Betroffenheit, co-created by Kidd Pivot's Crystal Pite and Electric Company Theatre's Jonathon Young, was first presented as part of the Panamania Festival accompanying Toronto's Pan Am and Para Pan Am Games back in the summer of 2015. It's been touring the world to acclaim ever since. Like most in Vancouver, I first saw the show when it was presented by DanceHouse at the Vancouver Playhouse in February 2016 (you can read my original impressions here). Now, just before it embarks on the final leg of its three-year world tour, DanceHouse has brought the show back to the same venue. I was there once again last night.
In part this was practical: I've updated an essay I've written about Pite and Kidd Pivot to include a discussion of Betroffenheit; and I'll also be speaking about the work at the University of Stockholm in May. So I wanted to ensure that I hadn't made any egregious errors in my representation of the work, particularly with respect to its complex distribution of the human voice. But really I just wanted to be swept up once again by the amazing on-stage world that Pite and Young have created, and to revel in the sublime movement of the performers. On both counts I was not disappointed. Christopher Hernandez, replacing Bryan Arias (who I think is premiering a new work of his own in New York), fits into the ensemble seamlessly. Hernandez is about double the size of Arias, and so this does change the partnering with Cindy Salgado somewhat; but his solo that opens Act 2 is still a marvel of off-axis lightness and grace. Otherwise, all of the other performers seem to have grown more deeply into and with their parts; none of the movement felt mechanical or marked, and there were new expressive details in the choreography that I had the pleasure of discovering--such as the little foot wiggles that Tiffany Tregarthen does at one point when she's turned upside down in her role as the devilish monkey on Young's character's back in Act 1. Ditto David Raymond's incredibly controlled staccato work with his arms and fingers during the therapist scene. And what I'll call Salgado's breathing solo in Act 2 was deeply affecting, the simple inflation and deflation of her shoulders speaking volumes about the bodily manifestations of grief.
As the blue silk suited co-hosts of our show-within-a-show, Young and Jermaine Spivey are by now expertly attuned to each other's rhythms, both in terms of the movement and the lipsynched dialogue that they share. I remain amazed by Young's technical facility with Pite's complex choreography, but it was Spivey whom I couldn't take my eyes off of. If anything, it seems like his body and limbs have grown even more elastic and liquid; the flipping of his legs backwards over the arm of Young, or later their wave-like rippling along the floor, seems absolutely of a piece with Young's floppy manipulations of his puppet stand-in. Likewise, the speed and precision of Spivey's turns and the air he catches while flipping his body through space seem to defy the laws of physics. Needless to say, the solo by Spivey that concludes the work remains a devastatingly gorgeous summation of the archive of grief and trauma that has been passed from body to body in the preceding two hours.
Of course there were aspects of the work that I'd forgotten about, mostly relating to the text and how personally self-accusatory it is. Betroffenheit both is and isn't Young's story, but in abstracting his and his family's tragedy onto this fictional world he hasn't spared himself a nightly real-time examination pertaining to his grief and guilt. Mostly this comes in the form of subtle repetitions of phrases that are inflected with telling pronouns ("Is he at fault?," "I know she...," "They're in there," "They're in this"). But there are also just incredibly raw and open displays of pain, and the failing of others that is a consequence of this pain--as with the phone call from Mom. Somehow I'd also forgotten the desperately uncomprehending solo that Tregarthen performs in Act 2, her final pose--arms bent in front of her, as if cradling an absent child--giving me new context as to why her character is Young's chief tormenter in Act 1.
For all of the very real sorrow upon which Betroffenheit is built, the work is also filled with joy. To me, the piece is the danced equivalent of one of my favourite poems, Hart Crane's "Chaplinesque." There Crane writes about how, in the wake of all the torment and unhappiness the world throws at us, no matter how the game of life smirks at us, "we make our meek adjustments," we find "our random consolations." Because "what blame to us if the heart live on"? And it does. That was clear last night during the curtain calls. The love on stage, in the audience, and between the two was physically palpable.
What's more, everyone gets to renew the affair next year when Pite, Young, the dancers, and virtually the entire Betroffenheit creative team return to the DanceHouse stage with the world premiere of a new work of dance-theatre, Revisor. I spoke briefly with composer Owen Belton while exiting the theatre, and he said they have already been workshopping the piece at Banff. It will apparently be something of a political satire. Given the new Cold War we suddenly find ourselves in, it should be timely.
P
Showing posts with label Crystal Pite. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crystal Pite. Show all posts
Sunday, March 18, 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, May 27, 2016
AUDC's Season Finale at The Playhouse
All through Thursday evening's premiere program of Arts Umbrella Dance Company's Season Finale at the Vancouver Playhouse AUDC Artistic Director Artemis Gordon sat in the back row of the orchestra section in tight conclave with Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar. This of course makes sense given the close ties between the two organizations, with AUDC's pre-professional program now officially serving as the training/feeder school for Ballet BC's apprentice program. Still, what was most interesting to me last night was to see how Molnar's programming choices and her determination to position Ballet BC aesthetically as a contemporary ballet company have clearly had a reciprocal influence on Gordon's repertory choices for this year's AUDC spring graduation program.
How else to explain Ballet BC Resident Choreographer Cayetano Soto leading off the evening with his PAU CLARIS, which puts the male and female members of AUDC's Senior Company in matching black jockey shorts and has them wag their fingers and thrust their hips cheekily to the strains of a Bach concerto? Or, following the second intermission (and continuing the Bach theme), the excerpts from Simone Orlando's Doppeling, first performed by Ballet BC in 2009, and which also features a pan-company costuming conceit in the dancers' matching bobbed wigs? Orlando's deconstructive approach to the gendered dimensions of classical ballet is echoed in the excerpts from Marie Chouinard's bODY_rEMIX/the gOLDBERG vARIATIONS that were performed following the first intermission. Gordon didn't send the women dancers out on stage topless, as Chouinard did in her original staging of the piece; nevertheless, judging by some of the reactions around me it was clear that the iconoclastic Montreal choreographer's approach to point shoes in this piece came as a bit of a shock to some of the ballet moms and dads in the audience. Indeed, in so far as classical steps were part of this mixed bill, they mostly came in the two pieces performed by the apprentice company: Andrew Bartee's Ballet Dance #6 and Monique Proença's Alone in the bright lights of a shattered life.
It wasn't an all Bach evening last night. Aszure Barton's BUSK is set to a pounding Israeli folk-rock score and featured relentlessly physical hip-hop inspired choreography, as well as an amazing concluding solo for stand-out dancer Zander Constant, whose incredibly fluid torso and longing arm reach combined to breathtaking effect at several points. The fact that Barton's piece reminded me a bit of the work of Hofesh Schecter and Ohad Naharin is notable given that another Israeli choreographer, Sharon Eyal, is included in the Friday and Saturday programming. That incredible get no doubt had much to do with Molnar's inclusion of Eyal's Bill on Ballet BC's season-ending Program 3 earlier this month.
I also very much enjoyed the senior dancers in James Kudelka's salsa-drenched (and self-reflexively titled) choreography, David Raymond's gothic Murmuration, and excerpts from Crystal Pite's Emergence, which notably focused on that piece's solo studies and duets rather than its large group unison sections--and, in so doing, allowed one to see Pite's remarkable attention to detail in, for example, a dancer's arachnid-like spread of her arms behind her bent back. Likely the choice of excerpts from Emergence had something to do with Pite's concluding contribution to Season Finale, The Paris Sessions, which together with Lesley Telford's Only who is left, was the highlight of the evening for me.
Continuing the method she employed with her award-winning Polaris, which she workshopped with Arts Umbrella, Modus Operandi and SFU student dancers before taking the piece to Sadler's Wells, Pite has been working with AUDC's Senior Company on studies for a commission from the Paris Opera Ballet. And judging from what we saw last night, this new work will also continue Polaris' experiments with scale, using upwards of forty dancers to redefine what group dancing looks like on stage. In Pite's hands, individual bodies don't blur into invisibility through homogenous unison; instead, they become part of a collective bodily unit, each contributing through precise spatial massings and intricately timed sequential micro-movements and ripples, tableaux and shapes that are visually arresting. Last night I saw a tidal wave, a whale spine, and so much more. And all, again like Polaris, undertaken with incredible sensitivity to the music--in this case a version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons (by Max Richter) unlike any I've heard.
Telford also knows how to mass dancers' bodies on stage. But if Pite's work here is about harmonious flow, Telford leans (quite literally) toward the off-axis. In Only who is left, she sends her dancers out in matching shimmery shifts and has them strut and preen and pose in a horizontal line like so many Atlases come to life from a Greek frieze. Later she'll clump the dancers together and have them jerk and stutter step their heels noisily into the floor as they move as a unit across the stage, the thoroughly ungraceful and off-beat movements providing a compelling counter-image to how dancers are expected to move and sound. The corralling or herding of bodies in Telford's work is compounded even further by the fact that at one point Constant appears with a bull horn; he mostly just whistles into it whimsically. But the device's appearance, especially when read alongside the epigraph Telford includes in the program, reminds one that as is so often the case these days when bodies gather together in public--and often in protest--there is almost always someone who wants to disperse them.
For now, however, lets just celebrate the fact that Telford and Pite have both decided to make Vancouver their dance homes, and that these two talented home-grown choreographers are sharing their gifts with the city's next generation of dancers.
P
How else to explain Ballet BC Resident Choreographer Cayetano Soto leading off the evening with his PAU CLARIS, which puts the male and female members of AUDC's Senior Company in matching black jockey shorts and has them wag their fingers and thrust their hips cheekily to the strains of a Bach concerto? Or, following the second intermission (and continuing the Bach theme), the excerpts from Simone Orlando's Doppeling, first performed by Ballet BC in 2009, and which also features a pan-company costuming conceit in the dancers' matching bobbed wigs? Orlando's deconstructive approach to the gendered dimensions of classical ballet is echoed in the excerpts from Marie Chouinard's bODY_rEMIX/the gOLDBERG vARIATIONS that were performed following the first intermission. Gordon didn't send the women dancers out on stage topless, as Chouinard did in her original staging of the piece; nevertheless, judging by some of the reactions around me it was clear that the iconoclastic Montreal choreographer's approach to point shoes in this piece came as a bit of a shock to some of the ballet moms and dads in the audience. Indeed, in so far as classical steps were part of this mixed bill, they mostly came in the two pieces performed by the apprentice company: Andrew Bartee's Ballet Dance #6 and Monique Proença's Alone in the bright lights of a shattered life.
It wasn't an all Bach evening last night. Aszure Barton's BUSK is set to a pounding Israeli folk-rock score and featured relentlessly physical hip-hop inspired choreography, as well as an amazing concluding solo for stand-out dancer Zander Constant, whose incredibly fluid torso and longing arm reach combined to breathtaking effect at several points. The fact that Barton's piece reminded me a bit of the work of Hofesh Schecter and Ohad Naharin is notable given that another Israeli choreographer, Sharon Eyal, is included in the Friday and Saturday programming. That incredible get no doubt had much to do with Molnar's inclusion of Eyal's Bill on Ballet BC's season-ending Program 3 earlier this month.
I also very much enjoyed the senior dancers in James Kudelka's salsa-drenched (and self-reflexively titled) choreography, David Raymond's gothic Murmuration, and excerpts from Crystal Pite's Emergence, which notably focused on that piece's solo studies and duets rather than its large group unison sections--and, in so doing, allowed one to see Pite's remarkable attention to detail in, for example, a dancer's arachnid-like spread of her arms behind her bent back. Likely the choice of excerpts from Emergence had something to do with Pite's concluding contribution to Season Finale, The Paris Sessions, which together with Lesley Telford's Only who is left, was the highlight of the evening for me.
Continuing the method she employed with her award-winning Polaris, which she workshopped with Arts Umbrella, Modus Operandi and SFU student dancers before taking the piece to Sadler's Wells, Pite has been working with AUDC's Senior Company on studies for a commission from the Paris Opera Ballet. And judging from what we saw last night, this new work will also continue Polaris' experiments with scale, using upwards of forty dancers to redefine what group dancing looks like on stage. In Pite's hands, individual bodies don't blur into invisibility through homogenous unison; instead, they become part of a collective bodily unit, each contributing through precise spatial massings and intricately timed sequential micro-movements and ripples, tableaux and shapes that are visually arresting. Last night I saw a tidal wave, a whale spine, and so much more. And all, again like Polaris, undertaken with incredible sensitivity to the music--in this case a version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons (by Max Richter) unlike any I've heard.
Telford also knows how to mass dancers' bodies on stage. But if Pite's work here is about harmonious flow, Telford leans (quite literally) toward the off-axis. In Only who is left, she sends her dancers out in matching shimmery shifts and has them strut and preen and pose in a horizontal line like so many Atlases come to life from a Greek frieze. Later she'll clump the dancers together and have them jerk and stutter step their heels noisily into the floor as they move as a unit across the stage, the thoroughly ungraceful and off-beat movements providing a compelling counter-image to how dancers are expected to move and sound. The corralling or herding of bodies in Telford's work is compounded even further by the fact that at one point Constant appears with a bull horn; he mostly just whistles into it whimsically. But the device's appearance, especially when read alongside the epigraph Telford includes in the program, reminds one that as is so often the case these days when bodies gather together in public--and often in protest--there is almost always someone who wants to disperse them.
For now, however, lets just celebrate the fact that Telford and Pite have both decided to make Vancouver their dance homes, and that these two talented home-grown choreographers are sharing their gifts with the city's next generation of dancers.
P
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Betroffenheit at the Playhouse
Betroffenheit, the much-anticipated dance-theatre collaboration between Kidd Pivot and the Electric Company Theatre, finally arrived in Vancouver this past weekend following its acclaimed debut during the PanAm Games in Toronto last summer. Given how widely the personal backstory to the piece's development is known in the local performance community, and given as well the professional pedigrees of its two primary collaborators, Jonathon Young and Crystal Pite, the stakes around what the work would deliver were extremely high. Happily, Betroffenheit, which was presented by DanceHouse, more than measures up, both in constellating with such intelligence and artistic rigour ideas and concepts and emotions that are more than the sum of Young's personal tragedy, and in signalling an exciting new turn in Pite's career not just as a choreographer, but as a stage director.
As Young noted in conversation with Pite at a public forum earlier in the day, the seeds of Betroffenheit came from the compulsive writing he was doing in an attempt to gain some control over the traumatic loss of his daughter. He showed these pages to Pite, hoping that she might agree to stage them. The title comes from Ann Bogart's And Then, We Act, and refers to a state of bewildered shock in the wake of an event, a space that exposes the limits of language to make sense of experience, a space of "fertile and palpable silence" where, in Bogart's words, "everything is up for grabs." A space, in other words, of theatrical imagination--one where social reality can be explored in an other, more heightened register. And, indeed, it was only after the two artists had begun collaborating that they discovered that the story they were telling was about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and related issues of addiction.
In the world of Betroffenheit these issues are translated, initially, into the hollowed out world of an empty sound stage that but for the electrical cables retreating like garden snakes before our eyes soon after the curtains part could double for an antiseptic psych ward (the amazing set is by Jay Gower Taylor). Our protagonist, Young, cowers in a corner; soon we hear him--or rather sometimes him and sometimes him in voiceover--having a conversation with himself about what he is not to do: that he shouldn't respond; a system is in place; the user only gets used. Young's interlocutors multiply, his voice distributed across any number of objects on stage--including, most compellingly, a HAL-like amplifier whose mechanical responses to Young's questions seem oddly comforting. Eventually, the narrative voice of Young's text gets distributed across other bodies as well, with Jermaine Spivey first showing up in a blue leisure suit and face paint to take over the amplifier's side of the conversation through the embodied technique of lipsynching, a choreographing of the voice that in Pite's hands is as precise and accomplished as the gestural phrasing and orchestration of dancers' limbs that accompanies it.
Spivey plays Young's alter ego; his, we might say, is the voice of Young's subconscious, or perhaps more properly, altered consciousness. For it is Spivey's role to lure Young back to the razz-ma-tazz world of "showtime," the imagined variety show that is Young's drug of choice and out of which Pite conjures spectacular tap and salsa sequences that wonderfully showcase the additional dance talents of Out Innerspace's David Raymond and Kidd Pivot regulars Bryan Arias and Cindy Salgado, respectively. Young and Spivey also engage in a charming vaudeville-style double act, the patter of their lipsynched conversation as diverting and seemingly harmless as their accompanying soft-shoe routine. However, in conversation earlier in the afternoon Pite also commented that it was important for her to make this world of showtime not just a pleasurable and joyful release--for us as much as for Young's character--but also dangerous. To this end, we get Tiffany Tregarthen, who plays a devilish and (quite literally) explosive imp, and whose fantastically physical and entangled duet with Young (who is revealed over the course of the entire piece to be a virtuosic mover) leads to what, in this "disordered system" of the stage, is the equivalent of an overdose. It takes all of the combined efforts of the other five performers to revive Young for his climactic solo number, a moving song of longing and regret that is of course not a solo at all--because his voice is lifted by a chorus of bodies, a corps, who in forming a chain of support illustrates through dance the network of sustaining relations in life that lets us know, no matter the claims we make upon them, that they have our back, that they will make sure we make it safely back down to the ground. And on this front it's been a while since I've responded so enthusiastically to Pite's penchant for tethering her group movement at the wrist. Whereas in the past the accordion-like unfurling and contraction of bodily bellows in her work has sometimes seemed like an exercise in momentum without direction, here the chains of movement seem to hint both at sequentiality (events unfolding over time) and obligation (how we are fettered together by those events)--as when, for example, the group slumps in succession against the stage right set wall, a submission to fate and to gravity that, combined with Young's song, made my heart catch in my throat.
Act 3 of Betroffenheit, which begins after a brief intermission, follows the pattern Pite has established in previous works like Dark Matter and The Tempest Replica. The ensemble, having traded in their sparkly "showtime" costumes for standard issue rehearsal sweats, deconstructs much of the action of the previous acts through pure movement. It begins with a spectacular off-axis solo for Arias, in which he spins his body around violently, like he is trying to exorcise a demon. Later he and Salgado will partner in a ghostly echo of their "showtime" salsa steps, only this time on their knees and in a desperately vertiginous bid to right themselves and prevent the other from falling over. Young, in the afternoon conversation, likened this section to the experience of withdrawal, and Pite supplemented this idea by saying that she was interested in staging various micro-scenes of rescue (a favourite theme of hers). To this end, I was very affected by the duet between Salgado and Tregarthen, who helped convey a sense of shared pain through a simple bit of gestural unison, moving their hands from knees to hips to elbows to heads through a sequence of facings, but also interrupting the cycle at different moments to place a solicitous hand on the other's body. As compelling was when all five dancers were on their hands and knees, their arms twitching uncontrollably--as if they are being collectively wracked by the DTs, or a horrible night sweat. The movement only stops when they slide a hand across to the person next to them, applying a different kind of physical pressure to still the mental anguish. If one of Pite's greatest concerns was figuring out how to distribute the narrative voice of trauma across the piece's entire ensemble, a consequent result has been how she has likewise shown how the physical symptoms of trauma can spread and be shared across different bodies.
To this end, after a couple of chimeric glimpses of showtime's lingering traces (a curtain reproduction of the set and a mysterious reappearance of a self-ambulating magician's box), the piece concludes with a reprise of Young and Spivey's earlier duet. This time, however, to echo both the voiceover (which has also returned) and the conversation between Young and Pite from earlier in the afternoon, we are made to realize that there will be no epiphany. There can only be the slow and painful practice of learning how to reengage with the world. And that starts, as Spivey demonstrates for us, by standing up on one's own, finding one's legs, putting one of those legs in front of the other, and beginning to move uncertainly into the future--a future that doesn't try to leave behind the past, but that accepts (and not without some measure of comfort) that it will always be present.
P.
As Young noted in conversation with Pite at a public forum earlier in the day, the seeds of Betroffenheit came from the compulsive writing he was doing in an attempt to gain some control over the traumatic loss of his daughter. He showed these pages to Pite, hoping that she might agree to stage them. The title comes from Ann Bogart's And Then, We Act, and refers to a state of bewildered shock in the wake of an event, a space that exposes the limits of language to make sense of experience, a space of "fertile and palpable silence" where, in Bogart's words, "everything is up for grabs." A space, in other words, of theatrical imagination--one where social reality can be explored in an other, more heightened register. And, indeed, it was only after the two artists had begun collaborating that they discovered that the story they were telling was about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and related issues of addiction.
In the world of Betroffenheit these issues are translated, initially, into the hollowed out world of an empty sound stage that but for the electrical cables retreating like garden snakes before our eyes soon after the curtains part could double for an antiseptic psych ward (the amazing set is by Jay Gower Taylor). Our protagonist, Young, cowers in a corner; soon we hear him--or rather sometimes him and sometimes him in voiceover--having a conversation with himself about what he is not to do: that he shouldn't respond; a system is in place; the user only gets used. Young's interlocutors multiply, his voice distributed across any number of objects on stage--including, most compellingly, a HAL-like amplifier whose mechanical responses to Young's questions seem oddly comforting. Eventually, the narrative voice of Young's text gets distributed across other bodies as well, with Jermaine Spivey first showing up in a blue leisure suit and face paint to take over the amplifier's side of the conversation through the embodied technique of lipsynching, a choreographing of the voice that in Pite's hands is as precise and accomplished as the gestural phrasing and orchestration of dancers' limbs that accompanies it.
Spivey plays Young's alter ego; his, we might say, is the voice of Young's subconscious, or perhaps more properly, altered consciousness. For it is Spivey's role to lure Young back to the razz-ma-tazz world of "showtime," the imagined variety show that is Young's drug of choice and out of which Pite conjures spectacular tap and salsa sequences that wonderfully showcase the additional dance talents of Out Innerspace's David Raymond and Kidd Pivot regulars Bryan Arias and Cindy Salgado, respectively. Young and Spivey also engage in a charming vaudeville-style double act, the patter of their lipsynched conversation as diverting and seemingly harmless as their accompanying soft-shoe routine. However, in conversation earlier in the afternoon Pite also commented that it was important for her to make this world of showtime not just a pleasurable and joyful release--for us as much as for Young's character--but also dangerous. To this end, we get Tiffany Tregarthen, who plays a devilish and (quite literally) explosive imp, and whose fantastically physical and entangled duet with Young (who is revealed over the course of the entire piece to be a virtuosic mover) leads to what, in this "disordered system" of the stage, is the equivalent of an overdose. It takes all of the combined efforts of the other five performers to revive Young for his climactic solo number, a moving song of longing and regret that is of course not a solo at all--because his voice is lifted by a chorus of bodies, a corps, who in forming a chain of support illustrates through dance the network of sustaining relations in life that lets us know, no matter the claims we make upon them, that they have our back, that they will make sure we make it safely back down to the ground. And on this front it's been a while since I've responded so enthusiastically to Pite's penchant for tethering her group movement at the wrist. Whereas in the past the accordion-like unfurling and contraction of bodily bellows in her work has sometimes seemed like an exercise in momentum without direction, here the chains of movement seem to hint both at sequentiality (events unfolding over time) and obligation (how we are fettered together by those events)--as when, for example, the group slumps in succession against the stage right set wall, a submission to fate and to gravity that, combined with Young's song, made my heart catch in my throat.
Act 3 of Betroffenheit, which begins after a brief intermission, follows the pattern Pite has established in previous works like Dark Matter and The Tempest Replica. The ensemble, having traded in their sparkly "showtime" costumes for standard issue rehearsal sweats, deconstructs much of the action of the previous acts through pure movement. It begins with a spectacular off-axis solo for Arias, in which he spins his body around violently, like he is trying to exorcise a demon. Later he and Salgado will partner in a ghostly echo of their "showtime" salsa steps, only this time on their knees and in a desperately vertiginous bid to right themselves and prevent the other from falling over. Young, in the afternoon conversation, likened this section to the experience of withdrawal, and Pite supplemented this idea by saying that she was interested in staging various micro-scenes of rescue (a favourite theme of hers). To this end, I was very affected by the duet between Salgado and Tregarthen, who helped convey a sense of shared pain through a simple bit of gestural unison, moving their hands from knees to hips to elbows to heads through a sequence of facings, but also interrupting the cycle at different moments to place a solicitous hand on the other's body. As compelling was when all five dancers were on their hands and knees, their arms twitching uncontrollably--as if they are being collectively wracked by the DTs, or a horrible night sweat. The movement only stops when they slide a hand across to the person next to them, applying a different kind of physical pressure to still the mental anguish. If one of Pite's greatest concerns was figuring out how to distribute the narrative voice of trauma across the piece's entire ensemble, a consequent result has been how she has likewise shown how the physical symptoms of trauma can spread and be shared across different bodies.
To this end, after a couple of chimeric glimpses of showtime's lingering traces (a curtain reproduction of the set and a mysterious reappearance of a self-ambulating magician's box), the piece concludes with a reprise of Young and Spivey's earlier duet. This time, however, to echo both the voiceover (which has also returned) and the conversation between Young and Pite from earlier in the afternoon, we are made to realize that there will be no epiphany. There can only be the slow and painful practice of learning how to reengage with the world. And that starts, as Spivey demonstrates for us, by standing up on one's own, finding one's legs, putting one of those legs in front of the other, and beginning to move uncertainly into the future--a future that doesn't try to leave behind the past, but that accepts (and not without some measure of comfort) that it will always be present.
P.
Friday, November 13, 2015
Guest Post on Ballet BC's Program 1 at the Queen E
I was in Portland last weekend for a conference and so did not get to see the opening program to Ballet BC's 30th anniversary season. Needless to say, I was pretty bummed. However, a posse of my SFU Dance Aesthetics students attended and as an adjunct to our blog writing related to that course (see the course website here), I encouraged anyone who might be so inclined to contribute a guest post on what I missed.
Andrea Valentine-Lewis took me up on the offer, and what follows are her observations on the evening's three works:
Andrea Valentine-Lewis took me up on the offer, and what follows are her observations on the evening's three works:
Overall remarks/notes:
- The dancers are very athletic-looking.
- All acts were performed in socks.
- The company is mixed-raced.
- There are more male dancers than female dancers.
- All dancers are quite classically trained.
- The lighting was very interesting in all three movements.
- ... By interesting I mean very specific to the action. I loved it.
- The ballet was divided into three acts/movements, with two intermissions.
- The three movements were presented in a different order than the program indicated.
- The company was presented as gender-neutral. There weren't specific female/male roles. Both genders were strong and similarly dressed.
1.) The first movement was called Twenty Eight Thousand Waves. It was choreographed by Cayetano Soto (Ballet BC's new resident choreographer). Surprisingly, it was my favourite movement, because the music, lighting, and costuming was very satisfying to me. I prefer fluid, graceful movements that are strong, and that is what I saw. I had expectations that Crystal Pite's work would be my favourite.
2.) The second movement was called New Work, by Stijn Celis. The piece was accompanied by 40 male singers. Both female and male dancers wore the same clothing (button down work shirts and slacks). The women had their hair in buns to hide the appearance of long hair. This piece seemed repetitive and not dynamic enough. The choir was beautiful, but I felt the dancers were washed out by the music. There were obvious themes of religion and the life cycle, which I was thankful of; otherwise I would have gotten bored.
3.) The third movement (a crowd favourite), by Crystal Pite, was called Solo Echo. Pite's piece had a beautiful, simple set of snow falling from the backdrop, with lights that moved to either frame sections of the backdrop, or expose the entirety of it. The dancers were all dressed in black vests and black slacks... again, a gender-neutral choice. The movements were very dynamic and strong compared to the silky cello music of Johannes Brahms (played by Yo Yo Ma). It was a nice juxtaposition. Pite's choreography has changed since I've seen it last, so in that regard my expectations weren't met. But I did appreciate some sections of strong, intelligent choreography.
So there you have it. My thanks to Andrea. And more from me soon.
P.
Friday, June 19, 2015
Tara Cheyenne Performance and Kidd Pivot in Rehearsal
Yesterday was a pretty special day. I got to sit in on rehearsals by two amazing Vancouver dance artists who will be premiering new work in July. And while very different in scale and tone, it was interesting for me to note that both works are consciously being constructed as dance-theatre performances, not least in their combining of text and movement. The pieces also share the distinction of having well-known local actors move (quite literally) outside their traditional comfort zones on stage, partnering with professional dancers to tell a story via kinaesthetic as well as narrative means.
The first rehearsal was of Tara Cheyenne Performance's How to Be, which will play the Firehall as part of the Dancing on the Edge Festival in three weeks. TCP Artistic Director and choreographer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg is working with the amazingly talented Kate Franklin, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, Kim Stevenson, and Marcus Youssef on what will be her second group show after the highly successful Highgate. However, this current work--a scaled down excerpt of which Friedenberg showed as part of Boca del Lupo's Micro-Performance Series at the Anderson Street Space earlier this spring--eschews Highgate's overt theatricality in favour of a deliberately toned down, non-spectacular and process-oriented exploration of themes of subjectivity, authenticity and relationality. The performers, all playing versions of themselves, are modelling for us in their individual movement styles and ways of being in their very different bodies, as well as in the coming together--sometimes harmoniously, sometimes more fractiously--of those styles and bodies, how all of us as human subjects must move through this world at once singly and as part of a larger collective.
All of this makes for some amazing comic set pieces (which I won't spoil before the piece opens), but also moments of truly poignant intimacy and vulnerability--what Friedenberg described as "hilarious heartbreak." It was also such a privilege to watch Friendenberg, who is not dancing in this iteration of the piece, work with her performers, at one point trying out three different spatial configurations of a sequence with Poole before very naturally and organically landing on what felt like the right fit. And all of this while keeping up a steady stream of witty banter and trademark one-liners. I know from experience what a joy it is to work with Friendeberg, and this studio visit (to Stevenson's shiny new space, The Happening, on Fraser at 39th) only confirmed that fact. I look forward to the DOTE show, as well as the full-scale version of the piece at the Cultch that Friendeberg is working towards for April 2017.
The second rehearsal visit took place at Progress Lab 1422 on William Street, where Kidd Pivot's Crystal Pite was working on a sequence from her new work-in-progress Betroffenheit. A co-production with PL 1422 co-tenants Electric Company Theatre, the piece will have its world premiere in Toronto at the end of July as part of the Panamania Festival that runs in conjunction with the PanAm and ParaPanAm Games. Vancouver audiences have to wait until next February to see the finished work; however, the presenters of that staging, DanceHouse, arranged yesterday's sneak peek as a perk for subscribers and donors. What we saw was an excerpt of a complex and highly physical duet between actor, ECT founding member and Betroffenheit co-creator Jonathon Young and dancer Tiffany Tregarthen. Betroffenheit is one of those composite German words that manages to encompass a complexity of meaning that seems inexpressible in anything other than a full sentence in English; in this case, it refers to the state of shock and bewilderment that befalls one in the wake of a disaster. It is, I am assuming, just such a state that Young's character finds himself in when he encounters the creature played by Tregarthen. It's not clear whether this creature is a magical being from another dimension or a product of Young's character's imagination; whatever the case, both Young and Tregarthen appear to be simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by each other, and the part of the duet we witnessed unfolds as at once a solicitous sharing of each other's bodily proximity and weight and as a desire to extricate oneself from the other's potentially threatening grip.
All of this results in some pretty acrobatic partnering, with Tregarthen at one point poised in the air over Young's prone body as she balances her knees on his raised hands and her own arms on his forehead. From this position she must then somersault backwards, while somehow also managing to pull herself and Young up to sitting position, so that they are both facing each other with legs extended and intertwined. It was fascinating to watch Pite work this particular bit over and over again, making minor adjustments (like having Tregarthen grab a bit of Young's shirt or getting Young to help out with momentum by giving Tregarthen a little shove) in order to refine the timing. Equally interesting to me was Young's running commentary as all of this was going on, bringing an actor's characterological "motivation" for his actions (e.g. "I have to get this thing off of me") to the specific physical tasks he needed to perform.
I couldn't stick around afterwards to mingle as I had to dash to the last of my Mountain View Solstice rehearsals. But a perfect day became even more special as I was exiting because I ran into Pite, who was ducking out to get a bit of air. I reminded her of who I was ("that annoying academic who wrote the article about your work"), and she was so gracious, saying how much she appreciated my interpretation of her work, and suggesting that we work together some day (!!!). Even if that never happens, it's enough of an ego-boost just thinking about the possibility. And all of Vancouver is richer for Pite's decision to pursue her career from here.
P.
The first rehearsal was of Tara Cheyenne Performance's How to Be, which will play the Firehall as part of the Dancing on the Edge Festival in three weeks. TCP Artistic Director and choreographer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg is working with the amazingly talented Kate Franklin, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, Kim Stevenson, and Marcus Youssef on what will be her second group show after the highly successful Highgate. However, this current work--a scaled down excerpt of which Friedenberg showed as part of Boca del Lupo's Micro-Performance Series at the Anderson Street Space earlier this spring--eschews Highgate's overt theatricality in favour of a deliberately toned down, non-spectacular and process-oriented exploration of themes of subjectivity, authenticity and relationality. The performers, all playing versions of themselves, are modelling for us in their individual movement styles and ways of being in their very different bodies, as well as in the coming together--sometimes harmoniously, sometimes more fractiously--of those styles and bodies, how all of us as human subjects must move through this world at once singly and as part of a larger collective.
All of this makes for some amazing comic set pieces (which I won't spoil before the piece opens), but also moments of truly poignant intimacy and vulnerability--what Friedenberg described as "hilarious heartbreak." It was also such a privilege to watch Friendenberg, who is not dancing in this iteration of the piece, work with her performers, at one point trying out three different spatial configurations of a sequence with Poole before very naturally and organically landing on what felt like the right fit. And all of this while keeping up a steady stream of witty banter and trademark one-liners. I know from experience what a joy it is to work with Friendeberg, and this studio visit (to Stevenson's shiny new space, The Happening, on Fraser at 39th) only confirmed that fact. I look forward to the DOTE show, as well as the full-scale version of the piece at the Cultch that Friendeberg is working towards for April 2017.
The second rehearsal visit took place at Progress Lab 1422 on William Street, where Kidd Pivot's Crystal Pite was working on a sequence from her new work-in-progress Betroffenheit. A co-production with PL 1422 co-tenants Electric Company Theatre, the piece will have its world premiere in Toronto at the end of July as part of the Panamania Festival that runs in conjunction with the PanAm and ParaPanAm Games. Vancouver audiences have to wait until next February to see the finished work; however, the presenters of that staging, DanceHouse, arranged yesterday's sneak peek as a perk for subscribers and donors. What we saw was an excerpt of a complex and highly physical duet between actor, ECT founding member and Betroffenheit co-creator Jonathon Young and dancer Tiffany Tregarthen. Betroffenheit is one of those composite German words that manages to encompass a complexity of meaning that seems inexpressible in anything other than a full sentence in English; in this case, it refers to the state of shock and bewilderment that befalls one in the wake of a disaster. It is, I am assuming, just such a state that Young's character finds himself in when he encounters the creature played by Tregarthen. It's not clear whether this creature is a magical being from another dimension or a product of Young's character's imagination; whatever the case, both Young and Tregarthen appear to be simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by each other, and the part of the duet we witnessed unfolds as at once a solicitous sharing of each other's bodily proximity and weight and as a desire to extricate oneself from the other's potentially threatening grip.
All of this results in some pretty acrobatic partnering, with Tregarthen at one point poised in the air over Young's prone body as she balances her knees on his raised hands and her own arms on his forehead. From this position she must then somersault backwards, while somehow also managing to pull herself and Young up to sitting position, so that they are both facing each other with legs extended and intertwined. It was fascinating to watch Pite work this particular bit over and over again, making minor adjustments (like having Tregarthen grab a bit of Young's shirt or getting Young to help out with momentum by giving Tregarthen a little shove) in order to refine the timing. Equally interesting to me was Young's running commentary as all of this was going on, bringing an actor's characterological "motivation" for his actions (e.g. "I have to get this thing off of me") to the specific physical tasks he needed to perform.
I couldn't stick around afterwards to mingle as I had to dash to the last of my Mountain View Solstice rehearsals. But a perfect day became even more special as I was exiting because I ran into Pite, who was ducking out to get a bit of air. I reminded her of who I was ("that annoying academic who wrote the article about your work"), and she was so gracious, saying how much she appreciated my interpretation of her work, and suggesting that we work together some day (!!!). Even if that never happens, it's enough of an ego-boost just thinking about the possibility. And all of Vancouver is richer for Pite's decision to pursue her career from here.
P.
Sunday, May 24, 2015
Arts Umbrella Season Finale at the Playhouse
Arts Umbrella has long been the Vancouver dance community's stealth weapon. Under the legendary leadership of Artistic Director Artemis Gordon, the Granville Island dance school has trained generations of Ballet BC members and now, increasingly, major international companies are travelling to recruit from its graduating ranks. The drawing card is that while Gordon has given her dancers an unparalleled foundation in classical technique, she also encourages individual expressiveness and creativity.
Part of that creativity emerges from the company's incredibly varied repertoire, which includes lots of contemporary work, and which also, to Gordon's great credit, makes a point of showcasing the diverse choreographic talents of local Vancouver artists. Both of these aspects were on display at this weekend's AU Dance Season Finale, held at the Playhouse from Thursday through Saturday. I attended yesterday's matinee performance, and the program featured works choreographed by two former Ballet BCers, as well as one current company member. (Ballet BC AD Emily Molnar was also in the audience, no doubt casting a watchful eye on possible future apprentices.) Alyson Fretz's Cuore, choreographed on the apprentice company, began with a charming extended sequence in which the dancers, seated on the floor and backlit, move their arms above their heads in gracefully silhouetted arcs. Peter Smida's even just hello, also set on the apprentice company and featuring an eclectic musical score (including Jimmy Durante singing Make Someone Happy), was a witty comment on both the dailiness of dance class and the social anxieties of adolescence, with the two male members of the company at one point interfering with their female counterparts' arm and leg extensions at an imaginary barre, and later dragging two other girls from the corps to partner them (willingly or not) stage right. Finally, Simone Orlando's En Avant, which closed the program, provided a fitting bookend to the excerpt from her former Ballet BC boss John Alleyne's Four Seasons that began the afternoon; the requisite leaps, turns, lifts and dextrous footwork appropriately (if somewhat ho-humedly) highlighted the senior company's technical command and musicality.
For me the standout pieces on yesterday's program were by Crystal Pite and Amber Funk Barton. Four women from the senior company (Ria Girard, Misa Lucyshyn, Brooke Williamson and Sabine Raskin) performed an excerpt from Pite's A Picture of You Flying (part of The You Show); in collapsing joint by joint to the floor and then floating back up as if pulled by invisible strings, and in inserting themselves into and serving as ballast for Pite's trademark bodily chains, the dancers proved themselves more than equal to both the work's distinctive choreography and Owen Belton's challenging electronic score. Finally, Barton's Factory was a revelation; set on the women of the apprentice company (though, I have to say, I mistook them for the senior company until I read the program notes), it begins in silence with the dancers preening and posing like bathing suit models or Andy Warhol superstars, albeit ones who look like they've just stepped out of a Francis Bacon painting, with the dancers pulling their arms in at the elbows, bending at the hips and baring their teeth in a fierce grimace. They do all of this before a line of men from the senior company, who sit cross-legged downstage, with their backs to the audience. Then suddenly an African bass drum tucked in the downstage left corner of the stage is struck, and this is the cue for the piece to move (quite literally) into a whole other register, with Barton using the driving beat of the drumming (and, periodically, the men's accompanying clapping) to structure a series of solos and unison sequences that emanate from the dancers' pelvic cores and that build upon the plie as a recurring motif.
One of the more interesting aspects of such year-end showcases is the audience. It's filled with parents and extended family members and friends, who embody a range of ages (and attention spans), and who, refreshingly, don't necessarily respect the usual protocols of spectating decorum. One rambunctious toddler in the row in front of me kept up a running commentary throughout the afternoon, asking her mother why none of the dancers were in tutus, why there was no music, how come it was so dark, why the dancers kept running on and off the stage like that? It was hilarious, but also encouraging: for here was someone who was fully engaged with the art. Which is, after all, what we wish from all performance.
P.
Part of that creativity emerges from the company's incredibly varied repertoire, which includes lots of contemporary work, and which also, to Gordon's great credit, makes a point of showcasing the diverse choreographic talents of local Vancouver artists. Both of these aspects were on display at this weekend's AU Dance Season Finale, held at the Playhouse from Thursday through Saturday. I attended yesterday's matinee performance, and the program featured works choreographed by two former Ballet BCers, as well as one current company member. (Ballet BC AD Emily Molnar was also in the audience, no doubt casting a watchful eye on possible future apprentices.) Alyson Fretz's Cuore, choreographed on the apprentice company, began with a charming extended sequence in which the dancers, seated on the floor and backlit, move their arms above their heads in gracefully silhouetted arcs. Peter Smida's even just hello, also set on the apprentice company and featuring an eclectic musical score (including Jimmy Durante singing Make Someone Happy), was a witty comment on both the dailiness of dance class and the social anxieties of adolescence, with the two male members of the company at one point interfering with their female counterparts' arm and leg extensions at an imaginary barre, and later dragging two other girls from the corps to partner them (willingly or not) stage right. Finally, Simone Orlando's En Avant, which closed the program, provided a fitting bookend to the excerpt from her former Ballet BC boss John Alleyne's Four Seasons that began the afternoon; the requisite leaps, turns, lifts and dextrous footwork appropriately (if somewhat ho-humedly) highlighted the senior company's technical command and musicality.
For me the standout pieces on yesterday's program were by Crystal Pite and Amber Funk Barton. Four women from the senior company (Ria Girard, Misa Lucyshyn, Brooke Williamson and Sabine Raskin) performed an excerpt from Pite's A Picture of You Flying (part of The You Show); in collapsing joint by joint to the floor and then floating back up as if pulled by invisible strings, and in inserting themselves into and serving as ballast for Pite's trademark bodily chains, the dancers proved themselves more than equal to both the work's distinctive choreography and Owen Belton's challenging electronic score. Finally, Barton's Factory was a revelation; set on the women of the apprentice company (though, I have to say, I mistook them for the senior company until I read the program notes), it begins in silence with the dancers preening and posing like bathing suit models or Andy Warhol superstars, albeit ones who look like they've just stepped out of a Francis Bacon painting, with the dancers pulling their arms in at the elbows, bending at the hips and baring their teeth in a fierce grimace. They do all of this before a line of men from the senior company, who sit cross-legged downstage, with their backs to the audience. Then suddenly an African bass drum tucked in the downstage left corner of the stage is struck, and this is the cue for the piece to move (quite literally) into a whole other register, with Barton using the driving beat of the drumming (and, periodically, the men's accompanying clapping) to structure a series of solos and unison sequences that emanate from the dancers' pelvic cores and that build upon the plie as a recurring motif.
One of the more interesting aspects of such year-end showcases is the audience. It's filled with parents and extended family members and friends, who embody a range of ages (and attention spans), and who, refreshingly, don't necessarily respect the usual protocols of spectating decorum. One rambunctious toddler in the row in front of me kept up a running commentary throughout the afternoon, asking her mother why none of the dancers were in tutus, why there was no music, how come it was so dark, why the dancers kept running on and off the stage like that? It was hilarious, but also encouraging: for here was someone who was fully engaged with the art. Which is, after all, what we wish from all performance.
P.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Compagnie Käfig at the Playhouse
DanceHouse ended its 2014-15 season in a rousing fashion last night with the Vancouver premiere of Compagnie Käfig, a hybrid, polyglot evening of hip hop featuring a company of eleven amazing male dancers from Brazil, with artistic direction by the Algerian-French choreographer Mourad Merzouko (of Centre Choréographique de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne) and choreographic contributions by three other French and one other Brazilian artists. In this case, many cooks definitely makes for a steamy, sexy pot.
The piece opens with the dancers clumped together against a backlit scrim positioned upstage. Slowly a hand emerges, extends upwards, and spreads its fingers in a fluid sequence vaguely reminiscent of voguing. Eventually, as one of the members accompanies the rest of the company on what I took to be a traditional samba instrument, while also vocalizing a succession of beats, the men spread--or rather, glide--across the dance floor, toprocking in a fast and rhythmically compelling coordination of steps and arm waves before heading down to the floor to bust various individual power moves (back and shoulder spins, headstands, swipes, acrobatic flips) and freezes.
Indeed, what was so fascinating about last night's performance was the thoroughly intertwined mix of freestyle elements and clearly choreographed unison movement. These men are eminently watchable even when they are just bobbing their heads together. But add in differences in tempo, spatial configuration and lightning-quick changes in the quality of movement--in which the dancers switch from poeticism to power in the space of a few beats--and one sees just how much work has gone into this collaboration of styles.
Of course it helps that the company is very easy on the eyes. At the start of the piece the dancers are all properly--even somewhat formally--attired in dress shirts and ties. By the end, however, they are shirtless, their torsos glistening with sweat as they display their well-toned abs. That alone was worth the standing ovation they received--even before they treated us to a short freestylin' encore.
In his curtain speech before the show, DanceHouse producer Jim Smith announced next season's line-up, which includes a visit by another Brazilian company, Companhia Urbana de Dança. Also on tap is the Hofesh Schechter Company and the Vancouver premiere of Crytal Pite's newest work, Betroffenheit, a collaboration between her company Kidd Pivot and Electric Company Theatre that will premiere later this summer in Toronto as part of the cultural component of the Pan Am Games. It's a shorter season that normal for DanceHouse (only three shows instead of the usual four), but with Schechter and Pite as part of the schedule, it should be memorable.
P.
The piece opens with the dancers clumped together against a backlit scrim positioned upstage. Slowly a hand emerges, extends upwards, and spreads its fingers in a fluid sequence vaguely reminiscent of voguing. Eventually, as one of the members accompanies the rest of the company on what I took to be a traditional samba instrument, while also vocalizing a succession of beats, the men spread--or rather, glide--across the dance floor, toprocking in a fast and rhythmically compelling coordination of steps and arm waves before heading down to the floor to bust various individual power moves (back and shoulder spins, headstands, swipes, acrobatic flips) and freezes.
Indeed, what was so fascinating about last night's performance was the thoroughly intertwined mix of freestyle elements and clearly choreographed unison movement. These men are eminently watchable even when they are just bobbing their heads together. But add in differences in tempo, spatial configuration and lightning-quick changes in the quality of movement--in which the dancers switch from poeticism to power in the space of a few beats--and one sees just how much work has gone into this collaboration of styles.
Of course it helps that the company is very easy on the eyes. At the start of the piece the dancers are all properly--even somewhat formally--attired in dress shirts and ties. By the end, however, they are shirtless, their torsos glistening with sweat as they display their well-toned abs. That alone was worth the standing ovation they received--even before they treated us to a short freestylin' encore.
In his curtain speech before the show, DanceHouse producer Jim Smith announced next season's line-up, which includes a visit by another Brazilian company, Companhia Urbana de Dança. Also on tap is the Hofesh Schechter Company and the Vancouver premiere of Crytal Pite's newest work, Betroffenheit, a collaboration between her company Kidd Pivot and Electric Company Theatre that will premiere later this summer in Toronto as part of the cultural component of the Pan Am Games. It's a shorter season that normal for DanceHouse (only three shows instead of the usual four), but with Schechter and Pite as part of the schedule, it should be memorable.
P.
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Tempest Replica Redux
Last night, at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Theatre, was a chance to revisit Crystal Pite's Tempest Replica, the most recent of her works for her company Kidd Pivot. I had first seen the piece in 2012 when it was staged at the Playhouse by DanceHouse. After touring the work to the US and Europe, Pite took a year's sabbatical; now she is back, relaunching Kidd Pivot with another mini-tour of The Tempest Replica, one that will take her to Sadler's Wells in London, where Pite has just been appointed an Associate Artist, and for whom she will be choreographing a large-scale work later this year.
The good news, however, is that despite such high-profile commissions--and multiple offers to lead major companies elsewhere--Pite has made the decision to remain in Vancouver and to use the city (and, I gather from SFU Cultural Programs Director Michael Boucher, SFU Woodward's) as her base to make new work for Kidd Pivot. That work will now have to be project-to-project based, as the stable multi-year funding she enjoyed from Frankfurt between 2010-2012 is not possible here (the latest tour has been partially subvented by an Indiegogo campaign). Still, Pite seems determined to make a go of it, and we are the luckier for it. To have such an internationally renowned dance artist making work here, in Vancouver, and mentoring local performers and choreographers is extraordinary.
As I have already blogged at length about the 2012 Vancouver production of The Tempest Replica, I won't elaborate on too much more here. I mostly wanted to see if the archive of my memory of that earlier performance matched Pite's repertory re-enactment of the piece--not least as I have an article coming out shortly in Dance Research Journal (46.1) on Pite's work and so wanted to ensure that my description of the piece was more or less accurate. As far as I can tell, Pite has made only minor adjustments, tightening up a movement transition here, tweaking a sound or light cue there. I don't recall there being as much projected text from Shakespeare's play in the second half as I witnessed last night, but that may just be a trick of memory. Ironically, it is Pite's use of text (projected, narrated, etc.) that is partly the focus of my article.
The movement is as compelling and complex as ever, and it is always a pleasure to see how Pite's amazingly gifted dancers incarnate that balance--or pivot--between technical precision and fluid organicity that her choreography requires. This remains most kinesthetically affecting to me in the duets that structure the second half--with the lush and ethereal pairings between Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) and Ariel (Sandra Marín Garcia), and Ferdinand (Peter Chu, filling in for Jermaine Spivey) and Miranda (Cindy Salgado), a counter-weight (quite literally) to the more tough and muscular ones between Antonio (Yannick Matthon) and Sebastian (David Raymond, replacing Jiří Pokorný), and Prospero and Caliban (Bryan Arias).
The Tempest Replica is Pite's most fully realized Gesamtkuntswerk to date, a piece in which movement and text and sound and visual design are seamlessly integrated. The contributions of Pite's Vancouver collaborators (composer Owen Belton, sound designers Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe, lighting designer Robert Sondergaard, set designer Jay Gower Taylor, projection maestro Jamie Nesbitt, and costumers Nancy Bryant and Linda Chow) are central to this. That Pite has made the decision to continue working with this local community of virtuosic talent is her gift to this city. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.
P.
The good news, however, is that despite such high-profile commissions--and multiple offers to lead major companies elsewhere--Pite has made the decision to remain in Vancouver and to use the city (and, I gather from SFU Cultural Programs Director Michael Boucher, SFU Woodward's) as her base to make new work for Kidd Pivot. That work will now have to be project-to-project based, as the stable multi-year funding she enjoyed from Frankfurt between 2010-2012 is not possible here (the latest tour has been partially subvented by an Indiegogo campaign). Still, Pite seems determined to make a go of it, and we are the luckier for it. To have such an internationally renowned dance artist making work here, in Vancouver, and mentoring local performers and choreographers is extraordinary.
As I have already blogged at length about the 2012 Vancouver production of The Tempest Replica, I won't elaborate on too much more here. I mostly wanted to see if the archive of my memory of that earlier performance matched Pite's repertory re-enactment of the piece--not least as I have an article coming out shortly in Dance Research Journal (46.1) on Pite's work and so wanted to ensure that my description of the piece was more or less accurate. As far as I can tell, Pite has made only minor adjustments, tightening up a movement transition here, tweaking a sound or light cue there. I don't recall there being as much projected text from Shakespeare's play in the second half as I witnessed last night, but that may just be a trick of memory. Ironically, it is Pite's use of text (projected, narrated, etc.) that is partly the focus of my article.
The movement is as compelling and complex as ever, and it is always a pleasure to see how Pite's amazingly gifted dancers incarnate that balance--or pivot--between technical precision and fluid organicity that her choreography requires. This remains most kinesthetically affecting to me in the duets that structure the second half--with the lush and ethereal pairings between Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) and Ariel (Sandra Marín Garcia), and Ferdinand (Peter Chu, filling in for Jermaine Spivey) and Miranda (Cindy Salgado), a counter-weight (quite literally) to the more tough and muscular ones between Antonio (Yannick Matthon) and Sebastian (David Raymond, replacing Jiří Pokorný), and Prospero and Caliban (Bryan Arias).
The Tempest Replica is Pite's most fully realized Gesamtkuntswerk to date, a piece in which movement and text and sound and visual design are seamlessly integrated. The contributions of Pite's Vancouver collaborators (composer Owen Belton, sound designers Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe, lighting designer Robert Sondergaard, set designer Jay Gower Taylor, projection maestro Jamie Nesbitt, and costumers Nancy Bryant and Linda Chow) are central to this. That Pite has made the decision to continue working with this local community of virtuosic talent is her gift to this city. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.
P.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Ate9 dANCEcOMPANY and Donald Sales/Project20 at Chutzpah!
In the as yet still young history of 21st-century contemporary dance, someone will surely have to write a study on the world-wide influence of Ohad Naharin. Already at this year's Chutzpah Festival, courtesy of LA's excellent BODYTRAFFIC company, we have seen the choreography of two well-known Bathsheva alums, Barak Marshall and Hofesh Shechter, on the Norman and Annette Rothstein stage. Last night it was the turn of Danielle Agami's Ate9 dANCEcOMPANY, also based in LA (where they seem to be found of majuscule letters).
Agami is an acclaimed teacher of Naharin's Gaga method, and it shows in her choreography, which is as physically contortionist as it is conceptually rigorous. Mouth to Mouth, which Chutzpah! audiences are getting a sneak peek at in advance of its official LA premiere in April, features backwards crab crawls, hip-to-head leg extensions while hopping across the stage on the opposite foot, convulsive floor works, and all manner of double and triple-jointedness. Each of the dancers is mesmerizing, not least as a result of their unusual costumes, which include bolero jackets paired with underwear, a version of leather lederhosen, and a burgundy jersey dress deconstructed before our eyes via two sets of sewing shears at the outset of the piece.
At the centre of the action is Agami herself, distinctive in her shaved head and so wonderfully dextrous in demi-point. There is a moment, near the end, when Agami pauses to receive a kiss from each of her dancers. Far from obeisance, however, I interpreted the gesture--especially in light of the work's palindrome-like title--as a representation of the always mutually sustaining relationship between choreographer and performers, the dancers and the dance. And the fact that post-performance I saw Crystal Pite in animated conclave with Bryan Arias and Yanick Matthon, two of the dancers in her company Kidd Pivot (preparing for the remount of The Tempest Replica at SFU Woodward's next week) more or less confirmed this.
The second piece on last night's double bill was gR33N, a new work by Donald Sales' Project20 Company. The former Ballet BC star (alongside Pite) is also on stage throughout the piece; however, unlike Agami, he is mostly sedentary, dressed in a hospital gown and confined to a leg cast and chair positioned upstage. Three nurse-orderlies--Sarah Brinson, Katie Cassady, and Rebecca Margolick--do the bulk of the movement, dancing singly and in unison, in sequences of structured improvisation and overt pantomime, to a varied sound score built around original music by local composer (and Pite favourite) Owen Belton.
The colour green's associations with illness--signaled most materially by the bright lime backlighting that accompanies the exchanges between Sales and his doctor (Fred Middleton)--are juxtaposed with sequences that explore, mostly playfully, other feelings linked to this particular palette, including envy, greed, and innocence. Overall, the work itself feels a bit young and not fully ripened at this stage; it could definitely do with some editing. And one, of course, wishes that Sales, in his brief ambulatory forays downstage, would occasionally join his three muses in some more physically locomotive movement.
At the same time, I was also fascinated to watch Sales watching his own choreography being performed. Here's hoping he liked what he saw.
P.
Agami is an acclaimed teacher of Naharin's Gaga method, and it shows in her choreography, which is as physically contortionist as it is conceptually rigorous. Mouth to Mouth, which Chutzpah! audiences are getting a sneak peek at in advance of its official LA premiere in April, features backwards crab crawls, hip-to-head leg extensions while hopping across the stage on the opposite foot, convulsive floor works, and all manner of double and triple-jointedness. Each of the dancers is mesmerizing, not least as a result of their unusual costumes, which include bolero jackets paired with underwear, a version of leather lederhosen, and a burgundy jersey dress deconstructed before our eyes via two sets of sewing shears at the outset of the piece.
At the centre of the action is Agami herself, distinctive in her shaved head and so wonderfully dextrous in demi-point. There is a moment, near the end, when Agami pauses to receive a kiss from each of her dancers. Far from obeisance, however, I interpreted the gesture--especially in light of the work's palindrome-like title--as a representation of the always mutually sustaining relationship between choreographer and performers, the dancers and the dance. And the fact that post-performance I saw Crystal Pite in animated conclave with Bryan Arias and Yanick Matthon, two of the dancers in her company Kidd Pivot (preparing for the remount of The Tempest Replica at SFU Woodward's next week) more or less confirmed this.
The second piece on last night's double bill was gR33N, a new work by Donald Sales' Project20 Company. The former Ballet BC star (alongside Pite) is also on stage throughout the piece; however, unlike Agami, he is mostly sedentary, dressed in a hospital gown and confined to a leg cast and chair positioned upstage. Three nurse-orderlies--Sarah Brinson, Katie Cassady, and Rebecca Margolick--do the bulk of the movement, dancing singly and in unison, in sequences of structured improvisation and overt pantomime, to a varied sound score built around original music by local composer (and Pite favourite) Owen Belton.
The colour green's associations with illness--signaled most materially by the bright lime backlighting that accompanies the exchanges between Sales and his doctor (Fred Middleton)--are juxtaposed with sequences that explore, mostly playfully, other feelings linked to this particular palette, including envy, greed, and innocence. Overall, the work itself feels a bit young and not fully ripened at this stage; it could definitely do with some editing. And one, of course, wishes that Sales, in his brief ambulatory forays downstage, would occasionally join his three muses in some more physically locomotive movement.
At the same time, I was also fascinated to watch Sales watching his own choreography being performed. Here's hoping he liked what he saw.
P.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
A Tempest Worth Replicating
Last night's performance of Kidd Pivot's The Tempest Replica at the Playhouse concluded what had to have been the city's most highly anticipated dance event of the fall season. Pite's latest, and most explicit, exploration of narrative in dance, the piece is also the result of her first time working with a pre-existing script.
The work begins with long-time company member Eric Beauchesne, who plays Prospero, sitting cross-legged downstage right, in front of a large shimmery and billowing silver cloth. He is intently folding sheet after sheet of white paper into perfect origami sail boats, which he promptly lines up in a row. It's another kind of kinesthetic labour that is as precise and elegant as classical dance,. Additionally, it not only telegraphs for those in the audience unfamiliar with Shakespeare's play (or who haven't bothered to read Pite's careful synopsis of the action in the program) the famous opening high seas storm, but in the number and colour and scale of the boats' replication recalls one of Pite's explanations for the inspiration for the faceless, all-white fencing-like costumes worn by all the other dancers in the first part of her work: they are meant to recall the replica human figures used in architectural models.
Manipulating one of the boats in the same way that he will soon manipulate the bodily figures occupying his own island, Prospero speaks aloud the word "shipwreck," and then promptly calls the spirit Ariel (Sandra Garcia), the real architect of his designs. Ariel does not look particularly pleased by the summons, a reminder that she has not chosen to do Prospero's bidding, something captured in two simple movements repeated here that will become signature gestures for her throughout the work: a fluttering of her hands over her heart; and an elbow thrust akimbo out from her side, as reflex response perhaps to a phantom wing that has been clipped or tamped down by her master. Taking the paper boat from Prospero, Ariel places it in her mouth and starts to chew, which is the signal for the storm to begin.
Pite has said in past conversations about the work that it began with the notion of incorporating a shipwreck in a dancer's body. But she has also said that she was excited about the theatrical possibilities--lighting and sound effects--of representing a storm on stage. She marries these two ideas in the next sequence, in which we witness pre-recorded digital images of Ferdinand's (Jermaine Spivey) Act Two shipwreck solo projected onto the stage left portion of the scrim, which are then overlain with pelting rain, and with which the live, white-costumed body of the Act One Ferdinand interacts behind the scrim. It's an uncanny doubling, supplemented by Alonso (Bryan Arias) and Sebastian (Jiří Pokorný) and Antonio (Yannick Matthon) rolling on the floor upstage right.
This was the first of the night's surprises: not just Pite's sophisticated use of projections, but the amount of movement contained within them, and the extent to which they merged with the shadow outline of live movement on stage via lighting effects in front of and behind the piece's two cloth scrims (the first downstage one is pulled down after the storm by Prospero, to reveal a second upstage one). Other projections, such as Prospero's explanation to Miranda (Cindy Salgado) following the shipwreck of how they came to find themselves on the island as a result of Antonio's usurpation of Prospero's dukedom in Milan, are more clearly cinematic (often expressionistically so). This makes sense given Pite's explanation for her complementary method of conveying the major plot points of Shakespeare's play in successive bodily tableaux during the first part of the piece: she has called it a movement-based equivalent of storyboarding.
But even here there was another surprise--just how dancey many of these tableaux were. I hadn't witnessed but a few of these scenes as part of Pite's open rehearsals at SFU Woodward's in September, and so while I was prepared for Prospero's marionette-like manipulations of Miranda as she witnesses the storm, I did not expect the exuberant jive that she and Ferdinand break into once Prospero releases the prince from his Sisyphean labours and consents to letting the young lovers wed. Cinematic and kinesthetic narrative combine most successfully in the first half of the work in the sequence when we're first introduced to Caliban (Arias again), who slithers across the stage on all fours, led by Prospero and towards Miranda, seated stage left, as the projections economically telegraph (in the same direction) how the monster came to be enslaved by Prospero. Equal in visual effect is the banquet conjured by Ariel for Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian.
Text in this first part mostly comes in the form of projected surtitles providing act and scene numbers, and a brief, one-line synopsis of the action. Occasionally, however, key words are projected onto unexpected surfaces: "daughter" onto Miranda's raised skirt, for example, and "doubt" onto one of Prospero's unfurled paper boats, held up by an unidentified, white-cloaked avatar in the final Act 5 sequence, which crucially has no textual synopsis accompanying its projected surtitle, and which, as crucially, displaces the play's epilogue, cuing the transition into the second half of Pite's piece as Prospero, clearly in need of new magic, calls aloud for Ariel once again.
Her arrival, now dressed in regular street clothes, begins the process of replaying in more pure dance form key scenes that were storyboarded for us in the first half. To paraphrase Pite, now that we know who everyone is, and the nature of their relationships to one another, we can concentrate on how the movement intensifies the emotions behind those relationships. Although all the dancers get brief solo moments during these sequences--and none more stunning than Spivey's live reproduction of the bodily shipwreck that we had previously witnessed digitally--Pite's basic architecture during the second half is the duet: between Prospero and Ariel; Prospero and Miranda; Antonio and Sebastian, Prospero and Caliban; and finally Miranda and Ferdinand. This is some of Pite's most complex and stunningly original partnering, giving a physical form to the degrees of indebtedness and obligation, choice and constraint, power and reciprocity, that mark both the connection and the distance between different characters. Thus, for example, the opening duet between Prospero and Ariel is notable for its gorgeous lifts; but the striving for flight that we intuit in Ariel's impossibly fluid leg extensions especially is counterbalanced by arms that remain locked with and pinned down by Prospero's. Similarly, Caliban remains in a hammer-lock for much of his duet with Prospero, and even when he does break free and stands up straight and smoothes down the suit jacket he is wearing as a sop to his wounded dignity and pride, he is just as quickly forced back down to the ground by the unrelenting Prospero, and must propel himself about the stage via his sits bones and knees.
Interestingly, Caliban is the only character/dancer other than Prospero who speaks while moving, in this case uttering, despite Prospero's best attempts to stifle his voice, his famous oath: "You taught me language; and my profit on't/ Is, I know how to curse." Otherwise, text in the second half comes mostly in the form of key projected lines that explicate further the movement sequences we see taking shape before us, or else layered in voice-over as part of the dense soundscape designed by Meg Roe and Alessandro Juliani to complement Owen Belton's electronic score.
The Tempest Replica ends with the epilogue that was forestalled in the first half, with Prospero, having given up magic, now being shadowed and eventually overwhelmed by the four other male dancers, now also back in their all-white costumes. In the final tableau, Prospero has been placed prone on the floor in a position akin to the one in which we first encounter Miranda at the start of the work; the other dancers stand over the stilled creator, silently clapping as the the lights fade to black. The image alludes, of course, to Prospero's concluding speech, in which he asks to be released from his own creative bondage via the audience's applause, and which most critics read as a self-reflexive comment, in this his final play, on Shakespeare's setting aside of his writing quill.
Given Pite's own longstanding concerns with the dialectic of creation and destruction, and taken together with her announcement that following this tour of The Tempest Replica she plans to take a year's sabbatical, it is hard not to interpret this as simultaneously a farewell of sorts for a choreographer who does not know in what form--or even if--her company will reconstitute itself. In her pre-show talk Pite stated that she hoped, following their break, that the company would be back, and ideally with its current full and full-time employed complement of dancers--all of whom, it must be said, were on fire last night. But Pite also stated that such an arrangement would depend on finding a replacement for the funding from Frankfurt that in essence has allowed the company to create and tour for the past two years. I hope the cultural power brokers in this city were listening and that they throw all available resources her way.
P.
The work begins with long-time company member Eric Beauchesne, who plays Prospero, sitting cross-legged downstage right, in front of a large shimmery and billowing silver cloth. He is intently folding sheet after sheet of white paper into perfect origami sail boats, which he promptly lines up in a row. It's another kind of kinesthetic labour that is as precise and elegant as classical dance,. Additionally, it not only telegraphs for those in the audience unfamiliar with Shakespeare's play (or who haven't bothered to read Pite's careful synopsis of the action in the program) the famous opening high seas storm, but in the number and colour and scale of the boats' replication recalls one of Pite's explanations for the inspiration for the faceless, all-white fencing-like costumes worn by all the other dancers in the first part of her work: they are meant to recall the replica human figures used in architectural models.
Manipulating one of the boats in the same way that he will soon manipulate the bodily figures occupying his own island, Prospero speaks aloud the word "shipwreck," and then promptly calls the spirit Ariel (Sandra Garcia), the real architect of his designs. Ariel does not look particularly pleased by the summons, a reminder that she has not chosen to do Prospero's bidding, something captured in two simple movements repeated here that will become signature gestures for her throughout the work: a fluttering of her hands over her heart; and an elbow thrust akimbo out from her side, as reflex response perhaps to a phantom wing that has been clipped or tamped down by her master. Taking the paper boat from Prospero, Ariel places it in her mouth and starts to chew, which is the signal for the storm to begin.
Pite has said in past conversations about the work that it began with the notion of incorporating a shipwreck in a dancer's body. But she has also said that she was excited about the theatrical possibilities--lighting and sound effects--of representing a storm on stage. She marries these two ideas in the next sequence, in which we witness pre-recorded digital images of Ferdinand's (Jermaine Spivey) Act Two shipwreck solo projected onto the stage left portion of the scrim, which are then overlain with pelting rain, and with which the live, white-costumed body of the Act One Ferdinand interacts behind the scrim. It's an uncanny doubling, supplemented by Alonso (Bryan Arias) and Sebastian (Jiří Pokorný) and Antonio (Yannick Matthon) rolling on the floor upstage right.
This was the first of the night's surprises: not just Pite's sophisticated use of projections, but the amount of movement contained within them, and the extent to which they merged with the shadow outline of live movement on stage via lighting effects in front of and behind the piece's two cloth scrims (the first downstage one is pulled down after the storm by Prospero, to reveal a second upstage one). Other projections, such as Prospero's explanation to Miranda (Cindy Salgado) following the shipwreck of how they came to find themselves on the island as a result of Antonio's usurpation of Prospero's dukedom in Milan, are more clearly cinematic (often expressionistically so). This makes sense given Pite's explanation for her complementary method of conveying the major plot points of Shakespeare's play in successive bodily tableaux during the first part of the piece: she has called it a movement-based equivalent of storyboarding.
But even here there was another surprise--just how dancey many of these tableaux were. I hadn't witnessed but a few of these scenes as part of Pite's open rehearsals at SFU Woodward's in September, and so while I was prepared for Prospero's marionette-like manipulations of Miranda as she witnesses the storm, I did not expect the exuberant jive that she and Ferdinand break into once Prospero releases the prince from his Sisyphean labours and consents to letting the young lovers wed. Cinematic and kinesthetic narrative combine most successfully in the first half of the work in the sequence when we're first introduced to Caliban (Arias again), who slithers across the stage on all fours, led by Prospero and towards Miranda, seated stage left, as the projections economically telegraph (in the same direction) how the monster came to be enslaved by Prospero. Equal in visual effect is the banquet conjured by Ariel for Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian.
Text in this first part mostly comes in the form of projected surtitles providing act and scene numbers, and a brief, one-line synopsis of the action. Occasionally, however, key words are projected onto unexpected surfaces: "daughter" onto Miranda's raised skirt, for example, and "doubt" onto one of Prospero's unfurled paper boats, held up by an unidentified, white-cloaked avatar in the final Act 5 sequence, which crucially has no textual synopsis accompanying its projected surtitle, and which, as crucially, displaces the play's epilogue, cuing the transition into the second half of Pite's piece as Prospero, clearly in need of new magic, calls aloud for Ariel once again.
Her arrival, now dressed in regular street clothes, begins the process of replaying in more pure dance form key scenes that were storyboarded for us in the first half. To paraphrase Pite, now that we know who everyone is, and the nature of their relationships to one another, we can concentrate on how the movement intensifies the emotions behind those relationships. Although all the dancers get brief solo moments during these sequences--and none more stunning than Spivey's live reproduction of the bodily shipwreck that we had previously witnessed digitally--Pite's basic architecture during the second half is the duet: between Prospero and Ariel; Prospero and Miranda; Antonio and Sebastian, Prospero and Caliban; and finally Miranda and Ferdinand. This is some of Pite's most complex and stunningly original partnering, giving a physical form to the degrees of indebtedness and obligation, choice and constraint, power and reciprocity, that mark both the connection and the distance between different characters. Thus, for example, the opening duet between Prospero and Ariel is notable for its gorgeous lifts; but the striving for flight that we intuit in Ariel's impossibly fluid leg extensions especially is counterbalanced by arms that remain locked with and pinned down by Prospero's. Similarly, Caliban remains in a hammer-lock for much of his duet with Prospero, and even when he does break free and stands up straight and smoothes down the suit jacket he is wearing as a sop to his wounded dignity and pride, he is just as quickly forced back down to the ground by the unrelenting Prospero, and must propel himself about the stage via his sits bones and knees.
Interestingly, Caliban is the only character/dancer other than Prospero who speaks while moving, in this case uttering, despite Prospero's best attempts to stifle his voice, his famous oath: "You taught me language; and my profit on't/ Is, I know how to curse." Otherwise, text in the second half comes mostly in the form of key projected lines that explicate further the movement sequences we see taking shape before us, or else layered in voice-over as part of the dense soundscape designed by Meg Roe and Alessandro Juliani to complement Owen Belton's electronic score.
The Tempest Replica ends with the epilogue that was forestalled in the first half, with Prospero, having given up magic, now being shadowed and eventually overwhelmed by the four other male dancers, now also back in their all-white costumes. In the final tableau, Prospero has been placed prone on the floor in a position akin to the one in which we first encounter Miranda at the start of the work; the other dancers stand over the stilled creator, silently clapping as the the lights fade to black. The image alludes, of course, to Prospero's concluding speech, in which he asks to be released from his own creative bondage via the audience's applause, and which most critics read as a self-reflexive comment, in this his final play, on Shakespeare's setting aside of his writing quill.
Given Pite's own longstanding concerns with the dialectic of creation and destruction, and taken together with her announcement that following this tour of The Tempest Replica she plans to take a year's sabbatical, it is hard not to interpret this as simultaneously a farewell of sorts for a choreographer who does not know in what form--or even if--her company will reconstitute itself. In her pre-show talk Pite stated that she hoped, following their break, that the company would be back, and ideally with its current full and full-time employed complement of dancers--all of whom, it must be said, were on fire last night. But Pite also stated that such an arrangement would depend on finding a replacement for the funding from Frankfurt that in essence has allowed the company to create and tour for the past two years. I hope the cultural power brokers in this city were listening and that they throw all available resources her way.
P.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Creative Conversations and City Lights
So, at yesterday evening's "creative conversation" between Robert Lepage and Crystal Pite at SFU Woodward's, I learned that Lepage is not buying a condo in Vancouver. Quel dommage.
I also learned that Lepage is happy not to claim authorship of his work; that he feels himself to be inadequately equipped as a filmmaker; that he kind of got off on the massive boos that greeted the premiere of the first part of The Ring he directed at The Met; and that he was the one who actively sought out Pite as a collaborator on his current acclaimed production of Thomas Adès's The Tempest at the same institution (not knowing she had just choreographed her own take on the Shakespeare play).
From Pite, I learned that she began choreographing at age three (she even remembers the music she chose and the costume she wore!); that she needs to impose incredibly high artistic stakes on herself before she feels ready to plunge into a new work; that the impetus for The Tempest Replica (which opens tonight at the Playhouse) came from the choreographic challenge of incorporating the idea of a shipwreck into the body; and that when directing actors, as opposed to trained dancers, to move, it's all about finding the right language ("pretend you're listening at a door" as opposed to "lead with your right ear").
After a quick dinner it was off to the Orpheum with Richard for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra's live accompaniment to Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, in honour of the 85th anniversary of this landmark building (which, as Maestro Bramwell Tovey told the audience in his opening remarks--and as Richard has been whispering in my ear for years--was almost torn down in the 1970s). It really was an amazing experience to see what I think is Chaplin's greatest screen representation of his Tramp character brought sonically to life by the full VSO. As delightful were the warm-up acts: Tovey's solo improvisation of the live musical score to a little-known short by Chaplin, How To Make Movies, a quasi-behind-the-scenes look at what went into the artist's unique brand of physical comedy and cinematic magic; and a special performance by Michael Dirk on the original (and hydraulically operated) 1927 Wurlitzer Organ.
P.
I also learned that Lepage is happy not to claim authorship of his work; that he feels himself to be inadequately equipped as a filmmaker; that he kind of got off on the massive boos that greeted the premiere of the first part of The Ring he directed at The Met; and that he was the one who actively sought out Pite as a collaborator on his current acclaimed production of Thomas Adès's The Tempest at the same institution (not knowing she had just choreographed her own take on the Shakespeare play).
From Pite, I learned that she began choreographing at age three (she even remembers the music she chose and the costume she wore!); that she needs to impose incredibly high artistic stakes on herself before she feels ready to plunge into a new work; that the impetus for The Tempest Replica (which opens tonight at the Playhouse) came from the choreographic challenge of incorporating the idea of a shipwreck into the body; and that when directing actors, as opposed to trained dancers, to move, it's all about finding the right language ("pretend you're listening at a door" as opposed to "lead with your right ear").
After a quick dinner it was off to the Orpheum with Richard for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra's live accompaniment to Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, in honour of the 85th anniversary of this landmark building (which, as Maestro Bramwell Tovey told the audience in his opening remarks--and as Richard has been whispering in my ear for years--was almost torn down in the 1970s). It really was an amazing experience to see what I think is Chaplin's greatest screen representation of his Tramp character brought sonically to life by the full VSO. As delightful were the warm-up acts: Tovey's solo improvisation of the live musical score to a little-known short by Chaplin, How To Make Movies, a quasi-behind-the-scenes look at what went into the artist's unique brand of physical comedy and cinematic magic; and a special performance by Michael Dirk on the original (and hydraulically operated) 1927 Wurlitzer Organ.
P.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Back to the Moon
Last night Richard and I were at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's for a sold-out performance of Robert Lepage's Far Side of the Moon, a co-production with Théâtre la Seizième, who together with the now departed Playhouse first brought the show to Vancouver back in 2003. That was, I believe, Lepage's first visit to the city since he toured here in the 1980s with The Dragon's Trilogy, but he's since been back with The Andersen Project (2005) and, most recently, The Blue Dragon, which was also mounted at SFU Woodward's as part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2010. And if the rumours are true of him buying a condo here, we may be seeing a whole lot more of him.
It was by no means certain that last night's performance would go ahead as scheduled. SFU is in the midst of labour disputes with two separate unions, CUPE (representing staff) and TSSU (representing sessional instructors and TAs), and picketing of the downtown campuses over the weekend had forced the cancellation of at least two performances of Yves Jacques' performances. A campus-wide picket had been called for yesterday. But with Lepage himself taking over the role starting this Tuesday, Michael Boucher, Director of Cultural Programs at SFU Woodward's, and the man most responsible for bringing the show back to Vancouver, was anxious to avoid further disturbances if at all possible. To that end, Ex Machina Producer Michel Bernatchez read a prepared statement from CUPE in advance of the performance indicating that, in fact, no further picketing of SFU Woodward's would take place for the duration of Far Side's run.
This was as much a relief to those of us at the PuSh Festival as it no doubt was to Boucher. For PuSh is a community partner on this production and last night's performance was a special "PuSh night," which in addition to allowing us to secure discounted seats for our loyal Festival patrons, also saw us distributing our 2013 Festival program guides to all members of the audience in advance of their official release throughout the city today. Great publicity for us, and for our own ongoing SFU Woodward's presence, which Executive Director Norman Armour rightly highlighted in his portion of the curtain speech.
And now onto the performance itself. Far Side has always struck me as one of Lepage's more successful solo shows, in part because its images and theatrical conceits are so stunning (a washing machine door that becomes a portal to space), and in part because it is so personal (about the relationship between two brothers, Philippe and André, in the wake of their mother's death, the play was written just after the death of Lepage's own mother). The play was also turned into a very successful film by Lepage, one that, if it--as it seems--remains his last, will stand as an excellent synthesis of several recurring themes in his work (a focus on doubles and Oedipal family dynamics, symbolic use of colour, screens-within-screens, etc.). Indeed, this current production of the play has, if memory serves correctly, been changed to accommodate several new scenes that come directly from the film and, as is increasingly the case with any new Lepage stage production (witness The Blue Dragon), projected credits at the top of the show emphasize the cinematic feel of this piece of theatre.
And yet, for all the various projected film excerpts of the American and Soviet space race and the high-tech mechanics of the set, some of the most effective bits in the play still come when Lepage reverts to the basics of theatre-making, as with the frequent use of puppets, or when he turns a simple prop like an ironing board into a gym bench press in one instance and a scooter in another. In these moments Lepage understands that in the theatre, unlike in the cinema, the audience needs to work with the performer to create the illusion.
Would that Lepage worked just a little bit harder with us to create the same kind of shared emotional intimacy. The man has always been a cool, almost affectless performer. No doubt this anti-spectacular acting style allows the spectacle of his staging to stand out. But in a show like this one--which is, after all, partly about grief--I longed for just a bit more intensity and, dare I say, energy. However, I certainly can't fault Lepage for the effort he puts into the amazing final scene, which combines all the best elements of his theatre into a singularly stunning, almost balletic image.
And speaking of ballet, Lepage will be in conversation with choreographer Crystal Pite at SFU Woodward's this evening, beginning at 5 pm. The two have collaborated on Lepage's staging of the opera of The Tempest, currently on at the Met in New York. Pite's own dance version of the Shakespeare play, The Tempest Replica, opens tomorrow at the Playhouse, the second show in DanceHouse's current season. And, as it happened, I was sitting beside Kidd Pivot dancer Sandra Garcia last night. She graciously let me gush about my admiration for the entire company's work. Which I look forward to immersing myself in once again this Saturday.
P.
It was by no means certain that last night's performance would go ahead as scheduled. SFU is in the midst of labour disputes with two separate unions, CUPE (representing staff) and TSSU (representing sessional instructors and TAs), and picketing of the downtown campuses over the weekend had forced the cancellation of at least two performances of Yves Jacques' performances. A campus-wide picket had been called for yesterday. But with Lepage himself taking over the role starting this Tuesday, Michael Boucher, Director of Cultural Programs at SFU Woodward's, and the man most responsible for bringing the show back to Vancouver, was anxious to avoid further disturbances if at all possible. To that end, Ex Machina Producer Michel Bernatchez read a prepared statement from CUPE in advance of the performance indicating that, in fact, no further picketing of SFU Woodward's would take place for the duration of Far Side's run.
This was as much a relief to those of us at the PuSh Festival as it no doubt was to Boucher. For PuSh is a community partner on this production and last night's performance was a special "PuSh night," which in addition to allowing us to secure discounted seats for our loyal Festival patrons, also saw us distributing our 2013 Festival program guides to all members of the audience in advance of their official release throughout the city today. Great publicity for us, and for our own ongoing SFU Woodward's presence, which Executive Director Norman Armour rightly highlighted in his portion of the curtain speech.
And now onto the performance itself. Far Side has always struck me as one of Lepage's more successful solo shows, in part because its images and theatrical conceits are so stunning (a washing machine door that becomes a portal to space), and in part because it is so personal (about the relationship between two brothers, Philippe and André, in the wake of their mother's death, the play was written just after the death of Lepage's own mother). The play was also turned into a very successful film by Lepage, one that, if it--as it seems--remains his last, will stand as an excellent synthesis of several recurring themes in his work (a focus on doubles and Oedipal family dynamics, symbolic use of colour, screens-within-screens, etc.). Indeed, this current production of the play has, if memory serves correctly, been changed to accommodate several new scenes that come directly from the film and, as is increasingly the case with any new Lepage stage production (witness The Blue Dragon), projected credits at the top of the show emphasize the cinematic feel of this piece of theatre.
And yet, for all the various projected film excerpts of the American and Soviet space race and the high-tech mechanics of the set, some of the most effective bits in the play still come when Lepage reverts to the basics of theatre-making, as with the frequent use of puppets, or when he turns a simple prop like an ironing board into a gym bench press in one instance and a scooter in another. In these moments Lepage understands that in the theatre, unlike in the cinema, the audience needs to work with the performer to create the illusion.
Would that Lepage worked just a little bit harder with us to create the same kind of shared emotional intimacy. The man has always been a cool, almost affectless performer. No doubt this anti-spectacular acting style allows the spectacle of his staging to stand out. But in a show like this one--which is, after all, partly about grief--I longed for just a bit more intensity and, dare I say, energy. However, I certainly can't fault Lepage for the effort he puts into the amazing final scene, which combines all the best elements of his theatre into a singularly stunning, almost balletic image.
And speaking of ballet, Lepage will be in conversation with choreographer Crystal Pite at SFU Woodward's this evening, beginning at 5 pm. The two have collaborated on Lepage's staging of the opera of The Tempest, currently on at the Met in New York. Pite's own dance version of the Shakespeare play, The Tempest Replica, opens tomorrow at the Playhouse, the second show in DanceHouse's current season. And, as it happened, I was sitting beside Kidd Pivot dancer Sandra Garcia last night. She graciously let me gush about my admiration for the entire company's work. Which I look forward to immersing myself in once again this Saturday.
P.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Cedar Lake at DanceHouse
The fifth season of DanceHouse was launched this weekend, with New York's Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet presenting a mixed program of three works by Hofesh Schechter, Alexander Ekman, and Vancouver's very own Crystal Pite. When Cedar Lake was founded in 2003 by WalMart heiress Nancy Laurie, the chatter among the culturati was that this was a vanity project, sheer dilettantism. But under the direction of Benoit-Swan Pouffer, the company has grown into a respected corps of 16 exceptionally talented dancers, and has commissioned new work from some of ballet and contemporary dance's top choreographers.
Last night's program began with Schecter's Violet Kid, an almost full-company piece that Richard read as a deconstructed Rite of Spring. And, it's true, in one of the tableaux to emerge amid the mix of voice-over and blackouts during the opening sequence, we do glimpse one man on his knees with another holding his fingers in the shape of a gun at the back of his head, all while the other dancers look on. There was no Bausch-like earth on the floor, but we did get similar massings of bodies, advances and retreats, abrupt changes of direction, the contrast of squares and circles and lines--including an obligatory horizontal self-reference to the corps de ballet as a leitmotif. As Pouffer noted in his pre-show talk, Schechter is a master in his use of stage space, and it was a wonder to watch all 14 dancers come together in different mosh pit-like formations as the anthemic music (composed by Schechter) surged, only to break apart and disperse as first one and then another dancer dares to break free from the group.
Next up was Swedish choreographer Ekman's Tuplet, a witty essay on rhythm for six dancers that features spoken word voice-over by the dancers (letting us put names to bodies) and digital projections. The piece begins with the dancers entering, one by one, and taking up positions downstage on individual white squares, beating time not just with their bodies, but with their breath. There then follows a solo by the amazing Jonathan Bond, his body outlined against the backlit upstage screens as he glides and twists and writhes in response to Mikael Karlsson's electronic score. Back on their white squares, the dancers then show us a bit of their individual rhythmic styles (this is where the voice-overs come in) before Joaquim de Santana and Matthew Rich pair off in a duet that explores various dimensions of shared rhythm. All of this culminates in an extended sequence of syncopation, in which the dancers create their own percussive beats by slapping their hands in unison on their bodies.
The evening concluded with Pite's Grace Engine, which for me was a bit of a disappointment. Described by Pouffer as film noirish in style and sensibility, the full company piece once again sees Pite playing with the limits of narrative in dance, borrowing from notions of cinematic time and featuring an innovative lighting design by Jim French to evoke montage- and flashback- and dissolve-like effects. Moodily evocative and especially compelling in the slow-motion group sequences, where Pite's trademark head-to-foot bodily chains were used to great effect, the piece unravelled for me in its duets, especially the concluding one. Though it showcased former Ballet BC star Acacia Schachte's graceful talents, it ended rather abruptly, and I found myself struggling to assimilate it within Pite's larger conception for the piece.
That said, Pouffer's curation of this program reveals his sensitivity to stylistic contrasts and, above all, what pieces best highlight the amazingly athletic movement of his magnificent dancers.
P.
Last night's program began with Schecter's Violet Kid, an almost full-company piece that Richard read as a deconstructed Rite of Spring. And, it's true, in one of the tableaux to emerge amid the mix of voice-over and blackouts during the opening sequence, we do glimpse one man on his knees with another holding his fingers in the shape of a gun at the back of his head, all while the other dancers look on. There was no Bausch-like earth on the floor, but we did get similar massings of bodies, advances and retreats, abrupt changes of direction, the contrast of squares and circles and lines--including an obligatory horizontal self-reference to the corps de ballet as a leitmotif. As Pouffer noted in his pre-show talk, Schechter is a master in his use of stage space, and it was a wonder to watch all 14 dancers come together in different mosh pit-like formations as the anthemic music (composed by Schechter) surged, only to break apart and disperse as first one and then another dancer dares to break free from the group.
Next up was Swedish choreographer Ekman's Tuplet, a witty essay on rhythm for six dancers that features spoken word voice-over by the dancers (letting us put names to bodies) and digital projections. The piece begins with the dancers entering, one by one, and taking up positions downstage on individual white squares, beating time not just with their bodies, but with their breath. There then follows a solo by the amazing Jonathan Bond, his body outlined against the backlit upstage screens as he glides and twists and writhes in response to Mikael Karlsson's electronic score. Back on their white squares, the dancers then show us a bit of their individual rhythmic styles (this is where the voice-overs come in) before Joaquim de Santana and Matthew Rich pair off in a duet that explores various dimensions of shared rhythm. All of this culminates in an extended sequence of syncopation, in which the dancers create their own percussive beats by slapping their hands in unison on their bodies.
The evening concluded with Pite's Grace Engine, which for me was a bit of a disappointment. Described by Pouffer as film noirish in style and sensibility, the full company piece once again sees Pite playing with the limits of narrative in dance, borrowing from notions of cinematic time and featuring an innovative lighting design by Jim French to evoke montage- and flashback- and dissolve-like effects. Moodily evocative and especially compelling in the slow-motion group sequences, where Pite's trademark head-to-foot bodily chains were used to great effect, the piece unravelled for me in its duets, especially the concluding one. Though it showcased former Ballet BC star Acacia Schachte's graceful talents, it ended rather abruptly, and I found myself struggling to assimilate it within Pite's larger conception for the piece.
That said, Pouffer's curation of this program reveals his sensitivity to stylistic contrasts and, above all, what pieces best highlight the amazingly athletic movement of his magnificent dancers.
P.
Saturday, September 1, 2012
In the Rehearsal Studio with Kidd Pivot
Yesterday was one of those goose-bump inducing days when you just have to marvel at the amazing opportunities afforded you. In this case the source of wonder was attending an open rehearsal with Crystal Pite and her company Kidd Pivot, who are in residence at SFU Woodward's for the next two weeks while they get ready to remount her latest evening-length work, The Tempest Replica. In conjunction with DanceHouse, who will be presenting the piece at the Playhouse in November, Pite invited members of the public into the studio for an hour of danced excerpts and talk as she took us through aspects of her (re)conceptualization of the piece.
The Tempest Replica premiered last year in Germany, but as Pite told us yesterday evening she was never entirely satisfied with the piece. And so the present rehearsals have turned into something of a radical rethink not just of different aspects of the choreography, but also of sound (which they were having a bit of trouble with) and design. Combined with the addition of a few new company members who are learning the piece for the very first time, and following a two-month hiatus from dancing for the rest of the company, we were warned that what we would be witnessing was very rough and exploratory. If that's the case, then judging from what I saw--which was frankly stunning--come November the superlatives will be unrestrained.
Conceptually and structurally, The Tempest Replica is in the same vein as Pite's earlier Dark Matters. Both works are structured in two parts, with the first part in each case laying out the "story" in more consciously theatrical ways as a prelude to the pure dance sequences then elaborated in the second halves. The black-clad supernumeraries/shadow puppets from Dark Matters are here replaced by all-white (including fencing-style masks) stand-ins for the main characters from Shakespeare's play, who telegraph, or "storyboard" in Pite's words, the key plot points in various tableaux. From what I could gather yesterday, the movement here is deliberately contained, with Pite gradually developing the outline of the gestural language that she will elaborate more fully and complexly in the all-dance sequences of the second half, or what she referred to as the "real" world. So, for example, in an early scene from the first part, we witness Miranda (Cindy Salgado) being manipulated (almost like the marionette from Dark Matters) by her father Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) into watching the storm that he has conjured to shipwreck Ferdinand (Jermaine Spivey), Antonio (Yannick Matthon), Sebastian (Jiří Pokorný) and the rest of the crew from Milan. In the second half of The Tempest Replica, we see the same scene replayed, with Miranda's desperation at having to witness the suffering of those on the ship translated into a series of quick pivots and staccato movements that viscerally convey both her panic at what's happening and her horror that her father has made it happen. All the caveats about rustiness aside, the dancers yesterday were superb, and it was such an amazing gift to be able to see them work there magic up close. The duet between Prospero and Ariel (Sandra Garcia) was especially breath-taking, because the lifts that magically send the enslaved sprite flying are less than ten feet away from you.
The Tempest Replica continues Pite fascination with combining text and movement, this time having lines from the play both repeated and manipulated acoustically on the sound score (created by Meg Roe and Alessandra Juliani in conjunction with composer and longtime Pite collaborator Owen Belton) and, as Pite herself conjured for us, projected onto the back wall of the stage. I got to ask Pite about her fondness for text in a Q&A session after the rehearsal, and her remarks were very helpful in relation to my own current research on dance-theatre, of which her work forms an important part. Hopefully I'll be able to continue that conversation with her at some point in the future. In the meantime, I thank her and her dancers for their generosity yesterday in giving us a glimpse of their working process. And, of course, I look forward to seeing the finished piece when it comes back to the city in November.
P.
The Tempest Replica premiered last year in Germany, but as Pite told us yesterday evening she was never entirely satisfied with the piece. And so the present rehearsals have turned into something of a radical rethink not just of different aspects of the choreography, but also of sound (which they were having a bit of trouble with) and design. Combined with the addition of a few new company members who are learning the piece for the very first time, and following a two-month hiatus from dancing for the rest of the company, we were warned that what we would be witnessing was very rough and exploratory. If that's the case, then judging from what I saw--which was frankly stunning--come November the superlatives will be unrestrained.
Conceptually and structurally, The Tempest Replica is in the same vein as Pite's earlier Dark Matters. Both works are structured in two parts, with the first part in each case laying out the "story" in more consciously theatrical ways as a prelude to the pure dance sequences then elaborated in the second halves. The black-clad supernumeraries/shadow puppets from Dark Matters are here replaced by all-white (including fencing-style masks) stand-ins for the main characters from Shakespeare's play, who telegraph, or "storyboard" in Pite's words, the key plot points in various tableaux. From what I could gather yesterday, the movement here is deliberately contained, with Pite gradually developing the outline of the gestural language that she will elaborate more fully and complexly in the all-dance sequences of the second half, or what she referred to as the "real" world. So, for example, in an early scene from the first part, we witness Miranda (Cindy Salgado) being manipulated (almost like the marionette from Dark Matters) by her father Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) into watching the storm that he has conjured to shipwreck Ferdinand (Jermaine Spivey), Antonio (Yannick Matthon), Sebastian (Jiří Pokorný) and the rest of the crew from Milan. In the second half of The Tempest Replica, we see the same scene replayed, with Miranda's desperation at having to witness the suffering of those on the ship translated into a series of quick pivots and staccato movements that viscerally convey both her panic at what's happening and her horror that her father has made it happen. All the caveats about rustiness aside, the dancers yesterday were superb, and it was such an amazing gift to be able to see them work there magic up close. The duet between Prospero and Ariel (Sandra Garcia) was especially breath-taking, because the lifts that magically send the enslaved sprite flying are less than ten feet away from you.
The Tempest Replica continues Pite fascination with combining text and movement, this time having lines from the play both repeated and manipulated acoustically on the sound score (created by Meg Roe and Alessandra Juliani in conjunction with composer and longtime Pite collaborator Owen Belton) and, as Pite herself conjured for us, projected onto the back wall of the stage. I got to ask Pite about her fondness for text in a Q&A session after the rehearsal, and her remarks were very helpful in relation to my own current research on dance-theatre, of which her work forms an important part. Hopefully I'll be able to continue that conversation with her at some point in the future. In the meantime, I thank her and her dancers for their generosity yesterday in giving us a glimpse of their working process. And, of course, I look forward to seeing the finished piece when it comes back to the city in November.
P.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
NBC at 60
No, not the National Broadcasting Corporation. I mean the National Ballet of Canada, which is currently on a 60th Anniversary Tour of Western Canada that sees them in residence at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre from last night through this Sunday.
The NBC is touring without its in-house orchestra, and with a mostly contemporary rather than classical repertoire. The latter might not be to everyone's liking (though last night's house was quite full, I hear many of the tickets were comped), but it certainly was to mine.
First up was William Forsythe's the second detail, to a pulsating electronic score by frequent collaborator Thom Willems. Filled with turned in and bent knees rather than pointed out and extended toes, the piece (first commissioned by the NBC in 1991) is classic (which is to say classically deconstructivist) Forsythe. To this end, the piece abounds with various meta-references to the classed, gendered, and raced history not just of ballet, but of modern dance. Was that not a nod to Josephine Baker with the dancer of colour in the white dress cutting through the corps de ballet at the end?
Next was Jerome Robbins' Other Dances, a suite of mazurkas and one waltz set to the music of Chopin (with live piano accompaniment provided by Andrei Streliaev). Originally created by Robbins for the legendary Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov, as danced by NBC principal dancers Greta Hodgkinson and Zdenek Konvalina, virtuosity never overshadowed the simple romanticism and folk origins of both the music and the steps.
The most recent piece on the program was former NBC Artistic Director James Kudelka's The Man in Black, a quartet for three men and one woman set to six cover songs recorded by Johnny Cash late in his life. With the dancers shod in cowboy boots, and employing trademark country and western movement patterns, including line and square dancing, Kudelka manages both to highlight the pantomimic qualities these forms share with classical ballet and to translate the melancholy at the heart of Cash's growly, faltering tremolo into a succession of arresting poses that reveal the aching vulnerability underneath each of his dancers' swagger. Beautifully brought to life by Kevin Bowles, Stephanie Hutchison, Patrick Lavoie, and Jonathan Renna, and with a terrific lighting design by Trad Burns, this was my favourite work on the program.
A close second, however, was local legend Crystal Pite's Emergence, which closed the evening by showcasing what at times seemed like the entirety of the 70-strong NBC company in her 2009 Dora Award-winning exploration of group formations and individual expression in an insect-like colony. The images Pite builds in this piece (akimbo arms evoking spidery legs; the heaving, tattooed backs of the male dancers conjuring about-to-be-birthed larvae; the female dancers swarming across the stage en pointe) are stunning. As is the stage design by hubby Jay Gower Taylor and the humming, buzzing, droning score by Owen Belton (like Forsythe, for whom she danced, Pite has understood the importance of working with a talented musical composer). However, given the complexity of Pite's work for her own company, I was frankly surprised at how mimetic this piece feels. Not that this stopped me from thrilling to the closing tableau: the company in full vertical extension, about to explode chrysalis-like from the stage, while one among them ducks back into the lit opening of their hive.
An excellent start to what promises to be a major dance season here in Vancouver.
P.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Kidd Pivot's Kinesthetics
At the talk-back session following last night’s performance of Kidd Pivot’s The You Show at the Cultch (which I reviewed in its Shadbolt Centre workshop phase back in October), Crystal Pite brought up once again the notion of kinesthetic empathy that she has been using in most press around the show to explain why she cast the four duets that make up the evening-length presentation in the second person. As Pite explained, when her dancers reach their arms behind them, or torque their bodies backward, or fall onto the floor, she is hypothesizing that, in witnessing those actions, we will feel something similar in our own bodies, whether as a result of our own storehouse of corporeal memories the dancers’ movements trigger, or by virtue of imaginatively simulating those movements ourselves. In the first and last pieces (“A Picture of You Falling” and “A Picture of You Flying,” respectively) she provides additional verbal cues in the form of spoken text that, through direct address, invites a further layer of identification of what we are watching.
Needless to say, this “resonated” quite powerfully with me, especially as I have just finished reading Susan Leigh Foster’s Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (2011) in connection with similar physical and affective processes at work in dance-theatre generally, and Pina Bausch’s repertoire more specifically. Drawing on Foster (whose work I’m convinced Pite has read), I’m interested in asking what the relationship is between physical motion, emotion, and social movements. I pose this question not just in the ideal terms of what action-oriented group formations and mobile politics the choreographed display of the first two terms in the equation might conspire to incite, but also, on a quite literally pedestrian level, in how the corporeal foundations of dance and theatre can get us to think more muscularly about the ways we move beside each other in the world.
In this regard, I find singularly instructive the research of Foster, who in tracing the parallel and entwined histories of kinesthesia and empathy (in neurobiology, psychology, aesthetic theory, and dance criticism) from the eighteenth century to the present suggests that choreographed dance (and movement-based performance more generally) is an especially useful critical and cultural lens through which to discuss a—by no means fixed, unmediated, or transhistorical—notion of fellow-feeling. From the influential modern dance critic John Martin’s early theories of “kinesthetic sympathy” and the spectator’s inductive muscular transference of the emotional intention of a dancer’s movement (what he first termed “metakinesis” and later “inner mimicry”) to Vittorio Gallese’s recent influential research on “mirror neurons” and the mutually resonant physical and emotional relationship between enacting, observing, and simulating movement, Foster considers the ways choreographed dance makes all the more apprehendable a notion of kinesthetic empathy that Gallese, for one, sees as foundational to human social interaction.
Foster poses the relevance of such inquiries not just to the politics of the body, but to the larger body politic, at the outset of her book: “Are there ways in which a shared physical semiosis might enable bodies, in all their historical and cultural specificity, to commune with one another?” Like Foster, I do not yet have an answer to that question, but I do think dance-theatre as emotionally and physically complex as that composed by Pite might help us reflect upon it.
P.
Needless to say, this “resonated” quite powerfully with me, especially as I have just finished reading Susan Leigh Foster’s Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (2011) in connection with similar physical and affective processes at work in dance-theatre generally, and Pina Bausch’s repertoire more specifically. Drawing on Foster (whose work I’m convinced Pite has read), I’m interested in asking what the relationship is between physical motion, emotion, and social movements. I pose this question not just in the ideal terms of what action-oriented group formations and mobile politics the choreographed display of the first two terms in the equation might conspire to incite, but also, on a quite literally pedestrian level, in how the corporeal foundations of dance and theatre can get us to think more muscularly about the ways we move beside each other in the world.
In this regard, I find singularly instructive the research of Foster, who in tracing the parallel and entwined histories of kinesthesia and empathy (in neurobiology, psychology, aesthetic theory, and dance criticism) from the eighteenth century to the present suggests that choreographed dance (and movement-based performance more generally) is an especially useful critical and cultural lens through which to discuss a—by no means fixed, unmediated, or transhistorical—notion of fellow-feeling. From the influential modern dance critic John Martin’s early theories of “kinesthetic sympathy” and the spectator’s inductive muscular transference of the emotional intention of a dancer’s movement (what he first termed “metakinesis” and later “inner mimicry”) to Vittorio Gallese’s recent influential research on “mirror neurons” and the mutually resonant physical and emotional relationship between enacting, observing, and simulating movement, Foster considers the ways choreographed dance makes all the more apprehendable a notion of kinesthetic empathy that Gallese, for one, sees as foundational to human social interaction.
Foster poses the relevance of such inquiries not just to the politics of the body, but to the larger body politic, at the outset of her book: “Are there ways in which a shared physical semiosis might enable bodies, in all their historical and cultural specificity, to commune with one another?” Like Foster, I do not yet have an answer to that question, but I do think dance-theatre as emotionally and physically complex as that composed by Pite might help us reflect upon it.
P.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
You Are Here
Last night at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby Crystal Pite presented her company Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM in a Mixed Repertoire of works in progress. It was a rare opportunity to see the acclaimed local dancer-choreographer not just talking about, but actively soliciting feedback on, four pieces she's currently building as part of a full-length evening of dance called The You Show. That show will premiere next month at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, which has stepped in where no Canadian institution or government agency has, and provided Pite and her company with a two-year residency to create new work. Thereafter, the show will tour, eventually ending up back in Vancouver at The Cultch in May.
But audiences this week at the Shadbolt were treated to a sneak peek in an intimate studio setting. Even better, a visibly pregnant Pite was on hand to chat with the audience and welcome commentary on the work in between pieces.
Pite introduced the evening's program by saying that the idea behind The You Show was to think about how one would compose works of dance in the second person, and how this might in turn enable audience members to locate themselves in a dancer's movements, and see their own stories and conflicts and losses reflected in the physically embodied language on stage. Her basic architecture for each piece is the duet, and the evening began with the only previously performed piece in the repertoire, "A Picture of You Falling," created in 2008 for Anne Plamondon and Peter Chu. Both dancers were back together on stage last night, and as precise and articulate as ever in their telegraphing not just of Pite's deconstructionist choreography, but of the narrated text (written by Pite) to which that movement is con-/dis-joined: "This is a picture of you falling--knees, hip, hands, elbows, head." Continuing Pite's fascination with the body's marionette-like qualities, the collapsings and strivings of which we are not always the agent (see Dark Matters, which also featured Chu as the puppet-master who comes to be controlled by his creation), the work establishes the leitmotif for the evening, which Pite has elsewhere described as a "kinesthetics of rescue," and which we might translate here as finding the you in me (and vice-versa).
That process can involve a descent to some very dark places, as the second piece in the program demonstrated. Going back and forth for the time being between two possible titles--"The Brother You Thought You'd Lost" or "The Other You"--Pite paired longtime collaborator Eric Beauchesne with new company member Jiří Pokorný in a study of increasingly high stakes brinksmanship and animal aggression that culminates in a surprisingly tender pas de deux to Moonlight Sonata. Afterwards, Pite said that she had no idea she would end up choreographing to that piece of music, but that when it became clear she would, she felt the prelude to it had to be even darker, in order to "earn," in her words, the romantic climax.
Then came an untitled work for Cindy Salgado and Yannick Matthon that began with an image of shattering glass, to which Pite then asked longtime musical collaborator Owen Belton to compose a score. Intensely physical and featuring an amazing lighting design by Robert Sondergaard, this was the one work of the evening that Pite herself labelled still unfinished. In the feedback she solicited, I couldn't help much with the movement, but I did, as per her instructions, suggest a title: "Pieces of You" is perhaps a bit kitschy and cliched, but she promised to write it down.
Finally, the evening concluded with the longest work, "A Picture of You Flying." It begins with dancer Jermaine Spivey sitting on a chair (!) talking to the audience about sacrifice, strength, endurance, the body's armor, and the physical and mental toll exacted by his line of work. At first you think this is a bit of self-reflexive commentary on his profession as a dancer, especially when he mentions the drawbacks of wearing tights. But then he lifts his pant leg to reveal a bit of red lycra underneath. And then dancer Sandra Garcia picks a bit of red cloth up from the floor and wraps it around Jermaine's neck, like a cape. When he mentions flying, you know he's talking about being a superhero, not a dancer. But then, as this piece (and others by Pite) reveals, what precisely is the difference?
In this 35-minute work, Pite has a great deal of fun playing with various iconic poses and movement imagery associated with comic book superheroes, and their related pop culture offspring. There's a lot of slow motion "ka-pow!" sequences and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger moves. And the highlight is the Transformer-esque duet between Spivey and Garcia, these two friend-foes and possible lovers raised aloft, their arms and legs and heads shielded and manipulated by other company members as they dance/fight to the death--or sheer exhaustion. But, again, as Pite's work repeatedly suggests, what's the difference?
All in all, a thrilling evening of dance. I can't wait to see the finished work next May.
P.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Ballet BC...
... is back.
New Artistic Director Emily Molnar certainly assembled a fine program of Vancouver dance premieres to mark her "bold new vision for the future" of the company this past weekend. That vision has less to do with Molnar creating (à la her predecessor, John Alleyne) new full-length story ballets of her own in-house and more to do with seeking out international choreographers to create contemporary works on and for Ballet BC's dancers. The recently announced 2010/11 season alone contains seven world premieres and three Vancouver premieres.
Bringing the best of international dance to Vancouver, and programming it alongside the wealth of homegrown talent we have in the city, is something I wholeheartedly support. We're nowhere near the model of London's Sadler's Wells, a grand clearing-house for the best groundbreaking local and global dance, but Barb Clausen and Jim Smith's excellent DanceHouse series (which closes its second season this weekend with Brazil's Grupo Corpo, and which will launch its third season this fall), together with The Dance Centre, festivals like the recently completed Vancouver International Dance Festival and the upcoming Dancing on the Edge, and now a rejuvenated Ballet BC, are helping to ensure that local audiences also get to see the best the world has to offer.
Why, for example, has it taken so long for William Forsythe's Herman Schmerman, the first work on the Ballet BC Re/Naissance program, to get here? (Why, for that matter, have we seen so little Forsythe dance in Vancouver more generally? He's only perhaps the world's leading contemporary choreographer...) Created for the New York City Ballet in 1992, Herman Schmerman showcases Forsythe's trademark improvisational style at its witty best, deconstructing academic ballet via syncopated rhythms that show the various kinds of slant and wrapped movements and bodily spatial configurations that lie between and, indeed, often lead to more synchronized, vertical, and standardly paired positions. This was especially on view in the concluding pas de deux between Makaila Wallace and Donald Sales, who not only displayed stunning physical communication and chemistry with each other, but were also clearly having a ball.
Next up was Israeli-born, Netherlands-based Itzik Galili's Things I Told Nobody, a more self-consciously theatrical work set to haunting music by Handel, Vivaldi, Mozart, and Satie, whose Gymnopédie No. 1 provides the opportunity for a stunning concluding solo by Wallace. However, it is the piece's opening, to the largo from Handel's Xerxes, that has stayed with me the most. The sequence begins with Conor Gnam stage right, curled up on the floor, illuminated by the golden glow of a suspended industrial lamp. Through a succession of low plies, leg extensions, and general floor work, Gnam eventually sets the rest of the company in motion, hitherto curled up in shadow under their own lamps. The whole thing ends with the dancers turning the suspended lights on the audience, and I could only think that here, in its emotional simplicity, was what Marie Chouinard should have emulated back in March during her bloated premiere of The Golden Mean.
The evening concluded with local darling Crystal Pite's Short Works: 24, two dozen minute-long, largely non-narrative pieces set to pulsating music by Pite's longtime collaborator, Owen Belton, and featuring the dancers in solos, duos, trios, and larger group formations exploring the kinesthetic possibilities of pure movement. Goofy, inventive, and filled with all manner of Pite's impossible-to-imitate sinuous, jittery, almost-boneless limned movements (the company lined-up in a row, caterpillar-like on the floor stage right, moving only their heads and shoulders--and occasionally their bums--while a single female dancer performs a break-neck solo stage left was a sight to behold), it was a perfect way to end, if only because it proved that Ballet BC's classically trained dancers are up to the complexity of the boldest of contemporary choreography.
Judging by the thunderous applause, so are Vancouver's audiences. Here's to Molnar's brave new vision for the company. I look forward to the next season, and many more to come.
P.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Judging a Book...
End of term madness has descended and it's affecting my performance attendance. That should pick up again next week, hopefully.
P.
In the meantime, I thought I'd share a jpeg of the cover of my new book, which features a photo by Chris Randle of the four male dancers from Crystal Pite's Lost Action, which I talk about in the book's coda. I'm thrilled this work is on the cover, though not so thrilled that the book is now two months late in appearing. So much for wanting it out before the Olympics!
I am told it's on the way, though I don't know why I'm so anxious; it's not like anyone is going to buy the thing given how hideously expensive it is. Oh well, at least it has a pretty cover:
P.
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