoriented themselves for our cross on the backwards crab walk. But I'm sure the audience, which was a lot bigger than Saturday's, didn't notice.
We did still go in the water at the end of the piece, but by that time I was ready for some cooling-off, and some help in washing the sand off my body, and just generally being buffeted by the waves.
Then it was time for a group picnic and reflective decompressing after two weeks of extremely intense work. Brie and Michael and Yvonne, who were doing WBB for the first time, all said it was an amazing experience and that, time permitting, they would definitely consider coming back next year. For me, partly as a result of the choreography this year and partly because of the storehouse of embodied and environmental knowledge I had retained from last year, I felt more than ever how truly unique WBB is as a work of site-specific dance: because of its sustained investigation of a singular but ever-changing site; because of the reciprocal material exchange between performers and site embedded into each iteration; and because of how much kinetic awareness (and locomotive energy) it also demands of its audience.
Then, too, Barbara and Jay, in their own inimitable tough-love way, give us through this process a lesson in what it means to come together as an ensemble. So, after all the hours of rehearsal, all the stairs descended and climbed, all the white paint applied and (imperfectly) removed, all the sweaty clothes and wet towels washed and dried (none of which I will miss any time soon), here's to us in before and after shots:
Left to right: Yvonne; Peter; Keith; Brie; Jay, Dana; Bronwyn; Molly; Irene; Michael; Tuan; Henry; with Barbara kneeling in front.
Look, even Barbara is smiling this time!
P
Saturday, July 2, 2016
Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Saturday Performance
What a difference a day makes. A later start time, warmer temperatures, and even some sun: all combined to make today's performance much more pleasant than yesterday's undress rehearsal. In fact, I would hazard to say that this morning approached near ideal conditions: not so hot as last year, but also no really gusting winds, and with the sea mercifully calm. There are contradictory reports on what it will do tomorrow: Jay says it will be even nicer, but the paper is predicting a chance of showers; and Bronwyn (spelled correctly this time!) says that westerly winds will push in colder air and water. I guess we'll have to wait and see. I'm just happy that the call time on the beach is even later.
Speaking of the beach, Jay and Barbara remapped our trajectory across it before the start of today's show. Following the end of Jay's section we now move further south on the teeter-totter walk, rather than north, as we did yesterday, to form our circles for the start of Barbara's choreography. Having walked us through all of this before we started putting on our make-up and doing our warm-up, there was nonetheless some dispute between Barbara and Jay near the conclusion of our opening swim about where exactly we were to alight on the beach for our dragging and rolling sequence. The shouts back and forth between them ("Jay, we said here"; "No, Barbara, we said over there") got quite loud, though Dana, Molly, Irene and I confirmed via Molly's partner, David, on the car ride home that no one in the audience could apparently hear.
Those of us downstage (that is, facing towards the cliffs) during this sequence made sure to position ourselves closer to the audience so that folks further upstage weren't rolling back into the water. However, there were tiny tide pools dotting the sandbar on which we were performing, and I somehow managed to position myself right smack in the middle of one, which made for lots of wet muckiness and water in the ears during the rolls. But I have to say, I did like the sloshy, suction-y sound our bodies made when they slapped over these pools as the rolls sped up. By the time we moved into the turning handstands it felt like the spiralling of my body had succeeded in digging a two-foot well, so deeply did my palms sink into the sand.
I think the performance went very well. I made a slight mistake in the choreography at the start of the dual circle sequence, and the timing of the two circles crossing was a bit off. But collectively we remembered to include all of the movement this time, and overall my balance was much better today than yesterday--no doubt because I wasn't shivering so violently.
I just wish there had been more people watch us. Jay said it was probably the smallest audience they'd ever had--perhaps as a result of this year's performances falling on a long weekend (and also not being tied to the Dancing on the Edge Festival, as they had been last year). Here's hoping more spectators come out tomorrow. But even if they don't, and in spite of all the pain and toil over the past two weeks, Sunday will be the culmination of a truly sublime experience.
That's the gift that Barbara and Jay give us each year through WBB, and while it may be hard to explain to friends and partners and family ("You're doing what?!," my niece Erika, a dancer herself, asked me when I told what I was doing this long weekend) why we do this, I certainly don't regret signing up for a second year.
P
Speaking of the beach, Jay and Barbara remapped our trajectory across it before the start of today's show. Following the end of Jay's section we now move further south on the teeter-totter walk, rather than north, as we did yesterday, to form our circles for the start of Barbara's choreography. Having walked us through all of this before we started putting on our make-up and doing our warm-up, there was nonetheless some dispute between Barbara and Jay near the conclusion of our opening swim about where exactly we were to alight on the beach for our dragging and rolling sequence. The shouts back and forth between them ("Jay, we said here"; "No, Barbara, we said over there") got quite loud, though Dana, Molly, Irene and I confirmed via Molly's partner, David, on the car ride home that no one in the audience could apparently hear.
Those of us downstage (that is, facing towards the cliffs) during this sequence made sure to position ourselves closer to the audience so that folks further upstage weren't rolling back into the water. However, there were tiny tide pools dotting the sandbar on which we were performing, and I somehow managed to position myself right smack in the middle of one, which made for lots of wet muckiness and water in the ears during the rolls. But I have to say, I did like the sloshy, suction-y sound our bodies made when they slapped over these pools as the rolls sped up. By the time we moved into the turning handstands it felt like the spiralling of my body had succeeded in digging a two-foot well, so deeply did my palms sink into the sand.
I think the performance went very well. I made a slight mistake in the choreography at the start of the dual circle sequence, and the timing of the two circles crossing was a bit off. But collectively we remembered to include all of the movement this time, and overall my balance was much better today than yesterday--no doubt because I wasn't shivering so violently.
I just wish there had been more people watch us. Jay said it was probably the smallest audience they'd ever had--perhaps as a result of this year's performances falling on a long weekend (and also not being tied to the Dancing on the Edge Festival, as they had been last year). Here's hoping more spectators come out tomorrow. But even if they don't, and in spite of all the pain and toil over the past two weeks, Sunday will be the culmination of a truly sublime experience.
That's the gift that Barbara and Jay give us each year through WBB, and while it may be hard to explain to friends and partners and family ("You're doing what?!," my niece Erika, a dancer herself, asked me when I told what I was doing this long weekend) why we do this, I certainly don't regret signing up for a second year.
P
Friday, July 1, 2016
Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Undress Rehearsal
The water turned out to be quite warm. It was getting out that proved most bone chilling, as by that time (around 9:30 am) a wind had picked up and it had started to sprinkle. The first part of Jay's choreography, where we dragging and rolling ourselves across the sand was a special kind of torture given the pools of water we were forming with our bodies, and then promptly rolling over. Poor Irene, who was in the back row, closest to the ocean, said in the car on the way home that every time she had to roll west, or upstage, it meant she was plunged back into the surf--which musn't have been pleasant.
Just when I thought I had my shivering under control, another wind would come up that would send my body into spasm yet again. At a certain point my fingers and toes started to go numb, which meant balancing in the sand (especially when walking backwards) and flicking ones hands proved extra tricky. Everyone's teeth were chattering loudly, and Brie said at a certain point she thought her jaw had locked. Barbara said she couldn't remember the last time it had been so cold for the undress rehearsal, and she must have been in a lot of discomfort because not only did she find it difficult to eat afterwards, but she also gave us no notes--which is more or less unheard of. At the end of the piece no one bothered to go back in the water to wash off the white make-up; we just dried off and wore it home, with Bronwen looking the most ghostly among us.
Despite all of this, and despite the fact that we were far from perfect, I did lose myself in the elemental experience of it all in several moments. We danced for over an hour, but it felt like the time flew by. In addition to official videographer Chris Randle, photographer Peter Eastman, and Tuan's wife, our audience included a lazily swimming seal and a great blue heron, who set off in flight from his perch on a rock just as we were emerging from the water to begin the opening of Jay's section--as if saying, "Yes, alright, you now have my permission to move in this space." And by the end of the piece, with our bodies a camouflaged tapestry of white make-up, brown sand and pinky-orange skin, it did seem that we had merged in some fundamental way with the natural landscape.
Which is why, I guess, we do this. Notwithstanding this fact, I do hope that, as forecast, the sun does emerge tomorrow and Sunday.
P
Just when I thought I had my shivering under control, another wind would come up that would send my body into spasm yet again. At a certain point my fingers and toes started to go numb, which meant balancing in the sand (especially when walking backwards) and flicking ones hands proved extra tricky. Everyone's teeth were chattering loudly, and Brie said at a certain point she thought her jaw had locked. Barbara said she couldn't remember the last time it had been so cold for the undress rehearsal, and she must have been in a lot of discomfort because not only did she find it difficult to eat afterwards, but she also gave us no notes--which is more or less unheard of. At the end of the piece no one bothered to go back in the water to wash off the white make-up; we just dried off and wore it home, with Bronwen looking the most ghostly among us.
Despite all of this, and despite the fact that we were far from perfect, I did lose myself in the elemental experience of it all in several moments. We danced for over an hour, but it felt like the time flew by. In addition to official videographer Chris Randle, photographer Peter Eastman, and Tuan's wife, our audience included a lazily swimming seal and a great blue heron, who set off in flight from his perch on a rock just as we were emerging from the water to begin the opening of Jay's section--as if saying, "Yes, alright, you now have my permission to move in this space." And by the end of the piece, with our bodies a camouflaged tapestry of white make-up, brown sand and pinky-orange skin, it did seem that we had merged in some fundamental way with the natural landscape.
Which is why, I guess, we do this. Notwithstanding this fact, I do hope that, as forecast, the sun does emerge tomorrow and Sunday.
P
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 2
And then we were fourteen: Brie joined the process yesterday. The even number makes for a nice bit of symmetry, especially in the canon sequence that Barbara is developing, and that we tried out for the first time in formation yesterday afternoon. Brie and Michael and Yvonne are the newbies this year, and they are all faring much better than I did at this stage last year. Yvonne actually has a long connection to WBB as one of Kokoro's preferred photographic documenters of each year's event. It's nice that she's now decided to join the performance.
Jay led class in the morning, and while I find his preferred warm-up routines easier to follow than Barbara's I had forgotten what a workout they are: all those sit-ups and leg squats that seem to never end. The second half of class was devoted to a continuation of Jay's choreography for this year. The particular sequence we learned was all on the floor and involved a lot of dragging and rolling of our bodies, with the latter gaining in speed over time. This will be easier on the beach, but even with long pants the parquet of Studio 2 at Harbour Dance was pretty punishing--I have the bruises this morning to prove it. We're also required to do some squat handstands, which proved particularly challenging for yours truly.
After lunch Barbara took over, beginning with her setting of the aforementioned canon sequence, which necessitates a lot of counting, another weakness of mine. Let's just say that I'm glad that for now I've been placed in Molly's group!
P
Jay led class in the morning, and while I find his preferred warm-up routines easier to follow than Barbara's I had forgotten what a workout they are: all those sit-ups and leg squats that seem to never end. The second half of class was devoted to a continuation of Jay's choreography for this year. The particular sequence we learned was all on the floor and involved a lot of dragging and rolling of our bodies, with the latter gaining in speed over time. This will be easier on the beach, but even with long pants the parquet of Studio 2 at Harbour Dance was pretty punishing--I have the bruises this morning to prove it. We're also required to do some squat handstands, which proved particularly challenging for yours truly.
After lunch Barbara took over, beginning with her setting of the aforementioned canon sequence, which necessitates a lot of counting, another weakness of mine. Let's just say that I'm glad that for now I've been placed in Molly's group!
P
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 1
I guess I like pain. How else to explain my decision to fly back earlier than planned from a sojourn in Europe in order to put my body through the rigours of another Wreck Beach Butoh boot camp? Or maybe it's just that, after last year, I have a better sense of what lies on the other side of the nine-day rehearsal process in the studio: a truly transcendent experience on the beach.
A few things are different this year. We are a smaller group: 13 instead of 21, with all but two of us returnees. We're also rehearsing at Harbour Dance instead of EDAM, which makes for a slightly longer commute (but also more lunch options). (Originally the plan was to work out of the new Kokoro space at the Woodward's complex, but Barbara had said in class weeks ago that the renovations wouldn't be complete.) Then there's the fact that the actual performances this year will be in the morning, which regardless of whether or not the sun is shining means that it will be colder--because, as Barbara put it, at that hour the sun hasn't actually made it over the side of the Tower Beach cliff edge. Finally, we were informed that most if not all of the choreography this year would be new, so no relying on past storehouses of corporeal memory, even for WBB veterans like Tuan and Irene and Henry and Bronwen and Molly.
In fact, Molly is somewhat at an advantage. Not only, as a professional dancer of innate and distinctive talent does she absorb kinetic instruction more quickly than the rest of us, but as a Kokoro company member who takes class regularly with both Barbara and Jay, she has experienced and been involved over the past few months in testing out the movement ideas of each for this year's WBB performance. As someone who tries to take Barbara's Friday morning class as often as possible, I have had a taste of this, having learned and practiced with her at least three different movement phrases that she is considering for the piece--my favourite, despite how exhausting it is, being what I'll call the monkey step. But it appears that Jay, together with Molly, has already developed much more material--almost 35 minutes worth, we were told. That perhaps explains why he took the lead in instruction yesterday, teaching us five different sequences he's been working on: some partnered bumping; a tick-tock walk in second position demi-plie that also involves full turns en dehors (something I have to work on); a series of backwards and forwards lunges and arm waves; an upright cat-cow walk, also with arms; and a bit that involved miming the picking up of a seed and putting it back on the tree from whence it fell. We repeated all of these sequences several times, receiving constant notes for improvement (as expected), and with Jay and Barbara yelling as much at each other as at us (also as expected).
A unique part of Jay and Barbara's process is, as I've partially outlined above, the fact that despite always collaborating on the choreography of each WBB piece (like most of the work they develop with Kokoro), they work on their sections separately, only bringing them together in the actual two-week boot camp rehearsal process. That means they, like us, are each experiencing the other's choreography for the first time; it also means they feel free to criticize that choreography, or at least the delivery of it, openly and loudly. Such was the case yesterday with Barbara, who especially had much to comment on regarding the timing of the bump sequence. This lead to the first all-out screaming match between she and Jay; it came a little earlier in the process than usual, but it definitely won't be the last. As Jay explained their working method yesterday, we'll experiment with lots of different ways of doing the movement over the next two weeks, and throughout he and Barbara will fight about what works best. And then, in the end, we'll do it Barbara's way.
None of us would have it any other way.
P
A few things are different this year. We are a smaller group: 13 instead of 21, with all but two of us returnees. We're also rehearsing at Harbour Dance instead of EDAM, which makes for a slightly longer commute (but also more lunch options). (Originally the plan was to work out of the new Kokoro space at the Woodward's complex, but Barbara had said in class weeks ago that the renovations wouldn't be complete.) Then there's the fact that the actual performances this year will be in the morning, which regardless of whether or not the sun is shining means that it will be colder--because, as Barbara put it, at that hour the sun hasn't actually made it over the side of the Tower Beach cliff edge. Finally, we were informed that most if not all of the choreography this year would be new, so no relying on past storehouses of corporeal memory, even for WBB veterans like Tuan and Irene and Henry and Bronwen and Molly.
In fact, Molly is somewhat at an advantage. Not only, as a professional dancer of innate and distinctive talent does she absorb kinetic instruction more quickly than the rest of us, but as a Kokoro company member who takes class regularly with both Barbara and Jay, she has experienced and been involved over the past few months in testing out the movement ideas of each for this year's WBB performance. As someone who tries to take Barbara's Friday morning class as often as possible, I have had a taste of this, having learned and practiced with her at least three different movement phrases that she is considering for the piece--my favourite, despite how exhausting it is, being what I'll call the monkey step. But it appears that Jay, together with Molly, has already developed much more material--almost 35 minutes worth, we were told. That perhaps explains why he took the lead in instruction yesterday, teaching us five different sequences he's been working on: some partnered bumping; a tick-tock walk in second position demi-plie that also involves full turns en dehors (something I have to work on); a series of backwards and forwards lunges and arm waves; an upright cat-cow walk, also with arms; and a bit that involved miming the picking up of a seed and putting it back on the tree from whence it fell. We repeated all of these sequences several times, receiving constant notes for improvement (as expected), and with Jay and Barbara yelling as much at each other as at us (also as expected).
A unique part of Jay and Barbara's process is, as I've partially outlined above, the fact that despite always collaborating on the choreography of each WBB piece (like most of the work they develop with Kokoro), they work on their sections separately, only bringing them together in the actual two-week boot camp rehearsal process. That means they, like us, are each experiencing the other's choreography for the first time; it also means they feel free to criticize that choreography, or at least the delivery of it, openly and loudly. Such was the case yesterday with Barbara, who especially had much to comment on regarding the timing of the bump sequence. This lead to the first all-out screaming match between she and Jay; it came a little earlier in the process than usual, but it definitely won't be the last. As Jay explained their working method yesterday, we'll experiment with lots of different ways of doing the movement over the next two weeks, and throughout he and Barbara will fight about what works best. And then, in the end, we'll do it Barbara's way.
None of us would have it any other way.
P
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Book of Love at the Roundhouse
For their 30th anniversary
season Kokoro Dance’s Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi have created Book of Love, a quartet they have been
building over the past two years with company members Molly McDermott and Billy
Marchenski, and excerpts of which they have previously unveiled at the
Vancouver International Dance Festival and the Powell Street Festival. Set to a
dynamic original score by Jeffrey Ryan that is performed live by the StandingWave Ensemble, and that builds dramatically in tempo and tone, the sixty-one
minute piece takes its cheeky inspiration from a song by The Magnetic Fields:
“The book of love is long and boring.” However, what Bourget and Hirabayashi
and their collaborators have put together is anything but ennui-inducing;
instead, the piece manages to be tender and funny and surreal and lusty all at
once--which is my ideal description not just of a butoh performance, but also
of any lasting relationship.
Part of the surreality of Book of Love comes courtesy of
London-based Jonathan Baldock’s otherworldly costumes, which clad both the
dancers and musicians in priest-like cassocks of vibrant hues, albeit with longer
drapey arm sleeves for the dancers, which they fling about and pitch into the
air with controlled abandon in the first section of the piece. That this
control comes from a finely tuned spatial and kinaesthetic awareness becomes
clear when one takes note of the other distinctive element of Baldock’s costume
design for the dancers: headpieces made out of overturned woven baskets, with
only the tiniest of openings for eyes and mouth, making direct visual
connection with one’s fellow dancers (let alone the rest of one’s own body) nearly
impossible. All the more remarkable, then, that this section features the
evening’s most extensive use of unison choreography, including a series of
spins and turns that in this context gives new meaning to bobble-headed.
Following the removal of the headpieces and
the placement of them centrestage in a sculptural configuration, like
miniature, torsoless versions of the Maoi humanoid statues on Easter Island,
for me the piece more or less divides into two complementary parts. In the
first, the dancers pair off along gendered lines. Jay and Billy, having
reconfigured their cassocks as sarongs tied at the waist, and reattaching the
headpieces as humps that they now wear at their backs, slowly pivot back and
forth in a central spotlight, like replica selves whose bodies and not-quite
matching movements have been distorted by an invisible funhouse mirror.
Meanwhile, Barbara and Molly are positioned upstage of the male dancers, each
bent at the waist and taking tiny, delicate steps in tandem, two gypsy
Esmereldas in search of their Quasimodos.
In the second part of the piece, the
dancers discard their cassocks altogether, arranging them under their
respective headpieces, with sleeves stuffed into eyes and mouths, or curled
around the small side handles that stand in for ears. Now completely naked
except for butoh’s traditional white body paint and fundoshi thongs, the dancers form opposite-sex partners, beginning
with Jay, in a gorgeously solicitous move, repeatedly lifting Barbara, wrapping
her body around his face, doing a slow quarter turn, before setting her back
down and then starting the process all over again. Behind the older couple
Molly and Billy are crouched in low squats, their arms raised to the sky in a
hieratic pose, as if in some ritual celebration of faith and fecundity. For
both, this piece suggests, are facing pages in the book of love. As Jay and
Barbara come together in a series of tight pelvic clinches and spins and
fumbling waltz steps, each trusting the other to find the right timing and
direction and rhythm of the steps, Molly and Billy encircle each other on all
fours like animals in heat, occasionally pausing to preen in an armstand and
twice crossing to meet--one with tongue extended, one with mouth open to
receive said tongue--in their own version of an embrace. It is on just such a
strange and compelling imagistic juxtaposition of mah and maw that the piece ends--that is, we are presented with both
the comforting stillness of the space between and the terrifying unknowingness
of being swallowed up that defines two-becoming-one in love as in dance.
Book
of Love continues at the Roundhouse through this
Saturday, with a special benefit performance beginning at 5 pm December 5th.
Tickets can be purchased here.
P.
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Edge 3 at Dancing on the Edge
Two legendary Vancouver dance artists. Two one-word titles. Two additional firecracker performers. You couldn't ask for a better line-up as part of the Edge 3 program at this year's Dancing on the Edge Festival.
First up was Oxygen, choreographed by Kokoro Dance's Jay Hirabayashi as a commission for dancer Billy Marchenski, and set to the industrial "no wave" music of the Swans. The twenty-minute piece unfolds on a single vertical plane, beginning with Marchenski in a crouch justly slightly up of centre stage. He slowly unfurls his body to standing, pointing skyward with one index finger, before collapsing to the ground and beginning the phrase again, this time extending the opposite finger. The movement is simple but in its execution anything but pedestrian, with the strain in Marchenski's calves attesting to the effort required to unfold and bend, unfold and bend in such a controlled manner, such that the slight suspension with the pointed index finger at full verticality feels like time itself is being suspended, forced to conform to the rhythms of Marchenski's body, his breath, rather than the other way around. No doubt Barbara was after something similar with the statue poses that started off our Wreck Beach Butoh piece this past weekend, but I can say that after last night I for one still have much work to do when it comes to slowing down time through movement.
Eventually Marchenski begins his slow butoh walk downstage: legs bent, torso forward with heart centre open, an invisible orchid cupped in his throat. Arching his body backwards, Marchenski descends to the floor for a series of weight-transferring poses on elbows and knees, but never on all four at one time. Next, he stands upright with his back towards us. Slowly he begins to shake: first just his buttocks, then his hips and legs, finally his torso and arms and head, until a succession of tremors ripple like waves up and down his entire body. Again, what is so fascinating to watch about this is how the shaking accumulates in intensity over time, with Marchenski not so much becoming possessed by the gradually distributed movement as choosing to possess it from the beginning and redistribute it at will.
So, too, with how the piece ends, which sees Marchenski incorporating a series of arm waves and jumps into a hypnotic score that had me straining to register their trajectories via the trace visual residue of their arcing flights through the air. And such was the power of the choreography that it wasn't a strain at all to believe that the dancer before me really was flying.
The second piece on the program was Trickster, a collaboration between Karen Jamieson and the San Francisco-based bouffon artist Nathaniel Justiniano. The piece began as a Brief Encounters pairing back in 2013. So successful was that early version that Jamieson and Justiniano decided to develop the piece further, this time inviting Stefan Smulovitz to perform the viola live with them on stage.
Essentially the work unfolds as a structured improvisation, with Jamieson exploring a series of movement phrases anchored in different parts of her body and Justiniano (who wears a traditional bouffon costume, complete with double-sided ass and a hump at his back) burlesquing those explorations both physically and in words--often via hilarious direct address to the audience. However, this conceit would quickly wear thin if the movement itself weren't compelling to watch, with Justiniano matching the precision of Jamieson's classical ballet steps from Giselle, for example, with his own deft and extremely light-on-his-feet traversing of the stage.
Indeed, the piece ends with the two performers arriving at a mutually agreeable rapprochement between their two different physical vocabularies, launching into a final duet that--to reference their own concluding conversation--may not be conceptually "deep," but is nonetheless deeply satisfying to watch.
P.
First up was Oxygen, choreographed by Kokoro Dance's Jay Hirabayashi as a commission for dancer Billy Marchenski, and set to the industrial "no wave" music of the Swans. The twenty-minute piece unfolds on a single vertical plane, beginning with Marchenski in a crouch justly slightly up of centre stage. He slowly unfurls his body to standing, pointing skyward with one index finger, before collapsing to the ground and beginning the phrase again, this time extending the opposite finger. The movement is simple but in its execution anything but pedestrian, with the strain in Marchenski's calves attesting to the effort required to unfold and bend, unfold and bend in such a controlled manner, such that the slight suspension with the pointed index finger at full verticality feels like time itself is being suspended, forced to conform to the rhythms of Marchenski's body, his breath, rather than the other way around. No doubt Barbara was after something similar with the statue poses that started off our Wreck Beach Butoh piece this past weekend, but I can say that after last night I for one still have much work to do when it comes to slowing down time through movement.
Eventually Marchenski begins his slow butoh walk downstage: legs bent, torso forward with heart centre open, an invisible orchid cupped in his throat. Arching his body backwards, Marchenski descends to the floor for a series of weight-transferring poses on elbows and knees, but never on all four at one time. Next, he stands upright with his back towards us. Slowly he begins to shake: first just his buttocks, then his hips and legs, finally his torso and arms and head, until a succession of tremors ripple like waves up and down his entire body. Again, what is so fascinating to watch about this is how the shaking accumulates in intensity over time, with Marchenski not so much becoming possessed by the gradually distributed movement as choosing to possess it from the beginning and redistribute it at will.
So, too, with how the piece ends, which sees Marchenski incorporating a series of arm waves and jumps into a hypnotic score that had me straining to register their trajectories via the trace visual residue of their arcing flights through the air. And such was the power of the choreography that it wasn't a strain at all to believe that the dancer before me really was flying.
The second piece on the program was Trickster, a collaboration between Karen Jamieson and the San Francisco-based bouffon artist Nathaniel Justiniano. The piece began as a Brief Encounters pairing back in 2013. So successful was that early version that Jamieson and Justiniano decided to develop the piece further, this time inviting Stefan Smulovitz to perform the viola live with them on stage.
Essentially the work unfolds as a structured improvisation, with Jamieson exploring a series of movement phrases anchored in different parts of her body and Justiniano (who wears a traditional bouffon costume, complete with double-sided ass and a hump at his back) burlesquing those explorations both physically and in words--often via hilarious direct address to the audience. However, this conceit would quickly wear thin if the movement itself weren't compelling to watch, with Justiniano matching the precision of Jamieson's classical ballet steps from Giselle, for example, with his own deft and extremely light-on-his-feet traversing of the stage.
Indeed, the piece ends with the two performers arriving at a mutually agreeable rapprochement between their two different physical vocabularies, launching into a final duet that--to reference their own concluding conversation--may not be conceptually "deep," but is nonetheless deeply satisfying to watch.
P.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Posts
