Random Thoughts on Performance in the Age of COVID

I hadn't anticipated writing a "performance in the time of COVID" blog post, especially on a site that's supposed to be retired. But this past Sunday afternoon's live-streamed all-request concert by local legend Veda Hille has prompted me to weigh in--if only to work through my own wildly shifting performative responses to some of the effects of this pandemic. As one of the more personal of those effects has been a temporary stymying of my ability (or desire?) to write (beyond the heaps of emails and memos and letters that have proliferated as a result of my administrative position at SFU), at the very least the following will hopefully prove a useful exercise in translating the jumble of my thoughts into slightly more coherent prose (though, no promises).

Like many the world over, I have spent the last ten weeks consuming a lot of online performance. Some of it has been fantastic, as in the case of Theatre Complicité's Encounter, in which the amazing binaural sound design seems especially suited to this headphones-wearing moment of Zoom videoconferencing--where the fixed perspectivalism of visual space has been replaced by the immersive absorption of acoustic space (that last bit of McLuhanism was mostly for Richard, but I defy anyone in a Zoom meeting of more than four to figure out instantly where to look when someone is speaking in Gallery view). But for every transportive experience like Encounter there have been reams of dreary live-streamed staged readings of cancelled productions; no matter how important or laudable the message of these works, they can't really compete with the medium (okay, that's it, I promise, but really there's a qualitative difference--including which is better suited to telling a story--between a podcast and a YouTube tutorial).

Which brings me to Sunday's concert, "Veda Hille Haunts The Cultch." Organized through Dan Mangan and Laura Simpson's Side Door Productions, the event was broadcast live from The Cultch's Historic Theatre via Zoom. Beyond the fact that it was Veda, and that she was at the top of her game in terms of singing and piano playing and storytelling, for me performer-audience intimacy transcended to a certain degree the live-digital divide by making this an all-request concert. You could email Veda your favourite songs from her catalogue, and even the odd cover suggestion, and she would draw titles from a hat (actually a coral-coloured water pitcher that sat atop her grand piano), or else spin a hand-made wheel of fortune on which several additional requested songs had been listed. When Veda picked a song and read out who had requested it (which was often more than one person), the chat box--which was lively throughout--would light up with comments and emojis, and following this thread was as entertaining as watching Veda sing. As exemplary, however, was how Mangan and his production team were able to capture the eventness of the event through their savvy camerawork. Two cameras were trained on Veda, and cut between close-ups of her singing and talking and of her fingers on the keyboard. But there was also another bird's eye view of the venue, and whenever the camera cut to this angle, I got a shivery feeling, both in the sense of momentarily feeling like I was there at the back of the house along with Veda and her crew and also perceiving a pang at the otherwise empty auditorium (and one can only note the material significance of that emptiness for Veda, who would otherwise have been performing to packed houses with a scheduled tour of her knock-out show Little Volcano, which premiered at the PuSh Festival this past January). Then, too, there were those moments--one coming during Veda's beautiful rendition of one of the songs that I had requested (Yaz's "Only You")--when Mangan cut to a montage of the screens of the online audience, which prompted enthusiastic waves and cheering, and very occasionally some displays of frolicsome exhibitionism.

Not that the success of this event has made me a full-fledged devotee of the digital dissemination of live performance. I've spent too much time looking at a screen over the past two months to accede willy-nilly to the many possibilities afforded by live-streaming (including affordability and accessibility). At the same time, I don't want to essentialize or romanticize the special co-presence between performer and spectator that supposedly comes with a live performance event. As much as sheltering in place has taught me that, introvertedly inclined though I be, I actually crave and need the company of others--especially to witness and talk about art--I find the instant nostalgia for "how things were" in theatre and performance to be specious. As many of us know, there were/are a lot of things wrong with standard performance production and presentation models, and the following debate articulated here and here about the "forgotten arts" of assembly and disassembly as they relate to the theatre is instructive about divisions within the broader global community. I am not taking a stand one way or another. These past few months I have gorged on iconic shows I would not otherwise have been able to see (hello Pina Bausch's Palermo, Palermo!), and as an educator I find video documentation of live performance to be incredibly valuable pedagogically (and our students at the School for the Contemporary Arts, seeing their scheduled end-of-semester productions and exhibitions and graduation projects evaporate one after another have adapted to various digital platforms with grace and wit and incredible ingenuity). But I also know that after all of this is over I also want to gather with others and share in all of the embodied rituals--from hugs in a crowded lobby to the sharing of laughter and applause--that come with attending (and tending to) live performance. Another thing I know, however, is that some companies may not have the means post-COVID to issue such an invitation, and so digital modes of production and dissemination might become key to survival. I refuse to make predictions or recommendations. There are too many prognosticators taking up too much space already as a result of this crisis, one that we're still very much in the middle of.

Incidentally, those two links on assembly and disassembly that I mention in the preceding paragraph came to me via an online conversation organized two weeks ago by P. Megan Andrews as part of her residency at The Dance Centre. She asked Justine A. Chambers, Olivia C. Davies, Vanessa Goodman, and Erika Mitsuhashi to talk about the "shift to the digital" in relation to their own practices. The conversation was wide-ranging and lively: how some folks were adapting in terms of projects and teaching and taking class, whether out of necessity or desire; and how others were hitting pause, using the radical stillness and enforced house arrest and new kinds of social choreography that have been imposed on their moving bodies (and the movement of bodies more generally) to ask deeper questions of their practice, their previous ways of making, and where they might want to go/what they might want to do differently in the future. It was all done via Zoom, of course, and following the online choreography of the conversation was as captivating as that conversation's content.

But I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge that after I left said meeting (which seems like such a weird Zoom sign-off, given that I haven't really gone anywhere) I didn't grieve a little. I so miss the company of these smart women and pre-COVID we would ideally at this very moment be celebrating the publication of my book about the Vancouver dance community. It was scheduled to be released last week, and while copies have arrived at my publisher's warehouse (I've seen the photos of the physical copies, as the attached image attests), they have delayed distribution until August. By that time, I fear that what was meant to be a celebration of the vibrancy of the dance community will already read like a period piece. Lockdown came during the middle of VIDF and one by one, dance events in this city have been cancelled. As The Dance Centre and other spaces prepare to open their doors to limited use under enhanced protocols, I worry about the futures of so many of the artists and companies I love. I also lament that the Dance Studies Association Conference that I was organizing with Allana Lindgren and Ahalya Satkunaratnam for this October at SCA, and at which Olivia and Justine were to be featured performers/presenters, has had to be postponed; I was so looking forward to introducing the Vancouver dance community to international dance scholars and artists. At the same time (and to borrow from the theme of the conference, which should be back in 2022), I know this community is so resilient. Just look at Dumb Instrument Dance's Ziyian Kwan, whom I write about in my book, and who in her response to a rise in anti-Asian racism in the city has refused to be cowed, peacefully claiming her and others' just rights to assembly and movement.

So instead of moping about what might have been, here's to looking forward to when we can all gather and dance together again (in hot pink lycra, of course).

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CAGE at The Dance Centre

Katie Duck is a legend on the international dance and performance scene, known especially for her focus on improvisation, and for her canny combining of text, movement, sound, and visuals. All of those elements were present last night as she performed her show CAGE for one night only at The Dance Centre. The title is a nod to the composer John Cage, and especially to his practice of creating chance musical scores. For her performance, Duck has created a text structured around loosely connected disquisitions on place and institutional power, the pleasure of women's bodies, the reciprocity of love, and the sweet relief of death. A portable score that's supplemented by a few key props (a chair, several wigs, a long black dress) and a haunting washed-out video of Duck moving in slow motion towards a sunlit door that plays at the beginning and end of the piece, Duck then collaborates with local musicians and performers wherever she tours the work.

For her Vancouver stop, Duck's musical collaborators were Ben Brown on drums, kazoo, and hand-cranked music box, Roxanne Nesbitt on the double bass, and James Meger on electric guitar, looping pedals, and cello. All were perfect matches for Duck's antics, alternating in places as foils to what she was doing (as when Nesbitt challenged Duck about whether or not she could fill Meger's shoes) or as illustrative supplements (as when Brown jumped up from where he had been lying downstage to demonstrate what it would be like to carry a fetus in his penis).

As for Duck, she is an assured and inventive improvisor and an equally charismatic performer. There were times when in adapting the text to the local context of Vancouver, as at the very beginning when she talked about the need to make an acknowledgment regarding the land, that I thought things were going horribly wrong. But every time she managed to spin out another interesting and deliberately aslant point, in this case starkly calling out the fact of dispossession. Duck's costume changes were equally inspired. The long black dress she wears for the central monologue extolling the beauty and perfection of all vaginas becomes in subsequent sections a mini-skirt, a witch's hat, and an Abu Ghraib-style blackout bag covering her face as she slumps in her chair.

This last image precedes the ending of the piece, in which Duck invites her collaborators and also us in the audience to join her in a fictional death scene. Seeing Brown drape his body so dramatically over his drum kit was priceless and attests to the risks Duck is able to inspire in her fellow performers.

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Spooky Action at the Dance Centre

Yesterday was International Dance Day and part of the celebrations at The Dance Centre included a free show of the latest iteration of Lesley Telford/Inverso Productions' Spooky Action. A shorter version of the piece was first presented a year ago (which I blogged about here), and then again in November at Dance in Vancouver. A collaboration with spoken word artist Barbara Adler and five dancers, Telford's ambitious exploration of the world of quantum entanglement seeks to make felt the uncanny kinetic experience both of making something happen and of having something happen to one.

It all begins with Adler explaining to us, via cribbed notes from Wikipedia, the basic principles of physical entanglement, how unseen particles, even separated by great distances, are somehow in communication with each other, and how the state of one particle (position, spin, momentum) necessarily affects the state of another. Action and reaction. Or as Adler later sums up the paradox in her first-person monologue: "I happened to people, but they happened back." Telford mines this choreographically in a number of intriguing ways, beginning with an opening solo in which Ria Girard explores--with her eyes closed and her searching arms outstretched--the delimited spatial orbit of her spotlit circle. But even in this suspended state things are happening: to Girard and to us. A turn in one direction produces a different facing. An arm reaching behind her back pulls her first this way, and then that way. Soon Girard is joined by five other dancers: Stephanie Cyr, Eden Solomon, Desi Rekrut, Lucas Wilson-Bilbo, and Ariana Barr. Surprised by their sudden appearance, Girard nevertheless discovers that her movements can somehow affect theirs. This ricocheting effect begins slowly and subtly, with a pivot by Girard from one dancer to the next producing a head bobble here, a buckle at the knees there. Soon, however, Girard's wizard-like turns become faster and the other dancers are bouncing up and down and boomeranging back and forth like pinballs.

But as Adler's text returns to the question of who is controlling whom, the other dancers constellate around Girard, each taking a turn whispering some secret message into her ear, before forming a chain hitched at the right arm behind her. This in turn leads into a sequence in which the group begins to move Girard, and from here the piece opens up into a succession of danced entanglements, Telford's arrangement of her bodies in space--via, for example, a simple yet beautifully captivating group pattern of unison breathing, or via more complicated duets--making manifest the axiom spoken by Adler: "There's distance, and also time." In dance, as in quantum physics, both can be stretched. And both can be folded and collapsed into each other, yet another paradox brilliantly illustrated with an elastic band, a story of the various lives affected by a car crash spoken by Adler as she moves slowly across the stage behind the elastic, and the dancers whizzing back and forth underneath it.

As Adler's text emphasizes just before this sequence, the question of the something that is happening--in the world, in one's life, in a performance--is not, or not only, an "if" or a "when" question. It's also, and perhaps most crucially, a "with" question: those seen and unseen forces that are beside one, acting upon one, and responding to one in the happening of that something. In quantum mechanics the term for this state of "withness" is superposition: that any two or more quantum states can be added together to produce another distinct quantum state. It's a principle that applies equally well to this unique collaboration, with text and movement the shared axes upon which the work spins.

I look forward to the next iteration.

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My Funny Valentine at The Dance Centre

Zee Zee Theatre's tenth anniversary production of Dave Deveau's My Funny Valentine is currently running at The Dance Centre, following a successful tour to Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto. It's an anniversary in two senses: it's the first play by Zee Zee playwright-in-residence Deveau that the company shared with an audience, beginning with workshop presentations overseen by Zee Zee Managing Artistic Director Cameron Mackenzie in the summer of 2009; and, more soberly, it also commemorates ten years since the death of Lawrence King, whose murder in February 2008 by a male classmate to whom he'd had the temerity to send a valentine inspired Deveau's own love letter of a play to all who have suffered violence for following their hearts.

This is not the first time My Funny Valentine, which has won many awards, has been remounted by the company. I previously attended and blogged about the last Vancouver production at the Firehall here. I won't rehearse all that I said in that earlier review about the play's structure. But I will note that one of the unique  features of Deveau's play--and also a way he solves the conundrum of writing for and to the ghost of someone whom we can only ever know through media reports, or as some group's positive or negative symbol--is how he tells his story at a slight remove, through the voices of those who knew the boy or have come to be affected--including, in some cases, positively or opportunistically--by his murder (Lawrence is never identified by name). These characters are all played by a single actor, in this case SFU Theatre alum Conor Wylie, who is as convincing inhabiting the body language and drawn out vowels of the bored and cynical tween Gloria as he is the at once bluffly swaggering and emotionally desperate working class masculinity of a homophonic father.

That said, two characters stand out for me, both in terms of the quality of Deveau's writing and the luminosity of Wylie's performance. The first is Helen, a teacher at the high school of the murdered boy who cannot let his death go. She is the only character we meet more than once, and the recurring conceit of her nervously and clumsily spilling whatever she is drinking all over herself is a sign of how shattered she is by these events--to the point where she burns through both her job and her marriage. Her final appearance at the end of the play, ten years after her student's murder, also allows Deveau, in this most recent staging, to do some subtle updates to the script--in part to show us all that hasn't changed in America in the past decade. The second character I found most affecting was little Ronda, a motormouth of a girl who has two Dads and who is awaiting a liver transplant--a final act of love from the dead boy that this time is reciprocated fully and completely, because that's all Ronda has herself been shown in her life. Wylie is able, in turn, to convey this joyful contagion to us in a way that is simple and direct and that feels like a blessing--just when we need it most. All while talking a mile a minute about hating the smell of tuna fish sandwiches.

Today's matinee audience was a bit sparse; no doubt we were partly competing with the weather. The play continues for another week and I urge folks to get out and see it. Quite simply, Deveau has written a classic, and Wylie is giving a star turn.

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PuSh 2018: Pour at The Dance Centre

Along with with Justine A. Chambers and Vanessa Goodman, Métis dance artist Daina Ashbee is one of the inaugural recipients of the Dance Centre's recently constituted Yulanda Faris Choreographers Program. Originally from BC, she now is based in Montreal, where her works have won multiple awards. Pour, on at the Dance Centre through tomorrow evening in conjunction with the PuSh Festival, is an entrancing solo performed by the amazing dancer Paige Culley in a power display of endurance, vulnerability, and control.

The piece begins in darkness, with the audience stumbling towards there seats as haunting cries emanating from the stage occasionally pierce the air. Soon everything quiets and it appears as if there is a body moving about before us, a ghostly figure whose aura haunts our imaginations precisely because her identity as yet remains unmarked. But then, with sudden violence--for both the audience and the performer--bright white lights come up, and we are literally blinded by what we see: Culley, naked to the waist, staring out at us. She moves downstage centre and stands absolutely still, holding our gaze in silence, for what seems like five long minutes. Then, ever so slowly, she moves her hands to the button and zipper at the top of her jeans, undoing both with an unhurried deliberateness that is both provocative and disturbing: does she feel compelled to do this because of our collective gaze, or is she doing this to test the quality, kind, and limits of that gaze? For she does, eventually, push down her jeans to reveal to us her sex, but in a way that is entirely unerotic, in fact, almost clinical, as if Ashbee is saying to both her dance audience and the world more generally: now that we've got the "fact" of woman's gender out of the way, we can get on to the far more interesting question of how she performs her sexuality.

That performance initially takes the form of Culley dropping to the floor, which looks to be made of some kind of white polyurethane substance, overlain with some kind of translucent mylar or viscous liquid, or maybe a combination of both. For as Culley begins rolling around the floor, her body becomes shinier and shinier, sweat mixing with whatever residue from the set that she is picking up as she reverses the masquerade of femininity, pouring herself out of (rather than into) the synthetic carapace of her jeans and back into not necessarily a more "natural," but certainly a more direct relationship between the materiality of her self and the materiality of her environment: a place where skin meets landscape in a surface encounter whose simultaneous porosity necessarily changes both. (In her program notes, Ashbee explains that she "used her own menstrual cycle as the hub of her interest throughout the development of the work.")

These changes we witness in the slow, repetitive cycle of Culley's rolling progress across the stage, lifting herself up onto her elbows, shifting the weight underneath her pelvis, slapping her arms and thighs and buttocks over and over again into the floor, her gaze never wavering from us even as the sound and the acts we can imagine it stands in for challenge us to look away. In these sequences and others--including an extended moment near the end when Culley struggles to find the voice we presumably heard at the beginning, but now only able to emit a few chocked hiccups--Ashbee refuses to resolve neat antimonies of pain and pleasure, power and resistance. Is Culley performing for us, or are we performing for Culley (and, interestingly, last night's audience was among the most quiet and attentive I've ever encountered at The Dance Centre)? The final sequence of the piece, in which Culley shuffles back and forth along the downstage lip of the stage with her back towards us once again cannily forecloses on an easy answer.

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PuSh 2018: Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster at The Dance Centre

A man with two children throwing stones at a duck along a canal in Ghent. A woman running along said canal who is outraged by what she sees, but also uncertain about whether she should intervene. This moral conundrum is the starting point for Melbourne-based Nicola Gunn's remarkable work of dance-theatre, Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster, co-presented by the PuSh Festival and the Dance Centre, where it plays through this evening.

Gunn is a virtuoso storyteller, taking everyday incidents and observations from her own life and crafting them into compelling, but also wickedly hilarious, commentaries on social relations and the human condition. She also has a way with the finer points of narrative, introducing what you think are throwaway descriptive details or meaningless digressions (Hercule Poirot actor David Suchet's secret heart surgery, her art world encounter with Marina Abramovic, a synopsis of the plot of the film Brief Encounter, the fact that she told her friends on Facebook that she was out for a walk rather than a run), only to bring those various threads together into a most surprising and satisfying conclusion at the end. And she does this all while moving non-stop, Gunn having collaborated with choreographer Jo Lloyd on a physical score that sees Gunn cycle through a series of gestures and phrases as she unspools her story. The movements are relatively simple, an accretive vocabulary of arm swings and leg pulses and step-touches and swivel jumps and all manner of floor crawls. That doesn't mean that they don't become increasingly taxing to perform, nor that their execution doesn't require incredible powers of mental concentration on the part of Gunn--not least because their abstractness bears very little direct explanatory relation to the story being told (except insofar as they might punctuate a point for emphasis).

However, the movement does relate, conceptually, to Gunn's concern with necessary and unnecessary actions. Indeed, there is a direct philosophical through-line between asking why Gunn is moving her arm such-and-such a way while speaking to why the man is throwing stones at the duck to why Gunn feels compelled to intervene to why all of this is grist for an art piece and, finally, to why we take pleasure in watching said art piece. Gunn doesn't attempt to answer definitively any of these questions. Rather, she eschews black and white problem solving for imagining so many more shades of grey: speculating, for example, on what might be motivating the man (who seems to be an immigrant) to throw the stones and what effect her crazed intervention might have on the future mental health of the daughters who are with him; gradually copping to the fact that her run by the canal that morning is not itself unmotivated; and implicating us in an art historical tradition--from Bruegel to Abramovic to Gunn herself--that seems to place no limits on what is acceptable representationally, and that catches us in the act of looking while also looking away. On this latter front, there is a moment in the performance when things shift and Gunn, who until now had been performing at a safe remove from the audience on a strip of white marley that is oriented more upstage, wades into the audience, using all available surfaces and limbs to balance herself while asking if we mind her pelvis gyrating in our faces. We don't say anything, just titter nervously: because this is contemporary performance--right?--and anything goes. Maybe, and maybe not: when Gunn returns to the stage, we're perhaps not wholly on her side anymore, and as she starts adding even more shades of grey to the story, lighting and AV designers Niklas Pajanti and Martyn Coutts also create effects on the upstage screen that start to make Gunn seem a lot more threatening.

And what about that ghetto blaster in the title, also for much of the piece the only additional prop on the stage? It, too, is somewhat unnecessary. At a certain point Gunn moves it stage right and turns it on and her movements now become additionally syncopated with composer and sound designer Kelly Ryall's beats. It's oversized, early 80s design puts one in mind of the kind of devices used by breakers and B-boys to claim public space--which is not irrelevant to the story Gunn is telling. But, technically speaking, the ghetto blaster doesn't really need to be there. Except perhaps as an object-oriented ontological reminder of who else might be missing from this two-sided story. And, indeed, at the end of the piece the non-human ghetto blaster becomes a key interlocutor for the non-human duck, who up until this point has only been spoken about. Here music and movement combine to transcend the limits of language as a tool for (mis)communication.

It's a surprising and wholly satisfying conclusion to a deeply thoughtful work of performance.

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Animal Triste at The Dance Centre

Animal Triste is Montreal-based choreographer Mélanie Demers' take on the evolution of that most melancholic of species, the human. Co-presented by Demers' company, Mayday, and Vancouver's plastic orchid factory, the piece continues at The Dance Centre through this evening and opens with a striking image. Demers' four dancers--Brianna Lombardo, Marc Boivin, plastic orchid's James Gnam, and Riley Sims--are positioned as naked odalisques among the snake-like yellow cords attached to the floor lights that rim the stage. Slowly and methodically as audience members file into the auditorium and take their seats, the dancers wrap long strands of pearls around their necks, pulling them tight so that the resulting chocker looks something like a cross between an Elizabethan ruff and African or Asian neck-stretching jewelry. After this task is complete the dancers begin putting on their clothes, reversing the usual trajectory of the revelation of flesh in contemporary dance, but also telescoping through this simple montage of collective dressing the historical domestication of the human animal.

Once dressed, the quartet of dancers gathers in a horizontal line upstage right, stretching and jumping in place, a series of preparatory calisthenics preceding the subsequent physical striving that seems to constitute each member's attempt to define his or her relationship to the others, and to the group as a whole. This mostly take the form of individual bodies twisting in place, with the dancers' bent torsos, splayed knees and crooked arms adding up to a strange family tableau. Albeit one in which the human invention of binary genders is for the most part played with and resisted. In this respect, while one is tempted to read Boivin and Lombardo as the parental figures in this quirky brood, Boivin, despite his imposing size, remains a rather passive paterfamilias (at least to begin with). By contrast, the compact and muscular Lombardo's physicality seems far more intense and explosive, with her body shooting forward from the line at various moments, the restiveness of her limbs seeking to be freed from the torpidity of her male confrères' movement. Gnam is deliberately channeling an androgynous presence, both in the long tunic he wears and in his sinewy and languorous locomotion across the stage. And Sims seems to be pure id, the child whose impulses derive from pure instinct and polymorphous desires.

Certainly in the program notes (accessible through plastic orchid's website) Demers makes no secret that her dancers function as allegorical figures, and many of the sequences in the piece have a distinctly ritualistic feel, especially when one pair's tribal-like movements are purposely framed by the bodies of a second pair, often arranged in a still Sphinx-like pose. But there comes a moment when the mythical and the untamed aspects of all of this energy seems to be brought under the thumb (or, more precisely, hand) of patriarchy. This happens when Sims sheds his t-shirt and Boivin, hitherto shirtless, dons his own. All of a sudden Boivin starts to corral the various members of his wayward family, bringing them in close to his now powerful and centrally positioned body. To be sure, they chafe against this, with Sims in particular twisting and fighting to be let free. However, Demers seems to be suggesting with this final image that what makes the human animal most sad is not its poverty of means for real communication despite its acquisition of language (as demonstrated in an earlier sequence in which the dancers spout tired maxims and various pop memes gleaned from song lyrics and other empty cliches), but the (hetero)normative organization of its kinship relations.

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Dialogue at The Dance Centre

Wen Wai Wang's newest full-length dance, Dialogue, premiered at the Dance Centre last night. Inspired in part by the movement history of Wang's own migrant body, the work was built on and in collaboration with six talented young male dancers in the city: Ralph Escamillan, Andrew Haydock, Arash Khakpour, Tyler Layton-Olson, Nicholas Lydiate, and Alex Tam. As I understand Wang's process, each dancer was invited to bring aspects of his own dance training and personal story to the work. The result is a unique and deeply engaging meditation on what it means to communicate kinetically across cultural identity and individual experience.

With the house lights still up, five of the dancers--Escamillan, Haydock, Khakpour, Layton-Olson, and Tam--enter and casually sit down on the chairs that have been positioned along the upstage wall. During the curtain speech they stare out at the audience, while alternately crossing their legs demurely (Escamillan), or lifting one up to the edge of the chair (Haydock), or manspreading (Tam and Khakpour), or slouching (Layton-Olson), each physical choice already inviting us to read their bodies--and thus their identities--in different ways. Lydiate only enters at the end of the curtain speech, pausing to stand in front of the remaining empty chair, and trading some not very friendly looks with his fellow dancers. Indeed, when Lydiate finally does sit down, this is the cue for the others to move their chairs into a semi-circle centre stage, with Tam beginning a relay of hand and arm gestures that gets taken up, adapted and expanded in turn by each of the other dancers. The gestures grow steadily bigger and bolder in their sweep out from the dancers' torsos and the arcs they make through the air, with Lydiate eventually joining the circle as the thrown movements ricochet back and forth from body to body at a faster and faster pace. It was like we were watching a seated hip hop dance circle, each dancer's ever more complicated gestures at once an invitation and a challenge to the others to top. This opening sequence is echoed later in the work when the dancers, standing now, form another semi-circle around the body of Khakpour, who has just finished a wrenchingly physical floor solo. Drawing their bodies into various Transformer-esque poses while simultaneously making lock and load sounds with their voices, the dancers now use their newly weaponized limbs to send imaginary bullets around the circle, but with each ricochet this time additionally passing through the defenceless body of Khakpour.

Much like the ethos of hip hop, the literal momentum of Dialogue accrues through the tension between these alternately combative and collaborative group sequences and individual moments of virtuosic solo improvisation. For example, early on in the piece, during a section featuring club music, the dancers groove on the spot in their own singular ways, alternately slowing down and speeding up the tempo, moving in and out of unison. But what's most striking about the tableau Wang creates here is that the two white dancers face front, while the dancers of colour have their backs turned to the audience, a simple yet highly effective comment on the politics of (in)visibility in social spaces, and one that is tellingly followed by a solo from Lydiate in his tighty whities. This dialectics of surface and depth, inside and outside, looking and being seen is further highlighted in the sequence that immediately follows, which sees each of the dancers don a hat (initially in Khakpour's case, a hair pic) that presumably somehow telegraphs an aspect of their personality, and then rotate through a series of poses as Elvis' Love Me Tender plays.

All of this builds to what I found to be the most arresting section of the dance, which immediately follows the aforementioned Transformer sequence. The dancers link arms and gather in a circle around Khakpour who, at first feeling trapped, lifts his shirt up over his head, a cloaking movement he has made before that is rich in imagistic associations we are wont to project onto Khakpour's Muslim body: from balaclava to veil. Here, however, the other dancers seem intent on letting Khakpour be seen, removing the mask and insisting on their own presence by placing their hands in turn in front of his face. This is followed by Escamillan then ducking his head and shoulders inside the circle, which sets off a succession of similar breaches by the group that gets repeated twice, with the circle eventually breaking apart to form a linked chain, the tethering of each of the men's bodies and the flow of movement that now gets passed up and down the line here suggesting balance and mutual support rather than competition and one upmanship.

I would have preferred if Dialogue ended there, but the piece--which, in my view, is about 10-15 minutes too long--continues on for a series of codas that culminates in a disco ball-infused tango duet between Escamillan (in heels) and Khakpour. I appreciated Escamillan's physical and emotional commitment to this scene, but structurally and conceptually it seemed to signal the start of a separate journey rather than satisfactorily concluding this one. Such caveats aside, Wang and his dancers have crafted a rich aesthetic and affective experience with this work and I hope, beyond its brief run here in Vancouver, that it tours widely.

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Three Sets/Relating at a Distance at The Dance Centre

The three pieces included as part of Lesley Telford's first full program of dance to be presented in Canada under the auspices of her company Inverso Productions reveal some common preoccupations. First, all combine--to greater or lesser degrees--text and movement. IF, an earlier and shorter version of which was developed in 2007 for a Nederlands Dans Theater workshop, is set to a poem by Anne Carson, "Seated Figure with Red Angle"--and here spoken in recorded voiceover by Amos Ben-Tal. My Tongue, Your Ear, from 2011, features its two dancers speaking aloud excerpts from Wislava Szymborska's poem "Tower of Babel." And Spooky Action at a Distance, receiving its phase one premiere as part of Telford's residency at The Dance Centre, is accompanied by an original spoken word score by writer and musician Barbara Adler, who speaks the text live.

Then, too, all three works are concerned with patterns of attraction and repulsion, proximity and distance, action and reaction. In IF these impulses manifest as a roundelay of occupations of and displacements from a chair positioned downstage right. As the piece begins, dancer Maya Tenzer is perched on it. Behind her, all the way upstage, is Eden Solomon. Both dancers are lit in such a way that as Solomon advances toward Tenzer in the chair the former's shadow gradually overtakes and subsumes the latter's physical presence (the lighting, adapted from an original concept by Jeroen Cool, is by my colleague Kyla Gardiner, who does amazing work throughout). Meanwhile visible offstage right is Stéphanie Cyr, who begins a horizontal walk across the stage, her passing in front of the chair cuing Solomon to supplant Tenzer from it. Cyr then begins a solo centre stage, eventually arcing into the upstage vertical pathway of the chair, and with the enactment of her own kinetic claims upon it launching first Solomon and then Tenzer into successive retracings of the circuit she has just completed. In this, IF is like a game of musical chairs that no one can win, because within the feedback loop of Telford's choreography we gradually discover that each act of sitting constellates within it both past and future acts of sitting, a sedimentation of time within at once shared and separate physical states that is vividly portrayed at the end of the piece when all three dancers sandwich themselves onto the chair.

My Tongue, Your Ear is a duet that casts Tenzer and Graham Kaplan as two halves of a couple. And yet while their cryptic and elliptical patter throughout the piece suggests a pair of lovers whose wires of communication are hopelessly crossed, their matching white shirts and black shorts and socks also put me in mind of a vaudeville double-act or toy marionettes come to life. Such images may have something to do with the twitchy and floppy movement vocabulary that Telford employs throughout the piece, with both dancers windmilling their arms and buckling their knees at different moments, and with the tall, lanky and Gumby-like Kaplan repeating a series of rubbery jumps into the air, like he is being pulled by strings from above. For a while Tenzer and Kaplan seem to be working in concert to support each other, propping each other up by the shoulders, for example, as they begin a precarious walk downstage. By the end of the piece, however, the individual crumbling of their bodies begins to mirror the disjointedness of their speech, their physical proximity to each other in this case failing to buttress their relationship.

Following an intermission, Telford presented her newest work-in-progress. Spooky Action at a Distance is based on the quantum theory of particle entanglement (that, to summarize crudely, electrons separated by galaxies can still be affected by each other's movements). The choreography seeks to physicalize the matter of human interconnectivity, using the time/space properties of dance to show the eventness of all action--that, for example, a movement initiated in one body both ripples outward to be registered by and reacted to by other bodies and contracts inward as a result of that reaction. The piece begins simply with the hard-working Tenzer positioned alone on stage, her back to the audience. Adler begins intoning her text from the front row of the audience. She talks about believing that it is she who makes the world happen, that she has control over the weather, able to conjure clouds or sun or fog simply by closing or opening her eyes. But maybe in fact it's the weather that's making her adjust her gaze; when she mentions turning her face "to accept/the event/at a different angle" Tenzer pivots slowly to look at us. Indeed, one of the delights of this work is how it enacts the principle of action and reaction--what Adler elsewhere in her text refers to as the time and distance between x and y--at the level of the relationship between text and movement. Sometimes the dancers seem to be responding to the text, at other times Adler is clearly taking her cue from the choreography. In neither case, however, are the results reductively descriptive or mimetic; instead they combine in a way that would seem to fulfill Niels Bohr's theory of complementarity, in which the corresponding, reciprocal and mutually constitutive properties of wave and particle, or position and momentum, are known to (co)exist, but cannot be measured or observed simultaneously. Likewise with the movement patterns that follow this opening, the other dancers (Cyr, Solomon, Caitlynn Danchuk, Katie DeVries, Bynh Ho, and Brenna Metzmeier) at once prompting Tenzer to respond to their spatial presence on stage (including by whispering in her ear) and also embodying an opposing force. To put this into some of the terms employed by Adler, what we are witnessing in Telford's choreography is people "happening" to each other: sometimes "more" and sometimes "harder," especially in the complex partnering sequences that pepper the work; and sometimes simply, but with "attentive" purpose, as when Tenzer later orbits Solomon ever more closely in a gradually accelerating walk centre stage.

There is so much more I could say about this last work, which was a delight to behold. I look forward to becoming more entangled with its progress as Telford and her collaborators continue to develop it.

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In Penumbra at The Dance Centre

In astronomy, penumbra refers to a space of partial shadow between full illumination and full shadow, as in an eclipse. And so perhaps it is to be expected that audience members are handed sunglasses upon entering The Dance Centre's Faris Studio for the world premiere of In Penumbra, a new work by Paras Terezakis' Kinesis Dance Somatheatro (which is how the choreographer is now branding his company in this, its 30th anniversary year). A co-presentation with the Vancouver International Dance Festival, the piece does feature a stunning lighting design by the incomparable James Proudfoot. Much of that design is an active and agential part of the larger scenography, including a hanging net of hundreds of incandescent bulbs, several plastic fluorescent tubes attached to long cords and lying on the stage floor, even a bunch of wearable LED headlights. Combined with the fact that the audience is seated in the round, it is hard not to be caught in the direct beam or refracted glare of one or more lighting sources over the course of the hour-long piece. (That said, the sunglasses pose a practical challenge for those of us who wear regular glasses, and so I ended up dispensing with them pretty quickly.)

The entire design concept for In Penumbra is incredibly sophisticated and integrated, starting with the unique banner-style program that we are handed in the lobby (yeah for challenging the hegemony of the DC's boring white one-page fold-overs!). Kudos as well to the rest of the design team, including sound designer Nancy Tam (who does wonders with a reverberating microphone stand), costume designer Natalie Purschwitz, and video designer Josh Hite (though the non-proscenium seating in this case somewhat worked against the projections, as they only played out on what would normally be the upstage wall, and so one only registered them when one or more of the dancers moved in that direction). The piece also features perhaps the most original and effective entrance and exit of its performers that I've ever seen in the Faris Studio, with dancers Arash Khakpour, Elissa Hanson, Hyoseung Ye, Diego Romero, and Renée Sigouin descending and then later ascending a ladder propped against the lobby-level tech booth.

As for what happens movement-wise in between these bookended coups-de-thèȃtre, things are much more inchoate, with the "grey zone" of kinetic exploration and discovery in relation to the objects and other material properties on stage sometimes going on too long and feeling a bit self-indulgent. That said, individual moments were utterly compelling, including the group waltz that opens the piece, a mechanical kissing duet between Khakpour and Hanson, each of the wildly careering solos by the men, and Sigouin's dragging of the microphone against the upstage wall. In between, however, it often felt like many physical actions were functioning more as stage business than as fleshed out movement ideas (a case in point being all of the taking off of and putting back on of clothes). And as far as I could tell the dragged out ending to the piece--in which audience members are coaxed out of their chairs, which are then removed along with other freestanding items on stage--seemed more like an expedient way to strike the set than as meaningful concluding statement about the dark spots of enlightenment.

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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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PuSh 2017: FOLK-S

Alessandro Sciarroni's FOLK-S: will you still love me tomorrow?, on at The Dance Centre through this evening in a co-presentation with the PuSh Festival and the Italian Cultural Centre, is at once a practice-based experiment in dance ethnography and a durational work of conceptual choreography. Part of a larger project investigating time, tradition and the role of the popular in contemporary dance, Sciarroni and his fellow performers (Marco D'Agostin, Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld, Francesca Foscarini, Matteo Ramponi, and Francesco Vecchi) taught themselves the Schuhplattler, a folk dance performed in Bavaria, the Austrian Tyrol, and the German-speaking part of northern Italy; it involves men dressed in lederhosen slapping their shoes and thighs, historically for the purposes of attracting a female mate. With the blessing of the professional Schuplattler groups to whom the team showed their efforts, Sciarroni then set about building a formal structure in which the dance was purposefully stripped of its cultural and geographical associations, becoming a task-based display of pure technique and real-time composition. He also added the following stipulation: the dance is to continue until there is either no one left in the audience or there are no more dancers on stage.

As the audience enters the Faris studio, the six dancers are in a circle, already pounding out a percussive rhythm with their feet. Only Sciarroni is dressed in lederhosen and wearing a Tyrolean wool hat; the others wear regular shorts and shirts. Additionally, all the dancers but Sciarroni have their eyes covered with a strip of white tape for this opening section. For it is sound, more than any other sensory element, that becomes the measure of whether or not the dancers remain in unison over the course of the piece, as well as the gauge of their initially ecstatic and gradually flagging energy levels. Subtle variations in spatial groupings, rhythm, and of course the sequence of steps and slaps are introduced over the course of the piece, with the dancers calling out various signals to each other and also pausing occasionally to rest or regroup. Sciarroni grabs an accordion at one point, but he doesn't produce any music from it, merely opens and closes its bellows, simulating the dancers' gulping exhalations and inhalations of breath. By ruthlessly stripping the dance of its traditional cultural associations in this way, Sciarroni makes the mechanics of its execution all about the presentness of the dancers, and also of us in the audience. That is, in FOLK-S not only are we witness to how the contract between the dancers is being negotiated in the moment (from who takes the lead in initiating a sequence to the level of difficulty of a sequence to who decides when they've had enough), but we are also invited to reflect on what we are bringing (in terms of energy and attention and kinetic response) to the space.

People did leave at different points during the performance last night, but most of us stayed, willing the dancers to go on despite their exhaustion. In this Sciarroni's piece is less a testament to how art survives over time than it is a pulsating, full-throttle encounter with the very art of survival.

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PuSh 2017: Sweat Baby Sweat

I have a new choreographic man crush. When Jan Martens was here in 2015 with The Dog Days Are Over I was first smitten, so enthralled was I by his rigorously minimalist and physically taxing exploration of jumping in that work (and which I wrote about here). So when I learned he was returning this year with Sweat Baby Sweat in a co-presentation between The Dance Centre and the PuSh Festival I knew I had to be there. At the same time, I had a bit of trepidation, as I knew the latter piece was a love duet between a man and a woman, with Martens deliberately troping on all the cliches of this signature sequence from dance. Was it possible for Martens and his dancers, the incredibly talented Kimmy Ligtvoet and Steven Michel, to interrogate those cliches without reproducing and reinforcing the gendered power dynamics in partnering that contemporary dance, no matter its apparent or avowed conceptualism, has necessarily inherited from the pas de deux in classical ballet? Happily after seeing the piece last night, and especially after listening to the incredibly smart and charming Martens discourse on the building of it during the talkback with his dancers and facilitator Alana Gerecke, I can say yes.

The piece, which we learned has been touring since 2012 (its last performance tonight here in Vancouver will be the hundredth iteration of the work), begins with the two dancers already on stage facing each other as the audience enters the auditorium. Like the stage, which is completely bare (even the legs on both sides and the backstage safety curtain have been removed), the dancers are stripped to their underwear and are staring intensely into each other's eyes. The lights dim and as they slowly come back up we gradually become aware that Kimmy is now standing on Steven's thighs, clasping her hands behind his neck as both dancers lean away from each other, holding that pose for what seems like forever, and still not breaking their shared gaze. What follows is a series of equally gymnastic clinches: Kimmy wrapping her legs around Steven's neck and hanging upside down as she slowly raises her torso to horizontal; Steven, lying supine on the floor, balancing in airplane mode Kimmy's outstretched body on one extended leg. All are entered into with the utmost precision and care, with the dancers never losing touch with each other's bodies and never looking away. Indeed, there is a way in which the somatic practices Martens is drawing from in the choreography (in the talkback he mentioned yoga as an influence, as well as acro-gymnastics and butoh) turn the partnering into much more of a technical exercise. The slowness of the movement and the stretching of the duration of each held pose means we focus as much, if not more, on the effort and balance and weight distribution and breath of the dancers as on any overtly expressive meaning that might be attached to their relationship. It becomes almost clinical, but in a way that is also tender and utterly compelling to watch, and in the talkback Martens noted that it was the discovery in the studio of slowness and the held gaze that led him to understand how he could upend the rules of contemporary dance, in which speed, strength, rhythm, changes of direction, falls and recovery nevertheless combine to reinforce a strict binary division between male and female. To that end, this work is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Edouard Lock's La La La Human Steps choreography post his split with Louise Lecavalier, in which the speed of the point work especially ends up turning his wraith-thin female dancers into mechanical dolls to be turned this way and that.

Not that Martens, having established a pattern, is afraid of breaking it and thereby upsetting our expectations. Thus, in the second pass through of the poses he has established, when at the end Kimmy is meant to climb up and down from Steven's legs, Martens has his two dancers lock lips and hold the kiss as they continue to execute their incredibly complicated and gravity-defying choreography. Once again, however, Martens undermines any romance we might want to read into the kiss by having it become another technical problem to work through: how will the dancers maintain mouth-to-mouth contact while they are simultaneously in the throes of a push-pull with the rest of their bodies? Here Martens is playing with notions of attraction and repulsion: for each of Kimmy's desperate scrambles up Steven's legs and chest he is ready with his arms to push her away. This is not done violently but the seeming rejection does register as a shock: after such sustained contact and mutual support, how can these two break apart? Martens catches us falling for the very hackneyed phrasing and trite image he is trying to deconstruct: we want these two to remain in contact, preferably with Kimmy draped languorously around Steven's neck. As the words that have been projected on the backstage wall for the length of the piece to this point announce, "As long as you are here, I am too."

These lines come from Cat Power's epic ballad "Willie Deadwilder," which begins to play through the final section of the piece, with the lyrics alternately flashing on the screen (conveniently highlighted in pink) and being interrupted by banalities imported from other songs and sayings. It's a strategy that works to resist a narrative reading of Steven and Kimmy's relationship as paralleling that of Willie and Rebecca in the song. For, indeed, after synching their bodies to the rhythm of the song with a series of torso pulses that begin while the dancers are standing and that continue as they move to the floor, the piece actually ends with the performers inching away from each other like earthworms, dragging their bodies toward opposite upstage sides, still in time with the music, but no longer ready for each other.

It's a terrific capstone to an amazing work, one that is at once sensually seductive and intellectually stimulating.

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Simile at The Dance Centre

Today is The Dance's Centre's annual fall open house, which officially marks the launch of its 2016-17 season. Last night Richard and I, along with other donors and invited guests, got a sneak peek of tonight's mainstage show, Simile. A collaboration between Ziyian Kwan, of dumb instrument Dance, and Vanessa Goodman, of Action at a Distance, the evening is made up of two solos and a duet.

Kwan leads things off with a reprise of "Still Rhyming," which she premiered at VIDF this past spring, and which pairs her with local musician Jo Hirabayashi, who plays electric guitar and sings. An homage to Patti Smith, and especially her writing in M Train, the piece asks, among other things, what it means to embody creative influence. How, for example, do you dance a book's possession of your soul? In Kwan's case, this leads to a provocative opening duet with the book as choreographic object. Lying prone on the floor with a hard-cover book covering her face as Hirabayashi picks out a riff on his guitar in the upstage right corner, Kwan slowly arises from her slumber, her eyes peeking out over the edge of the book. The book begins to slide down Kwan's torso, but she is careful not to let it fall to the ground. Indeed, in the movement that follows Kwan is at pains to keep the book in as close proximity to her body as possible: she passes it through her legs like a basketball; she clutches it under her chin; and, most extraordinarily, she grips the spine between her teeth, jumping up and down so that the white pages fan open and close, open and close, like a huge gaping mouth waiting to suck us into its world of mystery and pleasure. This first part of the piece was most captivating. I was less sure about what to make of Kwan's subsequent dialogue with a chair, which via its draping with a black leather jacket and bits of Kwan's conversation we are meant to surmise stands in for the absent presence of Smith. It's always tricky addressing an invisible interlocutor on stage, much less dancing with them--though embedded in Kwan's goofy mistake about how to spell her own name there does seem to be an interesting comment about whose signature ultimately belongs on the work, one that is also extended to the audience.

Goodman followed with a solo called "Floating Upstream," a work that once again showcased how beautifully and intuitively she moves to the original electronic soundscapes created by frequent collaborator Locsil. The piece begins with Goodman in a crouch centre stage, her back towards the audience. Clutching each of the long billowy white pant legs of the costume she is wearing up around her thighs, she slowly bounce-shuffles up stage, like she is wading through a heavy current or a soupy swamp. Following Goodman's program note, we can read the white pants as a nimbus of clouds through which she has thrust her body, keen to explore a different view and set of spatial orientations. At the same time, I couldn't also help seeing the hitched up pants as Victorian-era bloomers, symbol of gendered bodily constraint that in Goodman's efforts, having reached the upstage wall and turned to face the audience, not to let her cuffs fall means she literally has to keep her knees together. Either way, the initial isolation of Goodman's upper body means that we are able to marvel at the simultaneous flow and precision of her movement, her arms undulating in waves through the layered wash of Locsil's score only to jab suddenly at the air in response to successive musical pulses. Later, having freed up her legs and let loose her pantaloons, Goodman is also able to transition seamlessly from a rubbery Gagaesque style of inside-out lines and limbs into a version of a robot dance that, when placed in the context of past solo work (I'm thinking especially of Container), suggests a recurring theme of moving within, as well as busting out, of prescribed convention. Whether or not this is intentional, it's utterly compelling to watch.

After a short intermission, the evening concluded with a duet between Kwan and Goodman called In Vertebrate Dream. A rumination on the differences--as well as the productive synergies--of each artist's creative process, the work sees the dancemakers tapping into their inner animals by donning polar bear (Kwan) and zebra (Goodman) masks respectively. It is truly uncanny how the donning of a mask changes one's approach to a body on stage. Initially when presented with the tableau of Goodman standing upstage right and Kwan sitting downstage left I couldn't tell who was who (though, in retrospect, Kwan's furry high heels should have perhaps been a clue). Eventually, the dancers' different movement vocabularies register as identifying markers. However, I found myself most interested in the moments of stillness on stage and how traditional theatrical (and anthropocentric) perspectivalism can be upended through a simple act of turning a mask around on one's head. Here embodied inter-species encounter and contact (as when Goodman's zebra cradles Kwan's polar bear head in her hands) is very much about new ways of looking at creative exchange and sustainability--in artmaking and worldmaking. By contrast, when the human speaks through the animal and the latter is used as a metaphorical resource then there is a danger of reinforcing certain entrenched ways of thinking about animacy and our relationship to the material world. Not that I didn't enjoy those moments of silliness when Kwan's polar bear starts to sing an Edith Piaf song, or when Goodman's zebra narrates all the endings to the piece that the duo couldn't agree upon. I just think they need some editing--and perhaps also a bit more careful theorizing.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 15

It's been a while since Justine and Alexa and I have had a chance to gather together at the Dance Centre for another interview--though J and A did meet up last Friday in my absence to do some additional work on scores and, as a result, toss about some preliminary stage designs.

In the meantime, we've also been corresponding electronically about the genesis of and impetus behind the project--the cumulative results of which have just been published on The Dance Centre's blog. You can read the full dialogue here.

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ReVoLt at The Dance Centre

Belgian choreographer Thierry Smits, of Compagnie Thor, brought the solo ReVoLt to The Dance Centre last night as the closing performance of this year's Global Dance Connections series. A solo created for the Australian dancer Nicola Leahey, the piece deals--somewhat didactically--with the continued bodily oppression of women. As the lights come up, we see Leahey in a self-imposed choke-hold, her long blond hair covering her face, her body twitching in resistance to what we are to imagine is some external constraint (whether it be the arms of an abusive male lover or the expectations of society). A quick blackout and then we see Leahey centre stage, her arms pinned behind her back, the rest of her body again convulsing against the would-be disciplining of her physicality. And so the beginning of the piece continues, with two more such poses added to the repertoire of controlling movements, one in which Leahey's arms are wrapped around her waist, and one in which they get locked, like a chastity belt, underneath her pubis.

The rest of the piece is essentially built upon the repetition of these four poses, with Leahey every now and then breaking free to move into a tentative forward lunge, or to arch into a gorgeous back bend, as if to show us just what her body can do when unharnessed. In this respect, Leahey's long, loose hair plays an important role in the piece. Unbound and flowing freely, it will not be tamed like the rest of her body. As it flies and whips through the air during Leahey's convulsions, or spills dramatically about her head when she descends to the floor, its indiscreet and thoroughly wanton movement becomes a metaphor for female resistance against imposed expectations (including, presumably, in dance).

I just wish this wasn't delivered so literally. And also that the piece built to a point where Leahey really showed us what she could do when fully untethered. As it is, the score, as it progresses, has Leahey increasingly throw off the shackled arm holds of the four core poses; but there is no real indication of where she might go from there. Her arms ascend by her sides in that tentative forward lunge, hinting that she might take flight. But for now she remains at the threshold.

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Words in Motion at The Chan Centre

Yesterday evening I hiked it out to UBC's Chan Centre in order to take in a unique evening of words and dance. Words in Motion is a co-presentation with The Dance Centre that pairs three Vancouver writers with three local choreographers. Over the past year the artists have been working together, as well as with different dancers, designers, and musicians, to explore what happens when language and narrative are translated in and through the body. I have been peripherally involved in the last phase of the series' development as I had initially been asked to lead a book club in which interested audience members would read the specific works of literatures being adapted prior to the staged performances. That didn't work out as planned; however, I still got to sit in on a couple of rehearsals, as well as attend the filming of the artist conversations that precede each piece, which provided some unique insights into each of the creative processes.

The first pairing on the program was between poet and novelist Aislinn Hunter and dancer and choreographer Anusha Fernando. The text being interpreted was Hunter's dense and complex novel The World Before Us, which explores the connections between Jane, an archivist working in present-day London, and two sets of events that happened in Yorkshire in the recent and far past--both of which haunt Jane in different ways. Fernando is trained in Bharata Natyam, a form of Indian classical dance that is based on a storytelling tradition anchored in a specific repertoire of gestures and poses. Fernando combines this repertoire with the somatic practices of Tai Chi and Yoga to explore dynamics of spatial distance and proximity and the temporal flow of energy between herself and her two fellow dancers (Louise Ettling and Kelly Maclean). Additionally, the recorded voice of Veda Hille reading the prologue from the novel acts as a verbal score that the dancers, through their movement combinations and poses, sometimes enact more mimetically and sometimes more abstractly.

In the second pairing playwright and memoirist Carmen Aguirre reads her short story "Open Fire" live on stage while choreographer and dancer Olivia C. Davies, joined by fellow performers Alejandra Miranda and Sindy Angel, physicalize its action and themes in a parallel kinetic register. Aguirre, an acclaimed actor, has amazing stage presence and a powerful voice, and it was fascinating watching and listening to her as she responded to the dancers in real-time--and vice-versa. However, a side-effect of this staging choice was that the movement mostly came across as quite literal and illustrative, rather than exploiting the productive gaps or intervals when the same story is translated from one medium to another.

Finally, choreographer Paras Terezakis chose to work with Nancy Lee's short story collection Dead Girls. Drawing from different images and phrases in the book (as well as the book itself as object), Terezakis conjures a physical environment that consciously explores the interplay between and mutability of representational and non-representational forms. To this end, the hundreds of styrofoam cups scattered across the stage floor at the start of the piece (and upon which dancer Michelle Lui lies prone) evoke the chalk outline of a dead body on the street; but they will also eventually be stacked into various towers that suggest a scale architectural model of an urban landscape. Similarly, the dancers (Lui, joined by Thoenn Glover and Arash Khakpour) partner in ways that speak to different entanglements based on obligation or indebtedness or violence or love. However, Terezakis' juxtapositions between bold externally-directed physicality and small and tender moments of stilled self-care (captured for us via video) are equally evocative of how the embodied language of dance can capture the tone and emotional textures of a literary work in non-expository way.

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PuSh 2016: Relative Collider

My last show at this year's PuSh Festival was the conceptual dance piece Relative Collider, a collaboration between the dancer and choreographer Liz Santoro and the theatre artist and software engineer Pierre Godard. A co-presentation with The Dance Centre, the piece combines theoretical principles from physics with different mathematical and linguistic structures. On the one hand rigorously formal, the work is also a thrilling display of technical and bodily capacity from within a strictly defined system.

Part of that system has to do with the look of the space, which given the white Marley, the bright stage lights, and the pedestal stage left supporting a lone MacBook computer, resembles an Apple Store. Into this space march Godard and Santoro and her two fellow dancers (Cynthia Koppe and Stephen Thompson). Godard steps behind the computer and hits a key. A metronome's amplified counts start to sound. The three dancers, standing in a small semi-circle just to the right of Godard remain impassive. Soon, however, their feet and knees begin to pulse in time to the metronome. Just when one thinks one has the pattern--left, right, left, left, right--the dancers appear to switch things up, holding one leg flexed for an extra count, or reversing the order of the leg pulses. And then, all of sudden, they stop. Except that they haven't exactly. One of the dancers slowly splays one hand, another leans forward and twists her torso, and so on. Godard calls out a count of eight over the metronome, and then they're off with the leg pulses again.

And so things continue, with the intricate micro-movements of the dancers' legs eventually giving way to hops and skips and also at various moments being counterpointed with unison sequences of deconstructed vogue-like hand and arm gestures. Trying to figure out where and when these sequences occur, and what relation they have to each other, is part of the joyful kinaesthetic and intellectual surprise of this piece, which moves itself--and us--into a whole other realm when Godard starts to call out different words and phrases, while still rhythmically adhering to the timing of the metronome and a strict eight-count structure. This becomes the cue for the dancers to improvise with what they can do with their bodies from within this structure, the measured and controlled steps giving way to bold leaps and pirouettes, the tight-to-the-torso hand and arm work erupting into sweeping waves and fist pumps.

It's exhilarating to watch, a kind of danced version of entropy as Richard suggested to myself and Ziyian (who was sitting next to us) after the performance was over. Which I interpreted to mean in the case of this work that as we were witnessing the collapse of a choreographic system we were simultaneously discovering its constancy.

P.

Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 4

Our meeting yesterday, which I had to duck out of early, was mostly an excited debrief from last week's interview with Rob. It's amazing how this one conversation has already sparked so many ideas for possible performance elements, including what choreographic objects and material ephemera from recent Vancouver dance history we may have with us on stage (e.g. that mysterious other half of Monumental's original cut-up scrim). Also on the table: a live feed and/or recorded video of recreated backstage moments (which has, of course, instantly become another required interview question, along with "Where did you first show work?," and, devilishly from Alexa, "Who made you want to quit dancing?").

Justine also suggested that we begin tracking from this moment forward our own ongoing daily movements with and through the dance community, from the coffee with person X, or the lobby conversation with person Y, or the class with person Z. This will then provide a temporal and experiential anchor in the present for our historical recovery of the city's recent dance past.

We also decided that we might as well begin our rhizomatic map, populating it to start with the names mentioned by Rob and then radiating things out from there with each subsequent interview. This immediately led to some grand ideas about what the final installation version of this project element might look like, with it potentially spanning the entire stairwell of The Dance Centre, and with viewers, like Theseus chasing after Ariadne's dropped thread, literally traipsing from floor to floor to follow different connections.

Except in this case the whole point would be to get lost in rather than make one's way out of the labyrinth.

P.

PuSh 2016: Le Temps scellé

Nacera Belaza's Le Temps scellé, on at the Dance Centre through this Friday in a co-presentation with the PuSh Festival, is a subtle and hypnotic work that expands one's felt experience of time and space. Over the course of its 45 minutes, I was transported into a state of blissful and contemplative suspension, a floating of the mind and body above the dailiness and frenetic pace of clock and calendar time and into that strangely timeless present of performance.

The piece begins in semi-darkness. From this gloaming we catch glimpses of a figure slowly moving in space, the holographic outline of limbs and hips as much a denial as a confirmation of some embodied presence. As the intoxicating sound score (which layers gospel and rhythm and blues and chanting) starts to increase in volume, so does the light brighten and expand to fill more of the stage. Likewise Belaza's movements begin to take on more volume and energy, eddying out from her core in rhythmically undulating waves to fill the space around her. Grounding her practice in traditional Sufi movement philosophy, Belaza slows down and even deconstructs the turns of dervish dancing; but she doesn't abandon the centred axis of the body upon which those turns are based, nor the emptied out state of inner meditative awareness to which they are in service. However, just as we begin to give ourselves over to Belaza's lucubratory extension of this bodily embrace, she dials things down again, softening both the sound and lights.

It's at this point, when one might logically think the performance is over, that something magical happens. Belaza's sister Dalila slowly enters from upstage left, a lazily advancing spectral presence who, we soon discover, will take over Nacera's solo. Again, we are wont to doubt what we have just seen, but in the piece's third and final movement these two apparitions dance a duet together, their bodies now fully perceptually graspable--and as much because of how, up until this point, we have been made to register kinetically their absence as much as their presence.

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