The 2015 Dancing on the Edge Festival kicked off last night at the Firehall with the return of Festival favourite Paul-André Fortier, here presenting a new duet, Misfit Blues, that he choreographed for himself and Regina-based dance legend Robin Poitras. The set, designed by Edward Poitras, is comprised of a large white plastic circular tarpaulin that floats like a big glowing moon above the black marley of the stage, and upon which, positioned slightly stage right, there is a bench wrapped in what appeared to be layers of saran wrap or clear packing tape. Around the edges of this space are various props: piles of clothes stage right and left; a large stand-up electric fan upstage right; a closed suitcase on a tabletop with the Latin phrase "pro pelle cutem" written on it (which, after a Google search, I have subsequently learned is the motto of the Hudson's Bay Company, meaning "skin for skin [and/or leather]") upstage left; and, most curiously (and slightly menacingly), another suitcase downstage left, this one open and spilling various fur pelts before the open mouth of a stuffed dog.
Our senses thus primed to anticipate something more theatrical or narrative-based, Fortier and Poitras immediately undercut these expectations, emerging casually from the wings to strike a series of simple conjunctive poses in the middle of the white tarpaulin. There is no music, no fancy lighting: just two bodies silently arcing and torquing their arms and torsos and legs to form a succession of symbiotic tableaux. All we hear is the slight squish of the dancers' shoes (Fortier's black oxfords and Poitras' bright orange trainers) as they shift from position to position. (A bit later Poitras will change her shoes, joining Fortier in making another foot-related sound on the tarpaulin by crawling about on all fours and tapping their toes on the floor.) Eventually the pair moves to the bench, where they resume their sculptural duet, but this time sitting, and mainly shifting the balance and direction and weight of their upper bodies in response to each other. At a certain point Fortier gets up from the bench and moves downstage, bending his legs and extending one arm to the side, beginning a version of a solo that he will repeat throughout the piece, one that builds on his trademark wingspan to trace a series of gestural phrases and semi-indexical hails through the air. Indeed, one of the most compelling things to me about Fortier as a dancer is how he moves his arms: to watch him slide one of these limbs from his side and extend it into space, always punctuating the movement with a clear separation between the fingers, is to share in a sublime moment of kinaesthetic grace.
Not that Poitras is any slouch in the grace department (although it must be said that Fortier has given her a less obviously "dancey" movement vocabulary, and no solo, preferring to carry her around at the beginning like a rag-doll, and later even dancing her body for her). In one of my favourite moments in the piece, Fortier begins "walking" in place, pumping his arms forward and back in a rhythmic motion. Poitras, who has been doing a quick change off to the side, joins him mid-stride, as it were, perfectly coordinating her arms to Fortier's. At a certain point the pair begins a slow turn on the spot, all the while continuing to windmill their arms. Then the pace quickens, to the point where Poitras' arms start to flail off in all directions. But, without missing a beat, she finds the rhythm again, matching Fortier arm for arm, breath for breath. It's such a simple bit of unison choreography, but in its very simplicity reveals something profound about the beauty of two bodies being perfectly in sync.
That said, Misfit Blues, is not merely an abstract exploration of the possibilities of pedestrian movement. Those props are there for a reason, and Fortier and Poitras, in addition to revealing to us their dancing selves, also take on what I'm going to call clown roles, speaking to each other in pidgin Russian as they enact various scenes of physical buffoonery, starting with an energetic upside down sequence on the bench. These bits are hilarious, but are also filled with magical and truly surprising instances of movement, as when--most wondrously for me--the pair use that aforementioned fan to compete to see whose white tissue can be blown the furthest into space. Here, and elsewhere in the piece, we are shown that dance is not just a sequence of choreographed steps; it is the movement of all things in time and space.
Sometimes that movement is more and sometimes less theatrical; the juxtaposition of the pedestrian and the performative in this piece invites interpretation, to be sure, but it also resists easy synthesis. Just ask that stuffed dog, who, while not speaking, it turns out has been keeping a very close eye on the proceedings.
P.
Showing posts with label Paul-André Fortier. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul-André Fortier. Show all posts
Friday, July 3, 2015
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Vertiginous Encounters
Paul-André Fortier has some of the most expressive hands in contemporary dance. The legendary Quebec dancer, winner of a Governor-General's Performing Arts Award this year, was at the Firehall Theatre last night as part of 2012 Dancing on the Edge Festival, his first trip back to the city since he brought his site-specific solo 30 X 30 to DOTE, and the Central Branch of the Vancouver Public Library, in 2009. The audience was criminally small, which was probably an effect of our delayed summer having finally arrived. Still, I hope Thursday's opening night audience was much bigger.
The piece Fortier has brought to this year's DOTE, Vertiges, is a collaboration with the American experimental composer and violinist Malcolm Goldstein, who appears on stage with Fortier, improvising on the violin while Fortier dances. The dialogue between sound and movement is not meant to be mimetic. Except, perhaps, for a sequence where dancer and violinist advance vertically downstage in a line, with Fortier's body spasming and jerking in response to Goldstein's energetic plucking and bowing of his strings, the relationship between what we are hearing and what we are seeing is not primarily about direct correspondence and formal reproducibility. (Incidentally, this same sequence leads to a vocal call and response exchange between the two performers, in which they yell back and forth at each other in pseudo-Chinese and cut at the air with their arms, as though they are in a bad martial arts movie--not sure what that was all about).
Rather, I saw Vertiges as an encounter between different instruments--Fortier's body, Goldstein's violin--that gradually reveals their proximal relationships--in the shared spaces between notes and steps, or the breath required to sustain both--but that also insists on their necessary separateness. This was most strikingly represented for me when, early on in the piece, the two men sit across from each other on chairs and Fortier reaches out to extend his arms like a parenthesis around the two ends of Goldstein's moving bow. And then again, near the very end of the piece, when, along the plywood that serves as a very effective backdrop and projection surface for the piece, Fortier tries to embrace the shadow self of Goldstein, who is playing in front of him.
Which brings me back to Fortier's magical hands. A tall man, and long of limb, Fortier's movement often begins with a simple placement of a hand on hip, followed perhaps by the light touch of his other hand on the first hand's wrist, and then a delicate transfer of both to the opposite hip. Several variations of this kind of pattern can recur in Fortier's choreography, including with knees if, as was the case last night, he's sitting. Hands are our most proximate means of touch, and as Fortier so often works as a soloist what I read into the care and precision with which he moves his hands, first one onto another, and then both onto a different part of his body, and then maybe next onto an entirely other surface, is a deep empathy and responsiveness for how the body remains the primary means by which we extend our selves into the world. As Vertiges shows in different ways, and in different moments, that process of self-extension is always fraught with uncertainty--scraped knees, slapped away hands, turned backs--but we can't not decide to ever lose touch.
P.
The piece Fortier has brought to this year's DOTE, Vertiges, is a collaboration with the American experimental composer and violinist Malcolm Goldstein, who appears on stage with Fortier, improvising on the violin while Fortier dances. The dialogue between sound and movement is not meant to be mimetic. Except, perhaps, for a sequence where dancer and violinist advance vertically downstage in a line, with Fortier's body spasming and jerking in response to Goldstein's energetic plucking and bowing of his strings, the relationship between what we are hearing and what we are seeing is not primarily about direct correspondence and formal reproducibility. (Incidentally, this same sequence leads to a vocal call and response exchange between the two performers, in which they yell back and forth at each other in pseudo-Chinese and cut at the air with their arms, as though they are in a bad martial arts movie--not sure what that was all about).
Rather, I saw Vertiges as an encounter between different instruments--Fortier's body, Goldstein's violin--that gradually reveals their proximal relationships--in the shared spaces between notes and steps, or the breath required to sustain both--but that also insists on their necessary separateness. This was most strikingly represented for me when, early on in the piece, the two men sit across from each other on chairs and Fortier reaches out to extend his arms like a parenthesis around the two ends of Goldstein's moving bow. And then again, near the very end of the piece, when, along the plywood that serves as a very effective backdrop and projection surface for the piece, Fortier tries to embrace the shadow self of Goldstein, who is playing in front of him.
Which brings me back to Fortier's magical hands. A tall man, and long of limb, Fortier's movement often begins with a simple placement of a hand on hip, followed perhaps by the light touch of his other hand on the first hand's wrist, and then a delicate transfer of both to the opposite hip. Several variations of this kind of pattern can recur in Fortier's choreography, including with knees if, as was the case last night, he's sitting. Hands are our most proximate means of touch, and as Fortier so often works as a soloist what I read into the care and precision with which he moves his hands, first one onto another, and then both onto a different part of his body, and then maybe next onto an entirely other surface, is a deep empathy and responsiveness for how the body remains the primary means by which we extend our selves into the world. As Vertiges shows in different ways, and in different moments, that process of self-extension is always fraught with uncertainty--scraped knees, slapped away hands, turned backs--but we can't not decide to ever lose touch.
P.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Dancing on the Edge of Library Square
It looks like I'm not going to get to very much of the Dancing on the Edge Festival this year. Performances wrap up this weekend, and I've got too many other commitments right now. Still, I did manage to catch Paul-André Fortier's performance of Solo 30X30 yesterday evening at Library Sqaure. Fortier has performed the piece around the world, and as part of his current residency at the Scotiabank Dance Centre (where he performed Cabane last month) he is collaborating with Dancing on the Edge to stage it here in Vancouver. The work's conceit is simple: every day for 30 days Fortier performs a rehearsed dance solo of 30 minutes at the same time in the same outdoor urban location. In Vancouver's case, it's the Robson Street plaza/concourse outside the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library at 5:15 pm.
My student Alana will likely have much more insightful things to say about 30X30 in relation to site-specificity, public performance, urban space, and place as pause (which I will duly report), so I won't bore readers with my own analysis here. Instead, I'll just leave you with some pictures instead:
P
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