Arts Umbrella Season Finale at the Playhouse

Yesterday afternoon Richard and I took in Arts Umbrella Dance Company's annual Season Finale at the Vancouver Playhouse. As with past shows, it was a bit of a mixed bag, with the younger apprentice company in need of a pleasing end-of-year showcase for their parents, but not always up to the complexities of the choreography.

Three current Ballet BC dancers--Livona Ellis, Andrew Bartee, and Kristen Wicklund--all had pieces on the program for these younger dancers, and all three were rather formal toe shoe and tights classical compositions. Ellis's "To the Last," set to Gabriel Fauré's Requiem, was the best of the lot, but it still left me questioning the wisdom of setting this kind of work on dancers who at this point in their careers have neither the technique nor the strength to execute it satisfyingly.

The senior company fared much better in contemporary works by Cayetano Soto, Michael Schumacher (a fantastic cell phone piece called "Subtext"), Mats Ek, Crystal Pite, James Kudelka, and Wen Wei Wang, whose "Fremd" closed out the afternoon's proceedings. "Fremd" owes a clear debt to William Forsythe's "In the middle, somewhat elevated," down to its pounding sore, the off-kilter axes and non-traditional facings, and the rival ballerinas alone on stage shifting from foot to foot and sizing each other up. Regardless of its origins or influences, the piece allows the company's older dancers, alone and in pairs and trios, to shine, demonstrating their acceleration and speed, their impressive extension, and their overall theatricality.

One thing that rankled yesterday was the amount of distracting commotion in the audience during the performances. To be sure, fidgety pre-teens are only going to be able to sit still for so long. But the rustling of candy wrappers and the slurping on drinks straws was almost as loud as the music being played during each piece. Some of the parents were just as bad, ignoring the announcement about no cell phones and taking the opportunity to catch up on their texts when their own kids were not on stage. It was most annoying and makes me think that this is the last such event I'll be going to.

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Dorrance Dance at the Vancouver Playhouse

Last night DanceHouse's 2017/18 season concluded with a triple bill by Dorrance Dance, the award-winning tap company overseen by the choreographer and artistic director Michelle Dorrance. I was a bit dubious about sitting through 75 minutes of continuous tap, my usual threshold for the form being a few minutes of thematically juxtapositional razzle-dazzle within an otherwise rigorously contemporary work (as in DanceHouse's previous presentation of Betroffenheit), or else the paced out show-stopping routines of classic musical theatre (e.g. 42nd Street). But it seems that Dorrance's MacArthur Genius Grant is well-earned. Her aesthetic is one that marries deep respect for tap's history and traditions with a desire to push the form technically and conceptually.

This means, among other things, challenging the notion that it is only the soles of a tap shoe that can produce sound. In the opening number on last night's program, Jungle Blues, I was absolutely floored (the metaphor seems appropriate) when one of the company dancers first dragged the tops of their shoes along the parquet floor, producing a noise like a needle scraping across a vinyl record, and sending a corresponding shiver of delight down my spine. In this ensemble piece, set to a classic song by Jelly Roll Morton, the dancers alternate between unison choreography and character-based solo improvisations, with Dorrance herself playing up a gangly white-girl persona, all ungraceful angles and splayed knees. But my eyes were mostly on everyone's feet, watching how long someone's remained on demi-point (and sometimes full-on point), how often another's buckled over onto their sides, and so on.

If classic tap is all about the syncopated relationship between rhythm and gravity, such that we are made to marvel at how a person doing a freewheeling, double wing step, with both arms likewise windmilling the air, is able to remain upright, Dorrance is not afraid to push those limits--literally floorward. Her tap choreography is most interesting when it explores the off-axis and when, in doing so, it traces a genealogy between tap and a more contemporary form like break-dancing. This came to the fore especially in the concluding piece on the program, Myelination, which is an anatomical term that refers to the maturation and sheathing of nerve cells, allowing nerve impulses to travel more quickly. One can see how this applies to the hyper-kineticism of tap, but in this 30 minute piece with live music Dorrance also demonstrates its relevance to B-boying. Two of her dancers alternate between tap shoes and high tops, and some of the most innovative choreography relates to a sequence of intertwined prone legwork between this pair.

In between these pieces, Dorrance programmed a short but deeply affecting trio, Three to One, featuring herself and dancers Byron Tittle and Matthew "Megawatt" West. It begins with the three dancers, dressed in matching black cloth garments, standing side by side in a rectangle of downstage white light. Dorrance, wearing tap shoes, is positioned between the two men, who are both barefoot. As Dorrance begins to shuffle and click her feet together, almost like Dorothy seeking to return to Kansas from Oz, the men also start to move, sometimes falling into step with Dorrance, at other times breaking into quick, darting contraction and release movements of the hips and torsos and legs that are reminiscent of traditional African dance. Indeed, it is hard--especially once the two men exit the stage and Dorrance continues with a virtuosic solo that sees her alternate between retreating into the darkness of upstage and reemerging into the downstage light--not to read this work as an express comment on the specific African-American lineage of tap, as well as of so much American social dance more generally (from jive to hip hop).

This is hardly surprising coming from a choreographer as intelligent as Dorrance, who in addition to her years of tap training also designed her own undergraduate curriculum at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. According to Wikipedia, her courses focused on concepts of race in America in relation to democratic culture. If you're going to devote your life to reclaiming and celebrating tap as a form, this makes total sense.

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Betroffenheit at the Playhouse

Betroffenheit, co-created by Kidd Pivot's Crystal Pite and Electric Company Theatre's Jonathon Young, was first presented as part of the Panamania Festival accompanying Toronto's Pan Am and Para Pan Am Games back in the summer of 2015. It's been touring the world to acclaim ever since. Like most in Vancouver, I first saw the show when it was presented by DanceHouse at the Vancouver Playhouse in February 2016 (you can read my original impressions here). Now, just before it embarks on the final leg of its three-year world tour, DanceHouse has brought the show back to the same venue. I was there once again last night.

In part this was practical: I've updated an essay I've written about Pite and Kidd Pivot to include a discussion of Betroffenheit; and I'll also be speaking about the work at the University of Stockholm in May. So I wanted to ensure that I hadn't made any egregious errors in my representation of the work, particularly with respect to its complex distribution of the human voice. But really I just wanted to be swept up once again by the amazing on-stage world that Pite and Young have created, and to revel in the sublime movement of the performers. On both counts I was not disappointed. Christopher Hernandez, replacing Bryan Arias (who I think is premiering a new work of his own in New York), fits into the ensemble seamlessly. Hernandez is about double the size of Arias, and so this does change the partnering with Cindy Salgado somewhat; but his solo that opens Act 2 is still a marvel of off-axis lightness and grace. Otherwise, all of the other performers seem to have grown more deeply into and with their parts; none of the movement felt mechanical or marked, and there were new expressive details in the choreography that I had the pleasure of discovering--such as the little foot wiggles that Tiffany Tregarthen does at one point when she's turned upside down in her role as the devilish monkey on Young's character's back in Act 1. Ditto David Raymond's incredibly controlled staccato work with his arms and fingers during the therapist scene. And what I'll call Salgado's breathing solo in Act 2 was deeply affecting, the simple inflation and deflation of her shoulders speaking volumes about the bodily manifestations of grief.

As the blue silk suited co-hosts of our show-within-a-show, Young and Jermaine Spivey are by now expertly attuned to each other's rhythms, both in terms of the movement and the lipsynched dialogue that they share. I remain amazed by Young's technical facility with Pite's complex choreography, but it was Spivey whom I couldn't take my eyes off of. If anything, it seems like his body and limbs have grown even more elastic and liquid; the flipping of his legs backwards over the arm of Young, or later their wave-like rippling along the floor, seems absolutely of a piece with Young's floppy manipulations of his puppet stand-in. Likewise, the speed and precision of Spivey's turns and the air he catches while flipping his body through space seem to defy the laws of physics. Needless to say, the solo by Spivey that concludes the work remains a devastatingly gorgeous summation of the archive of grief and trauma that has been passed from body to body in the preceding two hours.

Of course there were aspects of the work that I'd forgotten about, mostly relating to the text and how personally self-accusatory it is. Betroffenheit both is and isn't Young's story, but in abstracting his and his family's tragedy onto this fictional world he hasn't spared himself a nightly real-time examination pertaining to his grief and guilt. Mostly this comes in the form of subtle repetitions of phrases that are inflected with telling pronouns ("Is he at fault?," "I know she...," "They're in there," "They're in this"). But there are also just incredibly raw and open displays of pain, and the failing of others that is a consequence of this pain--as with the phone call from Mom. Somehow I'd also forgotten the desperately uncomprehending solo that Tregarthen performs in Act 2, her final pose--arms bent in front of her, as if cradling an absent child--giving me new context as to why her character is Young's chief tormenter in Act 1.

For all of the very real sorrow upon which Betroffenheit is built, the work is also filled with joy. To me, the piece is the danced equivalent of one of my favourite poems, Hart Crane's "Chaplinesque." There Crane writes about how, in the wake of all the torment and unhappiness the world throws at us, no matter how the game of life smirks at us, "we make our meek adjustments," we find "our random consolations." Because "what blame to us if the heart live on"? And it does. That was clear last night during the curtain calls. The love on stage, in the audience, and between the two was physically palpable.

What's more, everyone gets to renew the affair next year when Pite, Young, the dancers, and virtually the entire Betroffenheit creative team return to the DanceHouse stage with the world premiere of a new work of dance-theatre, Revisor. I spoke briefly with composer Owen Belton while exiting the theatre, and he said they have already been workshopping the piece at Banff. It will apparently be something of a political satire. Given the new Cold War we suddenly find ourselves in, it should be timely.

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VIDF 2018: Shen Wei Dance Arts at the Playhouse

The 2018 edition of the Vancouver International Dance Festival is underway and last night at the Playhouse saw the Vancouver premiere of two remarkable works by Shen Wei Dance Arts. In her curtain speech VIDF co-producer Barbara Bourget said that she and her VIDF and life partner Jay Hirabayashi first saw Rite of Spring and Folding at the Montpellier Dance Festival in 2005 and that they'd been trying ever since to bring the works to local audiences. Lucky for us their persistence paid off, as together the pieces serve to showcase choreographer Shen Wei's eclectic intercultural and cross-disciplinary influences, combining the formalist rigour of American modernist dance technique (he trained at the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab following his move to New York in 1995) with the ritual compositional drama of Chinese opera.

The first piece on the program was Rite of Spring. It uses the famous Stravinksy score, but transposed to two pianos. The result preserves the pounding rhythmic dissonance of the original music, but stripped of any expressionistic embellishments that might come from string and wind and percussion instruments. Likewise, Shen Wei chooses to ignore the narrative of ritual sacrifice, abstracting the tension in the music into formal patterns of stillness and commotion, striving and collapse. That starts with the very opening of the piece, with the dancers emerging one by one from the wings and amassing in silence on either side of the stage (there are eleven in total, although a twelfth will later be added, perhaps Shen Wei's one sly and McGuffinesque allusion to a "chosen one"). In turn, the dancers then each walk stiffly and slowly to a different spot on the stage, which is painted in a swirl of white lines that matches the cross-hatching of markings on the dancers' costumes and that suggests a grid that has been exploded into broken pathways. For, indeed, once the last dancer has taken her place, the others will begin to locomote like remote-controlled chess pieces along different diagonals and axes, gradually accelerating their pace and barely avoiding collision until the walking patterns are suddenly disrupted from within when one of the male dancers throws his body through space and tumbles across the floor like an acrobat.

I can't remember if it's at this point that the music comes in, but hereafter the stage is mostly a riot of asynchronous movement, with Shen Wei especially adept at matching the various crescendos and diminuendos of the musical score with startling kinetic eruptions: as when the dancers propel themselves from a sitting position vertically into the air, or when they repeat an amazing scissor-kick sequence from the floor. In this version of the Rite, the group is not seeking to avoid being swept up into the maelstrom; they are moving with all of their energy and force closer and and closer towards it, to the point where, at the end of the piece, forming a circle out of all of the angular chaos that has preceded this moment, they become the collective whirling eye of the storm.

Folding couldn't be more different in its choreography and tone and pacing. And also its music--which combines a bell and string quartet by John Tavener with traditional Buddhist chants. The work unfurls like a strange dream, and it disappears like one too. Key to this is Shen Wei's canny use of lighting (he is clearly an adept student of Alwin Nikolais in this regard). After the curtains part, still in dim half-light, we see two figures float onto stage, again from opposite wings; they glide upstage and then disappear. This pattern repeats a few times as the lights slowly come up to full and we gradually take in who these otherworldly creatures are: wearing long red skirts, their torsos and arms and faces covered in white body paint, their heads prosthetically elongated with padding that makes them look like aliens from outer space. Eventually five (or maybe it was six) of these figures will cluster upstage right, their backs to the audience, where they will begin a simple distributed sequence of rises and falls, interrupted by the occasional dramatic pirouette, their floor-length skirts kicking out violently from underneath them like a whiplash of blood. As this is happening, couples clad in green begin emerging, the upper bodies of the women seeming to arc out, as if surgically attached, from the upper bodies of the men. Shen Wei doesn't seek to explain how these two groups are related; he leaves it to us to make our own connections, to as it were engage in the process of folding and unfolding inside from outside (and it's really impossible for me to not view this piece within a Deleuzian framework). In so doing, it behooves us to simply give ourselves over to the visual and kinetic pleasure of the gorgeous tableaux that Shen Wei creates on stage.

And the unfolding of the last of these is perhaps the most wondrous of them all. It begins with a trail of the red-skirted beings floating in a line on stage, both hands placed gracefully on their thighs. As each member of the group begins to approach centre stage, the right hand slowly moves up to the chest as the head is then thrown back, as if each dancer is making supplication to--or seeking benediction from--the gods. Out of this group one of the dancers, Alex Speedie (also a particular standout in Rite), moves further downstage and begins a slow sinuous solo that for me was all about the breathtakingly boneless floating of his arms and hands and fingers through space. It was one of the most powerful kinaesthetic representations of pure weightlessness that I've ever experienced, and it will stay with me for a long time. As will the ending of the piece, which sees the stage returned to dim half-light, the rest of the group coming together in a mass as Speedie continues his solo, and eventually ascending on risers that we did not know were there into the heavens. Utter magic.

Less enchanting, however, was the size of the house last night. These are two major works of dance genius that Vancouver audiences absolutely must see. One more performance remains tonight, and I urge folks to drop everything and buy a ticket.

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PuSh 2018: Some Hope for the Bastards at the Playhouse

I have renewed my love affair with Montreal choreographer-musician Frédérik Gravel. I fell hard for him following the premiere of Usually Beauty Fails at the 2014 PuSh Festival. But when he returned to the city in 2016 for the Dancing on the Edge Festival, I found the piece he presented, Thus Spoke..., to lack coherence and to border on self-indulgence. Some Hope for the Bastards, which opened this year's PuSh Festival last night at the Vancouver Playhouse, showcases Gravel at his most sublimely seductive, constructing an epic dance marathon in which the point of the party is less who's left standing at the end than the summation of highs and lows along the way.

When we enter the auditorium, Gravel's nine dancers are already lounging on the stage, sipping from bottles of Corona. They watch us as we take our seats, sometimes interacting with us (SFU theatre student Nicola Rough somehow made it on to the stage itself and was handed a beer), coming and going at random, but definitely aware--and maybe even amused--by our presence. At a certain point, with the house lights remaining up, the dancers' apparent pre-show casualness morphs slowly into performance mode, their poses slipping into stylized and increasingly exaggerated contortions, like time-lapse versions of drunken partygoers falling off their chairs and into a stupefied tableau. Which is in fact how this sequence ends, the dancers ranged with splayed legs and outstretched arms and rubberized heads and torsos among the plastic chairs that line the stage. It is at this point that guitarist Gravel, who in the middle of this sequence had emerged from the stage right wing with his fellow bandmates (a drummer and keyboardist/singer) to ascend the upstage bandstand and take up instruments, addresses the audience. He welcomes us to the start of the festival, worries about the responsibility of opening it, that that's a very adult thing, that after the assumption of such adult responsibility all there is left to do is die. Then he tells us the show is pretty long, that he doesn't mind if we leave before it's over, and that now they're going to start over because in making the show he couldn't decide how to begin.

This second beginning takes place to a recorded excerpt from what I think is a Bach misericordia, to which the dancers ever so gradually start to pulse their pelvises as Gravel gradually overlays more propulsive electronic beats. The sonic and kinetic marrying of sex and death, coming after Gravel's speech about adult responsibility, suggests that if all we do is live to die, then we might as well try to enjoy ourselves along the way. Indeed, the metaphor of life as an all-night dance party--filled with ecstatic highs and crashing lows, pockets of stillness amidst a non-stop whirl of movement--is what sustains this work conceptually, tonally, and stylistically. It explains, for example, the almost-but-not-quite hook-ups that occur as the dancers' gyrating hips lead them towards and then away from potential partners; the look-at me solos that occur soon after as different members of the ensemble preen or crash about the stage, or monkey wildly behind one another; and those moments of tender connection when couples do manage to form, even if only tentatively. That happens, for example, in a beautiful stuttered, bone-bending waltz between the tallest female and male dancers (the latter an incredibly willowy Ichabod Crane figure who nevertheless has utterly fluid liquid limbs) early on in the piece, and also later during a largely stilled rehearsal for touching among eight of the dancers as the ninth performs a reaching solo around them.

As with dance parties, there are also in Some Hope various time-outs, in which both the band members and the dancers take breaks and leave the stage, or else sit off to the sides watching as others work to sustain the energy. These moments, in which we in the audience also get a chance to catch our breaths, are juxtaposed to the relentlessly propulsive group movement sequences, with Gravel using a series of staggered canons to throw his dancers in and out of syncopated unison. And I do mean throw: the dancers fling their bodies onto the floor; whip themselves into twisted lunges; fall to their knees. My head exploded just thinking about the complexity of the dancers' counts, and one could forgive some necessary spotting among members of the group. Because absolute precision is not the point. Indeed, when a version of this choreography repeats at the end of the piece--in a coda I'm not entirely sure is necessary, especially after we arrive back at the core beat pulsing through their bodies with which we started--the dancers seem to be given license to fall into and out of rhythm when and with whom they see fit. That's part of the entrainment of life itself. Sometimes we're in step with others, and sometimes we're not. Sometimes we move this way, and sometimes that way.

The point is to not stop moving.

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The Marriage of Figaro at the Vancouver Playhouse

The Vancouver Opera has just wrapped up its inaugural festival format--in which it has moved its operations from a full season of stand-alone productions spread out over the course of a calendar year to a two and a half week festival incorporating three works in repertory and a number of parallel concerts, talks, installations, and related events. Richard and I finally got to see one of the main stage productions yesterday afternoon when we attended one of the final performances of The Marriage of Figaro, which was playing at the Vancouver Playhouse.

I have to say that this production, following upon the PuSh Festival's very successful presentation of Third World Bunfight's version of Verdi's Macbeth, has confirmed that the Playhouse is now my preferred venue to see opera in the city. The intimacy of the space makes the music and singing feel at once warmer and fuller, and the action just generally more alive. Additionally, given that Mozart's score (which is closer to chamber opera than the grand 19th-century romantic works of Verdi) calls for the recitative parts of the libretto to be sung to a harpsichord, being that much closer to the orchestra means that every note feels that much more resonant.

Of course proximity also means that the design of your production needs to hold up to thorough visual scrutiny. Happily on that front this version exceeds expectations. Director Rachel Peake has opted for a modern-dress take on the comic plot, but one that allows for a few historical anachronisms. As such, Drew Facey's gorgeous set--which morphs over the course of the opera's four acts from the interior of servant Susanna's chambers to those of her mistress, Countess Almaviva, to the grand hall and finally the exterior gardens of the estate--references 18th-century neoclassicism in its pediments and brocaded walls, but it is also sleekly and unfussily modern, with minimal furnishings and, most arrestingly, a mirrored floor for the interior scenes. The costumes, by hot young Albertan designer Sid Neigum, alternate between finely tailored monochromes for the lovers Susanna and Figaro to riotous patterns for the buffon characters of Cherubino and Barbarina, and from the plainly utilitarian (the quasi-military fatigues worn by the Count) to the overly decorative (the hooped dress worn by the Countess in Act 3). All of this is beautifully lit by lighting designer John Webber.

The performances were also uniformly excellent. The new paradigm in opera these days is for singers, no matter how fine the voice, to also be actors, and Peake draws fine comic texture--and timing--from the entire cast. Because this is opera buffa, most of the characters are broad and recognizable types; nevertheless, for us to be seduced by the sentiment of the arias, not to mention accept the implausibility of the plot, we have to believe the Countess' pain and the see-saw outrage of Figaro and Susanna at each other's apparent infidelity. On this front, the characters' various asides--a key part of the myriad stratagems and deceptions and counterplots set in motion in this opera--are especially well handled, not least in the opening act's catfight between Susanna and Marcellina, the latter seeking Figaro as her own boy-toy, only to have it revealed in Act 3 that she is his long-lost mother!

For me, the women in this production outshone the men in terms of overall vocal quality. Caitlin Wood as Susanna, Leslie Ann Bradley as Countess Almaviva, and the wonderful Mireille Lebel as a willowy and physically elastic Cherubino were special standouts. Among the men I was most captivated by Phillip Addis as Count Almaviva, both in terms of singing and acting. Alex Lawrence was suitably dashing as our put-upon hero, Figaro, but he had some trouble with breath in his lower register (which, to be sure, is pretty low given that Figaro is written as a baritone and not a tenor), and there were a few cracks in the upper register as well. But these are minor quibbles and the entire cast and crew are to be commended for this spirited and refreshed take on a classic from the operatic repertoire.

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Dairakudakan's Paradise at The Vancouver Playhouse

In 2015 Jay Hirabayashi and Barbara Bourget welcomed the Japanese butoh company Dairakudakan to the Vancouver International Dance Festival. Their presentation of the wild and surreal Mushi no Hoshi (Space Insect) was a sensation (I wrote about that performance here). Since then Hirabayashi and Bourget have gotten to know the company and its charismatic founder and lead performer, Akaji Maro, quite well, traveling to Japan to train with them and now inviting Dairakudakan back to Vancouver on the occasion of the company's 45th anniversary to present Paradise, their latest full-length work.

In the program notes Maro says that he has no problem imagining what hell looks like. For paradise, however, it's another story. His solution was to begin with the word itself, specifically its Persian etymological root, which means "enclosed garden." This of course synchs up with a Christian cosmology that begins with Adam and Eve romping through an earthly paradise, and that supposedly ends with a rapturous rising of the righteous and redeemed to a heavenly one. However, as Maro additionally notes, in Buddhism another word for hell is Sukhavati, or "Western Paradise." And it is this very dialectical relationship between apparent opposites--heaven and hell, garden and desert, life and death, misery and ecstasy--that constitutes Maro's vision of paradise in this piece.

The work is structured in eight movements. In the first, "Nature," the curtains part to reveal the full company, in traditional white body paint, crouched downstage, a single trembling mass that is punctuated by individual heads every now and then twisting this way and that. Slowly the twenty dancers stand up and fan out in a circle, their bodies attached by chains to the central figure of a green-robed Maro, who had been hidden amongst them, and around whom they now pivot like slaves to an all-powerful god, or maybe just cogs in the wheel of some churning elemental force that needs them as much as they need him. For when the company members eventually release themselves and leave Maro alone on stage dragging his chains about his skirts against a projected backdrop of lush forest he appears like a once mighty tree that is about to teeter and fall.

The piece is filled with stunning imagistic moments that play with both religious and popular conceptions of paradise: two snake-like figures, their bodies wound with rope, who tempt two trios of men and women with forbidden fruit; wooden containers atop which six women contort their bodies, their bottoms at one point pushed skywards by the utterly surprising appearance of six male heads rising up from unseen holes in the boxes and pressing against the women's pelvises; a disco parade of "Club Paradise" revellers roller-skating about the stage; the deaths and burials of these same revellers in a rainstorm of rose petals presided over by Maro; and finally a re-chaining of the entire company to the central figure of Maro, who over the course of this paradisal journey seems to have become unsettled in his being. "Who am I? What am I?," he asks at the end. It's an accounting of self that in many traditions we have to make before being granted access to paradise. But here, in the feverishly imaginative worlds conjured by Maro and Dairakudakan on stage, the suggestion is that such questions are prompted through a by no means benign encounter with paradise itself.

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Alonzo King LINES Ballet at The Playhouse

Vancouver International Dance Festival favourites Alonzo King LINES Ballet are back in town, in residence at the Vancouver Playhouse yesterday evening and tonight following their last visit to the city in 2012. As was the case then, King has brought his trademark melding of classical technique and contemporary expression to a program of two ensemble works that also showcases his and his company members' innate musicality.

The first piece on the program, Shostakovich, is set to four string quartets by the Russian composer, with the dissonant tonality and sharp contrasts between the notes finding kinetic form through the repetition of different patterns of suspension and release. Indeed, the simple act of relevé--further heightened here by the fact that the women are in point shoes--turns into a dramatic precipice from which the dancers, sometimes following and sometimes anticipating the music, alternately launch themselves into space, catching still more air, or else fall back to the ground.

Sand features a contemporary jazz score by Charles Lloyd and Jason Moran and a simple yet wonderfully effective set design by Christopher Haas that is made up of a backdrop of oscillating ropes (and behind which some of the dancers occasionally appear). Across the piece's eight sections the dancers move as individual grains, as composite forms, and as a single mineral mass. The final section, in which company members arrange themselves in different poses of stillness about the stage while watching, along with us, a gorgeous pas de deux performed by Madeline DeVries and Robb Beresford, perfectly captures this idea of granularity, simultaneously embodying proximity and distance.

Of sand it is often said that no two grains are alike, but that when aggregated in a sandbox or on a beach they are indistinguishable. I can think of no better metaphor for the way this company works. Looking at the dancers on stage, for example, one can't help noticing their refreshing racial diversity. But, at the same time, when they move together they become a single--and incredibly fine-tuned--instrument.

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Jessica Lang Dance at The Playhouse

DanceHouse's 2016/17 season launched this past weekend with the Vancouver premiere of Jessica Lang Dance. Not to be confused with the American actress of American Horror Story fame, Lang is a New York-based choreographer (and former Twyla Tharp dancer) who established her eponymous company in 2011 and has since been gaining international notice, having been most recently commissioned by American Ballet Theatre.

For her Vancouver visit Lang offered audiences a mixed repertoire of five pieces. The first was Lines Cubed, from 2012, a Mondrian-like riff on pathways through space that was made up of four colour-coded sections--black, red, yellow, and blue--plus a concluding coda that brought all the different patterns (grids, circles and spirals) together. It was an interesting conceit and the steps were well-executed but I was never emotionally invested. It also felt to me that if Lang was going to be so rigorously formal in her conception of the piece then she shouldn't have introduced dancers in black into the duet she had constructed for the blue section. I get that they were meant to be impediments to the successful completion of the duet, but the unfurling and furling back up of the black crepe paper on stage struck me as altogether unnecessary.

The Calling was a short excerpt from Lang's Splendid Isolation II (2006); it featured company member Julie Fiorenza sheathed in an elegant white dress, the extended length of which spilled about her like flower petals or a rippling moonlit pond on the stage. Working on pointe (I'm assuming), Fiorenza would rise vertically and then sink down at the knees, an effect that because of the dress momentarily gave the illusion that she was sinking through rather than merely into the floor. The short piece ends with the dancer doing a succession of micro-turns, gathering the dress's material inward around her legs like she is a beautiful butterfly going back into its cocoon. Again, it was pretty to look at but did not really engage me in a profound way.

Things got more interesting in Thousand Yard Stare (2015), which I gather was made in consultation with veterans suffering from PSTD. Lang sends her ensemble out on stage in army fatigues, their slow horizontal march backwards and forwards across the stage in formation every now and then arrested mid-movement when one of the dancers holds a raised leg off the floor. Other canon formations evoke images of soldiers burrowing through tunnels or falling against each other in battle. As fascinated as I was by the different bodily structures of support that Lang seemed to be investigating in the context of war, it struck me that the very precision with which she was creating them worked against the idea that in such situations one cannot possibly know at every moment what to do or how to react.

The fourth piece on the program, White (2011), was actually a film. Overlaying different images of bodies moving through space, and using different film speeds, Lang--working with director of photography Shinichi Maruyama and editors Tetsushi Wakasugi and Jackson Notier--was able to convey a sense of kinaesthetic immersion through this work. It segued seamlessly into the final work on the program: i.n.k. (2011) is another collaboration between Lang and Maruyama and Wakasugi and Notier. As washes and droplets of india ink traverse the upstage screen the dancers interact with them, ducking beneath or jumping over them, for example, and through their additional movement across the stage extending the dance that is also happening on the screen. This last piece was by far the most successful of the evening, but even here the concept felt somewhat programmatic. Lang is clearly a choreographer of abundant ideas; I just wish the work was more emotionally involving.

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AUDC's Season Finale at The Playhouse

All through Thursday evening's premiere program of Arts Umbrella Dance Company's Season Finale at the Vancouver Playhouse AUDC Artistic Director Artemis Gordon sat in the back row of the orchestra section in tight conclave with Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar. This of course makes sense given the close ties between the two organizations, with AUDC's pre-professional program now officially serving as the training/feeder school for Ballet BC's apprentice program. Still, what was most interesting to me last night was to see how Molnar's programming choices and her determination to position Ballet BC aesthetically as a contemporary ballet company have clearly had a reciprocal influence on Gordon's repertory choices for this year's AUDC spring graduation program.

How else to explain Ballet BC Resident Choreographer Cayetano Soto leading off the evening with his PAU CLARIS, which puts the male and female members of AUDC's Senior Company in matching black jockey shorts and has them wag their fingers and thrust their hips cheekily to the strains of a Bach concerto? Or, following the second intermission (and continuing the Bach theme), the excerpts from Simone Orlando's Doppeling, first performed by Ballet BC in 2009, and which also features a pan-company costuming conceit in the dancers' matching bobbed wigs? Orlando's deconstructive approach to the gendered dimensions of classical ballet is echoed in the excerpts from Marie Chouinard's bODY_rEMIX/the gOLDBERG vARIATIONS that were performed following the first intermission. Gordon didn't send the women dancers out on stage topless, as Chouinard did in her original staging of the piece; nevertheless, judging by some of the reactions around me it was clear that the iconoclastic Montreal choreographer's approach to point shoes in this piece came as a bit of a shock to some of the ballet moms and dads in the audience. Indeed, in so far as classical steps were part of this mixed bill, they mostly came in the two pieces performed by the apprentice company: Andrew Bartee's Ballet Dance #6 and Monique Proença's Alone in the bright lights of a shattered life.

It wasn't an all Bach evening last night. Aszure Barton's BUSK is set to a pounding Israeli folk-rock score and featured relentlessly physical hip-hop inspired choreography, as well as an amazing concluding solo for stand-out dancer Zander Constant, whose incredibly fluid torso and longing arm reach combined to breathtaking effect at several points. The fact that Barton's piece reminded me a bit of the work of Hofesh Schecter and Ohad Naharin is notable given that another Israeli choreographer, Sharon Eyal, is included in the Friday and Saturday programming. That incredible get no doubt had much to do with Molnar's inclusion of Eyal's Bill on Ballet BC's season-ending Program 3 earlier this month.

I also very much enjoyed the senior dancers in James Kudelka's salsa-drenched (and self-reflexively titled) choreography, David Raymond's gothic Murmuration, and excerpts from Crystal Pite's Emergence, which notably focused on that piece's solo studies and duets rather than its large group unison sections--and, in so doing, allowed one to see Pite's remarkable attention to detail in, for example, a dancer's arachnid-like spread of her arms behind her bent back. Likely the choice of excerpts from Emergence had something to do with Pite's concluding contribution to Season Finale, The Paris Sessions, which together with Lesley Telford's Only who is left, was the highlight of the evening for me.

Continuing the method she employed with her award-winning Polaris, which she workshopped with Arts Umbrella, Modus Operandi and SFU student dancers before taking the piece to Sadler's Wells, Pite has been working with AUDC's Senior Company on studies for a commission from the Paris Opera Ballet. And judging from what we saw last night, this new work will also continue Polaris' experiments with scale, using upwards of forty dancers to redefine what group dancing looks like on stage. In Pite's hands, individual bodies don't blur into invisibility through homogenous unison; instead, they become part of a collective bodily unit, each contributing through precise spatial massings and intricately timed sequential micro-movements and ripples, tableaux and shapes that are visually arresting. Last night I saw a tidal wave, a whale spine, and so much more. And all, again like Polaris, undertaken with incredible sensitivity to the music--in this case a version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons (by Max Richter) unlike any I've heard.

Telford also knows how to mass dancers' bodies on stage. But if Pite's work here is about harmonious flow, Telford leans (quite literally) toward the off-axis. In Only who is left, she sends her dancers out in matching shimmery shifts and has them strut and preen and pose in a horizontal line like so many Atlases come to life from a Greek frieze. Later she'll clump the dancers together and have them jerk and stutter step their heels noisily into the floor as they move as a unit across the stage, the thoroughly ungraceful and off-beat movements providing a compelling counter-image to how dancers are expected to move and sound. The corralling or herding of bodies in Telford's work is compounded even further by the fact that at one point Constant appears with a bull horn; he mostly just whistles into it whimsically. But the device's appearance, especially when read alongside the epigraph Telford includes in the program, reminds one that as is so often the case these days when bodies gather together in public--and often in protest--there is almost always someone who wants to disperse them.

For now, however, lets just celebrate the fact that Telford and Pite have both decided to make Vancouver their dance homes, and that these two talented home-grown choreographers are sharing their gifts with the city's next generation of dancers.

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Memory Wax/Retazos at VIDF

Last night's audience at the Vancouver Playhouse for VIDF's presentation of the international collaboration between Sweden's Memory Wax and Cuba's Retazos was woefully small. That's a shame, because folks missed some amazing dancing and equally inventive stage theatre.

The first of the two pieces on the program, Possible Impossible, begins with a nattily dressed balladeer enchanting us, and the space into which he enters (which includes a table, a wardrobe on wheels and a couple of empty door frames), with a song of welcome. Soon he is joined on stage by seven other performers (four men and three women), who begin to bang out a syncopated drum beat on the table. (The table must have been amplified by an overhead mike given the resulting resonance in the theatre.) The rhythm begins to overtake a couple of the dancers, who start to shake their hips and shimmy their shoulders as they move downstage. But this is only the beginning of the carnival atmosphere, and over the next 50 minutes the dancers will don white masks and blond fright wings as, drawing additionally from traditions of clowning and mime, they conjure various scenarios of encounter staged at the thresholds of reality and fantasy. To this end, those moveable empty door frames become sites for some uncanny mirrored partnering, and the table acts as a rostrum for a group sequence of combative jostling that reminded me very much of Kurt Jooss's The Green Table.

The second piece on the program is called Crisálida, and it begins with a lone female dancer perched on a chair centre stage. Her back is to us, and all we see is her long legs extended in the air as she cycles through a sequence of developpés, criss-crossed knee folds, single and double leg extensions, and of course an impossibly wide mid-air split. During the course of this a male dancer enters and attempts to partner the woman, or at the very least to arrest the movement of her legs. But she will have none of this, her legs refusing to be directed by the man, and instead very much directing him, including when they land on his chest and push him away. All of this is the prelude to a partnering sequence featuring the piece's full complement of eight dancers, and which was refreshing for its mostly genderless choreography: the women lift the men at various points and there are several same-sex combinations. The verticality of this section is contrasted with the horizontality of the hip-hop infused floorwork that follows, which is rendered all the more visually stunning by the fact that it is captured by a live video feed and projected onto the upstage screen, so that at various moments it looks like the dancers, in their different formations, are hanging precariously from a wall or the side of a building. The piece concludes with more partnering, only this time enhanced by the fact that all the dancers are additionally moving with and around their own chair.

The collaboration between these two companies has certainly yielded stunning results. I hope there will be more to come, and that next time they come through Vancouver they will get the sizeable audience they deserve.

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Betroffenheit at the Playhouse

Betroffenheit, the much-anticipated dance-theatre collaboration between Kidd Pivot and the Electric Company Theatre, finally arrived in Vancouver this past weekend following its acclaimed debut during the PanAm Games in Toronto last summer. Given how widely the personal backstory to the piece's development is known in the local performance community, and given as well the professional pedigrees of its two primary collaborators, Jonathon Young and Crystal Pite, the stakes around what the work would deliver were extremely high. Happily, Betroffenheit, which was presented by DanceHouse, more than measures up, both in constellating with such intelligence and artistic rigour ideas and concepts and emotions that are more than the sum of Young's personal tragedy, and in signalling an exciting new turn in Pite's career not just as a choreographer, but as a stage director.

As Young noted in conversation with Pite at a public forum earlier in the day, the seeds of Betroffenheit came from the compulsive writing he was doing in an attempt to gain some control over the traumatic loss of his daughter. He showed these pages to Pite, hoping that she might agree to stage them. The title comes from Ann Bogart's And Then, We Act, and refers to a state of bewildered shock in the wake of an event, a space that exposes the limits of language to make sense of experience, a space of "fertile and palpable silence" where, in Bogart's words, "everything is up for grabs." A space, in other words, of theatrical imagination--one where social reality can be explored in an other, more heightened register. And, indeed, it was only after the two artists had begun collaborating that they discovered that the story they were telling was about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and related issues of addiction.

In the world of Betroffenheit these issues are translated, initially, into the hollowed out world of an empty sound stage that but for the electrical cables retreating like garden snakes before our eyes soon after the curtains part could double for an antiseptic psych ward (the amazing set is by Jay Gower Taylor). Our protagonist, Young, cowers in a corner; soon we hear him--or rather sometimes him and sometimes him in voiceover--having a conversation with himself about what he is not to do: that he shouldn't respond; a system is in place; the user only gets used. Young's interlocutors multiply, his voice distributed across any number of objects on stage--including, most compellingly, a HAL-like amplifier whose mechanical responses to Young's questions seem oddly comforting. Eventually, the narrative voice of Young's text gets distributed across other bodies as well, with Jermaine Spivey first showing up in a blue leisure suit and face paint to take over the amplifier's side of the conversation through the embodied technique of lipsynching, a choreographing of the voice that in Pite's hands is as precise and accomplished as the gestural phrasing and orchestration of dancers' limbs that accompanies it.

Spivey plays Young's alter ego; his, we might say, is the voice of Young's subconscious, or perhaps more properly, altered consciousness. For it is Spivey's role to lure Young back to the razz-ma-tazz world of "showtime," the imagined variety show that is Young's drug of choice and out of which Pite conjures spectacular tap and salsa sequences that wonderfully showcase the additional dance talents of Out Innerspace's David Raymond and Kidd Pivot regulars Bryan Arias and Cindy Salgado, respectively. Young and Spivey also engage in a charming vaudeville-style double act, the patter of their lipsynched conversation as diverting and seemingly harmless as their accompanying soft-shoe routine. However, in conversation earlier in the afternoon Pite also commented that it was important for her to make this world of showtime not just a pleasurable and joyful release--for us as much as for Young's character--but also dangerous. To this end, we get Tiffany Tregarthen, who plays a devilish and (quite literally) explosive imp, and whose fantastically physical and entangled duet with Young (who is revealed over the course of the entire piece to be a virtuosic mover) leads to what, in this "disordered system" of the stage, is the equivalent of an overdose. It takes all of the combined efforts of the other five performers to revive Young for his climactic solo number, a moving song of longing and regret that is of course not a solo at all--because his voice is lifted by a chorus of bodies, a corps, who in forming a chain of support illustrates through dance the network of sustaining relations in life that lets us know, no matter the claims we make upon them, that they have our back, that they will make sure we make it safely back down to the ground. And on this front it's been a while since I've responded so enthusiastically to Pite's penchant for tethering her group movement at the wrist. Whereas in the past the accordion-like unfurling and contraction of bodily bellows in her work has sometimes seemed like an exercise in momentum without direction, here the chains of movement seem to hint both at sequentiality (events unfolding over time) and obligation (how we are fettered together by those events)--as when, for example, the group slumps in succession against the stage right set wall, a submission to fate and to gravity that, combined with Young's song, made my heart catch in my throat.

Act 3 of Betroffenheit, which begins after a brief intermission, follows the pattern Pite has established in previous works like Dark Matter and The Tempest Replica. The ensemble, having traded in their sparkly "showtime" costumes for standard issue rehearsal sweats, deconstructs much of the action of the previous acts through pure movement. It begins with a spectacular off-axis solo for Arias, in which he spins his body around violently, like he is trying to exorcise a demon. Later he and Salgado will partner in a ghostly echo of their "showtime" salsa steps, only this time on their knees and in a desperately vertiginous bid to right themselves and prevent the other from falling over. Young, in the afternoon conversation, likened this section to the experience of withdrawal, and Pite supplemented this idea by saying that she was interested in staging various micro-scenes of rescue (a favourite theme of hers). To this end, I was very affected by the duet between Salgado and Tregarthen, who helped convey a sense of shared pain through a simple bit of gestural unison, moving their hands from knees to hips to elbows to heads through a sequence of facings, but also interrupting the cycle at different moments to place a solicitous hand on the other's body. As compelling was when all five dancers were on their hands and knees, their arms twitching uncontrollably--as if they are being collectively wracked by the DTs, or a horrible night sweat. The movement only stops when they slide a hand across to the person next to them, applying a different kind of physical pressure to still the mental anguish. If one of Pite's greatest concerns was figuring out how to distribute the narrative voice of trauma across the piece's entire ensemble, a consequent result has been how she has likewise shown how the physical symptoms of trauma can spread and be shared across different bodies.

To this end, after a couple of chimeric glimpses of showtime's lingering traces (a curtain reproduction of the set and a mysterious reappearance of a self-ambulating magician's box), the piece concludes with a reprise of Young and Spivey's earlier duet. This time, however, to echo both the voiceover (which has also returned) and the conversation between Young and Pite from earlier in the afternoon, we are made to realize that there will be no epiphany. There can only be the slow and painful practice of learning how to reengage with the world. And that starts, as Spivey demonstrates for us, by standing up on one's own, finding one's legs, putting one of those legs in front of the other, and beginning to move uncertainly into the future--a future that doesn't try to leave behind the past, but that accepts (and not without some measure of comfort) that it will always be present.

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PuSh 2016: L'Immédiat

L'Immédiat, on at the Playhouse through this evening as part of the PuSh Festival, is perhaps best described as the new new circus. Which is to say that in addition to there being no animal acts, it is also not meant to look virtuosic, like the confections of Cirque du Soleil. Shambolic is the word my visiting colleague and seat mate Karen Fricker used to describe the antics of the eight performers (five men, including creator and Association Immédiat founder Camille Boitel, and three women) who conspire to produce the lunatic chaos that is this show.

The piece is divided into two main halves, followed by a climactic coda. In the first half a stage already littered with hundreds of props and set pieces gradually becomes home to more and more things, some of them flotsam particular to the theatre, including falling wires and crashing lights, most of them just imported junk, like the plastic water bottles released from a fly, or the cardboard boxes thrown in from the wings. Amid this rubble the performers, wearing an assortment of matted fur coats, dart and lurch, sometimes seeking to avoid all manner of matter thrown their way, but just as often abetting its physical distribution about the stage by kicking over a ladder here or releasing a net filled with shiny paper there. Then, just as suddenly, the back stage wall opens up and the performers start to clean up, using an assortment of long janitor's brooms to sweep the detritus out of sight.

Thereafter an assortment of moveable black curtain panels drops to the stage from the rafters, which together with some tricked out furniture (including a wardrobe subject to multiple entrances and exits) the ensemble uses to launch into a madcap routine of physical comedy and quick change artistry. Combining slapstick, pantomime and contortionism, the performers' movements are at once athletic and graceful, and in their precision and timing the ensemble is working like a finely tuned corps de ballet--most evident, for me, in their combined efforts to pull off the long slanted or askew set piece at the end of this section.

The show ends with one of the women, whose limbs keep floating up the sky, being buried under a growing mound of rubble. It starts with that wardrobe being tipped over onto her, on top of which the other performers gradually pile more and more things, building a ziggurat of precarious form and unusual beauty from the scrap heap of objects recycled at the end of act one. It's a stunning act of recomposition that provides formal closure to the sequence of collapsings with which the piece begins. However, I also couldn't help thinking of the gender of the body who peaks out from this midden just before the final blackout, especially given that elsewhere in the piece the men (who all at some point or another are wearing dresses) consciously play with tropes of femininity. To draw from the research of another colleague of mine, Laura Levin, is this woman being entombed within her environment or choosing to blend in with it? Who or what is being disciplined in this dazzling and mercurial exploration of the organicity and performativity of bodies and things?

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PuSh 2016: Inked and Murmur

This year's PuSh International Performing Arts Festival got under way this week with performances of English dancer Aakash Odedra's Inked and Murmur, in a co-presentation with The Dance Centre, but staged at the Playhouse rather than the latter's familiar Davie Street space. I understand this was as much for technical reasons as presumably in hopes of attracting larger audiences (not to mention animating a civic space close to PuSh's new home). However, I'm not sure the new venue best served these two solo pieces. Especially during the dimly lit opening of the first work, Inked, it was hard from my vantage point in the twenty-third row to see Odedra's footwork, though as per the percussive rhythms of kathak, one could certainly hear it. Likewise, in Murmur when Odedra addresses the audience or counts out a bol (a succession of mnemonic syllables used to keep time in Indian classical dancing and music) it was sometimes hard to hear him. These two works, in their focus on cultural and personal identity through non-Western dance forms, and in their combining of movement with other theatrical expressions of storytelling, reminded me of Faustin Linyekula's Le Cargo, which played last year's PuSh Festival; the intimacy and proximity with the audience cultivated through the staging of Le Cargo at The Dance Centre was something I craved last night as I watched Odedra. The Playhouse is a terrific venue for large-scale dance works, as DanceHouse's seasons have consistently proved; but for a solo performer it can look a bit lonely up there.

At the same time, there were many wonderful and visually stunning moments during both of the pieces that make up this double bill. Inked, choreographed for Odedra by Damien Jalet, begins with a two dimensional cut-out silhouette of a human figure illuminated upstage right. Out of this trompe-l'oeil Odedra emerges, his feet rat-a-tatting on the floor as he slowly shifts and shimmies upstage centre in an arc of horizontal light. Eventually he falls to his knees centre stage in front of an ink pot, using its contents to tattoo both of his hands in black. Like magnets, the hands find each other and stay connected as Odedra begins a series of gorgeous arm waves, the fluidity of his upper limbs providing a kinetic contrast to the fixity of his lower ones, which are crossed one inside the other in a classic yoga pose. Thus contorted, Odedra proceeds to move across the stage on his knees, his hands never unclasping. The connection between the marked body and the marking of space becomes even more clear when around the now spilled pot of ink Odedra begins to draw a series of ever-widening circles on the white Marley with two pieces of black chalk, his hands extending above his head and then lowering as he rotates his back across the floor, almost like he's making snow angels. The piece concludes with Odedra, his body now covered in ink, fully vertical, launching himself into a series of faster and faster spins that is one of the signatures of kathak. From the fixed centre of the body, worlds expand and spiral.

Murmur, which Odedra has created in collaboration with the choreographer Lewis Major and the video developers Ars Electronica Futurelab, takes as its starting point the dancer's discovery, at age 21, that he is dyslexic. As he tells us at one point, with reference to his passport, how could he have lived so long not knowing that there were two "a's" at the beginning of his first name? The supplement to identity that is signalled by that extra letter is visually materialized for us when Odedra forms two capital A's with sheer white fabric on the stage floor, the ghostly ephemerality of the one's mirror image of the other encapsulated as much by the transparency of the fabric as by the ease with which Odedra later bundles up and wipes the letters away. Earlier these sheets had been suspended from the rafters, sheer scrims behind which Odedra had danced as projections tracked the outline left by his body in the manner of heat-detecting sensors. The piece concludes with Odedra dancing in a whirl of papers that have also descended from the rafters, but that are simultaneously being blown skyward by a series of fans encircling the stage. If, drawing from the first piece, Odedra's body is the inkwell, then these are the blank pages of creative inspiration and self-expression that at once await and already bear his imprint.

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Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno at the Playhouse

We all have our indelible Isabella Rossellini film memory: as the wounded nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens in David Lynch's Blue Velvet; as Laura, the uncomprehending wife of Jeff Bridges's plane crash survivor in Fearless; as glass leg-wearing beer heiress Lady Helen Port-Huntley in Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World. Last night many of us shared these memories as we gathered at the Vancouver Playhouse to take in the live stage version of Rossellini's Green Porno, a one-woman show about the sex lives of animals that was being presented by the PuSh Festival in partnership with Vancouver's Italian Cultural Centre.

Green Porno is based on the wildly successful series of short films that Rossellini began making for Robert Redford's Sundance television station in 2008 (and now widely available on the web). As Rossellini tells us early on in the show, growing up in Rome the child of film royalty (she is the daughter of the legendary Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini) she always harboured a love of animals and nature, studying biology at university. When, however, she began modelling for cosmetics giant Lancome and then making films, she put this passion aside. It was reawakened when she re-enrolled in university later in her career, and Green Porno, which is modelled as a lecture-performance, suggests not just that Rossellini is an excellent student, but would also make an amazing professor--the kind of lecturer who could combine her natural charisma with a knack for conveying scientific material in an hilariously accessible way, all accompanied by an abundant and sophisticated use of media technology.

The films that make up Rossellini's original Green Porno series are all focused around sexual reproduction in the animal world. They are so fun to watch because they combine strange facts about the abundant diversity of conjugality across species with a DIY production aesthetic, with Rossellini dressed up in felt, cardboard, or papier-mache costumes (as, for example, an earthworm, or a hamster, or a duck), speaking directly to the camera against a flat, two-dimensional backdrop. A similar aesthetic governs the live theatrical show, with Rossellini making use of a series of crude props she withdraws from the lectern positioned centre stage to illustrate several of her points, before tossing them aside. She also makes two costume changes--first removing her long black shift and donning a fake moustache and tie to make a point about animal transgenderism, and later donning a big furry hamster costume, replete with outsize whiskers. The latter is the same costume she wears in the film clip that precedes this reveal, in which she notes whereas among hamsters it is common for mothers to eat the weakest of their young in order to preserve their energy and attention for the heartiest among their broods, among humans infanticide is morally reprehensible and punishable by imprisonment.

Because the above is delivered with such winking charm, we are wont to gloss over the explicitly feminist point Rossellini is making (and she is particularly adept at skewering stereotypes about female sexual passivity and the so-called maternal instinct throughout the show). Indeed one of the rich rewards of this show for me is just how slyly political it is, with discussions of animal homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, and polyamory putting the lie to the claim, among segments of the human population, that such things are simply "against nature." As Rossellini points out in a way that is both intellectually well-informed and humourously entertaining (not least in her dig against Noah and his arc), animal (and plant) biodiversity is vastly accommodating of all kinds of sexual behaviour and gender identities.

Would that it were the same among us.

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Dairakudakan at the Vancouver International Dance Festival

The showcase event of this year's Vancouver International Dance Festival, Dairakudakan's Mushi no Hoshi (Space Insect) concluded its two night run at the Vancouver Playhouse last evening. Founded and led by Akaji Maro, who studied with the legendary Tatsumi Hijikata (together with Kazuo Ohno, one of the pioneers of butoh as a form), Dairakudakan is one of the oldest and most respected butoh companies in Japan. The company brought its latest evening-length creation to VIDF, an epic blending of the ancient and the futuristic that, like all great works of butoh, is about animating metamorphosis--both in terms of image and in terms of movement. In the case of Mushi no Hoshi there was an added thematic resonance to butoh's traditional post-atomic, in extremis somatic concerns, as movies from Them to Starship Troopers have repeatedly reminded us that if any creatures are going to survive--and even thrive--after a nuclear apocalypse, it's insects.

Thus, on a set dominated by one large central and four smaller surrounding platforms encircled by long vertical poles (suggesting at once wind chimes and prison bars), the piece begins with a scene entitled "End of Days." The full company, which numbers more than 20, moves automaton-like in a circle around the main platform; each dancer is clad in street clothes, though their exposed limbs and faces are covered in butoh's signature white chalk. Sliding one leg forward, and then the next, while bending in the opposite direction at the waist, the shell-shocked group slowly progresses in a circuit. At a certain point, one of the women turns to face the audience, opening her eyes and mouth in horror, before falling back in line with the onward march of the group. Each of the other dancers will greet us in a similar manner, their individual expressions of distress or stupefaction variations on a collective trauma. Eventually pairs of dancers will break out of the group and join each other inside the enclosed main platform, adopting poses or executing repetitive movements suggestive of extreme agitation.

Following a brief blackout we are immediately transported to the world of our insect visitors, with five men in the company emerging from the wings on all fours; they wear overturned teapots on their heads and rope girdles wrapped around their waists. The effect is comic, but in a suitably disturbing way; the point is that they look alien, and whether dancing upright with jazz hands on crawling about the stage on the tips of their fingers, the sense images these dancers convey can't help insinuating themselves with a shudder into one's own body. Especially when five women from the company seem to be imprisoned within the platforms, at once guarded and baited by the men in teapots, as well as by four apparent overlords--distinguished by the fact that we can see their faces and they wear rope epaulets (my favourite detail among all the brilliant costuming effects). Soon, however, the women are freed by a sage-like figure who is very visibly coded as from another era, and who will return at various crucial points throughout the piece.

At first, based largely on this opening establishment of Mushi no Hoshi's "insect zone," I was wont to see Maro as reinscribing various traditional gender hierarchies--binaries which, in the insect world, don't always pertain in the ways they still unfortunately do among most human societies. But the women will get their revenge on the men, as when, in a stunning sequence involving a series of swooping butterfly nets, the mesh from the nets descends upon the heads of the men. As for Maro himself, he plays an enigmatic and deliberately gender-ambiguous central figure who emerges from a downstage pupa-like sandbox every now and then to show us the successive stages of his transformation--which are only partly, I would argue, about the fluid spaces between male and female. Maro's character will eventually end up inside the central platform dancing a duet with a fearsome and powerfully resistive woman who somehow transcends her apparent sacrificial status, the viscera of her body turned outward on her all-white dress--a scabrous badge of honour, and an indictment, rather than a victimizing wound.

In a show filled with amazing visual tableaux, Maro saves the best for last: the full company, now caked in shiny silver body paint, and with their faces covered by mesh cloths, emerging as a chorus-line, their twisted arachnid-like homogeneity offset by the distinguishing facial self-image that each of them wears around their necks. It's an ending entirely appropriate to the story Maro is telling, but also to butoh as a form: for underneath the white body paint each dancer is encouraged to find and express his or her own distinct movement vocabulary.

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PuSh 2015: Séquence 8

Montreal is the undisputed world hub for circus arts. In addition to being the home of the National Circus School and the venerable Cirque du Soleil, the city hosts an annual festival of international circus acts every summer and is also the base of two other acclaimed companies: Cirque Éloize and Les sept doigts de la main. The latter is in town this weekend as part of the PuSh Festival, in a co-presentation with Théâtre la seizième and Tom Lightburn.

Founded in 2002 by alumni of Cirque du Soleil and San Francisco's Pickle Family Circus, among others, Les sept doigts eschews the large scale spectacle and Las Vegas showmanship of Guy Laliberté's various Soleil franchises. Instead, they create shows that are more intimate, designed to play venues the size of the Vancouver Playhouse and to appeal in part because they showcase the individual personalities--alongside the incredible physical talents--of their performers. In the case of Séquence 8, a young, polyglot cast of eight comprises the ensemble. Colin acts as our impresario, keeping up a running comic banter throughout the evening, when not doing backflips or flying through a series of stacked hoops, or crooning a moving ballad as Camille leaps and flips through the air, alighting on Tristan's shoulders or upturned hands. Eric juggles blocks of wood with the dexterity and virtuosity of a master sculptor, so that it is impossible for us to determine where wood, air and arms come together and come apart. Dev scales the pole planted upstage right like he is running up the side of a wall, only to wrap one lonely limb around it before sending his whole body sliding downward, somehow stopping and suspending himself before crashing into the ground. Alexandra does impossibly high somersaults and half pikes off of a springy Russian bar perched on the shoulders of two of the men, landing each time with the precision and elegance of a trained gymnast on a balance beam; later she will also twirl and spin through the air in a dizzying display of acrobatics on a circle that descends from the rafters. Finally, even though they only joined the cast two weeks ago, Guillaume and the smallest male member of the troupe (whose name I've forgotten) prove themselves as adept as their cast mates at defying gravity, with Guillaume working a trapeze with fluid grace before later sending his companion vaulting and spiralling through the air by jumping with Colin onto one half of a see-saw.

The circus, premised as it is on the live performance of risk, is a profoundly kinetic form. We marvel at the agility and physical prowess of the artists, but there is also a way in which their daring literally moves us to the edge of our seats. In this physiological or muscularly empathic connection between performers and audience, circus shares something with dance. Thus, it is fitting that amid all of the more traditional acrobatics in Séquence 8 there is also a lot of choreography that would not look out of place at a contemporary dance show (this is, after all, the troupe that choreographed the acclaimed revival of Pippin that just finished its run on Broadway). In this respect, the transitions between individual routines were, for me, a particularly compelling aspect of the show; here we saw, through the execution of more pedestrian--though no less complex or agile--movement sequences, that this ensemble, like fingers on a hand, is very much the sum of its parts.

P.

The Brothers Rocco: Boxing and/as Dancing

DanceHouse ended its 2013-14 season last night at the Playhouse with the final performance of Rocco, choreographed by Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten of ICKamsterdam. The work is loosely inspired by the Luchino Visconti film Rocco e i suoi Fratelli, in which the recently demobilized title character (Alain Delon) and his boxer brother, Simone (Renato Salvatori), having moved to Milan from the south with the rest of their family in search of a better life, come to blows over their mutual love for the beautiful prostitute Nadia (Annie Girardot). Not that you need to know any of this to appreciate Rocco as a work of dance-theatre.

That's because Greco and Scholten use the metaphor and the movement vocabulary of boxing to explore not just the themes of comradeship and competition between brothers, but also the physical parallels between the pugilistic and the virtuosic dancing body. In both cases, it would seem, one must always be on one's toes.

This was certainly the case with our four performers last night (Dereck Cayla, Quentin Dehaye, Christian Guerematchi, and Arnaud Macquet). As the audience files into the theatre, two of them are already in their respective corners (red and blue) of the boxing ring that dominates the stage, legs splayed wide on their chairs as they smoke herbal cigarettes and attempt to stare down their opponent. Additional on-stage seating allowed select members of the audience a more intimate view of the proceedings, which begin with a countdown and then the sound of a bell. However, the men in the ring don't immediately move. Instead, two additional dancers, clad all in black and sporting boxing gloves and giant mouse masks descend from the two house aisles, punching the air and skipping their feet and occasionally pausing to spar with a spectator or two. Eventually these two "shadow boxers" climb into the ring, meet in the centre and promptly collapse onto the mat without even throwing a single punch.

Another bell rings and round two begins. This is the cue for the dancers in the red and blue corners to now engage each other. It is in this sequence, which unfolds in a slowly widening circle under a single spotlight that gradually expands its visual reach, that Greco and Scholten anatomize (quite literally) the kinesthetic links between dancing and boxing. What surprised me, however, was not the expected focus on fast footwork and virtuosic timing; rather, it was when the choreography was slowed down and the dancers, often with their backs to each other, carefully and precisely extended a leg and let it pulse on the floor, that I was able to see dancing's and boxing's shared bodily language of preparation, extension, and release.

Our shadow boxers come back in round three, in which the stakes are raised choreographically and conceptually. Gradually shedding their masks, their gloves, and their outer black costumes, the dancers enjoin each other in ever more complex unison movement and ever tighter clinches. I confess that after the surprising lack of direct bodily contact in round two between the dancers in the red and blue corners (remedied somewhat by the witty gender play that accompanies a later lipsynched musical duet), I was waiting for some explicit partnering to take place. We get that in abundance in this final section of the piece, and as the dancers whipped each other around with lightning speed, the sweat flying off their glistening torsos, I was reminded of two things: first, that boxing, among the most "macho" of sports, requires of its participants a bodily intimacy that necessarily approaches the eroticism of dance; and second, that at the end of a boxing match and at the end of a dance piece, all the physical training and mental preparation essentially boil down to one thing: endurance.

This last point applies, as well, to the audience. At the end of Rocco I was both exhausted and elated.

P.

Grupo Corpo: A Little Bit of Galicia in Vancouver

Exiting the Playhouse theatre last night following Brazilian contemporary dance troupe Grupo Corpo's presentation of Ímã and Sem Mim, I asked DanceHouse co-founder Barb Clausen (who was on her way to lead a post-performance critical response with interested audience members) why the movement in both pieces reminded me so much of Irish and Scottish step-dancing. "Galicia," she said. The autonomous region in northwest Spain, with Portugal directly south, takes its name from the Celtic peoples who first settled north of the Duoro River. Their descendants would eventually migrate north to what we now refer to as Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; east to the Carpathian Mountains, between what is now Poland and modern Ukraine; and finally west to Latin America, including Brazil. In the process they took with them their distinct language, as well as their cultural traditions, which included various hybrids of the rhythmically vertical style of dancing on display last night, as well as the pipe music also featured prominently in both works' scores.

Following Grupo Corpo's last visit to Vancouver in 2010--which concluded with the intensely athletic, almost futuristic, and largely floor-oriented Breu--I wasn't expecting the program this time around to be composed of choreography so rooted in folkloric dance traditions. Not that choreographer Rodrigo Pederneiras is at all interest in "heritage" movement. Rather, he infuses both pieces with all manner of contemporary stylistic twists on classical partnering (as with the visually stunning sitting/crab-walk opening to Ímã), release technique, ballet steps (I couldn't stop watching the company members' complex footwork), and large-scale unison movement.

Tonally, the two pieces are a nice complement to each other. Last night's performance opened with Ímã, which was actually listed second on the program. It's the warmer and sunnier of the two works, not least as a result of the primary colours that make up Artistic Director and Set and Lighting Designer Paulo Pederneiras' LED projections, as well as the T-shirts worn by the female dancers. Sem mim is lusher, set as it is to an original score by Carlos Núñez and José Miguel Wisnik that is based on a seven-song cycle about the sea of Vigo. A mass of silvery mesh netting also hangs over the stage; it is lowered and raised at different points throughout the piece to convey images of clouds, mountains, and the sea. The unitards worn by the dancers are "tattooed" with different designs by Freusa Zechmeister, which serve both to individualize the performers when they are on stage and to create an additional mass swirling bodily scenography during the group sequences.

As for the company, not only is it perhaps the most gorgeous one is likely to ever encounter on a concert stage (those stereotypes about Brazilians are true!), but it is also among the most technically accomplished. I have often found it difficult, in watching dance, to see the actual physical manifestation of the expression "light on their feet." Last night I did, with the men's jumps in particular seeming to come about as much through the mere thought of levitation as through the physical effort to do so.

It was something to behold, as was the sheer size of the company crowding onto the stage for their bows at the end of each piece. It must cost Grupo Corpo a lot of money to travel with so many dancers. But we, in the audience, are certainly the richer for it.

P.

All Over Underland

Deadlines everywhere, demanding my attention, so just a short note on the opening of DanceHouse's new season at the Vancouver Playhouse this weekend.

In his artist talk prior to last night's performance of Underland, Stephen Petronio talked about the formative influence of Trisha Brown, with whom he danced in the early eighties. Among other things, he said, Brown provided him with a model for successful artistic collaboration across disciplines. And while, as Petronio went on to note, his "full table" approach to choreography and scenography is very different from Brown's minimalist aesthetic, seeking out talented musical and design collaborators has been a trademark of Petronio's work since he established his own company in 1984.

Underland, for example, is set to the music of Nick Cave, and features costumes by Tara Subkoff, of Imitation of Christ fame, and video projections by Mike Daly. The cumulative effect is a Gesamkuntzwerk for our paranoid, post-9/11 age, bleak in tone, possessed of a raw, almost furious, energy that threatens to spill over into violence (to the self and to others), but also filled with small, achingly beautiful, moments of grace that are shattering in their combining of abjection with a kind of exaltation. Underland, as Petronio has conceived it, is a "place," materially submerged and mentally subconscious, signaled by the choreographer's own opening descent via a ladder into the stage space in the work's prologue, marking his progress with a pen (or is it a knife?) on the surface of his arm. What then follows plays out like a scratching at the wound that may have festered as a result, each subsequent sequence adding a tear or rent to the thin membrane that separates one world from another--something echoed in the deconstructed costumes by Subkoff.

But it is Petronio's whirling, complexly off-kilter, and gravity-defying choreography that is the driving engine of this piece. His dancers (all superb) throw themselves with such force into a signature horizontal arm extension, head toss and torso twist--and they travel with such speed across the stage while doing so--that one marvels at how fluidly they right themselves, bending into a deep plié or rising vertically on their toes before launching into the next impossible "tilt-a-whirl" sequence (coincidentally Cave's song "The Carny" yields some of the most jaw-dropping movement in this respect). Indeed, one of the rich pleasures of Underland is how seamlessly Petronio combines the classical and the contemporary in his choreography, with the partnering between Barrington Hinds and Natalie Mackessy to Cave's "Stagger Lee" a notable stand-out for its sheer physicality and the almost hostile toughness with which Mackessy throws herself into Hinds' lifts.

However, the work is not without tenderness, as when the quartet of Davalois Fearon (riveting throughout), Gino Grenek, Jaqlin Medlock, and Joshua Tuason enact a moving tableau vivant to "The Ship Song." The choreography here is more controlled and contained; it is about seeking out and maintaining our sense of connection--our touch--with another. The four dancers, even when momentarily separated, are in constant search of the hand, the limb, the lips, the bit of skin that marks not the boundary but the bridge between bodies.

It's another way of looking at the ladder Petronio descends at the top of the show (and, indeed, in Daly's video during this sequence we see the choreographer's on-screen avatar navigating a rope bridge). And it's definitely what was created with the audience at the end, a collective exhale and explosion of applause greeting this brilliant reach across different realms of artistic and sensory experience.

P.