My Vancouver Dance History: September 7 Artist Salon with Rob Kitsos

Here is my colleague, Rob Kitsos, talking about how he has adapted to teaching and creating in our new COVID-19 world:

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DOTE 2018: Edge Seven at The Firehall + Transverse Orientation at 395 Alexander Street

The 30th anniversary edition of the Dancing on the Edge Festival concluded last night with a 9 pm replaying of the Edge Seven program, a suitable study in contrasts featuring two distinctive approaches to movement and sound.

My colleague Rob Kitsos, together with collaborators Yves Candau and Martin Gotfrit, lead things off with their Real-Time Composition Study. Based on their shared interest in improvisation, the performers compose our perceptual environment in the moment, moving their bodies and sound through the space in response to each other, and to shifting geometric patterns of light that play across an upstage screen. While lighting designer Kyla Gardiner is in the booth overseeing all of this, much of the manipulation of light also happens from the stage, with Rob repositioning and partially shuttering and unshuttering a series of small LED spots in order to frame different areas of bodily focus. The result produces some uncanny trompe l'oeil effects, in which the shadows cast by the performers merge in such a way as to make one doubt whose limb is whose. Likewise, sound is often made to travel through space in a what initially appears to be an "unsourced" or acousmatic way, with Martin--and sometimes Rob--starting to play an instrument offstage that one thinks one can identify, only to emerge with something percussive or stringed or wind-based that totally upends such expectations.

The second piece on the program was Pathways, by Vision Impure's Noam Gagnon. Reworking a series of past solos into a large ensemble creation that Noam has set on eight young dancers whose ranks collectively represent some of the best talent to emerge from Vancouver's three main pre-professional dance programs (at Arts Umbrella, Modus Operandi, and SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts), the piece is performed to a pounding industrial score by Guillaume Cache. Clad all in black, and wearing matching knee-pads, the dancers hover outside the taped-off square of the main stage space, eyeing each other up and down like they are gladiators--or professional wrestlers. And, sure enough, once Eowynn Enquist (who has certainly been busy this festival) takes a running start and throws herself diagonally across the square, sliding to a stop on the other side, we are off on a non-stop contest of pure physicality. This is classic Gagnon choreography from his Holy Body Tattoo days: extreme, high energy, and punishingly visceral. We register the speed and impact of every body roll, the repeated jolts of limbs being thrown over and over again into the air (that five of the six women have long loose tresses that Noam shakingly exploits gives everything that much more of a rock and roll feel). The relentless kinetic and aural assault on our senses is almost overwhelming, but at a certain moment Noam shifts registers, with the dancers who seemed previously to be in competition, or just trying to run away from each other, now seeking each other out in a series of duets whose vocabulary of bodily climbing suggests that in this world even intimacy and tenderness can only be expressed in a similarly intense way.

Following some mixing with friends and artists in the community at DOTE's closing party, Richard and I (and several others circulating throughout the Firehall lobby and on its patio) headed north a few blocks to a warehouse space in Railtown owned by designer Omer Arbel to take in a midnight showing of Transverse Orientation, a new work of dance by Rachel Meyer. This is the second work of original choreography from the former Ballet BC dancer, who has only recently come back from maternity leave, looking impossibly lithe and limber. Based on the flight patterns of moths, and in particular how those patterns are oriented by and towards different natural and artificial sources of light, Transverse Orientation features: fellow Ballet BC alum Christoph von Riedemann as a lone moth-man figure, whose slow, calendrically-marked progress down a vertical runway frames the beginning and end of the piece (we move from watching his initial improvisations in a pre-show anteroom to the main playing space, from which we can track his progress towards us through a canny use of lighting and mirrors); Stéphanie Cyr, Ria Girard and Maya Tenzer as a trio of moths whose various bodily metamorphoses--from bumpy, fluttery proximity to grander, more swooping arcs of circular movement--are tracked through accompanying costume changes; and Meyer herself as a kind of queen moth figure (if I'm not mixing my insect metaphors), whose oversight of the proceedings progresses, transversally one might say, from semi-removed metteur-en-scène to fully engaged primum mobile, around which the others now must move--including violinist Janna Sailor, whose live playing is a key ingredient of the piece, and also eventually von Riedemann, who joins Meyers for a concluding duet that read a little too obviously as a mating dance.

For a self-produced show, Transverse Orientation has certainly spared no expense (including on its programs). Rigging up the lighting (by James Proudfoot) and configuring the set design (by Meyer herself) requires ample resources, and the apple budget alone must have been significant. As per the dramaturgical function of those apples, Meyer certainly has some sharp choreographic instincts. Fragments of the piece are individually compelling, particularly when Meyer is working with smaller, almost micro-movements: I'm thinking especially of von Riedemann's opening gestural sequence, and also Meyer's own fluttering responses to Sailor's improvised plucking and bowing--the way she can pulse a single shoulder blade, or infinitesimally shift the position of a bone in her foot is kind of amazing. That said, the fragments don't add up to a coherent whole and in seeking to interpret different aspects of moths' behaviours (why, for example, in their nocturnal attraction to artificial light, they frequently end up bumping against transparent surfaces, leaving a trail of dust from their wings), the movement comes across as mostly mimetic. I think the piece as it stands is also too long. But just as I always looked forward to what Meyer could do as a singularly virtuosic dancer on the Queen E stage, so do I anticipate great things from her in her new career as a choreographer.

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Death and Flying at the Vancouver International Dance Festival

My colleague Rob Kitsos's latest work, a duet created with and for dancers Jane Osborne and Kim Stevenson (both of them former students of Rob's), debuted last night at the Roundhouse as part of this year's Vancouver International Dance Festival. Death and Flying combines two of Rob's latest research interests: text and movement; and embodied ethnography. To this end, the piece takes its cue from interviews with Osborne and Stevenson about memories of their families, and specifically objects and mementoes from their families that have special meaning for them (both women have lost their fathers). We hear excerpts from these interviews in voiceover, which are remixed, looped and occasionally distorted as part of the overall score by composer and sound designer Elliot Vaughn, and which the dancers also break off their movements to lipsynch to at different moments.

However, the piece actually begins with a recording of a poem by Maximilian Heinegg, about the makeshift will that his parents would always make whenever they took a plane trip together, and how their improvisatory bequeathing of their worldly goods prompts a reflection on his relationship with them, and with his siblings. Osborne and Stevenson, dressed in simple t-shirts and jeans, enter from opposite sides of the stage, meet in the middle, and then launch themselves into a series of micro-gestures, the pointing of a finger, the roll of a shoulder, or the cutting through air of a hand creating separate embodied pathways for each dancer that mirror the twin jet streams of air billowing from behind the animated air plane that traverses the screen behind them (the beguiling animations, including ink-outlined avatars of Osborne and Stevenson, that play throughout the piece are by another former student of Rob's whose name I didn't catch).

Stevenson, in her recorded reflections, more than once uses the word "resemblance" when talking about her memories of her deceased father (a former RCMP officer). In the specific phraseology of her speech the word initially struck me as an odd choice, but upon reflection it now seems an apt way of describing a kinaesthetic process of re-membering, by which the cherished tics or traits of a loved-one become physicalized in one's own body. The way we make a bed or set a table, the way we lay out a suit to be pressed or line up papers on a desk: if, as many cognitive theorists have suggested, our first and most immediate way of learning and knowing is through sensori-motor observation rather than language, then it makes sense that over our lifetimes we will have inherited and physically incorporated a storehouse of kinetic memories from our parents. In Rob's choreography these play out as felt pathways to puzzle through and decipher, often beginning with a simple isolation of a single part of the body or a quotidian gesture (like the laying of hands on an invisible countertop) that then triggers an extended line of movement that Osborne and Stevenson, sometimes individually and sometimes together, follow instinctively but also with halting deliberation, every turn in one direction or step backwards or drop to the floor reminding me of the way one feels for the light switch in the darkened room of a house to which one has returned after some time away.

Two moments in particular stood out for me from last night's performance. The first is a sequence of gestures that Osborne and Stevenson perform in unison centre stage, but facing at a diagonal from each other, alternately pivoting away from and towards each other as they cycle through a vertical hail, a horizontal reach, a hip bend, a buckle of one knee, a shoulder roll, and so on. It's a repertoire of movements at once so common and yet here, placed in quasi-canon by virtue of the performers' different facings, likewise so uniquely individual; as such it powerfully encapsulated for me how one's individual genealogy of gestures might, over time, get shared with and distributed to other kinship networks--such as, in this case, one's dance family (and here I am reminded of the fact that Rob and Jane and Kim have a working relationship that dates back to 2009's Wake, and also of some of the ideas that Justine A. Chambers is working through in her Family Dinner: A Lexicon).

The second memorable moment came near the end when Osborne and Stevenson, again working in unison, engage in a series of super fast and barely perceptible stutter steps and sideways jerkings. Maybe it was because of the preceding voiceover from Osborne, about a gift of digitized Super-8 footage of her parents that she received from her brother, or maybe I was influenced by the evocative image by David Cooper included in the program, but the sequence reminded me of the glitches or unexpected jumps in an old video recording, or of the blur of motion stilled in a photograph. Either way it perfectly captured for me the ideas of embodied or kinetic memory that Rob is playing with in this piece: some recollected actions we can call on at specific moments for comfort or solace, and some overtake us, unbidden, and convulse us with their suddenness and their force.

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PuSh 2017: Zappa Meets Varèse and Oswald

Who knew that Turning Point Ensemble Artistic Director Owen Underhill was such a Frank Zappa fan? Or that Zappa, who apparently kept putting out rock and roll records (first with his band the Mothers of Invention, and then as a solo artist) so he could keep composing his orchestral works, was so influenced by French composer Edgard Varèse, one of the pioneers of musique concrète? In fact, the answer to both questions forms the basis for TPE's latest concert, Zappa Meets Varèse and Oswald: The Present Day Composer Refuses to Die, presented with the PuSh Festival at SFU Woodward's this past weekend. The third composer in this equation of influence is Canadian John Oswald, whose early experiments in "plunderphonics" prefigured contemporary sampling practices, and who was commissioned to write a new work, Refuse, for this concert.

I don't think I've ever seen so many musicians on stage at a TPE concert, and in the large ensemble pieces by Zappa especially one really felt the swing and rhythm of the wind instruments and percussion (there were three artists overseeing that section) and, of course, guitars. Indeed, the last piece on the program, G-Spot Tornado, was accompanied by a brisk, mamboesque duet choreographed by my colleague Rob Kitsos and performed by dancers Diego Romero and Anya Saugstad. The commission by Oswald, in "emulating Varèse's ascending octaves and fifths, and incorporating Zappa's rapid-fire collage of disparate genres," takes as its starting point some of the pop songs that were at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 list in January 1966. It also blends in references to other recognizable television and movie theme songs in order to suggest that in the detritus of musical history one can also find a shared signature that transcends time and place and narrow and isolationist ideologies (Varèse, who spent many years in the US teaching and conducting, was a committed internationalist, once proposing a "League of Nations of Art").

In these bleak times that's an idea I can snap my fingers to.

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Edge 6 at DOTE

It's that time in the Dancing on the Edge Festival when my desire to see as much work as I can exceeds my capacity to write in depth about it (a conference to plan for next week, wouldn't you know). So apologies for the capsule descriptions that follow of the pieces included on the Edge 6 program, which opened last night at the Firehall.

I've always loved Amber Funk Barton's taste in music. For Village, her newest work for her company the response., she choreographs a quartet to a suite of songs by Panda Bear. While content-wise the lyrics don't really have any direct correspondence to the movement, rhythmically Barton displays an intuitive sense of when to align beats with steps. In her program note, Barton writes that Village is about a group of individuals who live by the sea and survive a storm; that would explain some of the pantomimed sequences peppered throughout the piece: the shower scene that opens the work; the rope-pulling; the game of tag. However, not knowing this until after the piece was over, I was frankly more than happy to enjoy the movement for its own sake: the way Barton sends her dancers in and out of unison; how she creates subtle domino effects by having them lean into each other with their bodies; the way she juxtaposes small gestures (the kneeling prayer near the beginning) with more explosive and accelerated lifts and partnering sequences. Another thing Barton is really good at: spotting young talent. The dancers in this piece (Antonio Somero Jr., Andrew Haydock, Tessa Tamura, and Marcy Mills) were all excellent.

Sick Fish, by my colleague Rob Kitsos, is a charming duet that he dances with his daughter Beatrice, who has an abundance of natural stage presence. Set to an original sound composition by Lucas Van Lenton, and accompanied by digital projections of drawings that I gather were made by Beatrice and her brother Gabriel, the piece is about the playful and deeply mysterious world of children's dreams. It begins with Beatrice wandering the stage, glimpsing something off in the distance, something that may in fact be playing across the blankness of the upstage screen, but that apparently only she can see. Nevertheless, she tries to point out what she is seeing to her father when he joins her on stage, and later with his dancing--which begins with a simple repeated pull of his arms through space, as if gathering together the dark matter of his child's imagination--Rob will unleash a torrent of fantastical embodied shapes and projected images for us to revel in. The piece also incorporates lipsynching, a technique Kitsos has used in past work (for example, Barego); the uncanny alignment of mimed speech to the snatches of dialogue we hear in Van Lenton's score is another kind of aural kinesis that complements the physical movement. But it is young Beatrice who steals the show on this front with her own lipsynching to a song (sung by her younger self?) that gives us the title to the piece--and that in its mixing of the logically bizarre and the refreshingly unsentimental could only have come from a child's unconscious.

The program concluded with Starr Muranko's Spine of the Mother, a collaboration between Raven Spirit Dance and Starrwind Dance Projects, and an excerpt of which I had previously seen at the 2014 DOTE (and wrote briefly about here). Muranko has built what was previously a solo for the mesmerizing Tasha Faye Evans into a duet for Evans and Olivia Shaffer. At the top of the piece the dancers are positioned at opposite ends of a diagonal, with Evans facing us downstage left and Shaffer crouched with her back to us upstage right. As Evans begins a slow spiralling solo punctuated by the clicking sounds of the two rocks she holds in her hands, Shaffer initiates a subtle series of shaking convulsions with her body. In other words, the opening outwards of Evans' body is counterpointed with the contracting inwards of Shaffer's, a ripple effect shared across two female bodies meant to convey physically the shared belief among Indigenous peoples of the Americas that the continents are connected by the various mountain ranges that stretch from the Andes to the Rockies. By the end of the piece the two dancers will come together physically along the opposite diagonal axis to enact this very connection, their laborious and awkward earthbound crawl towards each other along the rock-strewn route that Evans had previously mapped for them by looking to the heavens (and which is visually amplified for us via Sammy Chien's projections) culminating in a mutual rise to standing that is accomplished by matching, vertebra by vertebra, one spine to another.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 3

So yesterday afternoon Justine and Alexa and I conducted our first interview. It was with my SFU colleague Rob Kitsos, who graciously agreed to sit down with us following his gig guest-teaching at Modus Operandi. Using our basic template of five W-questions, we were able to elicit some amazing memories and anecdotes and insights from Rob.

As Rob’s move to the city in 2004 precedes our historical purview by only two years, his perspective on the evolution of the city’s dance scene over the last ten years in some senses reflects his own progressive immersion into local aesthetic practices and collaborations and modes of making work. Also, because Rob trained in the US and teaches and creates within an academic setting, he brings with him and is likewise producing different genealogies of influence. As Justine said following the conversation, our rhizomatic map just got that much bigger and intersectional.

Most exciting for me, however, was the sensory experience of both watching and listening to Rob remember (and sometimes mis-remember) not just the genesis of some of the first pieces he created after arriving in the city, but also the context of his collaborations with local dance artists: Did he dance for Serge Bennathan before Peter Bingham or after? When did he first meet Susan Elliott? And so on. The gestures he produced in recounting this narrative will also be amazing fodder for our embodied performance archive.

Can’t wait for the next interview: Vanessa Goodman.

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Saudade at SFU Woodward's

The more-than-human and the not-quite-human: for the angels in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire and the replicants in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, respectively, the non-anthropoid is not all it's cracked up to be. Notwithstanding the frailty and fallibility of human bodies and desires, Bruno Ganz's Damiel and Rutger Hauer's Roy long for a temporality, a dailiness to living, that is at once more quotidian and less absolute than the one they currently inhabit. Such is the starting point for my colleague Rob Kitsos' new interdisciplinary dance piece Saudade, on at SFU Woodward's Studio T through this Saturday. Taking both films as key sources of inspiration, Kitsos and his collaborators have crafted a performance that combines movement, text, sound, light, multimedia projections and, not least, a series of moveable screens in order to explore the mutability and the porousness of borders between different states of being, including what it only seems proper--both within the multi-modal and perceptually immersive context of this piece and the conceptual premises of each film--to call the sensory and the extra-sensory.

In addition to sharing a world-weary detective as protagonist, Wings of Desire and Blade Runner are also notable for the ways in which they showcase the experience of alienated urban living, with the overheard interior conversations of the Berliners in the former and the walls of flashing neon advertising that form the futuristic backdrop to the Los Angelenos in the latter speaking in their different ways to the frequent attenuation of meaningful and felt interpersonal relationships in big cities. It's appropriate, then, that Saudade begins with the projected image of a city skyline that fills the upstage wall dissolving into what looks like a molecular mass that gradually fills the stage floor (the media design is by Remy Siu). Into this space steps Alexa Mardon, our surrogate flȃneuse, who proceeds to walk in a grid-like pattern, the map she is making (or is the one she is following?) illuminated for her and us on the floor (the lighting is by Jaylene Pratt, in consultation with Kyla Gardiner). Mardon is dressed in grey, which in terms of the more or less monochromatic colour scheme of Lorraine Kitsos' costume design, positions her as between what I took to be Cody Cox and Erika Mitsuhashi's angels (they wear white) and Michael Kong and Felicia Lau's replicants (in shades of black). And, indeed, to the extent that Mardon's character is both a part of and separate from the other dancers at various points throughout the piece, it is possible to read her as a combination of Rachel from Blade Runner and Marion from Wings of Desire, both of whom in their different ways hover between worlds (including as love objects).

Not that Kitsos' goal is to slavishly reproduce scenes or narrative tropes from each film. To be sure, the screens are effectively used throughout to convey the different insides and outsides of the various worlds being conjured (from the geometric to the kinaesthetic to the sonic), as well as the permeability of those worlds--as when, for example, Mitsuhashi leans her ear towards one of them to hear what we can see is happening just behind it. There is also an intensely physical scene in which Kong thrashes about on the floor downstage in a manner that recalls the painfully violent death of Pris, an interesting bit of cross-gender transference. However, for me the choreography was most captivating in those moments of almost- or shadow-partnering, when one of the dancers is mimicking from behind and with a slight but perceptible delay the movements of another. Here is where we see--and feel--that aching desire for connection with a human other--a space in which one's proffered hail (and the gesture of the raised hand is key for Kitsos throughout) is not just recognized, but also returned.

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Nostos at SFU Woodward's

As it's that time of year (end of semester), and I need to budget my time accordingly, this is less a formal review post per se, than an enthusiastic endorsement of the School for the Contemporary Arts' Fall Mainstage Dance show, Nostos, on at the Fei and Milton Wong Theatre at SFU Woodward's through this Saturday. Overseen by my colleague Rob Kitsos, and showcasing the choreography of Peter Bingham, Lesley Telford, Shauna Elton, and Kitsos, the evening is structured around the theme of nostalgia, and also features live musical and spoken word accompaniment by SFU MFA Candidate Barbara Adler and the Pugs and Crows (Meredith Bates, Cole Schmidt, Russell Sholberg, and Ben Brown).

A repertory company of 30+ dancers (including three of my students from FPA 228W, Dance Aesthetics), divided into two overlapping groups, seamlessly segues between each choreographer's individual contributions, which are so well integrated in terms of transitions (no blackouts!) and so complementary in terms of movement vocabulary that it is hard to determine where one section leaves off and another begins. With such a large ensemble, and building on the theme of nostalgia, it's no surprise that canon and retrograde movement features prominently; but what's so pleasurable about the incorporation of these techniques in this program is how they coalesce around simple patterns that accrue depth and emotional intensity by virtue of their repetition within and across each choreographer's work: the sidelong glance backwards, fall to the knees, and swaying lean of Bingham; the inner calf clasp and directional planting of a foot of Telford (a move that slayed me with its beauty); the supported arching of torsos and hands over the crawling backs of partners of Elton; and the rat-a-tat chopping and segmenting and boxing of visual space by so many industrious hands of Kitsos.

Repetition was a theme that came up in Adler's spoken word accompaniment to Telford's section, a riff on the spaces and sensory traces of memory (the taste of chocolate that lingers despite the absence of candy wrappers in purses and pockets) that came back in the evening's finale, which became both a constellation of and elaboration on the movement patterns we had been primed to respond to in each of the preceding sections. But this section also added new patterns and formations, including a group circle that like a collective sigh or exhalation of breath (or, indeed, the bellows of Adler's accordion) expanded and contracted to embrace both the parts and the whole of this remarkable group collaboration.

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The Tempest at Bard on the Beach

On the last weekend before school starts, Richard and I finally got to Bard on the Beach to see Meg Roe's production of The Tempest. First staged to acclaim in 2008, this reworked version is, courtesy of Christine Reimer's costumes, Alessandro Juliani's original music (played live by a quartet upstage right), and Rob Kitsos' choreography, certain a feast for the senses. The one confusing signal, however, came from Pam Johnson's cooly white and vaguely lunar set, which initially put me in the arctic hinterlands rather than the lush island tropics one assumes the play is set.

Tonally, this is certainly a "lighter" version of the play than I am used to, with the darker psychology that underscores Prospero's dark magic only occasionally bubbling to the surface. This might have been a result of the oddly passive and--it seemed to me--fatigued performance of Allan Morgan in the lead role. Interestingly, though like the other actors he was miked, I found it hard to hear Morgan's lines, and I was struck, in retrospect, by how much time Prospero spends offstage and also, when he is onstage, how often he is positioned as an observer. Lili Beaudoin's infectious performance as Miranda is certainly confident and winning, and it is charming to watch the utterly ingenuous flirtation between her and Ferdinand (a suitably besotted Daniel Doheny) unfold--in part because for once the actors match the roles in age. Again, however, it felt that the more complex emotions behind Miranda's temperament were glossed over. After all, we are introduced to her as she is offering paroxysms of shared grief for the victims of the shipwreck her father has just wrought. We seem to move from this fraught state to lively attentiveness (viz. the story Prospero has to tell regarding how they came to find themselves on this island) a bit too quickly and seamlessly.

Then, too, I wasn't all that compelled by the conspiring between Antonio (Ian Butcher) and Sebastian (Andrew McNee). Granted, the plot to kill Alonso (Scott Bellis) is presented in the play as wholly opportunistic and the arch-usurper Antonio does not give Sebastian a lot of time to rationalize--or doubt--his actions; however, I somehow wished I got a sense that the stakes were higher. Ditto my response to the key relationships between Prospero and Ariel (Jennifer Lines) and Prospero and Caliban (Todd Thomson). The former is as gossamer and delicately poised as Lines' constantly arched right foot, ready to take quick flight into the imaginative ether of beneficit master and willing servant rather than pausing to explore from a more grounded perspective the actual matter of what binds these two together. That is, of course, the perspective one associates with the monster Caliban, who has the greater grievance, and for whom the master/slave relationship is no mere dialectical exercise. But, ironically, he who provides the darkest ballast to the play is arguably overtaken (and undercut) by Roe's  most interesting dramaturgical innovation--turning the buffoonish clowns Trinculo and Stephano whom Caliban conscripts as potential assassins of Prospero into the drunken sisters Trincula and Stephana (and played uproariously by Luisa Jojic and Naomi Wright).

This casting innovation elicits all sorts of added gendered insights into the play. But the burlesque that accompanies it also firmly tips the generic hybridity of this, Shakespeare's most complex romance, firmly into the realm of comedy. And it renders Caliban as the voice of postcolonial resistance doubly impotent--by castrating him twice.

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PuSh 2014: Inheritor Album

605 Collective's Inheritor Album, on at the Dance Centre in a co-presentation with the PuSh Festival through tomorrow, opens with a stunning movement image. As six dancers begin running clockwise in a circle, a light projection on the floor reveals a spinning 78" record (the gorgeous animations used throughout the piece are by Miwa Matreyek). The dancers take turns tagging and pushing off each other, until one of them breaks away and begins running the other way. It's an apt metaphor for the intersection of collective versus individual identity that is at the heart of the concept of inheritance (familial, cultural, artistic) and the musical concept album, which though loosely united around a general idea or theme always has one or two breakout songs.

But, as my SFU Contemporary Arts colleague Rob Kitsos pointed out in the talkback following last night's performance, the opening also speaks to the nature of hip hop as a dance style, structured as it is around the idea of a "crew" who are all grooving in a circle to the same beats, but who also challenge and egg each other on with individual displays of virtuosic B-boy freestyling. There are plenty of those moments in this performance, but what I love about the 605 Collective is they are also not afraid of unison. In Inheritor Album audiences get some of the best contemporary group movement they'll see on any dance stage, not least in its seamless fusing of choreographic styles and training.

The six performers talked about their eclectic and varied dance training during the talkback, and how most of it--with the possible exception of tap--was reflected in some way or another in the piece. Core 605 members Josh Martin and Lisa Gelley also talked about reconstructing the work in less than a month on three new dancers (Hayden Fong, Waldean Nelson, and Renée Sigouin; the sixth dancer is Laura Avery, part of the original production last year along with Shay Kuebler, Justine Chambers, and David Raymond). To start, the main challenge is just teaching and learning the movement in such a short amount of time; however, once that movement was in the new dancers' bodies, Martin was able to work with them to adapt it to their own particular improvisational strengths.

And by such methods one builds a crew.

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Drawing Inside and Outside the Lines at EDAM

EDAM's fall mixed program, inside the lines/the lines inside, was just the kind of treat that was needed on a rainy evening following Halloween.

Artistic Director Peter Bingham started things off with Reinventing the Curve, a new contact duet danced by Monica Strehlke and Farley Johansson. The piece begins with Strehlke closing her eyes and Johanssson whispering her name; Strehlke leans into the call, and this becomes the mechanism for a solo exploration of the body moving through space, with Strehlke guided only by Marc Stewart's music and Johannson's beckoning signposting. Eventually Strehlke comes to a stop and the sequence is repeated, this time with Johansson closing his eyes and Strehlke serving as guide. Physical contact is, however, eventually made by the two dancers, with two sequences of inventive partnering featuring great floor (and wall) work especially standing out. In between, Bingham also includes a long stretch of unison movement--unusual for him, but structurally very effective in this piece.

Next up was New Raw, a piece created and performed by Deanna Peters in collaboration with Molly McDermott, Elissa Hanson, and Alexa Mardon. It's a fierce exploration of grrrlness that uses an eclectic musical score and a range of bodily tempos and rhythms to show a spectrum of female "fronts." Of particular interest in that respect was that all four performers are introduced to us with their faces turned away or obscured. By the end of the piece, however, as they move back and forth between upstage and downstage, showing us just how fully in their bodies they are, they are very much in our faces, and the piece builds to a thrilling climax.

The final piece on the program was my colleague Rob Kitsos's Con-found, an experiment in real-time composition created in collaboration with students and alumni from SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts. Losing things--wallets on rollercoasters, phone numbers, one's memory--becomes the thematic refrain around which the performers build a series of movement, textual, and musical phrases, choosing when and how to build the work as a whole in the moment of performance itself. The text may, at times, have dominated the movement, and sometimes transitions were lost in the confusion of bodies criss-crossing the stage; however, there were also sublime moments of supplementation and synchronicity, when the repetition or steady accretion of a simple gesture (hands fluttering before chests) and the arrangement of bodies on stage (in horizontal or vertical lines, in aligned pairs on the floor or against a wall) were starkly beautiful.

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War: Requiem at SFU Woodward's

Things are bustling at SFU Woodward's, where several year-end shows highlight the immense talent and creativity of Contemporary Arts students across the disciplines. Last night I got a chance to see the senior repertory dance students shine in War: Requiem, an intense, athletic, and visually stunning show overseen and co-created by Rob Kitsos, and featuring additional choreography by the 605 Collective, Shauna Elton, and Vanessa Goodman.

The show begins, more or less in medias res, with the full company of 18 dancers scattered about the Fei and Milton Wong Theatre's reconfigured thrust stage, clad in gender-neutral variations of grey and black (the costumes are by Carmen Alatorre), and each standing at rigid military attention. As the audience begins to file to their seats, one of the dancers shouts a command and, en masse, the group begins to march in place, 18 pairs of sneakers echoing like artillery fire off the Wong's sprung floor. Another command and the group comes together centre stage, a single unit now, marching with collective purpose, but going nowhere, their blank performance faces in this case telegraphing the anonymous--and obedient--abrogation of self required of the common soldier.

Here and elsewhere throughout the evening I was also reminded about how much unison choreography has in common with military drills and formations, not least in terms of the bodily discipline (and disciplining of the body) required for each. In one full-throttle sequence after another, in straight lines or diagonal v-shapes, running or simply standing in place, standing on tables upstage, or rolling on the floor downstage, the dancers executed a range of complex and intensely physical choreography with precision and virtuosic timing. Which made all the more memorable and impactful those moments when one among them broke away from or moved counter to the group. Often this occurred in combination with spoken text, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear one of my favourite parts from the Homebody's monologue in Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul being recited at a certain point (although it wasn't credited in the program).

It's also a credit to the overall curation of this show that while I could pick out what I thought were recognizable 605 moments or phrases and whole sequences that likely came from Rob or Shauna or Vanessa, the total experience of the choreography felt seamless. Which is also to say that the dancers' interpretations of the variations in style were also incredibly fluid and organic.

Finally a shout-out to the amazingly integrated design concept for the piece, with music by Gabriel Saloman, lighting by Sarah Bourdeau and Rui Su, projections by Chimerik (brothers and new media wizards Sammy Chien and Shang-Han Chien), and installation work by guest artist Nancy Tam. At moments throughout the piece we glimpse a figure walking slowing behind a scrim upstage, wearing what looks like a Hazmat suit. It's Tam, wrapped in layers of plastic. This mysterious figure finds a visual corollary at the end of the piece: as the dancers one by one deposit plastic replica bodies downstage and join each other in a heap on the floor centre stage, heaving for a few moments together as they collect, or expend, a final breath, Tam begins emerging from her own plastic cocoon, like a butterfly from its chrysalis. Creation from destruction? Beauty from ugliness? It's a deliberately ambiguous closing image, but one that, like everything else in this production, is full of meaning and resonance.

War: Requiem runs for two more performance today, at 2 pm and 8 pm.

P.

Bar None

At the Dancing on the Edge Festival's Edge Five presentation last night at the Firehall, Richard and I thrilled to the premiere of colleague and Objecthood collaborator Rob Kitsos' newest work. In Barego, Kitsos, together with Ballet BC dancers Leon Feizo-Gas and Alexis Fletcher and SFU Contemporary Arts alum Mark Arboleda, offer a meditation on the bar as a space where individual subjectivity and private desires (you can read the invisible slash mark in the title) come up against the rituals of public spectacle and collective judgment. Against a widescreen rear projection film loop consisting of a largely continuous pan of what I took to be the new Charles Bar at SFU Woodward's, and making strategic spatial use of three white barstools (which I like to think of as an homage by Rob to Objecthood), the four dancers mine (and at times mime) the subtle choreography so often exhibited in drinking establishments: from the way we perch on or fall off our stools to the complex sequence of hand and head movements involved in doing tequila shots; from the purposeful tango of would-be seduction to the elegant ballet of blissful inebriation. In solos, duos, and trios, Rob structures his movement around the twin poles of alienation and sociability, display and concealment that are always operating in the space of the bar: by that I mean that the dancers come together and move apart in patterns that telegraph at once the intoxicating effects of fellow-feeling and the sobering estrangement that comes when that feeling is withheld or not returned (including by the self).

Having worked with Rob, I know he likes to play with stage space, and that he is not afraid to have more than one thing going on at the same time movement-wise. I'm with him on this, as static dancers within a mise-en-scène is something that drives me nuts (and an element of Quiet that I couldn't understand, especially as Zaides' twice-repeated placement of his non-moving dancers downstage right effectively blocked the view of the left side of the house). All of which is to say that I appreciated how Rob played with foreground and background in Barego, including the incorporation of the film. One's attention is constantly being divided in a bar--focused near (on one's drink or potential conquest) and far (the animated conversations at adjacent tables, the sports game being broadcast on the television monitor, and so on)--so the fact that ours was as well during various sequences last night felt appropriate.

Acutely aware that bars are also prime sites of talk, with the confession, the boast, and the seduction all vying for performative supremacy, Rob incorporates audio excerpts from bar scenes in popular films into the work. Indeed, Rob himself offers up a memorable lip synch of a speech by Shelley "The Machine" Levene, the character Jack Lemmon played in Glengarry Glen Ross, and it's a treat to watch Fletcher incarnate the dissolute Wanda Wilcox (Faye Dunaway) from Barbet Schroeder's Barfly (Mickey Rourke's Henry to Dunaway's Wanda in that film: "What do you do?" Dunaway/Wanda: "I drink.").

One of the things that makes Rob's work so compelling to watch is that he not a "pure dance" choreographer; less interested in the technical execution of his movement, than in that movement's integration into a larger interdisciplinary aesthetic (one that often includes film/video, music, props, and big heaps of theatricality), Rob offers multiple avenues of access to the questions he chooses to explore. Movement is always central to this exploration, but it is never abstracted or marked off for its own sake. To this end, it is especially exciting to watch the classically trained Fletcher and Feizo-Gaz, so memorable as the leads in Rob's Long Story Short, his contribution to Ballet BC's Surfacing program at the Dance Centre in 2009, cut loose even further in Barego. The program notes state that the dancers had a hand in the choreography, and at moments last night line and extension definitely came to the fore; but Rob's inimitable choreography (where limbs contract and buckle as much as they straighten) kept everyone (dancers and audience alike) suitably off balance.

My one complaint: I wanted the piece to be longer. This definitely feels to me like a piece that can be expanded into something evening-length, and I do hope that Rob continues to work on it.

Actually, I have a second complaint, and it has to do with the work that precedes Rob's on the Edge Five program: Benjamin Kamino's Nudity.Desire. Over-theorized (Agamben, Deleuze, and Zizek are all cited in the program notes) and under-performed, the work betrayed, for me, the worst excesses of bad performance art. Why it's been paired with Rob's piece I cannot fathom. If you're planning to head to the matinee on Saturday (which I urge you to do), perhaps think about arriving at intermission.

P.

ASTR/CORD in Seattle

Just back from Seattle, and the joint American Society for Theatre Research/Congress on Research in Dance Conference. Kugler, Rob Kitsos, and I participated in a Thursday evening workshop purportedly aimed at coming up with some bombasts, manifests, and all-around provocative first principles regarding the creation, performance, and reception of a “bastard” form of dance-theatre that somehow wouldn’t be called that. You can check out the group’s preliminary blog posts on the topic at www.nursingabeautifulbastard.wordpress.com.

The actual workshop discussion was decidedly disappointing; not only did the co-conveners have an agenda for the evening that seemed to obviate completely—if not be totally antithetical to—the work we had been asked to do prior to the conference, but one of said conveners was further intent on reducing everything to her own delimited and circumscribed performance practice, training, experience, and biases. Then, too, it became very clear that no one—least of all the conveners—was very interested in hearing about our experience of cross-disciplinary collaboration on The Objecthood of Chairs, which we had very clearly stressed would be our primary reference point in our initial proposal to join the workshop.

All of this may have something to do with the unique structure of the ASTR working groups model, which has now been in existence for some years. This replacement for the traditional panel paper presentations (although those still do happen at ASTR, in the plenary sessions) does have the benefit of encouraging participants to dialogue and share work and ideas before the conference proper. However, it also—by virtue of the workshops being open to auditors/audience members who haven’t been a part of this prior conversation—forces speakers to distill, at times extremely reductively, very complex arguments (that might have been part of a much longer paper) into pithy sound bites of no more than one or two sentences, the reverberations or connections between which the convener then assembles like some sort of choirmaster (or director, or choreographer). It’s perhaps for this reason that the convener’s voice tends to dominate, and everyone else ends up looking to some extent like a performing monkey—with audience members for the most part passively absorbing the spectacle. Alana’s workshop on Saturday morning, “Risking Encounter,” looked extremely interesting on paper, and, indeed, some very provocative ideas about the “ethics of touch,” in particular, were bandied about; but the number of participants (13) was just too large, and again one of the co-conveners (who hadn’t even circulated a paper!) spoke way too much. Where is the pay-off, I wonder, in someone journeying half way around the world to present their research for at most five minutes worth of speech?

To be fair, this is my first time at ASTR. And I did only attend two sessions… I’m a fairly grumpy conference-goer as it is, and I’m not very much of a fan of the traditional format either. Still, I think I’ll need to do a careful reading of the workshop proposals for next year’s ASTR meeting (sans CORD folks) in Montreal before I think of interrupting our planned semester sojourn in the UK with a return visit to eastern Canada in mid-November.

Conference-wise, Seattle may have been hit and miss—and they could have done better with the weather (though all the American announcers were uniform in their blame of the “arctic air from Canada” for the unusual cold snap)—but culture-wise the city delighted, as is so often the case. We had a fine post-workshop dinner with Kugler, Rob, and Rob’s wife, Lorraine (a quasi-Seattle native), at Tulio, which also doubled as a kind of deferred celebration of the Chairs production—which we measured by raiding our box-office take for the three very yummy wines the table shared. Then there was the incredibly comprehensive Picasso exhibit on at the Seattle Art Museum. There was a crush of bodies, but there was much work I hadn’t seen before, and it was mostly accessible for more than rudimentary contemplation.

Finally, on Friday evening we caught Ralph Lemon’s new show, How Can You Stay in the House All Day And Not Go Anywhere?, at On the Boards. I haven’t yet processed all that was going on in the piece, and I think in some respects my reaction was both pre- and over-determined by all that I had read in advance about the background to the work (in particular Lemon’s successive losses of his partner and then his longtime collaborator, Walter Carter). Still, I was definitely struck by the mixing of media—live narrated text, video, and recorded and live dance—and how what can be said about, what can be shown of, and what is felt as a result of grief could be tracked along two parallel (and inverse) tracks of abstraction and (in)articulacy. The dancers’ frenzied movements, their convulsive writhing (which is almost as painful to watch as it must be to perform), embodies both the release and the absorption (indeed, the reincorporation) that is a necessary component of the work of mourning.

Lemon’s artistic sensibility is as capacious and prickly as his view of the world, which he presents as vast and amazing and complex, but also as raw and unfinished and filled with thorny thickets. Grief is an especially painful and constricting brier-patch, but as Lemon here suggests via Lewis Hyde and Uncle Remus, a wily hare or rabbit can eventually find his or her way out. So too with this very challenging work of art. Lemon doesn’t make it easy for his audience, but just when it seems like he’s completely boxed us in as spectators/witnesses/co-supplicants, and left us “no room” to maneuver (and only one way to react), a hole opens up and a possible way forward is glimpsed.

Talk about an ethics of touch…

P.

Henry V at Bard

It only took 20 years, but last night I finally made it to Bard on the Beach to take in Henry V on the Studio Stage. I've never thought Shakespeare to be the ne plus ultra of theatre in the first place (and, indeed, I've seen more bad Shakespeare in performance than good), and the quirky, crunchy rusticity of its outdoor seaside setting that BOTB promotes as part of its west coast charm has never been a huge selling point for me. Plus, while the company showcases the work of some very fine local performers year-to-year, I also think it retains some lesser lights for not altogether sound repertory reasons, and could be a bit more adventurous and diverse in its casting.

However, I put aside those reservations this year. Partly this had to do with the fact that I had taught Henry V in my Intro to Drama course earlier this spring, which was organized around the theme of war. Having unpacked--with the help of the Chorus--the jingoism of some of Henry's speeches, and asked my students whether, based on his actions in the play, we should consider Harry a hero or a war criminal, I was interested in seeing director Meg Roe's take on the play's martial masculinities, and how she treated the rather dubious reasons promulgated by Henry and his advisors for going to war with France (what to do about those tennis balls, for example...). The fact that Roe had cast her husband, Alessandro Juliani, in the title role also helped. I'd long been a fan of Juliani's work as the traitorous Felix Gaeta on Battlestar Galactica, and his starring role as Frog in last year's stupendous production of after the quake only confirmed my opinion of his acting chops. Finally, my colleague Rob Kitsos--and collaborator on The Objecthood of Chairs--has contributed original choreography to the production. So, really, it was the the right alignment of elements that found me under the smaller of the two tents at Vanier Park last night.

First of all, Roe's production is a miracle of concision. Any mounting of the play that can get us all the way through to 4.1 and the crucial pre-Battle of Agincourt scene pre-intermission needs to be applauded. What might be sacrificed in terms of plot and character complexity (especially regarding the Archbishops' opening discussion of Henry's surprising switch from wayward rebellion to pious devotion to duty upon the death of his father and his assumption of the throne, and equally in terms of the Archbishops' own conspiring reasons to convince Henry to invade France) is made up for in terms of a swift pacing that recognizes that the play really only gets going once Henry and his men reach the gates of Harfleur. Then, too, Roe takes the Chorus at her word when she says at the outset that the "wooden O" of a theatrical stage cannot do their story proper justice in truly representing the scale and scope of a story that moves between England and France, that features pitched battlefield scenes, and a cast of literally thousands of characters. Heeding the Chorus' advice for us in the audience to use our imaginations, Roe plays on the intimacy of Bard's Studio Stage, using simple design effects to turn the upstage entrance into the prow of a ship or the gates to Harfleur, and having her actors switch between their doubled roles as soldiers of France and soldiers of England by making some clever signals in costuming.

As the Chorus, Colleen Wheeler brings great stage presence and a suitable gravitas to the role, anchoring us in the story, if not exactly trying to colour our interpretation of that story, as in some revisionist productions. And here is where I would say my only real criticism of this staging comes in: this most political play is for all intents and purposes devoid of politics. Roe certainly does not shy away from showing us the brutality of war, and the scene where the Welsh Captain Fluellen (an excellent Andrew McNee) enters carrying the brutally murdered young Boy (a preternaturally poised Joseph Gustafson) is gut-wrenching. But at the same time there is little to no questioning of Henry's motives for going to war in the first place, nor of some of the decisions Henry makes in the name of war: the executions at Southampton of the traitorous Scroop, Grey, and Cambridge; the execution of Bardolph for his looting in France (an act that while interestingly performed on stage in this production had curiously little effect/affect on this viewer in terms of how we're meant to interpret the King's treatment of his former friends); and the order of the slaughter of the French prisoners, an order that's crucially given in Shakespeare's text before Henry knows of the French massacre of the young boys attending the English luggage).

Granted, I have not seen Bard's production of Falstaff, the reworked version of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 running in rep with Henry V, so I can't say exactly what continuities and/or changes in character we witness in Prince Hal/King Henry over the course of the two plays. And yet while I appreciated Juliani's naturalism in the title role, I didn't get much of a sense of him wrestling with his conscience regarding the justness of his war, nor in his arguments with Williams in 4.1--and in the soliloquy that follows--a sense of just what is at stake morally and ethically in his adherence (despite the sins of his father and grandfather and great-uncle) to kingly duty and ceremony. Whatever gender politics one might also discern in the final love scene between Henry and Katherine (a winning Amber Lewis) tend to be likewise obscured by the overt playing of this scene for comedy--which, in the expert hands of Juliani, did work, I have to say.

Where I think Roe takes the most risks in this production is in her approach to movement on stage. She correctly recognizes that this is a very physical play, and does not shy away from representing the labour of war. Which is where Rob's contributions come in, using a combination of dance choreography and martial arts moves to both abstract and literalize the kinesthetics of medieval battle, with its strange and heavy weaponry (swords and crossbows), its close proximity (ie, mostly hand-to-hand combat), and its interminability (pitched battles that go on for days). All of this is aptly signaled in the heaviness of the men's backwards and forwards steps, in the massings of bodies on stage, in the repeated and exchanged gestures that telegraph futility and exhaustion among the rank and file. Showcased on its own at select moments throughout the play, especially during the climactic Battle of Agincourt, Rob's choreography allows the audience a pause from the text, but by no means from the action represented in/by the text. Indeed, in daring to show us what the combat we hear about actually might look light, Roe and Kitsos also suggest that this battle isn't going to be won, as the Dauphin (an energetic Charlie Gallant) thinks, by superior steeds on the French side, nor even, as Henry thinks, by the hand of God guiding the English, but rather by which side has the most men left standing at the end of the day.

And therein lies the politics of this play: in its movement.

P.

Molecules, Markets, and Movement

What do the movement of molecules in liquids, stock market fluctuations, and successive waves of female dancers walking, in patterned randomness, across a stage floor (carrying Starbucks coffee containers, no less) have to do with each other?

To answer that question you need to haul ass to the Firehall Arts Centre this evening for the last remaining performance of Brownian Motion, a collaborative choreographic rumination on the economy by Mark Haim, Rob Kitsos, and Shae Zukiwsky for SFU's Off Centre Dancers.

In particle physics, "Brownian Motion" (a theory akin to Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle," but in this case named after a Scottish botanist), might be represented something like this:

And in economics, like this:

However, as Haim, Kitsos, and Zukiwsky, together with their very talented young dancers (including a student of mine from last term, Tessa Forrester), brilliantly demonstrate, the impact of what, after Lucretius, we would do well to call the "invisible blows" of physics and economics is always registered most viscerally on the human body.

This is a show that is sensorially and intellectually ravishing--as all great art should be. I was glad to be among last night's audience of Canucks refuseniks.

P.

Diving Deep

The Surfacing event that took place at The Dance Centre this past weekend proves that there is life yet in and at Ballet BC. I couldn’t get to the Ignite gala at the end of September that was meant to announce the resuscitation of the company under Interim Artistic Director Emily Molnar, so I was keen to attend a performance of Surfacing, if only to check the pulse of an artistic organization this city and province can’t afford to let die.

The first-ever commissioned choreographic series by Ballet BC, the conceit for the Surfacing program proves that Molnar is not interested in reinventing the wheel, and that she is not afraid of taking risks. Pairing Ballet BC dancers with members of the Arts Umbrella Graduate Program in Dance, Molnar assigned a differently mixed group to four respective—and respected—local choreographers: Joe Laughlin, Simone Orlando, Donald Sales, and Rob Kitsos. She also assigned the music for each piece, and imposed a 20-minute time limit on the finished product. Finally, the choreographers had less than a month to conceive and choreograph their works, and only two weeks to rehearse them. Despite—or maybe because of—these constraints, the pieces that resulted were uniformly excellent, although the combination of musical and choreographic styles (not to mention my own tastes) meant that some stood out for me more than others.

Joe Laughlin led off the program with “On Wings,” set to a Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 1. Perhaps because of the musical choice, this piece felt the most traditionally balletic, with the women en pointe for much of it and the men in the first sections mostly doing lifts. The piece did gain complexity as it proceeded, as did the partnering, and no doubt the two young men seconded from Arts Umbrella (one impossibly tall) gained immense experience and confidence as a result of the process.

Simone Orlando, who is currently Artist in Residence with Ballet BC, was next up with "Doppeling." Bach’s Concerto in D Minor provided the score to what I read as a witty post-Freudian take on the Olympia story from Hoffman’s Tales. Half a dozen female dancers, dressed in matching beige lyotards, and sporting similar bewigged bobs scamper, jump, prance, and pose mechanically to Bach’s allegro tempo. They are soon joined by four men, also in lyotards and wigs, also doing their best pixie wind-up impressions to the music. The two groups remain for the most part segregated along gender lines until the lead female doll encounters her blond male counterpart. There follows a moving pas de deux that would seem to bring the piece to a natural conclusion, except that—my only criticism—Orlando adds a coda that returns both dancers to the uniformity of their respective groups.

Donald Sales, working with Yann Tiersen’s combination of tango, accordion music and French chanson, created "Long Story Short," an alternately moving and joyful celebration of the rituals of social and romantic courtship. The piece opens with two tableaux: downstage left a couple reclines dreamily on the floor; upstage right there is a tense domestic stand-off at a table that seems to lead to a break-up (not least, it’s suggested through an effective bit of trompe l’oeil, because of another woman). Thereafter Sales alternates animated group scenes that involve the incorporation of everyday bodily movements (scratched heads, tugged ears, smelled armpits, picked noses) into exuberant expressions of pure dance with quieter movement sequences focused on three individuals who for different reasons (self-absorption, painful shyness, willful isolation) forsake both the group and the longed-for connection with another.

Finally, my colleague Rob Kitsos brought down the house with "Regression Line," a Jets and Sharks-style contest of movement set to a propulsive rock score by Dub Trio. A dance rumble that repeatedly brings the dancers to the threshold of (presumably violent) contact, only to back away and start the marshalling of short, sharp movements all over again, the piece is remarkable for its aggressive yet incredibly disciplined energy. The gang groupings and their respective star-crossed leaders, as I conceived of them, circled each other warily, often precariously, and yet at the same time knew when to keep their distance, with Rob effectively juxtaposing vertical and horizontal lines of movement throughout.

Rob’s piece, moving 15 plus dancers across an intimate stage space at full velocity, also reminded me of why I so love attending performances of The Dance Centre. It’s up close and personal, to use an old cliché. When the different groups of dancers marched purposefully downstage at different points in the piece, it did feel like they were going to continue on into the audience, and from where I was in the third row one could see every flexed muscle, every tensed tendon, every bead of sweat on their bodies.

Ignite, I recall, was staged at the Playhouse, which I’ve also come to appreciate more and more as a space to watch dance thanks to the DanceHouse series. It makes me hope that, as the company rebuilds and redevelops, it will think twice about making its home in the newly reopened Queen Elizabeth Theatre. I know changes in the design and acoustics mean that this venue is not the cavernous echo-chamber it once was; I also know that filling a theatre that size means that much more ticket revenue. However, I never thought the Queen E was the best fit for Ballet BC, and that the impulse for some of former Artistic Director John Alleyne’s more ambitious—if not always completely successful, not to mention financially remunerative—story ballets was just as much a function of the performance space as it was the imagined tastes of the company’s main audience base. If Molnar is indeed trying to attract a new kind of audience for a company that will distinguish itself less by a repertoire of Sleeping Beauties and Nutcrackers than by daring new works of the sort on display in Surfacing, then she would do well to think about the spatial fit of the performance venue as well (one wonders, in this regard, if the about-to-open SFU Woodward’s might fill a much-need size gap here).

One final note. From what I understand new Ballet BC Executive Director Jay Rankin is very good at his job, and is working tirelessly to put the company back on a sound financial footing. However, judging from what he had to say in advance of yesterday’s performance, he’s not the best public speaker. Which is unfortunate if you’re trying to draw attention to arts cuts and urge people to donate to endowment funds, etc. Molnar, on the other hand, is warmth and articulateness personified. My advice: let her do the talking from now on.

P.

DanceHouse Launches Second Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

P.

Dancing the City

Rob Kitsos's Wake, which premiered last night at The Dance Centre, and which runs for two more performances today (at 2 and 8 pm), is exactly the kind of dance theatre I most enjoy. It is a large-scale work for eight dancers (including Kitsos in a dual embodied and virtual role as choreographer/planner and metteur-en-scène) that combines movement, text, video, and live electroacoustic music (by composer Martin Gotfrit) in a wholly integrated and complementary way. Equally appealing to me is that the piece achieves a similar reciprocity in the compositional and aesthetic relationship between individual sequences of choreography (often challengingly abstract, technically complex, and intensely physical) and an overall narrative structure that neither reveals its meaning too willingly nor remains deliberately obscurantist.

Kitsos takes as his point of departure French philosopher Michel de Certeau's essay "Walking the City," in The Practice of Everyday Life, using the "urban 'text'" we all collectively write in our flânerie to explore both the spaces of connection and the distances between various bodies as they inhabit and interact with the built environment. How do you capture and represent what de Certeau calls "the activity of passers-by," when by its very nature that activity is meant to be fleeting, to not linger (passing by), to leave a trace only in its forgetting? Sounds like a perfect metaphor for the documentation of dance itself, and it is perhaps no coincidence that Wake opens with Rob Groeneboer's video capturing Kitsos in the guise of some sort of city planner, atop a downtown building, with various plans and blueprints spread out around him. Coincident with Kitsos's structured improvisation of a movement sequence atop the building on the video, the seven young live dancers (Cort Gerlock, Jane Osborne, Roxoliana Prus, Justin Reist, Olivia Shaffer, Kim Stevenson, and Leigha Wald--all graduates of the BFA Program in Dance at SFU, where Kitsos teaches) get up from the chairs on which they have been sitting along either wing, and take up recumbent positions on the floor. Eventually the dancers "wake" to the city, and one of the delights of the first in-sync movement sequence featuring all seven performers is how the horizontality of their floor work contrasts with the verticality of the office and residential towers captured in the montage of images in Groeneboer's video.

Thereafter, the piece proceeds in terms of a succession of movements choreographed around the dancers' own embodied relationship with the city, with various colour sequences filmed in and around Gastown becoming the basis for a reconfiguration (sometimes willful, at other times willed) of those relationships in solos and duos and trios that are all about negotiating the space between self and other (even if, as de Certeau reminds us, that other is space itself). In this regard, I was especially struck by the complex arm work and hand clasps Kitsos came up with for three of the women in one memorable sequence, finding a way to mimic in bodily gesture the tangled psychic complexity and constantly shifting terrain of friendship itself. Similarly, in a humourous pas de deux for the two men, they argue abstractly in spoken word about the best route from point A to point B as they materially enact proximity and closeness in their mutual physical striving.

In his role as planner/choreographer, Kitsos interrupts these proceedings at various points throughout the piece: via black and white sequences on the video that feature him furrowing his brow, taking notes, and eventually meeting up with someone who may be a developer or a government bureaucrat (a perfectly cast Emily Molnar) in some corporate boardroom; and via various live walk-throughs, during which he surveys and takes more notes on the performance we are witnessing. In this, we see Kitsos trying to flush out patterns, to make sense of various fragments, to render legible both the city's various intersections and the dancers' bodily intertwinings. But the city and the dancers resist easy conscription. When, for example, Kitsos improvises his own solo late in the show (to wonderful accompaniment on electric guitar by Gotfrit), attempting, it seems, to reduce what we have hitherto seen of the other dancers' bodily trajectories to one or two core repeatable phrases, those other dancers studiously avoid him, either remaining planted against either wing wall, or else, in running to the other side, going out of their way to avoid contact with Kitsos and his notebook (a prop he carries with him throughout the piece, and which he dances around during his solo). And, later, when Kitsos attempts to join the other dancers and mimic their movements at the very end, he finds he is unable to fully take part, perhaps not having paid close enough attention after all.

The dancer, like the city walker, does not easily conform to a grid.

P.

Whither BC: The Sequel

As expected, most arts and culture organizations (along with several other social programs) in the province received letters last week advising them that previously promised revenues from BC gaming revenues were being withdrawn owing to the ballooning deficit and Finance Minister Colin Hansen's revised budget projections (read the Vancouver Sun story here). This despite the fact that most of these organizations had already gone ahead and programmed their seasons in anticipation of the funds they had been contractually guaranteed.

As Lorna Brown noted in a recent email sent to the community urging people to join a Facebook campaign protesting the cuts, combined with the cuts to the BC Arts Council announced in last February's budget, this amounts to a de facto 75% cut to arts and culture in the province. Where else in the world would this be allowed to happen?! We live in a largely information-based and creative economy: why aren't, therefore, the creative industries duly rewarded with stimulus spending the likes of which was lavished on so many other dead or dying industries? When will the people of this province wise up to the dirty tricks of this government? Everyone's in an uproar about the HST (as well they should be--another kick in the pants to arts and culture in the form of higher ticket prices); but this is an administration that has gleefully--and with impunity--lied to us before. And that continues to do so (BC Rail, anyone? Missing emails?).

Of course, the Liberals are hoping the outrage over all of this will blow over as a result of the massive party that will be the Olympics. But what kind of party will it be with no money for the artists and creative producers who are best positioned to showcase the city culturally? I vote for riding this wave of anger right on into the Olympics themselves, letting the world know in no uncertain terms just what price this government puts on the second pillar of the Olympic Movement.

In the meantime, the public must do all it can to support the organizations whose programs and livelihoods are now imperiled. The best way we can do that is by going to see their work. The Vancouver Fringe Festival starts next week--I've just bought my Frequent Fringer Pass. Soon after that it will be time for the Vancouver International Film Festival. Though there's the little matter of teaching to contend with (the sabbatical is officially over today-boo hoo!), I hope to attend as many films as possible. And The Dance Centre's 2009/10 program just came in the mail today. It's chock-a-block with exciting offerings, starting with my SFU colleague Rob Kitsos's new work, Wake, next Friday and Saturday (Sept. 11-12).

Dig deep into your pockets, people, and buy a ticket to these and other events. And, since we can't vote Campbell and the Liberals out of office for another four years, consider doing so to the federal Conservatives instead. I hear Michael Ignatieff has just withdrawn support from Harper's minority government, so I guess that means we're headed to the polls once again this fall.

P.