Mountain View Solstice Dancers: Rehearsal 3

I was pretty tired at the start of last night's rehearsal--a long day followed by a rushed dinner and a mostly uphill bike ride against the wind. When Mark announced that there was a plan afoot to have us sing in addition to dance during part of the June 21 performance I was suddenly re-energized--with horror! Fortunately it has since been clarified that the singing won't be compulsory. And it sounds like, as with the overall concept of the piece, this part of it has been thought through with care. I look forward to seeing how it evolves--just without me contributing any off-key bass notes.

After a brief warm-up Jessica showed us, through the small band of windows on the north side of Celebration Hall, where we would be beginning our dance--from just beyond the lip of the bike bath that cuts across the cemetery at 37th. We will process up to the Hall in time with the first piece of music, Part's "Spiegel im Spiegel." As part of that procession, however, there will be various bits of choreography, the first few motifs of which we learned last night. These included a simple bounce up and down on the spot to the first piano note; a reaching of our hands skyward and then a twisty floating of them down to our sides, followed by a final, gentle bump of the arms in time to another of the piano notes (a really gorgeous move); and, finally, a little grapevine and hop on the spot with a partner. The latter took Susie and I a bit of time to master, but eventually we got there--and we had a lot of fun doing so.

Then came the really complicated part: massing in a triangle formation and learning an 11-count sequence from start to finish. The sequence begins with a coordinated leg and arm circle, followed by a step backward with upraised arms, a step forward with hands on knees, a quarter turn to the left, a torso swivel, and various bits of arms stretches and rolls that conclude with our hands above our heads and balancing on our toes, ready to fall on eleven. That I can remember most of this sequence in my head is a good sign. Now it's just finding time to practice it between now and next Monday.

That's right: no holiday for us. Not when there's only eleven more weeks to performance.

P.

Manuel Roque at the Vancouver International Dance Festival

Manuel Roque's Ne meurs pas tout de suite, on nous regarde (Don't die right now, we're being watched), the closing show at this year's Vancouver International Dance Festival, is as excessive as its title is long. From the balloons that litter the stage, and to which co-performer Lucie Vigneault keeps adding from her plastic deck chair at the top of the show (which Roque, seated beside her, registers with only the faintest of interest); to Roque moaning and grunting while he slithers about the stage and eventually up into the audience to lie in the laps of various patrons; to a one-sided and thoroughly banal telephone conversation by Vigneault; to Roque jumping about the stage with increasing freneticism while repeating over and over, "Lucie, look at me": durationally and conceptually, everything about this piece is designed to test the limits of our spectating patience.

And yet it is never for a second boring. The performers, even when they are doing nothing, are utterly compelling to watch. One gets the sense, not least from the work's title, that theirs is an environment not completely of their own choosing--including the fact that they have to share it with each other. In this space of enforced play--to which we are tipped not just by the balloons, but also by the party hats that the performers wear--Vigeneault and Roque must constantly seek out new ways to amuse themselves. In so doing, they interact with the space and its objects in ways that feel authentic and spontaneous despite their routine repetitiveness: Roque jumping up and down over and over, or wrestling with an inflatable giraffe (or was it a deer?); Vigneault trying to crush the balloons with the legs of her deck chair or, at the microphone, insisting ad infinitum that what she has to say is IM-POR-TANT. And for a piece that has very little "choreography" in the traditional sense, the movement was nevertheless consistently surprising and--precisely because of its iterativeness--necessarily virtuosic.

Indeed, there is a way in which one can read Ne meurs pas as an extended rehearsal for partnering. Having spent the whole piece either trying to upstage or just plain get the other's attention, at the end Roque and Vigneault come together in a brief push-pull pas de deux that sees Roque persevere in extending his hands to initiate the duet as Vigneault appears to rebuff him by poking him in the chest. Or maybe in this unreal world of post-apocalyptic play she is just checking to make sure he exists. Either way, they are already dancing with each other--as, of course, they have been all along.

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Ballet BC at the Queen E

Ballet BC's Trace program is on at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre this weekend. The coup of the evening is artistic director Emily Molnar landing William Forsythe's "workwithinwork" for the company. One other Forsythe piece, the witty "Herman Schmerman," is already part of the Ballet BC repertoire, but "workwithinwork" is Forsythe at his most rigorously deconstructive and technically complex. First premiering in 1998, and here receiving its Canadian debut, the piece is set to a violin duet by Luciano Berio and clocks in at a demanding 35 minutes or more. Part of what makes watching Forsythe--and this work, in particular--at once so challenging and rewarding is that he gives his audiences neither a narrative nor a movement through-line; instead, he creates a series of synchronous tableaux in which he shows us with precise accumulation the extraordinary physicality and athletic training that goes into the execution of a signature pose or a seemingly effortless bit of partnering. Forsythe is less interested in completion and dancers in this piece will frequently break off (or out of) a movement pattern before it is "finished" to walk nonchalantly offstage. In this way, Forsythe takes apart ballet's set structures and exposes the work that goes into making the work.

If "workwithinwork" is dance stripped down to its bare essentials--bodies moving in space--then the second piece on the program, the world premiere of Walter Matteini's Lascia ch'io pianga, shows what can happen when a concept becomes overdressed in theatrical embellishment. From the weighty choice of music (from Verdi and Vivaldi to Bach and Handel), to the evocative lighting by James Proudfoot, and the mixed register costume design by Ina Broeckx (the men in tux tails, the women divided between masculine slacks and shapeless shifts), everything about the piece screams "pay attention, this is meaningful." Except that I found the choreography anything but, and apart from a final mournful procession of company members to an upstage recess, all that I have retained is Emily Chessa's opening and closing gesture of wiping off her arms and the gimmick of suspending two of the women dancers on swings.

The evening closed with the audience favourite Petite Cérémonie, by Medhi Walerski. First set on the company in 2011, the piece is based on Walerski's interviews with company members about the concept of "life in a box," and appropriately features a series of white cubes--which get a vigorous workout, especially during a riotous closing sequence set to the allegro movement of Vivaldi's "Winter" section of The Four Seasons. Despite the undeniably pleasurable and infectious energy derived from the ending, and also the humour of an earlier bit in which Peter Smida (taking over from much lamented former company member Dario Dinuzzi) addresses the audience about the differences between men's and women's brains while juggling, for my money nothing can beat the simple elegance of the opening. With the wings and back walls of the stage exposed, the dancers, beginning with Gilbert Small, enter noiselessly one by one (including from the audience), joining each other in a simple metronomic two-step in which they shift their weight from foot to foot. Here is corps de ballet as chorus line that despite the lack of Broadway-style razzmatazz still conveys a palpably singular sensation of what it feels like to watch a group of individuals move as one.

Speaking of Walerski, Ballet BC has announced its line-up for its 2015-16 season, which will also be its 30th anniversary. It features a new evening-length work by Walerski, who will be joining the company for a three-year stint as choreographer-in-residence. Also on tap are Canadian premieres by Crystal Pite and Sharon Eyal, new work by Cayetano Soto and Jorma Elo, and the return of Molnar's own 16 + a room.

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Monsieur Auburtin at The Dance Centre

Last year Serge Bennathan, artistic director of Les Productions Figlio, had a cancer scare. The episode prompted him to reflect back upon his life and, in particular, his long career in dance. That reflection initially took the form of text and in Bennathan's latest creation, Monsieur Auburtin, that form remains dominant. The work, which runs at The Dance Centre through this Saturday in a co-presentation with the Chutzpah! Festival, sees Bennathan seated at a laptop computer reading his first-person script; he is accompanied by Bertrand Chénier on electric guitar and piano. Two female dancers, Erin Drumheller (who also plays violin) and the ubiquitous Kim Stevenson, are also part of the piece--though to what precise ends remains somewhat unclear to me.

After thanking us for coming and apologizing unnecessarily for his French accent, Bennathan launches us into his narrative, taking us back to 1963; it's the height of the Cold War and little Serge's father, a military man in France, wants his son to take up the flute--or, more precisely, as Bennathan notes with disdain, what in English we would call the recorder. The choice of instrument is less important than that the activity of studying and practising it will occupy time, keeping Serge--who has a penchant for getting into trouble (including, a little later, stealing motorcycles and selling their parts)--off the streets. But Serge rebels, announcing one day that he no longer wants to study the recorder. To his surprise, his father acquiesces to this desire. However, Serge is not off the hook, for eventually the day comes when his father asks him what he will do instead. Thinking quickly, Serge remembers that he has a friend a few floors up in his building who studies ballet; he has no idea what "ballet" is, but nevertheless blurts out that he wants to study it.

And so begins Bennathan's apprenticeship in dance, as he enrols in an introductory ballet class taught by the M. Auburtin of the title. The arc of that apprenticeship during Bennathan's years in France, before he emigrated to Canada, gives the piece its narrative structure, which is mostly built around a series of signal encounters with ballet legends, all set against the backdrop of Bennathan's youthful arrogance and apparently willful squandering of the opportunities he is being given and the skills he is being taught. Thus, for example, M. Auburtin introduces him, via a series of photographs, to the commanding presence of Nijinsky, upon whose flexed ankle, poised to launch the dancer into flight in a still from L'après-midi d'une faune, Bennathan becomes obsessed. Later, having moved to Paris as a teenager to study, Bennathan becomes a devotee of another sexually charismatic male ballet star, in this case Rudolf Nureyev, who was then in charge of the Paris Opéra Ballet. Bennathan recounts an hilarious anecdote about stealing a pair of Nureyev's tights, which he then promptly shows us. But such youthful escapades came at the expense of the discipline demanded by his disappointed Cuban ballet master, who slaps Bennathan at one point for arriving at the theatre fifteen minutes before curtain.

Finally, the last section of Bennathan's narrative is devoted to his time dancing for Roland Petit, who in the early 1970s was starting up a new ballet company in Marseille and looking for dancers. At an audition in Paris packed with more than 200 male dancers, Bennathan makes it to the last 10 (based in part on his strengths in jumping), only to have his hopes dashed when he is not one of the final four chosen. However, remaining at the barre dazed and confused, his disappointed immobility is eventually rewarded when Petit suddenly looks up from his conversation with the chosen and motions him over to join them. Bennathan's is launched on his career, one that will eventually take him from the apartment block in Marseille he shares with a posse of motherly prostitutes to points all around the world, including a tour of Canada, where he gets his first taste of Vancouver. Oh yes, and during his time with Petit, Bennathan will also spend a week taking more or less private class with one Mischa Baryshnikov. However transformative this event is, witnessing Pina Bausch's Cafe Müller for the first time is even more mind-blowing for Bennathan, an experience that will force him to question his years of classical training and that will eventually launch him on the path of contemporary dance.

One cannot help but be charmed by the recounting of such moments. Bennathan is a gifted and compelling storyteller, applying his choreographic skills with rhythm and pacing to shape an autobiographical fable that, like the best story ballets (including Bennathan's favourite Giselle), seems at once magical and inevitable. Chénier's musical accompaniment aids immeasurably to this end, providing tempo but also crucially creating atmosphere, including dramatic suspense. The dancing, however, I found more difficult to integrate into the overall concept of the piece. At times Drumheller and Stevenson, who are both very talented movers, appeared to be illustrating what Bennathan was describing, and at other times deliberately burlesquing it. Whatever the case, mostly I just wished there was more movement--full stop. For long stretches the dancers remain stationary on the stage, and only rarely--in the few moments he gets up from his chair to move up- or downstage to read from a sheaf of printed pages, do they interact with Bennathan directly. This is in contrast to an earlier excerpt from the work-in-progress that I saw at EDAM last fall. Then Bennathan was standing throughout, and the female dancers (Karissa Barry and Hilary Maxwell) interacted with him--and each other--much more physically, at various points encircling him like the Wilis from Giselle.

I realize that the piece has become something much different in its present incarnation. But as Bennathan--who after last night's performance was presented by Howard Jang with the Canada Council's Jacqueline Lemieux Prize for dance--has distinguished himself in this country as such an adept choreographer for women, I was hoping to see more of this artistry in action. Perhaps that will become the second half of the story of Bennathan's life in dance--which, happily for us, is still unfolding.

P.

Mountain View Solstice Dancers: Rehearsal 2

Last night at Celebration Hall, Jessica began by introducing us to new rehearsal assistant Hayley (I think I've got that right), who took us through a few opening somatic breathing and knee bending exercises in order to get us to think about ways to mitigate the effects of dancing on a concrete floor. Then, after a brief warm-up, Jessica reversed the process of last week, having us start with our concluding shaped improv exercise.

Soon, however, the improv morphed into the contact variety as we paired off and played with transferring weight and following the direction of different touching limbs, starting with out foreheads. Having long marvelled at the spontaneous flow and reciprocal response of professional contact dancers, it was fun to actually move in this way, working first with Ellen and then Christine and finally Ling. Needless to say, Ling and I eventually ended up on the floor in a fit of giggles.

The main portion of the rehearsal was devoted to taking our waltz steps and arm combinations from last week and putting them together in our first choreographic pattern, a group procession in which we floated (or "wafted," to use Jessica's term) down the length of the hall, doing a turn with our same waltz step (but a new set of arms), and then floated back. It sounds simple, but figuring out the number of steps to our turns and when to begin vis-a-vis each preceding set of partners took some time. Eventually we got there and now we have our first phrase to practice at home.

Among the announcements at the end of the rehearsal, Diane--who is a professional couturier--let us know her concept for our costumes. We're all to wear white. That means finding some appropriate pants, I guess. I think I'll forgo Value Village this time.

P.

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.

P.

Out Innerspace and 605 Collective at the Vancouver International Dance Festival

Last night's mainstage show at VIDF featured a double bill by two stellar local companies: Out Innerspace and 605 Collective. Both companies were presenting excerpts from works-in-progress.

Up first was Out Innerspace's as yet untitled piece. It begins with a lone woman at a microphone, her face half in shadow, extolling the goodness of us in the audience, what good work we're doing, how she and her peers exist only because of us, and that this is most certainly a very good thing. After a brief blackout, the woman is joined by five other dancers (members of OIS's Modus Operandi youth training initiative, I'm assuming). They stare out at us in terror, recoiling three times in a series of collective gasps; maybe we're not so benignly enabling after all. Thus, turning inward to each other, the dancers link arms and form a single bodily chain, propelling each other in eddying waves of massed movement, as if to let go of each other would be to risk abandonment to some outside force (would that be us in the audience again?).

As much as I enjoyed watching these young dancers move so fluidly together, and the ways in which James Proudfoot's warm and glowingly off-centre lighting would catch and momentarily highlight various outstretched limbs, I thought that this opening sequence went on a bit too long, to the point where the various bodily pivots in the chain (shades of mentor Crystal Pite's influence at work here, for sure) became muddied and indistinguishable. Indeed, when, eventually, members of the group broke apart and began responding to each other with distinct phrases, it was rewarding to see just what excellent movers each of them is. And when they were joined by OIS artistic directors and choreographers David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen for a robust and high-energy bit of unison movement, I was in a definite spectatorial sweet spot.

Soon, however, we're back to that massed clump, only this time it assumes a form that seems to have a face--and that now chases offstage one among the group it had previously spit out. This dancer (Arash Khakpour) will eventually return, breathing and scatting into the now hand-held microphone from the top of the show as the other dancers slowly advance upon him, heaving and pulsing along with his rhythms. But whether they are feeding off of, or on, his energy remains unclear.

Following an intermission, we were treated to a "short draft" of the research that has so far gone into 605 Collective's Vital Few, which according to the program will premiere at VIDF next year. Also exploring the relationship of the individual to the group, but in ways that specifically seek to comment on how members of the 605 ensemble create movement together, the piece begins with six dancers (including co-artistic directors Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin) emerging in a parallel line stage left, improvising a series of lunges and squats and backwards and forwards arm extensions in response to one another. Arriving centre stage, the group forms a circle, into the middle of which one of the women now steps, swiping one arm through the air. Returning to the edge of the circle, the woman repeats the same movement once again. And again. And again. This is the signal for the other dancers to begin adapting their own improvised and previously autonomous movements into a larger choreographic structure.

Over the course of the next twenty minutes each of the dancers will take a turn "in the lead," initiating a phrase which the others will either repeat or adapt. This is the way 605 has always worked, but here they are exposing that process for us, making it the basis for the work itself. And we are able to see and appreciate the way they are working together in part because the group has deliberately slowed down their usual high-speed tempo. This culminates in an amazing round-robin of pick-up movement to an aria by Enrico Caruso, a marrying of contemporary and classical forms that allows us, in turn, to pick up (and out) what makes each of these dancers--and the group as a whole--so distinctive.

P.