Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 40

The 2017 edition of Dance in Vancouver officially kicked off yesterday, which also means that our Dance Histories Project is now cumulatively launched into the world. Natalie Purschwitz's installation has been on glorious display for a while now, but to this in the Faris studio lobby we've now added our gesture video and sound installation. Even the turn-down trivia for DiV presenters successfully found its way to Holiday Inn hotel staff. And several t-shirters and gesturers were in evidence in the audience yesterday for the roundtable organized by DiV guest curator Adam Hayward on "Why Shrink the World?"

Ostensibly about the idea of working locally but thinking globally (in one's artistic, curatorial and social practice), the roundtable showcased the work of three New Zealand/Aotearoa artists: Jack Gray (also presenting alongside his Native American collaborator Dakota); Julia Harvie; and Claire O'Neil. I very much enjoyed hearing about all of their practices, but the session ran rather long, and there wasn't really much time for any back and forth with the audience. Still, the session, following upon a studio showing by Olivia C. Davies (one of our Dance Histories interviewees), did importantly emphasize the parallel IndigeDiV focus of this year's biennial--a dance and conversation series organized by Raven Spirit Dance that focuses on Indigenous artistic creation and expression on these unceded Coast Salish Territories.

I didn't stick around for the reception following the roundtable, nor for that evening's performance (Wen Wei Wang's Dialogue, which I previously wrote about here). In fact, I won't be attending any of DiV's mainstage performances this year: a combination of other stuff competing for my attention and also waiting too long to purchase tickets that I'd wrongly assumed might be extended our way complimentarily as a result of our Dance Histories work (which is, after all, featured in the DiV program). Not a big deal, as I've seen and written about most of the work before. But it does mean that I won't witness how DiV presenters and audiences experience and interact with our "lobby animation," as it's officially been called.

Nor, for that matter, will Alexa, who beginning tonight will be busy performing in the world premiere of Vanessa Goodman's Wells Hill (which I look forward to seeing Saturday evening). We'll have to rely on Justine to let us know how things go. Indeed, I look forward to the post-DiV debrief. In the meantime, I think this post more or less concludes the on-line documentation of our work on this project. Hard to believe it's been more than two years since we've been working on this (and closer to three for Alexa and Justine). And, of course, it's not finished, nor will it ever be finished. Figuring out where we go from here will almost surely be part of our debrief conversations.

P

Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 39

In addition to commissioning Natalie Purschwitz's amazing installation (now on full glorious display in the lobby of The Dance Centre), one of our more inspired ideas for how we would disperse and animate aspects of the interviews that we collected for our Dance Histories Project during the upcoming Dance in Vancouver biennial was to pull quotes from each of our interviewees and, with their permission, iron them on to T-shirts that also had that their name and interview number on the back, like so:

That's the front of Deanna Peters' T-shirt, and the back of Jane Osborne's, carefully decaled into place at an ironing party that Justine and Alexa and I had at my house last Monday morning. Over the rest of that week, I completed the rest of the 53 total T-shirts (in my earlier summary of the folks we'd interviewed, listed here, I left out Kelly McInnes and Olivia Shaffer, both of whom Alexa interviewed, but whose videos she hadn't been able to upload to our shared Dropbox folder from her phone). Yesterday Alexa and Kate Franklin and I distributed about half of them to the current students of Modus Operandi following their Sunday hip-hop class at The Dance Centre:

For the second half of this part of the project is that we're asking volunteers to wear one of the T-shirts during the week of DiV, and also to learn three shared gestures, and however many additional ones they'd also like to embody--all culled from our video interviews with Vancouver dance artists; whenever they're at The Dance Centre, or wherever else they might be in the city, our T-shirt-wearing volunteers are then invited to either slip these gestures covertly into routine conversations and interactions, or else to deliberately interrupt and/or open up a space through the repetition of the gestures. In this way, the discursive histories we've captured through our interviews will be reembodied and redistributed through this double act of transfer.

The Modus students all seemed eager to participate, and also proved amazingly adept at learning some very complicated gestures. Next Monday we'll have a further T-shirt and gesture distribution session at The Dance Centre with a bunch of dance artists (including several of our interviewees) who are keen to participate. Together with the sound and video installations we're also planning, it will hopefully be a lively complement to the regular DiV programming.

Everything kicks off on November 22nd. You can check out the full schedule here.

P.

Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 38

If you're at the Dance Centre in the coming weeks, you'll be able to catch sight of the installation that Natalie Purschwitz has conceived for our Dance Histories project taking shape. On Wednesday, with the help of DC technician Daniel O'Shea, we rigged the main supporting platform into place. This was no easy task, as the installation is essentially a very complicated Calderesque mobile that will hang from the ceiling above the stairwell leading down to the main Faris Studio. And because Natalie will need to be able to raise and lower the platform while she is working on the installation, this involved figuring out a very complicated system of rope pulleys. And finding a three-quarter inch drill bit--which proved the most difficult task of all.

Nevertheless, success was eventually achieved, and now the main task is threading the hundreds and hundreds of names that Natalie has attached to different playing cards through the holes that I punctured through the platform. Having spent seven hours yesterday and Wednesday doing so, I can attest to how finicky and time-consuming this work is. Add to this the very real risk of the different bits of dangling threads getting hopelessly tangled as the platform is raised and lowered and just generally moved around, and you can understand how stressful all of this can quickly become. And it doesn't help that we're doing all of this in a tiny corner of the Faris lobby near the bar, and having to work around matinee and evening performances.

Natalie has worked out a very complicated system for how all the different playing cards fit together, which perfectly captures our goal of illustrating how all of these histories overlap and intersect--and which will be represented in the finished installation by the bits of orange coloured thread that horizontally connect the dangling vertical cards. But in an Excel spreadsheet, as a list of names and a numbered count of times mentioned, such a system is one thing. Three-dimensionally it's quite another, and Natalie said that if it sounded like she was talking to us like children in explaining things we shouldn't take offence; she was simply figuring things out herself in the process of articulating them.

I feel bad abandoning Natalie and the rest of the crew just as the work is getting started (Richard and I are off to London and Amsterdam for 10 days); but I'm sure there will still be stuff to do when I get back. And, in truth, it's probably good to have me and my clumsy fingers out of the way during the main and hardest phase of work.

As Justine said yesterday, that work will take as long as is needed to complete. And when it's done, the piece is going to look amazing.

P

Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 37

All this week and next Justine and Alexa and I have bracketed off morning studio time to start pulling together the various threads of our Dance Histories project in advance of their unveiling at Dance in Vancouver this November. Actually, the first of those quite literal threads will be visible to Dance Centre patrons later this month--maybe even as early as the end of next week. That would be Natalie Purschwitz's rhizomatic installation based on the interconnected web of names and places we have collected via our interviews with local dance artists. She has a fantastic design concept for how to represent all of the overlapping layers of influence and attachment and bodily and spatial sedimentation--which I won't spoil here. Let's just hope it can be sustained by the actual material supports of the Dance Centre building...

The last piece of data collection necessary for Natalie's work was completed this morning when Justine and I finally interviewed Alexa about her own dance history. Afterwards Alexa said that she now understood why so many of our interview subjects likened the experience to a kind of therapy. Perhaps because this particular interview came at the end of our process, but more likely because Alexa is such a smart and reflective person, for me Alexa's narrative was at once singularly her own and also so consciously and respectfully connected to so many of our previous conversations: not least concerning the idea of developing an ethic care--with respect to our bodies, our collaborators, and our community.

Among other things, I learned that Alexa dates her Vancouver dance history from 2010. That's when she returned to the city from London, where she'd been trying--and in her words failing--to be a commercial dancer. While shooting a television commercial for the SyFy channel choreographed by Kelly Konno, and that featured Josh Beamish, Alexa learned about Modus Operandi. She promptly went to an Out Innerspace show, saw Elissa Hanson do something amazing, and said she wanted in. She did two and a half years of the program, before gravitating toward a cohort of dance artists affiliated with SFU, including Daisy Thompson, Katie DeVries, Emmalena Fredriksson, Erica Mitsuhashi and, eventually, my colleague Rob Kitsos.

In addition to dancing for and with Deanna Peters, Amber Funk Barton, and Vanessa Goodman (whose upcoming Wells Hill will premiere at the end of November, overlapping with Dance in Vancouver, and thus keeping Alexa extremely busy between now and then), Alexa is also an amazing dance writer and critic. Collaborations with Lee Su-Feh on the Migrant Bodies Project and Brynn McNab on An Exact Vertigo at UNIT/PITT Projects are just two instances in which Alexa has demonstrated her amazing choreographic facility with words. At one point in her interview, Alexa talked about an inspirational moment in a workshop in Toronto with Ame Henderson, in which she reported saying "I'm a writer and a dancer and I'm trying to figure out if both of those things are part of my practice." Mercifully for all of us--and especially for Justine and I on this project--Ame's definitive response was "Of course they are!"

In fact just today Alexa was instrumental in contributing to the short blurb that she and Justine and I crafted for what it is we think we're doing at Dance in Vancouver. We've given the various distributed component parts a three-part title: Our Present Dance Histories, or, Dance Histories Project, or, Vancouver Dance: an incomplete history of the present - Part 1. Because, of course, we didn't get to interview everyone we'd ambitiously planned to (on the way out of the Dance Centre today, I bumped into Joe Laughlin, who is somewhat egregiously missing from the hours and hours of our compiled video footage); because history is never finished and always moving; and because, after two years, we're only just getting started.

That said, here's a roughly chronological list of the 51 Vancouver dance artists we've interviewed (sometimes all together, sometimes in pairs, and sometimes individually) as part of this first phase of research:

Rob Kitsos
Vanessa Goodman
Ali Denham
Delia Brett
Daelik
Lee Su-Feh
James Gnam
Deanna Peters
Ziyian Kwan
Judith Marcuse
Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg
Arash Khakpour
Aryo Khakpour
David McIntosh
Chick Snipper
Jennifer Mascall
Natalie LeFebvre Gnam
Alana Gerecke
Molly McDermott
Elissa Hanson
Sophia Wilde
Barbara Bourget
Jay Hirabayashi
Bevin Poole
Amber Funk Barton
Justine A. Chambers
Diego Romero
Paras Terezakis
Karissa Barry
Caroline Liffman
Lesley Telford
Natalie Tin Yin Gan
Noam Gagnon
Ralph Escamillan
Emmalena Fredriksson
Karen Jamieson
Josh Martin
Jane Osborne
Olivia Davies
Judith Garay
Alvin Tolentino
David Raymond
Margaret Grenier
Laura Avery
Anne Cooper
Lara Barclay
Kim Stevenson
Lexi Vajda
Wen Wei Wang
Peter Bingham
Alexa Mardon

Stay tuned for words and gestures from many of these individuals coming to souvenir t-shirted bodies near you this November.

P

Cinerama at Spanish Banks

Extending their enquiries into the principles of materialist scenography and the performativity of performance environments, Fight With a Stick's (FWS) latest production is called Cinerama, and is a site-based work set on Spanish Banks at low tide. At an appointed time (it varies each day) and regardless of the weather, audience members assemble just beyond the beach's western concession stand. After checking in with an attendant yesterday afternoon around 1:15 pm and receiving some general instructions, we are all issued noise-cancelling earphones and instructed to head off in the general direction of one of the many container ships dotting the horizon.

It was a surprisingly long trek, a good 12-15 minutes, before we arrived at the playing space, which was an instructive lesson in just how vast a sweep of shoreline is covered by the intertidal, or littoral, zone the closer one gets to the mouth of the ocean. This initial journey was also a crucial first phase of the performance. For me, the earphones accomplished two interrelated goals. First, they made me more aware of my breathing, which in turn put me more in touch with my body as a whole, including the feel of the sand underneath my bare feet and the warmth of the water collecting in different tidal pools. At the same time, the absence of sound extended my visual sense outward, so that the entire panorama in front and to either side of me--from the human and animal action on the sand, to those sublimely disturbing ships set against the backdrop of the north shore mountains, to the built cityscape to my right, and to the hazy, shimmery archipelago of Vancouver and the Gulf Islands to my left--seemed to present itself as a series of shifting relationships of scale that regardless of actual physical distances nevertheless felt collectively within and out of reach, all at once: as if my body might punch through a trompe l'oeil painted backdrop on an old-school Hollywood studio set at any moment. In this way, the opening walk in Cinerama sets up the context for the rest of the piece, which seeks to make manifest the mechanisms by which we frame--and, by extension, annex--the natural spaces around us.

Once we arrive at the playing space, which FWS has positioned several hundred metres from the edge of what is already the incoming tide, we are instructed by sound designer Nancy Tam to place our headphones in an awaiting wagon and to take a seat on any of the vertically staggered chairs not marked with an X that have been anchored into the sand. To the backs of the X-marked chairs have been affixed mini-iPods, from which issue Tam's score, a mix of recorded extra-diagetic nautical sounds (the whoosh of water ebbing and flowing, boat horns, the squawking of birds) that combines with the live diagetic noise being produced around us (including the curious and/or flummoxed comments from passersby who happen upon the scene). Produced through this hybrid double-act of DJing is an assemblage of the natural and the mechanical, the ambient and the amplified, that is in keeping with Cinerama's overall troubling of the categories of background and foreground, and that contributes to an exploration of an idea of "atmosphere" that is at once theatrical and climatological.

Thus seated and newly "attuned" to our environment, we await the next phase of the performance. Not that things aren't already happening all around us: folks of every age and shape and state of undress promenading on the sand and in the surf; dogs chasing after balls; kids water skimming; birds and the occasional float plane soaring past in the sky. And not that we aren't also, as previously mentioned, the surveilled object of other onlookers' more or less focussed gaze. But at a certain point these multiple circuits of looking start to shift in a single direction as, on our left (or western) periphery, we begin to become aware of something (and someone) advancing towards us from the horizon. Two large steel frames, mobile picture windows onto the vista's equally portable vanishing point, are being carried by FWS performer-devisers, one person on either side of the frame and similarly apparelled in designer all-weather hazmat-style suits that Natalie Purschwitz has assembled from fabric that seems to mimic the elements of sea and sky, clouds and earth, so that at a greater remove it appears as if the performers are at one with their surroundings and that the frames are moving all on their own (a trick of perception FWS had previously experimented with in the award-winning Revolutions). Somewhere in this process I must have looked away, because when next I focussed on the progress of the advancing frames and performers, two had suddenly multiplied to five (and four to ten); I can only surmise that three of the frames had been positioned to lie in the sand more proximately to where the audience was seated and that as the more distant ones crossed their paths, they were raised up and also started moving. At any rate, the peripatetic journey of the frames ends when they are installed at different junctures in between the staggered line-up of audience chairs, so that depending on where one is seated in this line-up one's experience of watching watchers watch is diffracted x-fold.

Had the performance ended here I would have been supremely (and sublimely) satisfied, so content was I to stare out through the four frames in front of me, this mise-en-abyme of human and non-human actants coalescing into a single long take that was refreshingly contemplative: an installation- or site-based version of slow cinema. However, the performance was far from over and the frames, no matter our initial expectations, did not remain stationary. Instead, over the next half hour or so the FWS performers (company co-directors Steven Hill and Alex Lazaridis Ferguson, alongside collaborators who included Scott Billings, Delia Brett, Elissa Hanson, Josh Hite, Diego Romero, and Paula Viitanen) manipulated the frames in a kind of mechanical ballet. The movement started slowly and subtly, with the frames being raised up and down a quarter-inch or so, and rippling backwards from the frame positioned closest to the water. Eventually the tempo picked up and the up-and-down movement was supplemented by the frames being tilted forwards and backwards, shifted horizontally to the left and the right, and arced vertically on their axes by incremental degrees. As this was going on, the tide was slowly (and then more and more quickly) creeping in, with the movement of the frames not so much mimicking as complementing the locomotive drift of the water, which swirls and eddies from different directions, picking up speed and force, until what seemed impossibly distant and at a safely calculable physical and temporal remove is suddenly lapping at your knees.

And this, finally, is what comprises the brilliance of this production, what I'll call the framing of the rhythms of diurnal events. The tide goes out and it comes back in. Still at this point in the anthropocene such a statement remains a dialectical certainty. Cinerama focuses our attention on the inevitability of waiting for what we know is coming. And the payoff is that we still end up surprised.

P.

Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 33

This past week Justine and Alexa and I have been working in the studio at The Dance Centre, developing some preliminary text and gesture scores from the video interviews we have assembled so far. We also visited with Natalie Purschwitz about our planned rhizomatic installation that will take over the stairwell and Faris lobby beginning in September. Our plans for the various components are still evolving, but one thing that has become increasingly clear is how much work we still have to do, not least with respect to completing our outstanding interviews.

And so, on that front, this afternoon I met my colleague Judith Garay at SFU Woodward's to talk about her dance history. It is an incredibly varied and peripatetic one. Judith was actually born in BC (something I didn't know), but moved with her family at a very young age to London (her dad was in the navy). That's where she took her first dance class. Returning to Victoria at age seven, she began taking class once a week in Victoria with Vivian Briggs. Following a move to Halifax, she continued her training, but she only really got serious about things after she enrolled at NASCAD (she was intending to be a fashion and textile designer) and met her first modern and professional dance instructor, Anita Martin. From there, she took a couple of summer intensives at Toronto Dance Theatre, but realizing she needed more structured instruction, she headed off to London to study with London Contemporary Dance Theatre at The Place. It was in London that Judith met her life partner, Anthony Morgan, also a dancer. Following their time in London, the pair decided to return to North America, but whereas Judith wanted to relocate to Toronto, Anthony was keen to try to New York.

Judith agreed to try out the Big Apple for three months, but she ended up staying for sixteen years. That was because very soon after arriving in the city, Judith hooked up with Pearl Lang at the Ailey School. Lang, along with Alfredo Corvino (a former Ballets Russes dancer and a master teacher of ballet at Julliard), became a key mentor. Then, too, there was the fact that soon after arriving in New York Judith joined the Martha Graham Company, quickly becoming a principal dancer there. This was at the height of Graham's fame, with celebrities like Liza Minnelli routinely dropping by the studio, and Halston, Graham's preferred costume designer, giving the dancers rides in his limo. And yet at the same time, Judith said that was living below the poverty line in a roach-infested railroad apartment in a slum, saving up her per diems while on tour in order to help make ends meet.

One of Judith's favourite memories from her time with the Graham company was being asked to reconstruct a three-minute 1926 solo by Graham called Tanagra. They had only some silent film footage to go by and had to guess at which piece of Satie music was being used, but Judith said the six month experience remains an important memory.

It was in January 1992 that Judith returned to BC to take up a guest teaching position at the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU. She stayed on for an extra six weeks over the summer to lead the School's Off-Centre Dance Company on a tour of the province. That experience, Judith said, is what hooked her, and so when Santa Aloi encouraged her to apply for the full-time, tenure-track position that opened up that fall, she did. She has been at SFU ever since, and while Judith admitted that she still has a somewhat vexed relationship with the institutional structures of the academy, she also said that she enjoys teaching, especially with SFU's cohort system, where one is able to watch the evolution of a dancer over the course of four or more years. She also admitted that after being poor for most of her life as a working dancer, having a steady paycheque was something that she came to appreciate.

Of course Judith is perhaps best known in the Vancouver dance community for leading her company Dancers Dancing, which has given many emerging dance artists their first job, and which, during its formative years, regularly toured to all regions of BC. Judith said that bringing dance to communities in BC beyond Vancouver and Victoria became something of her mission--though it was also a mission that essentially required her to work two full-time jobs. This explains why she has backed away from the rigorous touring schedule in the last decade.

But she still has a keen eye for emerging talent, and on that front Judith concluded her interview by saying that as a dance city Vancouver is completely unrecognizable from what it was when she returned in the early 1990s. She admitted that she couldn't keep up with all the talent, but she also said that that was a good thing.

P

Digital Folk at SFU Woodward's

I have been following the evolution of plastic orchid factory's Digital Folk for the past three years: first as initial concept showing during the company's residency at the Cultch in 2014; then as an adapted micro-performance at the Anderson Street Space on Granville Island in 2015; and finally as a test run of version 3.0 last month at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby (you can check out past writing on the piece here, here, and here). Now the show arrives, in all its immersive glory, at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, where it opened last night, welcoming members of the paying public for the first time. During its long gestative journey (the metaphor seems appropriate given that two core collaborators on the show are now pregnant), Digital Folk has never lost sight of some key ideas it wished to probe through the research and creation process: how interactive media technologies have fundamentally altered patterns (cognitive and kinetic/physical) of group socialization; and how to transfer and interrupt such patterns within a live performance environment.

The first idea plays out through a proliferation of mirroring techniques in the piece. There are, for example, the myriad screens with which performers and spectators interact: the television monitors that play the Xbox dance and music games with which we are invited to interface, mimicking the grooves of various cross-species avatars; the larger screens upon which the record of these efforts is sometimes streamed; even the screens of performers' smart phones, which they take out at one point in order to attempt a hilarious real-time reenactment of a group folk dance posted to YouTube. But Digital Folk complicates this particular feedback loop of connectivity by including other kinds of mirroring, including that which takes place all the time in a studio between dancers practicing their technique or learning new choreography. At various points throughout the piece, one performer will begin following another, attempting to reproduce the other's improvised movement as their partner wends this way or that way throughout the space; after a while, however, it becomes difficult to tell who is following whom. Then there is the outstretched palm used to start up the video games that in one powerful moment of stillness magically becomes a gestural hail to all the performers. Mirroring is also transferred to the grain of the voice, with the deliberately awful vocal mimicry of The Sally Field Project house band to classic tunes called up through software memory contrasting with the virtuosic display of human memory as Jane Osborne and James Gnam take turns echoing each other during a shared recitation and riff on a scientific article dealing with perceptual and spatial recall. The event of the echo, a vocal delay, returns sound to one altered, changed, so that the singular voice becomes double, something also neatly captured in this performance through the polyphonic--and polyglot--telling of a folk tale in multiple languages by Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, Diego Romero, Shion Carter, and Vanessa Goodman.

In Digital Folk the audience becomes a fundamental part of the tale being told. Invited to don various bits of costume as we enter the performance space--an immersive installation built within the Wong Theatre--we are then free to roam about the wonderful set designed by Natalie Purschwitz and lit by James Proudfoot, taking a seat on the stacked blocks in the centre, lying down on a bit of indoor-outdoor carpet, joining the performers and fellow audience members in a group dance to one of the videos, or just standing and watching in the corner. And while there are certainly moments in the piece--for example, at the end when Romero and Bevin Poole Leinweber perform a duet of David Bowie's Starman on the ukulele--where the audience is prompted to adopt the spectating habits of a traditional proscenium setting, becoming silent and still and directionally attentive, what struck me in this version of the show is how much I wanted to participate: twice getting up to shake it, shake it alongside Goodman and Lexi Vajda and others to different dance videos; and accepting without hesitation a slow dance to Freebird with fellow audience member Walter. And it is in these unscripted--or rather, unprogrammed--bodily encounters that Digital Folk as a live performance interrupts the one-way circuitry of human-computer interaction. Nowhere was this more apparent to me than in that space of free play that occurs between the end of one nightly iteration of the performance and the start of another. To explain: Digital Folk, which is about an hour long, runs on a loop at 7, 8 and 9 pm over the course of an evening. Audience members are free to come in and out and to stay for as long as they like. While Richard and I, having both had long days, chose to leave after an hour, in ceding our show garments to new arrivals we were able to pass on a bit of recently acquired folk wisdom about how to be with others in this truly amazing performance space.

It has been fascinating to watch the development of Digital Folk. Just in the month since its penultimate test run at the Shadbolt the piece has undergone a superb edit in both content and form--though I do wish The Sally Field Project were still ethnomusicologists from the future. Transitions between different bits have tightened and all the performers have become freer and looser in improvising with the always shifting rules of this particular game. This includes the student interns from SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, who in a unique arrangement facilitated through SFU Woodward's Cultural Programs (a co-presenting partner on the show) have gained valuable artistic experience through this project. Carter, Kayla DeVos, Rachel Helten, Hannah Jackson and Rachel Silver have all proven their chops alongside the more seasoned professional performers mentioned above. That three of them also got to see their former professor lamely execute a familiar repertoire of pop choreography (pelvic thrusts and finger points included) is something I'm more than happy to live with.

Digital Folk continues tonight through Sunday. I highly recommend checking it out. It's the first great dance party of the fall.

P

At the Culture Lab with Plastic Orchid Factory

Yesterday evening Richard and I, along with 15 or so other invited guests, were given a behind-the-scenes glimpse of plastic orchid factory's new work-in-progress, Digital Folk. The invited showing was the culmination of a three-week creative residency at the Cultch that involved an interdisciplinary collaboration between dance artist James Gnam, visual artist Natalie Purschwitz, sound designer Kevin Legere, and lighting designer James Proudfoot. The work also features the expert simulacral movement and air guitar skills of Natalie Lefebvre Gnam, Vanessa Goodman, Bevin Poole, Dario Dinuzzi, Jane Osborne and ... (I know I'm missing somebody).

As James explained in answer to a question from Dances for a Small Stage's Julie-anne Saroyan, and as Natalie put it in her email invitation to the showing, the work seeks to explore "the role that immersive movement and rhythm based videos games have played in defining a generation’s approach to identity, physicality, social dance and performance." James sees these video games as in many ways defining the folk identity of a generation of millennials who have become virtuosic adepts of mimicked musicality and movement (holy alliteration, Batman!), but in ways that paradoxically alienate them from a kinesthetic awareness of their own bodies in time and space, and that thrust them into an isolated feedback loop with the technology that then becomes an extension of themselves.

In what Saroyan usefully suggested was a "reverse engineering" of the video games themselves, we thus see in the 35-minute piece as it currently stands the dancers responding to different dance routines supplied by various immersive videos, before turning the cameras on themselves as, in a series of slow duets, they start to mirror each other's movements in more intimately responsive ways. We also see the six dancers call upon the arsenal of standard club grooves that gets repeated in many of these videos (fist pumps and hip thrusts and booty shakes) as they respond collectively to the same set of repeated instructions in digitally altered voice-over. A similar repertoire of rehearsed and stored moves is called upon by Dinuzzi in a standout solo to "Pump Up the Jam" that certainly made me see the Ballet BC company member in a brand new light.

There's a whole circuit (as it were) of additionally complex ideas at play in the piece, and it's gratifying to know that the Canada Council, together with the Cultch, is still willing to support this kind of research phase to the building of a piece--in which a lot of smart and talented artists can get in a room together and play. It was a privilege to be able to witness the results thus far, and I look forward to seeing the finished work.

P.