If you'd asked me on Wednesday how things were going in terms of building the show, I probably would have smiled tightly and said "We're getting there ... slowly." I confess I was a bit panicked by the incremental progress we seemed to be making in blocking the play and integrating this with the movement sequences. And then there were all the other production elements that had yet to be integrated, including sound, lighting and video. Richard had distributed a scene breakdown table earlier in the week, with columns for all of these things and by mid-week a lot of them still remained blank.
But what a difference two days away makes. In the interim, Richard and the cast had sketched the blocking for all but the last few pages of the play, Lesley had set the movement for the top of the second act and refined several other sequences, and the designers had held a production meeting in which much of the video had been locked down and a production schedule laid out for paper tech, lighting hang, set load-in and install, and Q-2-Q. Clearly I should keep clear of rehearsals more often.
That said, I was back at the Gateway yesterday to watch Richard set the remaining blocking in the morning, as well as Lesley teach the actors in the early afternoon what she had come up with for the part near the end of act one in which Mobius bands are discussed. Then it was time for a stumble through of the whole play. To this point the scenes had been built and rehearsed in fragments, often out of order, and so it was revelatory to watch the whole thing unfold from start to finish, hiccups included. I know Lesley was concerned with the execution of much of the movement in the second half, and we have yet to come up with a physical score for the ending, but I was so pleased to see where we were. Rough around the edges though it currently is, we at least have a structure. And as Richard reminded Lesley and myself, there was, relatively speaking, still a fair amount of time to refine and polish things.
And all of this was accomplished in the midst of some unexpected and deeply trying personal circumstances for one member of our team. This play is partly about dealing with grief and let's just say that it has been a bit of shock to have that theme hit so close to home. But it has also reminded me of what a strong and resilient tribe actors are.
P
Sunday, November 6, 2016
Saturday, November 5, 2016
Ballet BC's Program 1 at the Queen E
In the pre-show chat that preceded last night's performance of Ballet BC's season-opening Program 1, choreographer-in-residence Cayetano Soto talked in glowing terms about his admiration for the company, its dancers, Emily Molnar as artistic director, and about how, following the premiere of his acclaimed Twenty Eight Thousand Waves in 2014, he didn't have to think twice about Molnar's invitation to accept his current appointment. Soto, who not only choreographs but also designs the lighting and costumes for his pieces, is unusually adept at creating provocative and sensorially arresting atmospheres in and through his dances. That talent was on abundant display last night, as in an evening devoted to four of his works the mood shifted gradually from darker to lighter.
Beginning After, the first piece on the program and a world premiere, begins with a projected title about the fine line between truth and the illusion of memory. The dancers emerge singly and in pairs from the upstage darkness in shiny black singlets that resemble exoskeletons. There is rarely ever more than two dancers on stage, but such is the shutter-like effect that Soto creates with his lighting (which in addition to the general dim half-light throughout includes brief blackouts and later strobe-like flashes) and the slow fade ins and fade outs that accompany the dancers' entrances and exits that the whole piece has the look and feel of time-lapse photography or stop-motion cinema. Certainly we are meant to question what we are seeing, which extends to the extraordinary partnering that Soto builds to at the conclusion of the piece. I had thought that the lifts in Twenty Eight Thousand Waves were the most complicated I had ever seen, but here Soto takes things to a whole other level, and it is impossible not to marvel at how the dancers--who often put me in mind of baroque versions of pairs figure skaters (the music is by Handel)--combine the speed, fluidity and angularity required to accomplish the partnering for this piece. As my colleague Judith Garay put it at intermission, it's the tangled lines Soto creates in this work that are so captivating.
There followed two short pieces created by Soto in 2007 and 2013 respectively, but here receiving their Canadian premieres. The first, Fugaz, is a meditation on the death of Soto's father, but it unfolds in such a way that it is impossible not to meditate on the gender politics embedded--whether consciously or not--in the piece. Emily Chessa, Racheal Prince, Nicole Ward and Livona Ellis form a feminine quartet whose spatial interactions are interrupted by successive appearances of masculine ghost-like presences, these figures in black emerging from stairs at the lip of the stage and then disappearing into the darkness upstage. However, on one such pass towards the end of the piece, first Christoph von Riedemann and then Peter Smida partners with Chessa and Ellis respectively, the latter pairing turning into a violent scene that almost resembles a rape, and that left me a little confused as to how to read the piece. The gender dynamics that necessarily accrue to traditional dance partnering are less obviously on display in Sortijas, an affecting duet for Scott Fowler and Alexis Fletcher performed to the music of Lhasa de Sela. This is partly because of the nude jersey that Fletcher wears on her torso, that next to Fowler's bare chest and when combined with their matching black pants, has the effect of making her appear androgynous. To be sure, it is the powerful and technically superb Fowler who is still doing the lifting throughout but elsewhere in the piece one has the sense that the two dancers are equal halves of the same striving soul. This is nowhere more apparent than at the end of the piece when, after the music cuts out, the movement continues for a moment longer, the dancers' breathing synchronizing into its own lush and immersive soundscape as the curtain drops (a similar conceit ends Beginning After).
The evening concluded with the second world premiere of the program. Schachmatt, which is German for check-mate, and which Soto has developed and expanded from an earlier piece called Conrazoncorazon. Tapping into the ribald energy of Weimar-era cabaret (think Marlene Dietrich's Blue Angel crossed with Fosse's Kit Kat girls, referenced not least in the short shorts worn by both the male and female dancers), this exuberant ensemble piece showcases lots of quick shuffle toe and ball change unison footwork, swivelling hips, and even jazz hands. But it's by no means a parody and the virtuosity of the dancers is utterly compelling. It was a great way to finish the evening and to punctuate the start of the company's new season.
P
Beginning After, the first piece on the program and a world premiere, begins with a projected title about the fine line between truth and the illusion of memory. The dancers emerge singly and in pairs from the upstage darkness in shiny black singlets that resemble exoskeletons. There is rarely ever more than two dancers on stage, but such is the shutter-like effect that Soto creates with his lighting (which in addition to the general dim half-light throughout includes brief blackouts and later strobe-like flashes) and the slow fade ins and fade outs that accompany the dancers' entrances and exits that the whole piece has the look and feel of time-lapse photography or stop-motion cinema. Certainly we are meant to question what we are seeing, which extends to the extraordinary partnering that Soto builds to at the conclusion of the piece. I had thought that the lifts in Twenty Eight Thousand Waves were the most complicated I had ever seen, but here Soto takes things to a whole other level, and it is impossible not to marvel at how the dancers--who often put me in mind of baroque versions of pairs figure skaters (the music is by Handel)--combine the speed, fluidity and angularity required to accomplish the partnering for this piece. As my colleague Judith Garay put it at intermission, it's the tangled lines Soto creates in this work that are so captivating.
There followed two short pieces created by Soto in 2007 and 2013 respectively, but here receiving their Canadian premieres. The first, Fugaz, is a meditation on the death of Soto's father, but it unfolds in such a way that it is impossible not to meditate on the gender politics embedded--whether consciously or not--in the piece. Emily Chessa, Racheal Prince, Nicole Ward and Livona Ellis form a feminine quartet whose spatial interactions are interrupted by successive appearances of masculine ghost-like presences, these figures in black emerging from stairs at the lip of the stage and then disappearing into the darkness upstage. However, on one such pass towards the end of the piece, first Christoph von Riedemann and then Peter Smida partners with Chessa and Ellis respectively, the latter pairing turning into a violent scene that almost resembles a rape, and that left me a little confused as to how to read the piece. The gender dynamics that necessarily accrue to traditional dance partnering are less obviously on display in Sortijas, an affecting duet for Scott Fowler and Alexis Fletcher performed to the music of Lhasa de Sela. This is partly because of the nude jersey that Fletcher wears on her torso, that next to Fowler's bare chest and when combined with their matching black pants, has the effect of making her appear androgynous. To be sure, it is the powerful and technically superb Fowler who is still doing the lifting throughout but elsewhere in the piece one has the sense that the two dancers are equal halves of the same striving soul. This is nowhere more apparent than at the end of the piece when, after the music cuts out, the movement continues for a moment longer, the dancers' breathing synchronizing into its own lush and immersive soundscape as the curtain drops (a similar conceit ends Beginning After).
The evening concluded with the second world premiere of the program. Schachmatt, which is German for check-mate, and which Soto has developed and expanded from an earlier piece called Conrazoncorazon. Tapping into the ribald energy of Weimar-era cabaret (think Marlene Dietrich's Blue Angel crossed with Fosse's Kit Kat girls, referenced not least in the short shorts worn by both the male and female dancers), this exuberant ensemble piece showcases lots of quick shuffle toe and ball change unison footwork, swivelling hips, and even jazz hands. But it's by no means a parody and the virtuosity of the dancers is utterly compelling. It was a great way to finish the evening and to punctuate the start of the company's new season.
P
Sunday, October 30, 2016
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.
P
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.
P
Saturday, October 29, 2016
Long Division: First Week of Rehearsal
Today is the end of the first week of rehearsals for Long Division. In fact, as I write this our amazing cast is still hard at it in Richmond, taking turns working on their respective monologues with director Richard Wolfe and Assistant Director Keltie Forsyth, while presumably also running lines from the choral group scenes under the watchful eye of stage manager Jethelo Cabilete. Having worked our way through the beats of those scenes and any lingering questions about them by the end of the day yesterday, I decided to knock off from today's rehearsals as I have so much else to catch up on.
Not that I regret for a moment being there the rest of this past week. It's such an exciting--and terrifying--thing to dive into the rehearsal process. The exploration and moments of discovery are so stimulating; at the same time, one is always in a bit of a panic about the steadily diminishing amount of time one has for said exploration and discovery. In our case, because there are so many different moving parts to the production--not the least of which is creating and learning actual physical movement--juggling available time is one of Richard's main priorities. Fortunately, choreographer Lesley Telford hit the ground running during the first three days of rehearsal, aided by the emerging dance artists from her Arts Umbrella class with whom she has been building much of the choreography for the show, and many of whom have very generously agreed to accompany Lelsey to our rehearsals to help teach the material to the actors. And in this respect, one of the delights so far has been to watch the dancers' and actors' mutual admiration for each other's specific performance gifts. The entire cast has done an amazing, and exceedingly fast, job of absorbing into their bodies some fairly difficult physical phrases. At the same time, they've also absorbed much of the text into their brains, with several of them already off book in terms of their very long monologues. Composer Owen Belton was also present to observe what Lesley was working on in relation to his music, and to get a sense of what he still needed to come up with to accompany the rest of her movement score.
Yesterday we also got a glimpse of Lauchlin Johnston's mock-up of the set, which blew me away with its elegance and beauty. The Gateway's Studio B is not a huge space and we're losing some of that to the backdrop that Lauchlin has created, and that will additionally serve as the surface onto which video designer Jamie Nesbitt's will project his images. One thing Jamie flagged for Lauchlin and Richard was the colour of the floor. If, as originally intended, it remained white, like the backdrop, then it would create a lot of bounce from the lights that would make it hard to see the projections. This would only be exacerbated if, as planned, lighting designer Jergus Oprsal used a series of shins to provide side light from the wings. So the lino floor will now be a light shade of grey. If everything goes accroding to plan the set will be installed by next Thursday, with the lighting grid hung soon after and the cue-to-cue happening much earlier than usual so that the performers will ideally have three full tech runs instead of cramming everything into one half day.
It was also useful to have Jamie at the table yesterday for our final beat-by-beat read-through of the text, as he asked a lot of tough dramaturgical questions about what exactly was going on in different sections, and how video might support them in some instances, or conceivably work against them in others. Combined with the cast's similarly probing questions from the rest of the week, the rigorous text analysis has really forced me to justify my choices, and to explain their relevance to the overall structure of the play and the respective inner worlds of each of the characters. It also required me to not be precious about material that clearly had to go, or about changes to specific lines, however micro or macro. I really appreciate the attentiveness of all involved to my writing, as it has indeed made the work stronger and, in one instance spotted by Keltie, saved me from making a pretty glaring mistake in the math!
Lots more work to do, of course, but so far the process has been thoroughly rewarding. The level of collegiality and collaboration on everyone's part has been inspiring, and that's in no small measure to the open and non-hierarchical environment Richard has worked hard to create. I can't be in the studio on Monday due to teaching commitments, but I look forward to being back at rehearsals on Tuesday.
So stay tuned for more.
P
Not that I regret for a moment being there the rest of this past week. It's such an exciting--and terrifying--thing to dive into the rehearsal process. The exploration and moments of discovery are so stimulating; at the same time, one is always in a bit of a panic about the steadily diminishing amount of time one has for said exploration and discovery. In our case, because there are so many different moving parts to the production--not the least of which is creating and learning actual physical movement--juggling available time is one of Richard's main priorities. Fortunately, choreographer Lesley Telford hit the ground running during the first three days of rehearsal, aided by the emerging dance artists from her Arts Umbrella class with whom she has been building much of the choreography for the show, and many of whom have very generously agreed to accompany Lelsey to our rehearsals to help teach the material to the actors. And in this respect, one of the delights so far has been to watch the dancers' and actors' mutual admiration for each other's specific performance gifts. The entire cast has done an amazing, and exceedingly fast, job of absorbing into their bodies some fairly difficult physical phrases. At the same time, they've also absorbed much of the text into their brains, with several of them already off book in terms of their very long monologues. Composer Owen Belton was also present to observe what Lesley was working on in relation to his music, and to get a sense of what he still needed to come up with to accompany the rest of her movement score.
Yesterday we also got a glimpse of Lauchlin Johnston's mock-up of the set, which blew me away with its elegance and beauty. The Gateway's Studio B is not a huge space and we're losing some of that to the backdrop that Lauchlin has created, and that will additionally serve as the surface onto which video designer Jamie Nesbitt's will project his images. One thing Jamie flagged for Lauchlin and Richard was the colour of the floor. If, as originally intended, it remained white, like the backdrop, then it would create a lot of bounce from the lights that would make it hard to see the projections. This would only be exacerbated if, as planned, lighting designer Jergus Oprsal used a series of shins to provide side light from the wings. So the lino floor will now be a light shade of grey. If everything goes accroding to plan the set will be installed by next Thursday, with the lighting grid hung soon after and the cue-to-cue happening much earlier than usual so that the performers will ideally have three full tech runs instead of cramming everything into one half day.
It was also useful to have Jamie at the table yesterday for our final beat-by-beat read-through of the text, as he asked a lot of tough dramaturgical questions about what exactly was going on in different sections, and how video might support them in some instances, or conceivably work against them in others. Combined with the cast's similarly probing questions from the rest of the week, the rigorous text analysis has really forced me to justify my choices, and to explain their relevance to the overall structure of the play and the respective inner worlds of each of the characters. It also required me to not be precious about material that clearly had to go, or about changes to specific lines, however micro or macro. I really appreciate the attentiveness of all involved to my writing, as it has indeed made the work stronger and, in one instance spotted by Keltie, saved me from making a pretty glaring mistake in the math!
Lots more work to do, of course, but so far the process has been thoroughly rewarding. The level of collegiality and collaboration on everyone's part has been inspiring, and that's in no small measure to the open and non-hierarchical environment Richard has worked hard to create. I can't be in the studio on Monday due to teaching commitments, but I look forward to being back at rehearsals on Tuesday.
So stay tuned for more.
P
Monday, October 24, 2016
Long Division on Roundhouse Radio
As we head into the first week of rehearsals today, I thought I would share the link to a segment I did this past Friday on Roundhouse Radio's "Sense of Place" show, with host Minelle Mahtani. All you need to do is go here.
Minelle was terrific and she seemed keen to have me back before the show opens, perhaps with some cast members to read an excerpt from the play on air. Stay tuned for more on that, as well as updates on the rehearsal process.
P
Minelle was terrific and she seemed keen to have me back before the show opens, perhaps with some cast members to read an excerpt from the play on air. Stay tuned for more on that, as well as updates on the rehearsal process.
P
Sunday, October 23, 2016
Dance Weekend Roundup: Noam Gagnon, Lesley Telford, Donald Sales
What do the Bionic Woman, Leigh Bowery and Michel Tremblay all have in common? They're all influences on Noam Gagnon's ambitious new dance-theatre piece, This Crazy Show, which ran at The Dance Centre this past weekend. The Vision Impure choreographer and performer, working with a team that includes composer, sound designer and on-stage accordionist James Coomber, rehearsal director and outside eye Danielle Lecourtois, lighting designer Stéphane Ménigot, and performer Ken Blaschuk, among many other collaborators, has created a collage of kinetic, visual and sonic set pieces. This allows Gagnon to move in and through a range of different personas, all of them further refracted and multiplied in the sixteen disco balls suspended within Bryan Kenney's amazing set, and which are themselves spun or swung like pendulums at various points by Blaschuk, who enters in a series of increasingly elaborate and ornamental costumes (always, like Coomber, with his face covered, which is not the only curious, gender-bending and slightly problematic allusion to the veil over the course of the evening). The always charismatic Gagnon addresses the audience at the top of the show, inviting us, if we feel like it, to get up and dance at any point. However, the audience on Friday evening mostly left that to Gagnon, who in addition to a funky bit of interactive partnering with the disco balls timed to a series of glitches in Coomber's score, also later donned a pair of heels and a succession of wigs to perform a kind of off-balance stumbling slip-and-slide mop dance as Coomber played his accordion while lying prone on the floor.
In the talkback I led after the show with the Gagnon and his aforementioned collaborators, we were given further insight into the process behind creating the signature craziness of this particular show; according to Gagnon this mostly involved him abandoning the way he usually works, which is alone and pushing one, largely physical, idea to the max. This time, he took on whatever his collaborators threw at him, trusting that they would eventually find a way to put it all together. Gagnon was also asked about that invitation to dance he issues at the beginning, and what his response would be if someone took him up on his offer. Grinning broadly he said he would love it.
Earlier this afternoon, I also took in New Works' latest addition to its Dance Allsorts series at the Roundhouse. It was a double bill featuring work by Lesley Telford and Donald Sales for his company Project20. Telford's Only who is left is a reworking of the large-scale ensemble piece that she created for Arts Umbrella's Season Finale this past May, and which I wrote about here. Working this time with just seven dancers (many of whom are helping out with the choreographic process on Long Division), the effect of her opening play of having the dancers move into various heroic poses and then retreat affectlessly and almost listlessly into a kind of non-presentational on-stage embodiment registered much more powerfully--especially as this dialectic was both amplified by and served to undercut the very martial music she was working with (the name of which I should know). In the more intimate space of the Roundhouse and in this scaled down staging, I was also able to appreciate the way Telford is working with deliberately broken lines and an aesthetic of what I'll call anti-virtuosity: it's there in the bent leg extensions, the pirouettes that don't quite finish, the series of stutter steps and incredibly loud foot thumps all the dancers engage in, even the torpid way the lone male dancer whistles into his bullhorn. Who and what is all of this for is the question undergirding this piece, and it's one that can be asked not just of dance as a species of live performance, but of any human enterprise.
The latter theme is taken up by Donald Sales in his preview of Gates of Hell, a new work in development for his company Project20. Throughout this 30-minute work we hear in voiceover excerpts from two different British sociologists commenting on the conundrum of humanity, of how to a certain extent we are hard wired to be selfish, but how we also need to work together if we--and our planet--are to survive. This paradox is initiated in movement at the top of the show by having the six women dancers engage in a succession of brief duets that register at once as territorial provocations and invitations to share space. The theme of competition versus collaboration plays out elsewhere in the piece through the juxtaposing of individual solos and some gorgeous unison. The last piece I saw by Sales was gR33N, which I thought was weighed down by a confusing narrative structure and too much gimmicky stage business. It was a delight to see what is in effect a pure movement piece by the former Ballet BC dancer; that the work was set to a score by Long Division composer Owen Belton only made it that much better.
P
In the talkback I led after the show with the Gagnon and his aforementioned collaborators, we were given further insight into the process behind creating the signature craziness of this particular show; according to Gagnon this mostly involved him abandoning the way he usually works, which is alone and pushing one, largely physical, idea to the max. This time, he took on whatever his collaborators threw at him, trusting that they would eventually find a way to put it all together. Gagnon was also asked about that invitation to dance he issues at the beginning, and what his response would be if someone took him up on his offer. Grinning broadly he said he would love it.
Earlier this afternoon, I also took in New Works' latest addition to its Dance Allsorts series at the Roundhouse. It was a double bill featuring work by Lesley Telford and Donald Sales for his company Project20. Telford's Only who is left is a reworking of the large-scale ensemble piece that she created for Arts Umbrella's Season Finale this past May, and which I wrote about here. Working this time with just seven dancers (many of whom are helping out with the choreographic process on Long Division), the effect of her opening play of having the dancers move into various heroic poses and then retreat affectlessly and almost listlessly into a kind of non-presentational on-stage embodiment registered much more powerfully--especially as this dialectic was both amplified by and served to undercut the very martial music she was working with (the name of which I should know). In the more intimate space of the Roundhouse and in this scaled down staging, I was also able to appreciate the way Telford is working with deliberately broken lines and an aesthetic of what I'll call anti-virtuosity: it's there in the bent leg extensions, the pirouettes that don't quite finish, the series of stutter steps and incredibly loud foot thumps all the dancers engage in, even the torpid way the lone male dancer whistles into his bullhorn. Who and what is all of this for is the question undergirding this piece, and it's one that can be asked not just of dance as a species of live performance, but of any human enterprise.
The latter theme is taken up by Donald Sales in his preview of Gates of Hell, a new work in development for his company Project20. Throughout this 30-minute work we hear in voiceover excerpts from two different British sociologists commenting on the conundrum of humanity, of how to a certain extent we are hard wired to be selfish, but how we also need to work together if we--and our planet--are to survive. This paradox is initiated in movement at the top of the show by having the six women dancers engage in a succession of brief duets that register at once as territorial provocations and invitations to share space. The theme of competition versus collaboration plays out elsewhere in the piece through the juxtaposing of individual solos and some gorgeous unison. The last piece I saw by Sales was gR33N, which I thought was weighed down by a confusing narrative structure and too much gimmicky stage business. It was a delight to see what is in effect a pure movement piece by the former Ballet BC dancer; that the work was set to a score by Long Division composer Owen Belton only made it that much better.
P
Thursday, October 20, 2016
Long Division: In the Studio with Lesley Telford
Earlier today the choreographer of Long Division, Lesley Telford, invited me to drop by the studio at Arts Umbrella on Granville Island, where she was working with members of her new pilot research-training program for early career dancers to test out some possible studies for different movement sections in the play. (In fact, I invited myself and Lesley generously agreed that I could stop by.)
As I have previously mentioned, Lesley just happens to be working with seven amazingly talented dancers as part of this program, and they have each taken on a character in the play, drawing from the text (which was spread out across the studio floor when I arrived) to improvise and develop individual gesture phrases that may or may not eventually get set in some related form on our corresponding actors when we begin rehearsals next week (yikes!). Lesley asked each of the dancers--Aden as Paul, Corrine as Reid, Brenna as Jo, Maya as Lucy, Stephanie as Naathim, Caitlyn as Grace, and Katie as Alice (apologies for any misspellings)--to run through the solo phrases they had come up with and I was amazed at how bang-on their instincts were in terms of energy and tempo and line, as well as things like muscularity vs. flow, repetition, different levels and directional facings, and so on. I was also pleased to note that I could also read each character in the movement without reading the movement itself as telegraphing too obviously this or that character's psychology or profession. Which is to say that is the furthest thing from mimeticism or pantomime.
The dancers also ran through different group sequences that they had developed with Lesley, including a portion of what might become the opening walking pattern (there's a recurring falling into gravity motif that together with simple moments where the dancers just stop and acknowledge each other in space, or else let a loose arm swing back and forth that had me smiling the whole way through). Lesley has additionally choreographed a bit where the dancers move downstage as a clump, with each of them taking turns fading into the pack, which is a nice visual image for how the characters are connected to each other, whether they want to be or not. Another sequence Lesley tried in canon for the first time today, and despite the fact that some of the dancers were only just learning the movement, it was most effective. Ditto the moments when the dancers took turns manipulating each other.
It was all so exciting to see and it was a joy to share with the dancers some of my thoughts on each of the characters whose movement vocabularies they are helping to build. That vocabulary will necessarily look somewhat different (less dancerly, more pedestrian) when transferred to the actors, but the point is that no matter where it has come from, it has to be performed with intention. To that end, it will be an enormous help to have the dancers with us on Wednesday afternoons as we move through the rehearsal process.
I keep having to pinch myself that we have such a fabulous creative team.
P
As I have previously mentioned, Lesley just happens to be working with seven amazingly talented dancers as part of this program, and they have each taken on a character in the play, drawing from the text (which was spread out across the studio floor when I arrived) to improvise and develop individual gesture phrases that may or may not eventually get set in some related form on our corresponding actors when we begin rehearsals next week (yikes!). Lesley asked each of the dancers--Aden as Paul, Corrine as Reid, Brenna as Jo, Maya as Lucy, Stephanie as Naathim, Caitlyn as Grace, and Katie as Alice (apologies for any misspellings)--to run through the solo phrases they had come up with and I was amazed at how bang-on their instincts were in terms of energy and tempo and line, as well as things like muscularity vs. flow, repetition, different levels and directional facings, and so on. I was also pleased to note that I could also read each character in the movement without reading the movement itself as telegraphing too obviously this or that character's psychology or profession. Which is to say that is the furthest thing from mimeticism or pantomime.
The dancers also ran through different group sequences that they had developed with Lesley, including a portion of what might become the opening walking pattern (there's a recurring falling into gravity motif that together with simple moments where the dancers just stop and acknowledge each other in space, or else let a loose arm swing back and forth that had me smiling the whole way through). Lesley has additionally choreographed a bit where the dancers move downstage as a clump, with each of them taking turns fading into the pack, which is a nice visual image for how the characters are connected to each other, whether they want to be or not. Another sequence Lesley tried in canon for the first time today, and despite the fact that some of the dancers were only just learning the movement, it was most effective. Ditto the moments when the dancers took turns manipulating each other.
It was all so exciting to see and it was a joy to share with the dancers some of my thoughts on each of the characters whose movement vocabularies they are helping to build. That vocabulary will necessarily look somewhat different (less dancerly, more pedestrian) when transferred to the actors, but the point is that no matter where it has come from, it has to be performed with intention. To that end, it will be an enormous help to have the dancers with us on Wednesday afternoons as we move through the rehearsal process.
I keep having to pinch myself that we have such a fabulous creative team.
P
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