This year's Dancing on the Edge Festival, its 30th anniversary, opened yesterday, and I had tickets for both of the evening performances at the Firehall. The 7 pm show showcased the Vancouver premiere of Lara Kramer Danse's Windigo. I have not seen Kramer's work before, but I have read a lot about her 2013 work, Native Girl Syndrome, a difficult and viscerally affecting examination of the inherited intergenerational trauma of cultural genocide. In the program notes, Kramer refers to Windigo as NGS's "masculine counterpart, where trauma is externalized through different ages and bodies, individuals and objects." Two of the main objects that dominate the quasi-installation-like set are a pair of mattresses on which performers Peter James and Stefan Petersen (replacing Jassem Hindi) are sprawled as the audience files into the auditorium. Kramer sits between the men, engaging both in quiet conversation. Another mattress, still in its protective plastic, is positioned against the upstage left wall, and in the upstage right corner is a huge pile of discarded clothes, toys, and other objects. Pictorially, this tableau suggests any number of possible scenarios, including the aftermath of a terrible violence and an ongoing struggle for survival.
Soon after Kramer moves to her laptop and audio console to live mix the striking sound score for the piece (composed by Kramer and featuring field recordings of crackling fires and other natural noises overlain with conversations between Kramer and her children), Petersen removes a switchblade from one of his jeans pockets, and all of a sudden the relationship between the two men takes on new stakes. In fact, the knives in the piece--for we eventually learn that James has one as well--are only ever used on the mattresses: the slash marks Petersen makes on his bed perhaps represent his own psychic wounds (at one point he eats a bit of the mattress stuffing); James, on the other hand, is intent on secreting away clothes and other personal belongings into the holes he has created, whether for safekeeping or added comfort it is unclear. Either way, both the hollowed out and overstuffed mattresses become key dance partners for both men; despite the knives, their attention to the mattresses is solicitous, almost tender, turning them into ceremonial objects, with the slash marks on Petersen's and the peekaboo bits of coloured clothing emanating from James' recalling, in some ways, the residual traces of carving and beadwork traditions, respectively. Later, Petersen will wear his mattress like a polar bear skin and James will ride his like a sled, and suddenly the scenographic landscape we are wont to read as evidence of urban blight and decay turns into a northern topography whose ancient cultural magic can transform what is potentially threatening and strange into something protective and even hopeful--which is how I read the shaggy pink puppet that James dances around the stage towards the end of the piece.
After the performance I had a conversation with the woman sitting beside me, who wondered how what we had just seen in Windigo was any different from what we might see on any given day on a street corner just a few blocks from the Firehall. But as PuSh Festival Interim AD Joyce Rosario and I agreed in a shared cab ride home, walking by two men on mattresses on Hastings Street we have the option to do just that: walk on by. Framing that scene aesthetically on stage, Kramer forces us to sit with what we might otherwise choose not to see, to deal with its complicated layers of history and, perhaps most importantly, our own discomfort. This is not an easy work, but it is incredibly powerful, and I was never less than compelled.
The 9 pm show was a double bill featuring South Korea's Dab Dance Project and Vancouver's own Company 605. Dab Dance's Bomberman is a trio that takes place inside a plastic box. Three men (performers Hoyeon Kim, who also choreographed the work, Jungha Lim, and Gunwoo Jun) introduce us to their quarantined environment via illuminated fluorescent tubes. The cooperation they must enact physically in order to form the tubes into a triangle that frames each of their bodies becomes a metaphor for working together within this enclosed space. For when they are moving on their own in different competing displays of virtuosity, as happens soon after this opening, there is always the possibility that one of them will suck up all the available oxygen. By contrast, when they move in unison, often in striking acrobatic formations, there seems to be more air to breathe--for them, and for us. Indeed, the atmospheric connection between performers and audience is made manifest at the very end of the piece when, from the now foggy inside of their translucent box, one of the dancers breaches the plastic, making a hole in it and reaching his hand through.
Company 605's Loop, Lull is an excerpt from a work in progress by Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin that explores repetition and transformation. Dancers Sophia Wolfe, Laura Avery, Bynh Ho, Jessica Wilkie and Francesca Frewer cycle through a range of iterative movement patterns, testing out different individual starting positions and bodily combinations, and even taking turns adjusting light and sound levels (via two downstage consoles; the striking sound design is by Matthew Tomkinson). At first the staggered entrances of the dancers (several carrying water bottles and snacks) and the instant replay of their struck poses makes it seem like we are watching a rehearsal warm-up, something reinforced by the casual banter back and forth, as well as the occasional on-stage documentation via a mini-Polaroid camera. But following a duet between Ho and Wilkie in which they ask each other how their attempts at perfecting their partnering sequence feel, the choreographic looping gets more complex, with Gelley and Martin pressing the reset button through a group pattern in which the dancers take turns spelling each other in the middle of a phrase. Like binary code, the different bodily integers produce a movement algorithm that is always morphing and shifting, a pattern we think we recognize, but that is also simultaneously reshaping our perception.
P
Showing posts with label Company 605. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Company 605. Show all posts
Saturday, July 7, 2018
Saturday, March 18, 2017
Ballet BC's Program 2 at the Queen E
For her second offering of Ballet BC's 2016/17 season, Emily Molnar has programmed a celebration of Canada's 150+ history (as she astutely re-temporalized this year's national anniversary in her curtain speech, though without an accompanying territorial acknowledgement). Even more specifically this weekend's performances are a showcase of local Vancouver choreographic talent, featuring three world premieres and the return of an audience favourite by superstar Crystal Pite.
In advance of last night's show I was most eager to see the commission by Company 605's Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin. How would their urban hip-hop aesthetic and signature transversal movement flows translate onto a ballet company, with its emphasis on verticality and readable lines? The answer, I have to say, is not so easily. Anthem begins with the Ballet BC ensemble standing upstage in a circular clump; the music (initially by Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld) begins and a couple of dancers sway their torsos, sending a similar ripple throughout the rest of the group. This relay effect continues for some time, changing direction and building in choreographic complexity, but also with individual dancers every now and then taking themselves out of the transfer of a particular movement tide to stand and watch. This was my first inkling that all was not right with these new inhabitants of 605-land. A requisite feature of b-boying is members of a posse regularly ceding the floor to their confrères to perform a showcase sequence of moves; while this also allows the folks on the so-called sidelines to catch their breath, they are still kinetically engaged to what's happening around them and in Gelley and Martin's work for their own company there is never a sense that individual dancers, even when momentarily still, aren't connected to the larger movement energy of the group. Maybe it had something to do with how long this opening upstage tableau went on, or maybe it was just my desire for this largely upright crew to drop to the floor, but whenever a Ballet BC dancer paused and took themselves out of the flow of movement it felt like they didn't know what to do with themselves, that they needed a moment to re-sync their bodies with the rhythm of the rest of the group. Of course how one identifies or aligns oneself with a group or cause is implicit in the title Anthem, and Gelley and Martin were certainly playing with this idea when, eventually dispersing the dancers across the stage, they started working with unison. However, as with the music selections that followed these sequences never built to the expected choreographic crescendo. I also found I was missing two features of 605 dancing that I always look forward to: the way in which a volley of movement begun in one body is finished in another; and the sculptural clumps they so often form in their pieces, the liquid limbs of the dancers conjoining as if in a ridiculously complex game of Twister. Paradoxically it was the distance between the dancers that I most registered in Anthem.
Wen Wei Wang's Swan was next on the program. A short and sharp six-part deconstruction of Swan Lake, complete with Sammy Chien's brilliant and loudly industrial distortion of Tchaikovsky's score, the piece was in many ways deliberately derivative: I detected references to Matthew Bourne and Black Swan in the two same-sex partnering sequences, and even to Marie Chouinard in the brilliantly gymnastic solo by Andrew Bartee (who was also excellent on point) on the parallel barres (!) in the concluding sequence. But that didn't make the work any less fun to watch, and the partnering--between Bartee and Christoph von Riedemann, Alexis Fletcher and Peter Smida, Kristen Wicklund and Gilbert Small, and Wicklund and Fletcher--was sublimely accomplished.
Following a pause we were treated to a new pas de deux choreographed by Lesley Telford and danced to a spoken word composition by Barbara Adler. If I were 2 is inspired by the Narcissus myth, which put me in mind of Norman McLaren's brilliant NFB dance film from the 1980s. But Telford and Adler are much more free in their adaptation of the myth, with Adler managing to embed a Debordian critique of the "society of the spectacle" into her text--our hero and heroine first catch a glimpse of each other via their reflections in a storefront window, their faces framed by the deer antlers on the display mannequins--and Telford playing with some of the gendered dynamics of traditional ballet partnering. Thus, while near the top of the piece there is an absolutely stunning lift of the petite Emily Chessa by Brandon Alley, most of the rest of the duet sees the two trading positions of leading and following, including during a very effective play-rewind-repeat sequence in which first one dancer steps forward and points stage right and then the other replaces him or her, each look for a returned gaze simultaneously "a slip of the hook" in Adler's rhythmic phrasing. This is not the first time Telford and Alder have collaborated together and happily it will not be the last (they have another collaboration coming up at The Dance Centre at the end of April); the way they combine text and movement is utterly symbiotic, to the point where once again it is impossible to determine who is leading and who is following. This was made all the more apparent last night by the fact that in addition to a looped recording of Adler's voice, the dancers were also responding to her live recitation of the text from the orchestra pit--and she, likewise, to their movements.
Pite is another Vancouver-based choreographer not afraid of incorporating text into her dance compositions. And yet while Solo Echo takes inspiration from Mark Strand's poem Lines for Winter (which are excerpted in the program), the piece is actually danced to two haunting cello sonatas by Brahms. In the first movement, the seven dancers slide across the stage and orbit around each other like individual points in a rotating constellation, or isolated and pulsating pixels in a momentarily stilled and blown-up photograph. Indeed, the way that Pite has her dancers run on stage successively and then freeze mid-stride in an overlapping horizontal tableau puts one in mind of stop-motion animation, or the panels of a film storyboard (a technique she has explored elsewhere in works like Plot Point and Grace Engine). Here, in the first half of the work, the danced version of montage is used to explore how a force (including a sonic force like an echo) can reverberate from body to body, binding them into a shared resonant field (as with the gorgeous assisted walk that ends this section, with one of the women dancers launching herself from the wings into a supine position on the floor and stretching her arms above her head to capture her male partner's ankles just as he starts to put one leg in front of the other). This single force field then becomes the focus of the second half of the work as Pite exploits the connected bodily massings and domino-like chains that have become her signature in large group works. In so doing, she shows in an expressly kinetic way how the echo, as a sound launched from a singular source out into a larger environment, necessarily comes back as something more expansive, more resonant--something that, though transformed via its diffusion, nevertheless attaches us through careful listening to one another, and to our environment.
Thus for me it is this concluding work by Pite that arguably--and un-anthemically--fulfills the promise of the evening's opening.
P
In advance of last night's show I was most eager to see the commission by Company 605's Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin. How would their urban hip-hop aesthetic and signature transversal movement flows translate onto a ballet company, with its emphasis on verticality and readable lines? The answer, I have to say, is not so easily. Anthem begins with the Ballet BC ensemble standing upstage in a circular clump; the music (initially by Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld) begins and a couple of dancers sway their torsos, sending a similar ripple throughout the rest of the group. This relay effect continues for some time, changing direction and building in choreographic complexity, but also with individual dancers every now and then taking themselves out of the transfer of a particular movement tide to stand and watch. This was my first inkling that all was not right with these new inhabitants of 605-land. A requisite feature of b-boying is members of a posse regularly ceding the floor to their confrères to perform a showcase sequence of moves; while this also allows the folks on the so-called sidelines to catch their breath, they are still kinetically engaged to what's happening around them and in Gelley and Martin's work for their own company there is never a sense that individual dancers, even when momentarily still, aren't connected to the larger movement energy of the group. Maybe it had something to do with how long this opening upstage tableau went on, or maybe it was just my desire for this largely upright crew to drop to the floor, but whenever a Ballet BC dancer paused and took themselves out of the flow of movement it felt like they didn't know what to do with themselves, that they needed a moment to re-sync their bodies with the rhythm of the rest of the group. Of course how one identifies or aligns oneself with a group or cause is implicit in the title Anthem, and Gelley and Martin were certainly playing with this idea when, eventually dispersing the dancers across the stage, they started working with unison. However, as with the music selections that followed these sequences never built to the expected choreographic crescendo. I also found I was missing two features of 605 dancing that I always look forward to: the way in which a volley of movement begun in one body is finished in another; and the sculptural clumps they so often form in their pieces, the liquid limbs of the dancers conjoining as if in a ridiculously complex game of Twister. Paradoxically it was the distance between the dancers that I most registered in Anthem.
Wen Wei Wang's Swan was next on the program. A short and sharp six-part deconstruction of Swan Lake, complete with Sammy Chien's brilliant and loudly industrial distortion of Tchaikovsky's score, the piece was in many ways deliberately derivative: I detected references to Matthew Bourne and Black Swan in the two same-sex partnering sequences, and even to Marie Chouinard in the brilliantly gymnastic solo by Andrew Bartee (who was also excellent on point) on the parallel barres (!) in the concluding sequence. But that didn't make the work any less fun to watch, and the partnering--between Bartee and Christoph von Riedemann, Alexis Fletcher and Peter Smida, Kristen Wicklund and Gilbert Small, and Wicklund and Fletcher--was sublimely accomplished.
Following a pause we were treated to a new pas de deux choreographed by Lesley Telford and danced to a spoken word composition by Barbara Adler. If I were 2 is inspired by the Narcissus myth, which put me in mind of Norman McLaren's brilliant NFB dance film from the 1980s. But Telford and Adler are much more free in their adaptation of the myth, with Adler managing to embed a Debordian critique of the "society of the spectacle" into her text--our hero and heroine first catch a glimpse of each other via their reflections in a storefront window, their faces framed by the deer antlers on the display mannequins--and Telford playing with some of the gendered dynamics of traditional ballet partnering. Thus, while near the top of the piece there is an absolutely stunning lift of the petite Emily Chessa by Brandon Alley, most of the rest of the duet sees the two trading positions of leading and following, including during a very effective play-rewind-repeat sequence in which first one dancer steps forward and points stage right and then the other replaces him or her, each look for a returned gaze simultaneously "a slip of the hook" in Adler's rhythmic phrasing. This is not the first time Telford and Alder have collaborated together and happily it will not be the last (they have another collaboration coming up at The Dance Centre at the end of April); the way they combine text and movement is utterly symbiotic, to the point where once again it is impossible to determine who is leading and who is following. This was made all the more apparent last night by the fact that in addition to a looped recording of Adler's voice, the dancers were also responding to her live recitation of the text from the orchestra pit--and she, likewise, to their movements.
Pite is another Vancouver-based choreographer not afraid of incorporating text into her dance compositions. And yet while Solo Echo takes inspiration from Mark Strand's poem Lines for Winter (which are excerpted in the program), the piece is actually danced to two haunting cello sonatas by Brahms. In the first movement, the seven dancers slide across the stage and orbit around each other like individual points in a rotating constellation, or isolated and pulsating pixels in a momentarily stilled and blown-up photograph. Indeed, the way that Pite has her dancers run on stage successively and then freeze mid-stride in an overlapping horizontal tableau puts one in mind of stop-motion animation, or the panels of a film storyboard (a technique she has explored elsewhere in works like Plot Point and Grace Engine). Here, in the first half of the work, the danced version of montage is used to explore how a force (including a sonic force like an echo) can reverberate from body to body, binding them into a shared resonant field (as with the gorgeous assisted walk that ends this section, with one of the women dancers launching herself from the wings into a supine position on the floor and stretching her arms above her head to capture her male partner's ankles just as he starts to put one leg in front of the other). This single force field then becomes the focus of the second half of the work as Pite exploits the connected bodily massings and domino-like chains that have become her signature in large group works. In so doing, she shows in an expressly kinetic way how the echo, as a sound launched from a singular source out into a larger environment, necessarily comes back as something more expansive, more resonant--something that, though transformed via its diffusion, nevertheless attaches us through careful listening to one another, and to our environment.
Thus for me it is this concluding work by Pite that arguably--and un-anthemically--fulfills the promise of the evening's opening.
P
Friday, March 18, 2016
Vital Few Rehearsal at VIDF
This is an insane weekend for dance shows: it's the last weekend of VIDF; Ballet BC's Program 2 kicks off tonight at the Queen E; Words in Motion, a collaboration between The Dance Centre and UBC's Chan Centre, takes place Friday and Saturday; and Justine Chambers and James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam are collaborating with mixed media artist Evann Siebens for a showing of "The Indexical, Alphabetized, Mediated, Archival Dance-a-thon!" at WAAP on Saturday. Something had to give, and owing to previous commitments it ended up being VIDF. Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed to be missing the premiere of Company 605's latest work, Vital Few. However, thanks to the intervention of Ziyian Kwan, whose latest creation for dumb instrument Dance, Still Rhyming, will be preceding Vital Few on VIDF's free Roundhouse Exhibition Hall stage tonight through Saturday, I was able to get 605 founders Josh Martin and Lisa Gelley to consent to let me watch a run through of the piece yesterday afternoon.
Vital Few is built from some of the work that 605 showed at VIDF last year, but they have expanded the piece quite substantially. There is, quite simply, an amazing amount of dancing jammed into the show's 75+ minutes, most of it featuring the full company complement of six dancers (Martin, joined by Laura Avery, Hayden Fong, Renee Sigouin, Jessica Wilkie, and Sophia Wolfe; co-director Gelley was watching over everything from the tech booth). The piece begins with Avery entering stage left, walking downstage centre and staring out searchingly at the audience; Martin soon joins Avery, embracing her, but in a way that requires a constant shifting of their responses to each other, with Martin actively adjusting Avery's limbs, moving one arm here, shifting her head there. Not that it felt to me that Martin was treating Avery like a wind-up doll; it was more like he was dissatisfied with the external representation of bodily affect each pose was conveying and that he was in search of something more authentic--because, presumably, more natural.
Soon Avery and Martin are joined by the rest of the dancers, who pile on in a group hug, but one that is constantly in motion, with different bodies darting out from under, or else diving back into, the mass of bent torsos, tucked heads and wrap-around limbs. It was like the company was playing a completely upright game of Twister. Eventually Avery's head pops out of this restless bodily mass, her expression as quizzical as when she first entered on stage, her hair none the worse for wear. Two arms belonging to her still enmeshed confreres slice the air, like a conductor, or reach around to scratch the back of the dancer most downstage to the audience (Martin as I recall). Again, I didn't really register this as a visual cliche, 605's version of a many-armed Hindu goddess practicing her mudras. Instead, I saw it as a concrete physical articulation of the company's method, which is all about how the individual moves with and in response to the group, and which involves a mix of improvisation and set choreography.
To this end, when we start to hear the first of the two Enrico Caruso songs used in the piece, the dancers begin breaking apart, spitting out duos and trios that approximate the occasional waltz step or bit of classical partnering, before reforming like an amoeba under a microscope. Eventually, however, the amoeba does unfurl into a chain, and then the chain itself splits apart, with each of the dancers taking turns at some solo freestyling. But it is 605's version of serial, shared, or transferred movement, their very own hybrid of canon and unison formations, that always captivates me. The way they begin a movement phrase in one body and transport it mid-articulation to another without interrupting the flow, but also while frequently changing the direction, is something that I experience in my own body as an uncanny bit of mirrored rippling, almost as though we in the audience should be doing the wave in response--except for the fact that in this case, apart from the assembled crew and videographer, I was an audience of one.
Maybe as a result of the piece's opening tableau, I found myself focusing a lot on the dancers' arms in Vital Few. They do a lot of work here: they hail, they wave, they signal; they are cocked above the eyes when someone looks out, or raised heraldically above the head when someone else wants to pose; they are used to push people out of the way and also offered in support. More than once, as in the jazzy swingtime number where Fong is a standout, they are used to square off space between dancers, or to frame parts of their bodies, a game tinged with shades of threatened violence that leads to a series of increasingly fast and more complex interlocking Lego-like combinations of so many arms akimbo.
Not everything worked for me in the show. I thought it was a bit too long and it felt like there were two endings (a note Martin confirmed to me afterwards that they'd received from others). Following a particularly vigorous and rhythmically hypnotic group sequence danced to a loop of what sounded like a record stuck in a groove (shades of Inheritor Album?), the dancers all eventually arrive upstage, freezing one by one in a rectangle of white light. I heard myself audibly exhaling at that point, which suggests to me this would be an appropriate place for a blackout. Instead, the piece continues for another fifteen minutes or so, culminating in the group ripping up the shiny reflective Mylar floor surface taped over the white Marley, and which casts such amazing effects of light upon the upstage screen wall throughout much of the piece. The sheets are piled upstage where before the dancers' bodies had stood, a shiny aluminum mass that in its lumpen and amorphous shape recalls the fluid and heaving mass of bodies downstage at the top of the show, and that perhaps serves as a metaphor for all of the vital energy the dancers have literally left on the floor.
But to bypass interpretation and to settle into the experience of this moment (that was for you Deanna!), this second ending wasn't as satisfying for me. This is partly because it felt like I had seen it before. I am thinking in particular of DanceHouse's 2012 presentation of Blush by Gallim Dance (who were just back in town last week as part of Chutzpah!). There a similar instance of "tearing up the dance floor" came as a shock, but the effect still somehow registered as being very much inside the world of the dance; but in the case of Vital Few, by contrast, I couldn't help thinking I was watching the striking of a stage set. That's an ending, to be sure, but maybe one that's a bit too "meta" for a piece that is otherwise so focused on what remains so vital about the pure art of dance.
P.
Vital Few is built from some of the work that 605 showed at VIDF last year, but they have expanded the piece quite substantially. There is, quite simply, an amazing amount of dancing jammed into the show's 75+ minutes, most of it featuring the full company complement of six dancers (Martin, joined by Laura Avery, Hayden Fong, Renee Sigouin, Jessica Wilkie, and Sophia Wolfe; co-director Gelley was watching over everything from the tech booth). The piece begins with Avery entering stage left, walking downstage centre and staring out searchingly at the audience; Martin soon joins Avery, embracing her, but in a way that requires a constant shifting of their responses to each other, with Martin actively adjusting Avery's limbs, moving one arm here, shifting her head there. Not that it felt to me that Martin was treating Avery like a wind-up doll; it was more like he was dissatisfied with the external representation of bodily affect each pose was conveying and that he was in search of something more authentic--because, presumably, more natural.
Soon Avery and Martin are joined by the rest of the dancers, who pile on in a group hug, but one that is constantly in motion, with different bodies darting out from under, or else diving back into, the mass of bent torsos, tucked heads and wrap-around limbs. It was like the company was playing a completely upright game of Twister. Eventually Avery's head pops out of this restless bodily mass, her expression as quizzical as when she first entered on stage, her hair none the worse for wear. Two arms belonging to her still enmeshed confreres slice the air, like a conductor, or reach around to scratch the back of the dancer most downstage to the audience (Martin as I recall). Again, I didn't really register this as a visual cliche, 605's version of a many-armed Hindu goddess practicing her mudras. Instead, I saw it as a concrete physical articulation of the company's method, which is all about how the individual moves with and in response to the group, and which involves a mix of improvisation and set choreography.
To this end, when we start to hear the first of the two Enrico Caruso songs used in the piece, the dancers begin breaking apart, spitting out duos and trios that approximate the occasional waltz step or bit of classical partnering, before reforming like an amoeba under a microscope. Eventually, however, the amoeba does unfurl into a chain, and then the chain itself splits apart, with each of the dancers taking turns at some solo freestyling. But it is 605's version of serial, shared, or transferred movement, their very own hybrid of canon and unison formations, that always captivates me. The way they begin a movement phrase in one body and transport it mid-articulation to another without interrupting the flow, but also while frequently changing the direction, is something that I experience in my own body as an uncanny bit of mirrored rippling, almost as though we in the audience should be doing the wave in response--except for the fact that in this case, apart from the assembled crew and videographer, I was an audience of one.
Maybe as a result of the piece's opening tableau, I found myself focusing a lot on the dancers' arms in Vital Few. They do a lot of work here: they hail, they wave, they signal; they are cocked above the eyes when someone looks out, or raised heraldically above the head when someone else wants to pose; they are used to push people out of the way and also offered in support. More than once, as in the jazzy swingtime number where Fong is a standout, they are used to square off space between dancers, or to frame parts of their bodies, a game tinged with shades of threatened violence that leads to a series of increasingly fast and more complex interlocking Lego-like combinations of so many arms akimbo.
Not everything worked for me in the show. I thought it was a bit too long and it felt like there were two endings (a note Martin confirmed to me afterwards that they'd received from others). Following a particularly vigorous and rhythmically hypnotic group sequence danced to a loop of what sounded like a record stuck in a groove (shades of Inheritor Album?), the dancers all eventually arrive upstage, freezing one by one in a rectangle of white light. I heard myself audibly exhaling at that point, which suggests to me this would be an appropriate place for a blackout. Instead, the piece continues for another fifteen minutes or so, culminating in the group ripping up the shiny reflective Mylar floor surface taped over the white Marley, and which casts such amazing effects of light upon the upstage screen wall throughout much of the piece. The sheets are piled upstage where before the dancers' bodies had stood, a shiny aluminum mass that in its lumpen and amorphous shape recalls the fluid and heaving mass of bodies downstage at the top of the show, and that perhaps serves as a metaphor for all of the vital energy the dancers have literally left on the floor.
But to bypass interpretation and to settle into the experience of this moment (that was for you Deanna!), this second ending wasn't as satisfying for me. This is partly because it felt like I had seen it before. I am thinking in particular of DanceHouse's 2012 presentation of Blush by Gallim Dance (who were just back in town last week as part of Chutzpah!). There a similar instance of "tearing up the dance floor" came as a shock, but the effect still somehow registered as being very much inside the world of the dance; but in the case of Vital Few, by contrast, I couldn't help thinking I was watching the striking of a stage set. That's an ending, to be sure, but maybe one that's a bit too "meta" for a piece that is otherwise so focused on what remains so vital about the pure art of dance.
P.
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