My Vancouver Dance History: September 9 Artist Salon with Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg (Tara Cheyenne Performance)

The hilarious and fabulous Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg was in the house at Morrow yesterday "talking shit" (the name of her amazing podcast) about dance during COVID, how you turn an ensemble piece into a solo (while still retaining an ensemble ethos), and the general state of our topsy-turvy world.

The video appears to be too big to upload directly to Blogger's tired interface, so here's a link to the video on Vimeo.

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From Where We Stand at the Firehall

As readers of this blog will know, I am a huge fan of the Vancouver dance scene. But sometimes the lack of communication between presenters can be frustrating. This weekend is a case in point: between Ballet BC, Chutzpah!, DanceHouse, and the Firehall (to name only a few), there were simply too many shows to see. So last night something had to give, and in our case it was our regular subscription tickets to DanceHouse's presentation of Toronto Dance Theatre (those went to Stefan and Lara). Instead Richard and I decided to catch the Firehall's last showing of From Where We Stand, a double bill featuring new works by Chick Snipper and Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg.

The connection between these two dance artists is longstanding and deeply material. A decade ago, when Snipper decided to move to Ottawa, she handed over her company, DanStaBat (DSB), to Friedenberg, who reconstituted it as Tara Cheyenne Performance (TCP). Recently returned to Vancouver, Snipper and Friedenberg are now sharing a double bill to celebrate the ten year anniversary of Tara's company. Except in Snipper's case, she is not presenting the work she thought she would be creating. Big Melt, a planned investigation of the relationships between four generations of women dancers, did not receive its anticipated Canada Council funding, and so with the encouragement of Friedenberg and Firehall AD Donna Spencer and production manager Daelik, Snipper conceived Unnecessary, a piece that begins as a solo for Anne Cooper and that turns into a duet between Cooper and Snipper. That this transition also involves a dialogue between text and movement is just one of subtle surprises of the piece.

A reflection on the vitality and creativity that older women artists still have to offer, Unnecessary begins with Cooper, her normally braided hair here long and loose, straddling a chair positioned centre stage. As a woman's voice begins to reflect on how her anticipated easy slumber in old age has in fact been increasingly interrupted by late night bouts of restless insomnia (the text is by Snipper, the voiceover by Jane Perry), Cooper begins to pivot her body from side to side on the chair, her hair making wild arcs in the air, like it is a fifth limb. Indeed, throughout the solo, as she eventually gets up off the chair and starts to torque her body through space, Cooper will continually pause to lift her hair off her face, holding it above her head. Is she gathering up the multiple wild and untamed strands of her being as a woman and an artist into some tidy bundle for a scrutinizing public, or is she simply trying to be seen? Either way, the image is a striking representation of the paradoxical (in)visibility of older women in our culture--which is enough to make anyone pull their hair out. Snipper and Cooper talk about some of these issues in a downstage conversation that encompasses the collapse of funding for Snipper's originally planned piece, their generational evolution as artists, and much more. And the piece closes with Snipper reciting a moving poem downstage while we see Cooper reflected behind her in an upstage diagonal.

Friedenberg's  I can't remember the word for I can't remember, an excerpt of which was first presented at Dancing on the Edge in 2016, begins with the artist loping on stage on all fours like a chimpanzee. Friedenberg opens her big expressive eyes wide and blinks blankly out at the audience. She scratches herself, beats her breast and hoots in the air, before pausing and executing a short movement phrase with her fingers on the floor, her simian self sliding the tips of her digits out from under their curled knuckles in a rhythmic tempo reminiscent of a trained pianist--or a virtuosic texter (and digital technologies will return as a motif). Eventually Tara-as-chimp climbs into the lap of one front-row spectator and proceeds to pick invisible gnats out of his hair and eat them. Beyond serving as an hilarious set up, and also demonstrating Friedenberg's amazing gifts of physical mimicry, it's not immediately clear how this opening relates to the theme of memory, nor to the rest of what follows. For, after a short blackout, we are given Friedenberg, now fully bipedal and standing in a square of white light centre stage, asking us, in medias res, "What was I talking about?" 

She puts this question directly to two different audience members, whom she also proceeds to size up and label (as, for instance, a New York Times-reading, NPR-listening hipster), telling them how much she likes their boxes--but not as much as that of a third audience member whom she picks out, whose architecturally minimalist, postmodernly deconstructivist box is the ultimate cat's meow. This second opening establishes the narrative through-line of the piece. On the one hand, waning memory is linked closely by Friedenberg to our current age of multiple electronic devices, social media and general information overload. Who can remember anyone's phone number anymore, she asks, while simultaneously remonstrating her own cell phone, positioned in its personalized square of light, not to compete for her attention. Later she will also enact an increasingly slapstick movement sequence based on gestures associated with the tapping and scrolling and swiping of our screen devices. This theme alternates, however, with the piece's other big concern, namely the categorical boxes into which we slot different people, and into which we in turn are slotted (or slot ourselves). As Friedenberg cheekily notes, returning to her square of light following her initial discourse with the audience, we all come out of a box when we're born (which she demonstrates), and after about 36 months of running around and being allowed to remain generally formless, we're then immediately put back into a box (let's call it identity), where we'll remain more or less until it's time to climb into that other box that gets lowered into the ground when we die.

The problem for Friedenberg, however, is that in terms of her own life, there's a four year gap in her memory between the ages of three and seven. She wants to know where that box went, and also what's in it. Or does she? This part of the show involves some of Friedenberg's most personal textual material, including voiceover recordings with both of her parents (and also, very movingly, her child, Jasper). Forgetting, here, becomes associated with trauma, and the black hole of memory that Friedenberg is trying to excavate within the black box of the theatre sends her scurrying more than once to the upstage black wall, where, in perhaps seeking safety and/or escape, her body becomes that much more exposed and vulnerable and surveilled--more than once she recoils physically from the wall as the result of some sort of electrical shock or pulse it seems to emit.

On the one hand, Friedenberg seems to be suggesting in this piece that there is the forgetting that happens as a result of benign neglect--that is, because we have ceded the task of remembering to software and big data. And then there is the more wilful forgetting we do, the things or events or people we put into boxes and then hide away at the back of our closets or underneath our beds. There's no suggestion or resolution of which kind of amnesia is more harmful, although (to go back to her opening entrance, which will be reprised) Friedenberg does hint that both are evolutionary processes, that within the larger context of deep, planetary time, what we do or don't remember from day to day or across the arc of an entire lifetime is really just a drop in a really big and bottomless bucket. And this Friendenberg cannily and metatheatrically demonstrates at the end of the show when, returning to the audience, she seeks our help in recalling what she's doing here on stage and what has just happened over the course of the previous hour. The fact that her interlocutors have some trouble recalling what they have only just witnessed happen is an apt metaphor for performance as a kind of anarchival forgetting in real time (it's here and then it disappears). But, at the same time, the fact that, based on what scraps of information she is able to glean, Friendenberg attempts to reconstitute the sum of the performance through the physical repetition of its various fragments points to how the body is its own memory muscle. And one whose storehouse of voluntary and involuntary recollective impulses far exceeds our own skeletal frames and even historical contexts.

That is, loping offstage once again on all fours, Friedenberg reminds us that there's a little bit of chimp in all of us.

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Next Week at The Cultch: Tara Cheyenne Performance's How to Be

I'm bummed that I am going to miss the full-length version of Tara Cheyenne Performance's How to Be at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre next week. I have been following the development of this work over the past few years (read past posts here, here and here) and was excited to see this latest iteration, not least because it unites on stage all the previous performer-collaborators, including Justine A. Chambers, Susan Elliott, Kate Franklin, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, Kim Stevenson, and Marcus Youssef.

Thankfully I was able to get a sneak peek of the work earlier today as choreographer and TCP AD Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg invited me to stop by the studio to take in a run-through. In deference to Tara and the performers--and also because the piece is still being refined in sections--I will not divulge what's in store for viewers. But I can say that there will be surprises--including from the costumes!

And also that the Prince section remains.

And, finally, that you would be a fool to miss this show.

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empty.swimming.pool at The Dance Centre

What must it be like for a solo artist with a significant and quite distinctive body of work that straddles multiple disciplines to discover she has a performance twin? Would one sit slack-jawed thinking someone had stolen your act? Or would you immediately start scheming about how you could work with this person? Happily for Vancouver audiences, in the case of local dance-theatre maven Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg it was the latter. When she first saw Italian artist Silvia Gribaudi on stage at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago in between laughing herself silly she began plotting about how they might collaborate. The result, a duet called empty.swimming.pool, is on at The Dance Centre through this Saturday in a co-presentation with the 2017 Chutzpah! Festival.

While it would be wrong to describe Friedenberg and Gribaudi as exact clones, both create works that combine movement and text, and that use comedy grounded in the body to ask questions about the social construction of gender. Essentially they are feminist buffons interested in tickling our funny bones while also getting us to think about why, exactly, we're laughing. Now, on the one hand, it might be risky putting two such similar dancing, talking comedic egos in a rehearsal studio together, like inviting Amy Schumer and Kathy Griffin to duke it out in a boxing ring, and with a go big or go home aesthetic presumably prevailing. In fact, Friedenberg and Gribaudi both play with and undermine these expectations, troping in empty.swimming.pool on questions of female rivalry through a subtly hilarious burlesquing of theatrical razzmatazz conventions (I don't think I've ever seen such an over-the-top lighting design by James Proudfoot), while simultaneously eschewing the commodifying politics of spectacle that frequently attends those conventions, especially for women. (One detects something of the dramaturgical hand of outside eye Justine A. Chambers in the framing of this dialectic.)

Indeed, the piece begins quite soberly, with Gribaudi and Friedenberg, both dressed in black, emerging in turn from the wings to survey the audience, coyly soliciting our gaze and occasionally playing with a hemline or a hand in a pocket, but otherwise refusing to "perform" for us. Eventually the duo moves downstage, but even then it takes them forever to do what we're waiting for: talk. Instead they first engage in a pantomime of raised eyebrows, moued lips, and open hand gestures. When, finally, they begin talking their conversation immediately descends into glossolalia as they cycle through the languages they both do and don't really speak. This sequence culminates in a wickedly funny parody of common French words non-native speakers are wont to pepper their speech with, a string of syncopated "voilàs" and "wows," accompanied by suitably Gallic raised arms, all of which sent last night's audience into stitches.

Thereafter Gribaudi and Friendenberg take turns poking fun at the concept of virtuosity, with the latter partnering the former in a series of arabesques as Barbra Streisand sings "Don't Rain on My Parade," and Friedenberg demonstrating her impressive flexibility in cycling through a range of yoga poses. Gribaudi also launches into an operatic soprano during a bit in which she wades into the audience with her eyes closed. That particular moment seemed to come out of nowhere and was an especially visceral reminder that the two performers were not necessarily there to ingratiate themselves to spectators' mainstream entertainment sensibilities. Likewise, the simple step-touch sequence that serves as the culminating routine of the piece was the exact opposite of Vegas-style, automaton-like sexiness. Having stripped to panties and bras--Fridenberg's red and sparkly, Gribaudi's covered in appliqué flowers--the two performers not only remain nonplussed by the display of their non-showgirl bodies, but also keep up a barely in unison snapping of fingers and sashaying of legs as Friendenberg tells a story about being looked through as a mother with her son at the pool. Gribaudi sympathizes, only to complicate this moment of female bonding by subsequently telling us that she herself doesn't have kids and then indicating that the only thing she really likes to do with the lower half of her body is ... to sit down.

There is, however, something of a splashier finish to empty.swimming.pool. It begins with our duo warbling Somewhere Over the Rainbow together in a spotlight stage right. But Gribauldi, evidently disturbed by her partner's lack of pitch, abandons Friedenberg and walks offstage. She returns seconds later with a bottle of water, which she hands to Friedenberg, who promptly takes a grateful swig and then continues to gurgle through another verse of the song. Disgusted, Gribauldi empties the rest of the water on the stage and again walks towards to the wings. Just as Friedenberg gets to the end of her number, reaching into her bosom to spray confetti over herself, Gribauldi runs on stage, sliding through the water like a grand odalisque, and arriving at the feet of Friedenberg with arms upstretched in triumph. Not to be outdone, Friedenberg, having stormed off, makes her own sliding finale, this time on her stomach.

It was the perfect capstone to a slyly subversive performance that was all about these amazingly skilled artists negotiating, within the traditional frames of theatrical reproduction, the terms by which they will be looked at.

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West Side Story at TUTS

It took us a while, but Richard and I finally made to the venerable Malkin Bowl for this year's iteration of Theatre Under the Stars. Eschewing all things Disney for the classic idiom of American musical theatre, we chose to see West Side Story, and we certainly had beautiful night for it.

I've seen the 1961 film adaptation of West Side Story, but never a live production of the musical, not even the version staged by the Vancouver Opera a few years ago. Leonard Bernstein's score is certainly operatic, not least in the signature numbers Maria and Tonight and Somewhere. But the orchestrations also draw as much, if not more, from jazz, with Bernstein ably distilling that form's polyglot influences into a story about the tragic consequences of a cross-cultural love affair. That said, under musical director Chris D. King (who also, somewhat mysteriously, doubles as the racist detective Schrank, requiring him to vacate his conductor's box for long stretches), the playing last night seemed a little underwhelming, even slow. Many of the jazzier numbers lacked pep to my admittedly untrained ears.

Notwithstanding all the glorious music (supplemented of course by the wonderful lyrics of Stephen Sondheim), it is the dancing that has always set West Side Story apart. The great Jerome Robbins (who also conceived and directed the musical's Broadway premiere) was responsible for the original choreography, which has become so iconic--all those finger snaps and high-flying leaps--that it continues to be quoted everywhere. Local dance artist and choreographer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg was given the unenviable task of creating a completely new movement score for this production (she had to sign a waiver from the Robbins estate attesting to this), while also providing enough of an homage to encourage buy-in from audience members familiar with the musical's choreographic pedigree. She succeeds brilliantly, drawing on period street dance idioms, contemporary acro, and her own take on classic mambo and waltz steps (especially in numbers like America and I Feel Pretty). She is aided immeasurably by her talented cast, especially the boys who make up the rival Jets and Sharks gangs, who are able to get so much air in the opening prologue (a musical theatre movement sequence that, when it first appeared, was as groundbreaking as Agnes de Mille's famous dream ballet in Oklahoma!) that one would think they were experts parkourists (Brian Ball's brilliant set of moveable scaffolding aids immeasurably in this regard). The second act number Gee, Officer Krupke is also a terrific showcase for the movement talents of the Jets half of the male ensemble, with William Edward Hutchinson (as Action) and Kurtis D'Aoust (as Big Deal) demonstrating admirable strength and flexibility respectively. (An interesting side note: for all the progressive social politics regarding the treatment of Puerto Rican immigrants embedded into Arthur Laurents' book to West Side Story, it is noticeable just how much less stage and singing time the Sharks get throughout the production.)

Not that the women in the show are slouches in the dancing department. Friedenberg's update of the shimmying salsa steps and kicks accompanying America requires speed and precision and, above all, abundant personality. The women, led by a terrific Alexandra Lainfiesta as Anita, more than deliver. I also very much appreciated those moments when Friedenberg slowed things down, as when Tony and Maria first spot each other at the school dance, with the rest of the cast swaying in place as the doomed lovers move towards each other from across the room, pulled by a force they are unable to resist. During the dream sequence in Act 2 Friendenberg also features some interesting partnering, suggesting in her same-sex pairings that the right to choose whom one loves extends beyond cultural difference.

I have spent so much time talking about the dancing in this production because, frankly, the singing was only so-so. Jennifer Gillis, as Maria, and Matt Montgomery, as Tony, make a winsome couple, but vocally they failed to impress. Montgomery can hit the high notes, but he needs greater depth and projection in the lower range to make a song like Maria truly soar. Gillis certainly has power, but her soprano often lacks nuance and without the right control comes across as a bit shrill in the upper register. When she is forced to reign things in a bit, as in the delightful I Feel Pretty, the results are quite pleasing. By contrast, Lainfiesta's Anita and Daniel James White's Riff, are standouts in both their singing and their acting, which in turn points to one of the central paradoxes of this work: pace Shakespeare, the secondary characters are far more interesting than the leads.

And speaking of folks in the background making an impression. Director Sarah Rodgers chooses to end the show with a reprise of Somewhere, but this time sung as a solo by Daren Dyhengo, who plays the otherwise mostly anonymous Shark Luis. Dyhengo has a beautiful tenor and his rendition of the song was perhaps the single most electrifying musical moment in the whole production. Which begs the question: why wasn't he front and centre from the beginning?

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 19

Yesterday I interviewed the amazing and hilarious Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg in my office at SFU Woodward's. Turns out we arrived in the city more or less at the same time, me to start grad school at UBC, and she to begin the dance program at SFU. Tara had come to Vancouver from the University of Calgary, where she had been in the theatre program, and she continued to work across both disciplines while at SFU--as, of course, she does today in her own creations, as well as the choreography she does for theatre (including this year's TUTS mounting of West Side Story, which is on my list of must-see shows next week).

Notwithstanding Tara's adeptness at, in her words, "working the system," her time at SFU was fortuitous in terms of the development of her own career: my colleague Judith Garay cast Tara in her very first Dancers Dancing show; Chick Snipper, who would later cede her company to Tara, created work on SFU students dancers while Tara was in the program; and she also performed in Judith Marcuse's States of Grace while at SFU. Coincidentally, Tara received her first commission to choreograph for the theatre when Mary Louise Albert, who was then a dancer in Judith Marcuse's company, said she didn't have the time to do it, and was Tara interested? Flash forward several years and Tara is presenting her first 11-minute solo, Frame, at the Chutzpah! Festival, which Mary Louise has overseen for the past decade or so. So once again we see how everything--and everyone--is connected in this community.

Having danced for Deborah Dunn, Conrad Alexandrowicz, Lola McLaughlin, and having worked with the folks at Radix Theatre and others, Tara took some time off "to find herself" in South America. Coming back from Chile after a few years away, she was eager to work and realized if she wanted to do so--and, moreover, to be in work that reflected her own hybrid interests in and talent for dance and theatre--she had best create the opportunities herself. Such was the beginnings of Tara Cheyenne Performance and Tara's trademark character-driven solos, which achieved a significant turning point when Tara premiered bANGER in 2006. For the permission to inhabit the psyche and physicality of a male character for the first time Tara credits working with mentor Denise Clarke (of One Yellow Rabbit fame) on a project "where the process was great, the product not so much," and also seeing Nigel Charnock perform in his solo Frank at the PuSh Festival. Before his untimely death, Charnock was to have been involved (as director) in the next big step in Tara's evolution as a choreographer: her first group piece, Highgate, which grew out of an invitation from Peter Bingham to "do something different" for his annual choreographic series at EDAM. You couldn't get much different than the mourning triplets that Tara sent out on stage in the wonderful group dress created by her mother, Alice Mansell. I still remember the impact of first seeing those three women (Jackie Collins, Barb Murray and Jane Osborne) bobbing back and forth to the chimes of Big Ben. Combined with my discovery of Tara's work at the BC Scene showcase in Ottawa in the spring of 2009, as well as the subsequent delight I took in the premiere of Goggles at The Cultch later the same year, that moment at EDAM confirmed to me that this was someone whose work I had to absolutely follow from now on.

Indeed, the interest that Tara and I share in the combustible performance possibilities of combining dance and theatre, text and movement, has meant that I have increasingly sought her out as a collaborator: first on a semi-private studio experiment involving research into the performance ethnography of humour (you can find the results on the web if you google assiduously); and hopefully in the near future on a more formal collaboration for which I will supply the words and Tara the movement (and the French accent). So it was only fitting that our conversation yesterday ended with Tara turning the tables and interviewing me for her "Talking Shit" series: chats, discussions, gossip-fests that she tapes with members of the Vancouver dance community on any number of topics.

That in Tara's estimation I am someone who merits inclusion in that community means a lot.

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Edge 3 at DOTE

Last night's Edge 3 program at the Dancing on the Edge Festival was made up of three solos by three Vancouver artists/companies who like to explore the porous boundaries between dance, theatre and performance/installation art.

First up was dumb instrument Dance's Ziyian Kwan, remounting the neck to fall, which she first presented at Dance in Vancouver in 2013, and which I have previously written about here. The piece's movement has changed over time, as has Kwan's costume (I recall a black suit and heels from the premiere). But the core set of objects with which Kwan interacts remain; these include two cardboard boxes, one small and one large, two sets of chopsticks, a large plastic bag into which she sinks her head and body, and a furry stool, upon which Kwan at one point mimes a virtuosic cello solo, an ode to composer Peggy Lee's wonderful musical score. Each object anchors a set of external commands (delivered by a recorded Asian female voice) against which Kwan struggles to adapt her body, the piece being as much a rumination on perceptions of racialized and gendered comportment as it is a tribute to the pioneering work of somatic practitioner Amelia Itcush.

The second piece on the program was The Biting School's Helmeat. To the pounding beat of the classic song "War: What Is It Good For?," the curtain opens upon Aryo Kkakpour kneeling at the downstage edge of a red-taped square; he wears a red jumpsuit reminiscent of prison garb and wrapped around his head is a turban of tinfoil. At a certain point Khakpour unplugs the cable of the speaker to his right and the music stops; he begins to methodically lay out tiny squares of tin foil in a grid just on the other side of the downstage edge of the red tape. Retreating upstage and calling for the lights to dim, the next thing we see is Khakpour rolling about the stage, crushing the tinfoil atop his head into a face-masking silvery balaclava, minus the eye and mouth holes; thus blinded our hero staggers about his enclosure, feeling his way from object to object (two stacks of wrapped helmets upstage, a full-length mirror, a shopping cart, and that speaker) via the tape on the floor. However, the signature moment in the piece must surely be the extended bit of coitus that Khakpour engages in with the shopping cart, grinding his pelvis into its handle as he slowly positions it in front of the mirror. Climbing in, he takes out a kazoo and proceeds to hum out the tune to "The Ride of the Valkyries." The piece concludes with Khakpour turning over an actual helmet to reveal a mess of hamburger meat inside. Telling us that this is what we've been waiting for, he then proceeds to roll the ground beef into individual meatballs, which he slowly and deliberately places upon the squares of tinfoil from the top of the show. While this is happening, Arash Khakpour--Aryo's brother and the other half of The Biting School--emerges from the wings and begins striking the set. The link established by the two brothers between consumerism, petroleum products and war might seem a bit obvious were it not for the charisma of Aryo as a performer. He commits utterly to everything he does and so is eminently watchable. In turn, the strangeness of the world that he and Arash create, in which everyday objects and tasks are turned into exceptional and even alienating phenomena, reminds us of how thoroughly we have internalized war into our daily diet.

Finally, the evening concluded with a short excerpt from Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg's work-in-progress, I can't remember the word for I can't remember, a collaboration with local actor/writer/director John Murphy. Loping on stage on all fours like a chimpanzee, Friedenberg opens her big expressive eyes wide and blinks blankly out at the audience before climbing into the lap of one front-row spectator and proceeding to pick invisible gnats out of his hair. Already we are putty in her hilarious hands. After a short blackout, Friedenberg stands fully upright centre stage in a square of white light. She launches into a monologue, or at least one side of two potential dialgogues, about how she can't remember with whom she was having a conversation. This theme of waning memory, linked closely by Friedenberg to our current age of multiple electronic devices, social media and general information overload (who can remember anyone's phone number anymore, she asks), alternates with the piece's other big concern, namely the categorical boxes into which we slot different people, and into which we in turn are slotted (or slot ourselves). On the one hand, Friedenberg seems to be suggesting, there is the forgetting that happens as a result of benign neglect--that is, because we have ceded the task of remembering to software and big data. And then there is the more wilful forgetting we do, the things (or people) we put into boxes and then hide away at the back of our closets or underneath our beds. There's no suggestion at this point which kind of amnesia is more harmful, although (to go back to her opening entrance) Friedenberg does hint that both are evolutionary processes. And that each has bodily effects--which she ably demonstrates through a series of physical scores that accompany her text. I look forward to how text and movement evolve together in this piece as Friedenberg and Murphy continue with its development.

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My Year in Vancouver Dance (a review) + Vancouver Dance History, 2006-2016 (a preview)

Hard to believe that this time last year I was in the final stages of rehearsal for Le Grand Continental. The free outdoor performance on the plaza of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre--choreographed by Montreal's Sylvain Émard, programmed as part of the PuSh Festival, and featuring 70+ community dancers strutting their stuff--recently made Deborah Meyers' year-end Vancouver Sun list of top 2015 dance shows in the city. That was nice to see.

Who would have thought that the experience would go on to launch something of a parallel community site dance career, what with the Mountain View Summer Solstice and Wreck Beach Butoh experiences following in quick succession this past summer? Certainly if you'd said to me last January that I'd now be taking weekly class with Barbara Bourget, I'd have laughed in your face. Though, if we're pointing fingers, I should probably place much of the blame for all of this at the feet--quite literally--of Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, who has certainly spoiled me for thinking that dancing and laughing naturally go together. (Sorry Barbara!)

There were a lot of laughs yesterday on the sixth floor of The Dance Centre, where I gathered with Artistic Associate Justine A. Chambers and Alexa Mardon to brainstorm a planned project on recent Vancouver dance history that Justine is spearheading as part of her two-year DC residency. Part living archive, part dance ethnography, part an exercise in kinaesthetic mapping and performance kinship, the collaboration is still in its very early stages. But the general idea is that the three of us will, over the next year or so, conduct video interviews with several of the city's leading dance artists in order to document the story of Vancouver dance over the past decade. Or I should say, stories. Because we are particularly keen not just to include as many voices as possible, but also to note where those voices converge and diverge on common anecdotes or topics of discussion, be they related to specific works, creation processes, tours, presenters, etc.

The temporal period we've imposed on the project coincides with Justine's arrival in the city, but also with something of a generational shift--or perhaps, more properly, supplement--in/to Vancouver dance practice, with many younger artists (several of them, like Justine, relocating to Vancouver from elsewhere) beginning to form companies and make new work and get noticed locally, nationally, and internationally. To be sure, we are also expecting that fissures will automatically open up in this timeline, with questions of aesthetic influence, and dance training, and performance collaboration and mentorship necessarily pointing backwards as much as forwards. We envision the process being rhizomatic rather than linear; as Justine put it yesterday, by the end of this we should have a constellated web of Vancouver dance-world connections in which there are zero degrees of separation between anyone.

Oh, and did I mention that all of this will culminate in a performance, and that I have agreed to participate in said performance? That part of it makes me a little sick to my stomach, not least as it will almost surely be at the Dance Centre in front of an audience made up of many of the artists whom we'll have interviewed. That's far in the future, though, and for now I can compartmentalize it in my mind as something comfortably abstract and on the distant horizon. However, I was relieved to hear from Justine and Alexa, both experienced performers, that they still want to throw up before most performances.

Watch this space--and possibly others--for updates on the progress of this project. My first task: to dig through the last decade of my collected programs.

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Romeo and Juliet at Studio 58

Studio 58's current staging of Romeo and Juliet, which launches the venerable performance training institution's 50th anniversary season and runs through this Saturday, bills itself as an immersive production set in the swinging 1960s. More specifically, the play's opening scenes unfurl at a party in Andy Warhol's Factory, with many of the guests already lolling about in debauched loucheness as audience members file into the theatre to take their seats. But there's the rub: as spectators, we actually sit through this entire performance. Action takes place in the round, with some of it spilling into or emerging out of different tiers of seating. However, we do not move--and, in the absence of quaaludes or other drugs to make it feel otherwise, that's hardly my definition of immersion.

I'm also left to query director Anita Rochon's decision to update the action to the 1960s. It seems to be a bit of a caprice, more the young creative team's idea of what that period symbolized ("Live fast, die young") than offering any deeper insight into the themes of the play. (Then, too, there are some mixed temporal signals sent by both the costuming and the music. Tybalt and Mercutio, played by Kamyar Pazandeh and Conor Stimson O'Gorman respectively, look like they could have stepped out of a scene in West Side Story featuring the Sharks and the Jets.) Warhol, who stands in for the Prince of Verona, is played with a slouch and an ill-fitting wig by Nathan Kay; he trolls the action with his Super-8 camera, immortalizing his superstars. Chief among these is Edie Sedgwick (Chloe Richardson), the only other historical figure from the period who mingles among Shakespeare's fictional personages. Perhaps this is because she really did die young, following a brief marriage and--as crucially--a break with Warhol and his set. Otherwise, it's not clear what dramatic or symbolic function she serves.

Indeed, while in this version they do end up as beautiful silk-screened corpses in one of Warhol's "Death and Disaster" series of paintings, Romeo and Juliet seem to be the exact opposite of Warhol's superstars. Both in Shakespeare's play and in this production, they are the most authentic folks around. Casting Camille Legg as a lesbian Romeo seems to have less to do with putting a sexually subversive spin on this famous romance than showcasing Legg's extraordinary talents and facility with the text. Whether as a moony teenager still in love with Rosaline, a hot-headed kinsperson intent on avenging Mercutio's death, or a mourning lover for whom suicide is not just logical but inevitable, Legg is never less than fully present and believable. When she is on stage you cannot take your eyes off of her. I had more problems with Adelleh Furseth's jittery turn as Juliet, whose impatience to be married to Romeo and distress at the death of her cousin Tybalt seemed to be conveyed with the exact same physical quality, namely rocking back and forth agitatedly on her heels. Nevertheless, it is quite captivating to watch the scene in the Factory when the two lovers first spy each other; their wordless, whirling courtship, in which each's body becomes the new fixed point in the other's world, is made all the more kinetically compelling as a result of the horizontal movement of the other Factory guests (the choreography is by the wonderful Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg).

One final comment on the cuts to the text. To be sure, this is standard practice in most Shakespeare productions. However, one would think that a guiding rationale should be to preserve the integrity of both the text's poetry and its plot. Here, it seems, Rochon was concerned to find a way to give all the actors at least one or two speaking lines. How else to explain, at the end of this production, the mystery of retaining the bit of comic relief with the musicians at the end of Act 4, Scene 5 while cutting out altogether Romeo's slaying of Paris?

Definitely something to talk about with my students...

P.

Edge 6 at Dancing on the Edge

Last night, as part of the Edge 6 program at this year's Dancing on the Edge Festival, I got a chance to revisit--and enjoy all over again--two works I had previously seen in earlier incarnations. A version of Tara Cheyenne Performance's how to be, which TCP AD and choreographer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg has been developing with collaborators Justine Chambers, Susan Elliott, Kate Franklin, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, Kim Stevenson, and Marcus Youssef since last fall, was showcased as part of Boca del Lupo's Micro-Performance Series earlier this spring. I wrote about that performance, a trio featuring Friedenberg, Franklin and Stevenson, and very much tailored to the tight confines of the Anderson Street Space on Granville Island where it was performed, here. For this iteration, which I was privileged to witness being partially built as part of a studio visit last month, Friedenberg has taken herself out of the dancing equation for the first time in her company's history. Instead, she has constructed from the abundant raw materials of movement and spoken text that are her stock in trade a series of vignettes for Stevenson, Franklin, Martin, Poole and Youssef that focus on what I will call the "doing of being," asking what it means when we materialize our aspirational or compensatory or competitive thoughts about who or what we wish to be as physical enactments of struggle or mimicry or synchronicity or incongruity.

For Youssef, a theatre artist, this means dealing with his anxiety about performing as a dancer in this piece, something Friedenberg showcases right at the top of the show. Just as Firehall AD and DOTE producer Donna Spencer is finishing her curtain speech, Youssef, nattily attired in suit jacket and tie, descends to the stage from where he had been sitting in the audience. He places a notebook before him on the floor, consults it briefly, and then begins to assume various ballet positions with his feet, eventually ending up in third--and demonstrating a fantastic turn-out in the process! More consultation of the book follows, and then an attempt at an arabesque. Next we get a bit of tap and step-dancing. And, finally, the big finish: a double pirouette with planted jazz hands. Consult, repeat: just as Youssef starts to win us over with his efforts, the other dancers--also surreptitiously embedded in the audience, and similarly attired in jackets and ties--descend one by one to the stage, with Stevenson (who happened to be sitting beside me) bringing up the rear. Forming a quartet upstage right, they cycle fluidly and in unison through the steps Youssef has been trying to master, and which he now seeks to match with ever increasing desperation to their rhythms. This sequence culminates with Youssef taking to the chair that has been positioned downstage centre, the other dancers clustered around him as he begins to talk to an off-stage analyst about his relationship with his father and an older sibling he never knew he had. The psychology of the group is still in play, however, as the other performers variously mimic and mock Youssef behind his back; whenever he turns around, they pretend to be engaged in some other activity: we hear the tail-end of a joke being told by Martin; or else Poole has launched herself into an energetic round of charades. In both cases, Youssef is clearly positioned as being on the outside of the group and amidst this at once proximate and separate relation of bodies before us we see how the principle of inclusion and exclusion is central to identity formation in our culture.

Each of the other performers experiences her or his own moment of separateness within the group, and to the extent that I read this piece as an attempt on Friedenberg's part to explore the question of dance ontology within a larger spectrum of ways of being in the world, it was fascinating to watch these amazingly talented but also very different movers explore the dialectic of coming together as an ensemble while also holding on to their individual expressiveness. This is a tension for any freelance dance artist performing in someone else's work, but throw in the fact that in this case the choreographer is known for her highly charismatic solo dance-theatre performances, and one can perhaps see why Friedenberg chose to absent herself from the stage in this case. Instead, the role of comic cut-up is here taken over by Stevenson, who in a virtuosic spoken word sequence demonstrates her mastery of faux-sincerity in praising the talents of her fellow performers in relation to herself, all the while simultaneously masquerading and revealing in her gestures the violence such comparisons are doing to her own psyche. Franklin is utterly compelling in a section in which she is literally straining to make herself seen and heard while being forcibly constrained by three of the other dancers. Poole makes Michael Bolton's power ballad "How Can We Be Lovers" utterly her own, despite the opprobrium of the others. And Martin has a hilarious Magic Mike moment in which we witness the uber B-boy give way to his inner Beyonce, swinging his hips, shaking his ass, and vogueing like there's no tomorrow. There's also a terrific duet between Stevenson and Franklin that turns (again, quite literally) on the often fine line between affection and aggression, as the two attempt to trade ever more physical kisses and caresses while also tossing out compliments that start to sound like personal indictments.

Before Stevenson and Franklin come to actual blows, Martin and Poole intervene, and the piece concludes with two couples waltzing to Prince's "Purple Rain." Youssef watches from the sidelines, the non-dancer yet again excluded from the group. Until, following a brief blackout, we see him centre stage, busting a set of grooves that, to refer back to his opening attempts to follow a choreographic score, suggests that sometimes to be part of a structure you just have to improvise.

Structured improvisation is the basis for Mutable Subject/Deanna Peters' NEW RAW. I first saw the piece as part of EDAM's fall choreographic series in 2013, and wrote briefly about that premiere here. Following a second outing in Edmonton in 2014, we are now getting, at DOTE 2015, version 3.0.

The piece begins with dancer Molly McDermott slouched in a chair downstage right, her head thrown back. She is illuminated from above by a soft spot. Peters stands beside her, in the half-light; her back is turned towards us, a sliver of which we can see courtesy of the suit jacket she is wearing back-to-front. As McDermott begins to twist and contort the lower half of her body in the chair, her toes somehow always in demi-pointe, Peters rests her right hand just above McDermott's right shoulder, as if seeking to calm or still or comfort her--or maybe just to prevent her movements from getting too out of control (a point to which I will return). At a certain point the chair begins to move, pulled backwards by an unseen Alexa Mardon, who is crouched behind it. By the time the chair comes to a stop upstage, McDermott's movements have become a riot of frenetic tics and crooked shapes and the chair starts to take on more ominous associations--as something to which McDermott's body has been tied or strapped, for example, and from which she is seeking to free herself (in which case that hovering hand of Peters is perhaps not so benevolent after all, and maybe that open slit from the backwards suit jacket starts to look like one we'd see on a standard issue hospital gown). Then, too, as an object that encodes and scripts an entire history of sedentary gendered behaviour, the chair carries associations of decorous bodily comportment (women don't usually get to manspread) against which McDermott might be rightly rebelling.

McDermott does eventually escape the chair's confines, and after she and Mardon exit the stage, Peters, still with her back too us, turns turntablist, putting on an old 45 and cranking up the volume. There follows a most compelling floor solo, in which Peters moves her body across the stage in a series of sexily languorous poses, exposing the gorgeous curves and silhouette of her back to us as the suit jacket falls about her head, but always keeping her face from us. Indeed, one of the things that is most interesting about the opening of NEW RAW is how consciously Peters has herself and her fellow female dancers avoid the (presumptively male) gaze of the audience: Peters dances with her back to us; McDermott, while in the chair, has her head cast upward to the ceiling; and Mardon in the opening sequence is completely invisible behind the chair. A little later on, following an amazingly physical duet between Mardon and McDermott in which the former aggressively "manhandles" (the word seems appropriate in this context) the latter, these three will perform an improvised trio of walking with album covers held in front of their faces. And when the fourth dancer in the group, Elissa Hanson, finally appears she does so by shimmying on stage on all fours, her ass in the air--and defiantly in our noses.

Hanson's delayed appearance is the prelude to the thumping climax of NEW RAW, in which the four dancers move from avoiding the potentially objectifying gaze of the audience to actively soliciting and even owning that gaze--of being quite explicitly in our faces. This begins when Hanson eventually stands upright and turns around, her acknowledgement of us and what we want prompting her to tease us with a catalogue of provocative poses culled from the catwalk and beauty pageants and striptease; a highlight during this sequence is when the flirty little moue Hanson begins to make with her mouth grows bigger and bigger, turning into a gaping open maw that functions simultaneously as a silent scream at the indignity of our presence before her. Thereafter, as the music gets louder and louder, the women improvise a series of forward and backward movement lines, their accelerations towards and retreats from us operating like a taunt. Yes, here we are dancing in front of you. But that doesn't mean we are dancing for you. It's a cheeky dance slap in the face. And it feels amazing.

P.

Tara Cheyenne Performance and Kidd Pivot in Rehearsal

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

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

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

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

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

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

P.

how to be at the Anderson Street Space

Yesterday afternoon I made my way to Granville Island to take in the first of this year's Micro Performance Series, presented by Boca del Lupo. Staged at the intimate Anderson Street Space, this season's line-up of shows kicked off with Tara Cheyenne Performance's how to be. An excerpt from a larger work-in-progress, the thirty minute piece is conceived and directed by Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, who performs alongside Kate Franklin and Kim Stevenson.

After spectators are ushered into the tiny quadrangular performance space and we take our places leaning against the walls, the three women, clad nattily in men's suits, take turns entering and exiting from the lone door, sometimes muttering aloud to themselves, at other times simply taking the measure of the room. Eventually they come together in a whispered chorus of first world modal phrases: "I should juice more"; "I should do more Pilates"; "I should eat less pasta." As always with TCP, text is an equal partner alongside the movement, and in this case the interrogative mode ("Should I wax my pubic hair?") operates in dynamic tension with the declarative ("I'm very good at remembering song lyrics").

The performers, playing to the space, have fun rearranging audience members, positioning us into four groups (whose significance we discover at the end of the show). They also test the limits of our physical boundaries, inserting themselves at various points in between our own bodies, or snuggling up close for a quick nap or animated conversation with one or other of us. This is only appropriate given the intimacy of the space, as well as the larger issues Friedenberg seems to be exploring in this piece. Part of the question of "how to be"--especially in polyglot urban centres like Vancouver--is how to interact and get along and move beside others in proximate material relation: how, in other words, to share space with strangers. (And coming together as an audience has much to teach us in this regard.)

Friedenberg, who over the past decade has made her name as a charismatic solo performer, as fleet of tongue as she is of foot, builds here in how to be on her previous success in Highgate with multi-character work. She provides numerous opportunities for her fellow performers to shine. Thus, in an hilarious sequence involving the three women not only moving but speaking in unison, Stevenson emerges as a virtuoso comic mimic in the mould of her director, channeling her Jesus-loving grandmother as she laments the daily grind of trying to make her way as a single working artist in Vancouver. For her part, Franklin is given a show-stopping solo, in which she performs various ballet moves while offering advice-laden bromides to the audience: "Eat more organic vegetables"; "Call your mother"; "Don't be a dick."

All of this bodes extremely well for the full-length piece Friedenberg is working towards, not least when one considers that her other collaborators on the project include Justine Chambers, Susan Elliott, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, and Marcus Youssef. At present, what was staged as part of Boca's MPS was a more than satisfying appetizer. Watching Friedenberg and Stevenson wrestle to kiss each other while Franklin does a stationary step dance against one wall or, alternately, Franklin and Friedenberg sing and sway along to the Whitney Houston standard "The Greatest Love of All" while a head-scratching Stevenson engages in random badinage with the audience, is pure comic gold.

P.

Le Grand Continental: Making the Cut

So I recently had my very own "I Hope I Get It" moment when, along with several other community hoofers, I put my dancing skills on the line at a recruitment session for a free outdoor show that will be performed at the 2015 PuSh Festival in January. Le Grand Continental, choreographed by Montreal's Sylvain Émard, is a big, joyous celebration of social dancing that puts non-professional movers between the ages of 10 and 75 through their paces as they perform a mash-up of styles in a 30 minute re-imagining of a traditional line dance. Since its debut at Festival TransAmériques in 2009, the piece has been performed in cities all across North America with casts ranging in size from 60 to as many as 200 (at Le Grand Continental XL in Montreal in 2011). Vancouver will be the eleventh iteration of the show, where the cast will number around 70 or so.

Coincidentally, last Thursday evening at the Roundhouse I was number 11 of approximately 30 hopefuls. Our task was to follow Sylvain and rehearsal assistants Anna and Caroline in learning the three-minute "funk" section of the piece--a tiny portion of which you can view here. Apparently I made the grade, as PuSh Associate Curator Joyce Rosario emailed on Wednesday evening to welcome me to the project!

Truth be told, the odds were in my favour, and not because of my PuSh insider connections. The goal is to have an equal representation of male and female dancers, and I was one of only two men at the Roundhouse recruitment session.

Whatever the case, I am beyond excited! Twice weekly rehearsals begin early November and we go pretty much non-stop (except for a brief holiday break) until the four scheduled performances on January 24 and 25 (mark your calendars now!). I plan to blog about our progress on a regular basis, maybe even sharing some inside photo documentation--so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I'm back in the studio with Tara Cheyenne on Monday afternoon. Who knew I'd be turning into such a dancing dynamo so late in life.

"One--singular sensation..."

P.

In the Studio with Tara Cheyenne

So today I began a very exciting project--working on a short dance-theatre piece with Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg. The catch--and very much terra incognita for yours truly--is that Tara is building the work on me and my oh so not at all flexible body.

It all started with an email from my SFU colleague Dara Culhane, who invited me to participate in a fall "Imaginings Project" sponsored by the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography (of which we are both affiliates--though Dara's disciplinary bona fides are certainly much stronger than mine). The theme of this particular "Imaginings Project" is "Laughing Matters: Humour, Imagination and Political Possibilities." Twelve of us have been invited "to explore humour as a form of imaginative ethnographic practice" in our respective fields, thinking self-reflexively about how comedy, satire and parody might offer a different lens through which to envision our social theory and practice, research methodology, fieldwork and its transcription/translation, etc. And we were given lots of creative license in terms of the form through which we take up such questions: a creative text; images; audio or video works.

Given that my current research is on dance-theatre, and given that Tara is one of the funniest dance-theatre makers I know, I thought it would be great to collaborate on a short video in which she taught me to dance and talk at the same time. That, in and of itself, would be hilarious, I knew. But there were some larger political issues I was also interested in exploring--not the least of which is that humour in dance (when it is allowed) is, as with virtually all comedy, so intensely gendered. Stick a man in a tutu (like the famous Trocks of Monte Carlo), or have him parody Martha Graham (like Richard Move), and it's gut-splitting (though, to be fair to Move, his mimicking of Graham very much oscillates between deliberate send-up--as when Move-as-Martha attempts to learn from Yvonne Rainer her famous "Trio A"--and very sincere homage--as in his reenactment of the iconic solo "Lamentation"). As is the case in other performance modes, women in dance are given far less room (quite literally) to be funny; one sees this, for example, when classic burlesque morphs into striptease--the eroticized dancing female body cannot also be bawdy (something Joanna Mansbridge writes perceptively about in her work on burlesque, including in a book on Women and Comedy that I've co-edited).

As I talked over these and other issues with Tara earlier this month, I also realized that the project would inevitably become something of an autoethnography, particularly in terms of working through some of the complex feelings (including the very unfunny feeling of shame) that would inevitably accrue around my own body when I explicitly put it on display and made it move to set choreography, no matter how basic the steps might be. If Tara is the expert informant in terms of her facility in moving and telling a story in a virtuosically side-splitting way (the metaphor seems appropriate), what would it mean for me, as a decidedly non-virtuosic mover (who nevertheless loves dance), to use humour as means to absorb into my own body some of her training and kinesthetic knowledge? And how might we think of our ethnographic experiments in the studio contributing to a larger discourse around a comedic pedagogy of the body that could be equally useful in analyses of concert dance and social dance?

Okay, so this post is way more theoretical and egg-headed than I meant it to be. Without going into too much detail about what we played with and at in the studio (because I want the finished video to be a surprise, even if it fails utterly in its intent), suffice it to say that I was stunned at what we accomplished in 2.5 hours. Tara is such an amazing teacher, quickly intuiting from our warm-up and early bits of improv that behind my demure exterior there's a showy diva at heart (the reference to the Rockettes probably tipped my hand). Having thus discovered my intuitive way of moving, and using one of my current favourite tunes, she was then able to come up with some simple choreography that I not only felt capable of mastering, but that also didn't feel alien or unnatural. Ditto her methods for finding the threads of a narrative: a series of questions about what makes me happy and what I like to complain about very quickly morphed into the start of a comic monologue that again felt unforced because it came from daily life.

I suppose this is altogether unsurprising for a professionally trained dance or theatre artist (like Tara Harris, who was also with us in the studio capturing everything on digital video). But as someone who mostly thinks about these things rather than does them, the process was revelatory.

I look forward to the next session. And stay tuned for news about the video's posting.

P.

Dusk Dances at DOTE and Bike Rave 2014

It was touch and go weather-wise earlier in the day, but the rain managed to hold off in the evening, which made the experiences of this year's Dusk Dances at the Dancing on the Edge Festival that much more pleasant. As was the case last year, this unique outdoor dance event (which originated in Toronto's Trinity Bellwoods ravine 20 years ago, and has been playing DOTE for eight of those years) took place in CRAB/Portside Park. Returning once again as host was the inimitable Tara Cheyenne Friendenberg. After a rousing opening set by Commercial Drive's pick-up Carnival Band, Friendenberg took to the stage in character as the chakra-obsessed yoga guru Arlene, from her recent Porno Death Cult. After inviting us to breathe in the park's positive energy and to get lost (conceptually speaking) in the wonder of the movement that was to follow, Friendenberg then led us to the setting of our first piece.

Body Narratives Collective's be graceful in the wind began as a solo choreographed by company co-director Meghan Goodman for her partner Julia Carr. The piece has since been expanded into a trio, with Susan Kania joining Goodman and Carr as tree nymphs using their bodies to at once honour and mimic the sapling around which they dance. To this end, the highlight of the piece occurs when the three dancers, all very fine movers, slowly and expertly unfurl their bodies into freestanding headstands, revealing the bright green foliage on the brown tights underneath their skirts (the costumes were by Lina Fitzner). They then begin to bend and twist their legs in a manner that suggests tree branches swaying in the wind.

Following Friendberg/Arlene's ringing bell, we next gathered back in the centre of the park, in front of a teepee, and looking out at the magnificent view of the north shore mountains and Burrard Inlet. Yvonne Chartrand's Cree Creation Story, excerpted from a longer work called Cooking It Up Métis, makes use of CRAB/Portside's beach in a way similar to last year's Incandescent, with Cree's four performers (Chartrand, Eloi Homer, Kat Single-Dain, and M.Pyress Flame) slowly coming into view from the "upstage" space of the beach, as if emerging directly from the sea. This is fitting given that the piece takes its impetus from a story told by an Elder (whom we hear at various points in voiceover) about the Cree peoples' relationship with the natural elements.

For the third piece on the program, we hiked up a ridge to a grove of cedar trees in the southwest corner of the park. This was the setting for Denise Fujiwara's Unquiet Winds, which features Dusk Dances founder and artistic director Sylvie Bouchard and Brendan Wyatt as two harlequin-like figures trying to come together in love. East meets west, however, as commedia traditions combine with Butoh-inspired movement (Bouchard and Wyatt are clad all in white and wear white face- and body-paint) in a delicate and very moving display of our inevitable, almost instinctive bodily trepidation in making a connection with another.

The final choreographer on the program was Julia Aplin, who was back this year with another water-themed duet. In place of the slip-n'-slide from Onward, Ho, however, Inner City Sirens, Part II, features two inflatable mini-wading pools. Dancers Mairéad Filgate and Brodie Stevenson, clad in old-fashioned onsie bathing suits, bathing caps, and goggles, eventually dive into the pools, demonstrating their synchronized swimming skills to the live musical accompaniment of Blake Howard and Jesse Baird. Needless to say, there's not a lot of water left in each pool by the end of the piece, especially when, as he is wont at several points, Stevenson goes rogue with his testosterone-heavy splashing.

All in all, I would say, this year's selection of Dusk Dances pieces made much more conscious place-based use of their CRAB/Portside Park setting (coincidentally, the subject of an essay I am working on). For much of the evening, however, I was worried that that setting would descend into riotous chaos as the performance drew to a close; this was because the park was also to be the meeting point (between 8:30 and 9 pm) for the start of Vancouver's 2014 Bike Rave. But I guess organizers of the latter event were alerted somehow that this would have seriously disturbed everyone's collective energy flow because my colleague and fellow raver Tiffany--whom I was meeting at the park--alerted me that the Bike Rave folks had moved the launch point to Science World. It was thence we pedaled, joining what looked like thousands of other groovy and glowing and ready-to-rave cyclists for a different kind of social choreography.

The whole thing was a bit ad hoc--when to ride, when and where to stop and dance--but also a lot of fun, with participants for the most part loopily chill and getting high (literally and metaphorically) on the music (a five hour house mix downloadable here) and the general vibe of being outdoors and moving along the seawall with so many people on a night without rain. (I only saw one incident of aggression, and it came from a pedestrian, who was clearly frustrated by his progress against the manic flow of bike traffic, and so gave the woman riding next to Tiffany a shove; mercifully our pace at that point was so slow that the woman's stumble didn't initiate a domino-like spill.)

After pit stops to shimmy and shake (bodies and bikes) at the Plaza of Nations, David Lam Park, and Sunset Beach, Tiffany and I cut out at English Bay to go for a drink along Denman (the entire route was, I believe, to have gone all around the seawall, eventually arriving back at CRAB/Portside). Sipping our negronis, we agreed that this is what we need for next year: more and better glow sticks for our bikes; costumes; a boom box so that we can hear the music on our own instead of chasing after or waiting for someone else; and, perhaps most importantly, a flask or two for liquid refreshment.

P.