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.
Showing posts with label Dance-Theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dance-Theatre. Show all posts
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Sunday, November 21, 2010
ASTR/CORD in Seattle
Just back from Seattle, and the joint American Society for Theatre Research/Congress on Research in Dance Conference. Kugler, Rob Kitsos, and I participated in a Thursday evening workshop purportedly aimed at coming up with some bombasts, manifests, and all-around provocative first principles regarding the creation, performance, and reception of a “bastard” form of dance-theatre that somehow wouldn’t be called that. You can check out the group’s preliminary blog posts on the topic at www.nursingabeautifulbastard.wordpress.com.
The actual workshop discussion was decidedly disappointing; not only did the co-conveners have an agenda for the evening that seemed to obviate completely—if not be totally antithetical to—the work we had been asked to do prior to the conference, but one of said conveners was further intent on reducing everything to her own delimited and circumscribed performance practice, training, experience, and biases. Then, too, it became very clear that no one—least of all the conveners—was very interested in hearing about our experience of cross-disciplinary collaboration on The Objecthood of Chairs, which we had very clearly stressed would be our primary reference point in our initial proposal to join the workshop.
All of this may have something to do with the unique structure of the ASTR working groups model, which has now been in existence for some years. This replacement for the traditional panel paper presentations (although those still do happen at ASTR, in the plenary sessions) does have the benefit of encouraging participants to dialogue and share work and ideas before the conference proper. However, it also—by virtue of the workshops being open to auditors/audience members who haven’t been a part of this prior conversation—forces speakers to distill, at times extremely reductively, very complex arguments (that might have been part of a much longer paper) into pithy sound bites of no more than one or two sentences, the reverberations or connections between which the convener then assembles like some sort of choirmaster (or director, or choreographer). It’s perhaps for this reason that the convener’s voice tends to dominate, and everyone else ends up looking to some extent like a performing monkey—with audience members for the most part passively absorbing the spectacle. Alana’s workshop on Saturday morning, “Risking Encounter,” looked extremely interesting on paper, and, indeed, some very provocative ideas about the “ethics of touch,” in particular, were bandied about; but the number of participants (13) was just too large, and again one of the co-conveners (who hadn’t even circulated a paper!) spoke way too much. Where is the pay-off, I wonder, in someone journeying half way around the world to present their research for at most five minutes worth of speech?
To be fair, this is my first time at ASTR. And I did only attend two sessions… I’m a fairly grumpy conference-goer as it is, and I’m not very much of a fan of the traditional format either. Still, I think I’ll need to do a careful reading of the workshop proposals for next year’s ASTR meeting (sans CORD folks) in Montreal before I think of interrupting our planned semester sojourn in the UK with a return visit to eastern Canada in mid-November.
Conference-wise, Seattle may have been hit and miss—and they could have done better with the weather (though all the American announcers were uniform in their blame of the “arctic air from Canada” for the unusual cold snap)—but culture-wise the city delighted, as is so often the case. We had a fine post-workshop dinner with Kugler, Rob, and Rob’s wife, Lorraine (a quasi-Seattle native), at Tulio, which also doubled as a kind of deferred celebration of the Chairs production—which we measured by raiding our box-office take for the three very yummy wines the table shared. Then there was the incredibly comprehensive Picasso exhibit on at the Seattle Art Museum. There was a crush of bodies, but there was much work I hadn’t seen before, and it was mostly accessible for more than rudimentary contemplation.
Finally, on Friday evening we caught Ralph Lemon’s new show, How Can You Stay in the House All Day And Not Go Anywhere?, at On the Boards. I haven’t yet processed all that was going on in the piece, and I think in some respects my reaction was both pre- and over-determined by all that I had read in advance about the background to the work (in particular Lemon’s successive losses of his partner and then his longtime collaborator, Walter Carter). Still, I was definitely struck by the mixing of media—live narrated text, video, and recorded and live dance—and how what can be said about, what can be shown of, and what is felt as a result of grief could be tracked along two parallel (and inverse) tracks of abstraction and (in)articulacy. The dancers’ frenzied movements, their convulsive writhing (which is almost as painful to watch as it must be to perform), embodies both the release and the absorption (indeed, the reincorporation) that is a necessary component of the work of mourning.
Lemon’s artistic sensibility is as capacious and prickly as his view of the world, which he presents as vast and amazing and complex, but also as raw and unfinished and filled with thorny thickets. Grief is an especially painful and constricting brier-patch, but as Lemon here suggests via Lewis Hyde and Uncle Remus, a wily hare or rabbit can eventually find his or her way out. So too with this very challenging work of art. Lemon doesn’t make it easy for his audience, but just when it seems like he’s completely boxed us in as spectators/witnesses/co-supplicants, and left us “no room” to maneuver (and only one way to react), a hole opens up and a possible way forward is glimpsed.
Talk about an ethics of touch…
P.
The actual workshop discussion was decidedly disappointing; not only did the co-conveners have an agenda for the evening that seemed to obviate completely—if not be totally antithetical to—the work we had been asked to do prior to the conference, but one of said conveners was further intent on reducing everything to her own delimited and circumscribed performance practice, training, experience, and biases. Then, too, it became very clear that no one—least of all the conveners—was very interested in hearing about our experience of cross-disciplinary collaboration on The Objecthood of Chairs, which we had very clearly stressed would be our primary reference point in our initial proposal to join the workshop.
All of this may have something to do with the unique structure of the ASTR working groups model, which has now been in existence for some years. This replacement for the traditional panel paper presentations (although those still do happen at ASTR, in the plenary sessions) does have the benefit of encouraging participants to dialogue and share work and ideas before the conference proper. However, it also—by virtue of the workshops being open to auditors/audience members who haven’t been a part of this prior conversation—forces speakers to distill, at times extremely reductively, very complex arguments (that might have been part of a much longer paper) into pithy sound bites of no more than one or two sentences, the reverberations or connections between which the convener then assembles like some sort of choirmaster (or director, or choreographer). It’s perhaps for this reason that the convener’s voice tends to dominate, and everyone else ends up looking to some extent like a performing monkey—with audience members for the most part passively absorbing the spectacle. Alana’s workshop on Saturday morning, “Risking Encounter,” looked extremely interesting on paper, and, indeed, some very provocative ideas about the “ethics of touch,” in particular, were bandied about; but the number of participants (13) was just too large, and again one of the co-conveners (who hadn’t even circulated a paper!) spoke way too much. Where is the pay-off, I wonder, in someone journeying half way around the world to present their research for at most five minutes worth of speech?
To be fair, this is my first time at ASTR. And I did only attend two sessions… I’m a fairly grumpy conference-goer as it is, and I’m not very much of a fan of the traditional format either. Still, I think I’ll need to do a careful reading of the workshop proposals for next year’s ASTR meeting (sans CORD folks) in Montreal before I think of interrupting our planned semester sojourn in the UK with a return visit to eastern Canada in mid-November.
Conference-wise, Seattle may have been hit and miss—and they could have done better with the weather (though all the American announcers were uniform in their blame of the “arctic air from Canada” for the unusual cold snap)—but culture-wise the city delighted, as is so often the case. We had a fine post-workshop dinner with Kugler, Rob, and Rob’s wife, Lorraine (a quasi-Seattle native), at Tulio, which also doubled as a kind of deferred celebration of the Chairs production—which we measured by raiding our box-office take for the three very yummy wines the table shared. Then there was the incredibly comprehensive Picasso exhibit on at the Seattle Art Museum. There was a crush of bodies, but there was much work I hadn’t seen before, and it was mostly accessible for more than rudimentary contemplation.
Finally, on Friday evening we caught Ralph Lemon’s new show, How Can You Stay in the House All Day And Not Go Anywhere?, at On the Boards. I haven’t yet processed all that was going on in the piece, and I think in some respects my reaction was both pre- and over-determined by all that I had read in advance about the background to the work (in particular Lemon’s successive losses of his partner and then his longtime collaborator, Walter Carter). Still, I was definitely struck by the mixing of media—live narrated text, video, and recorded and live dance—and how what can be said about, what can be shown of, and what is felt as a result of grief could be tracked along two parallel (and inverse) tracks of abstraction and (in)articulacy. The dancers’ frenzied movements, their convulsive writhing (which is almost as painful to watch as it must be to perform), embodies both the release and the absorption (indeed, the reincorporation) that is a necessary component of the work of mourning.
Lemon’s artistic sensibility is as capacious and prickly as his view of the world, which he presents as vast and amazing and complex, but also as raw and unfinished and filled with thorny thickets. Grief is an especially painful and constricting brier-patch, but as Lemon here suggests via Lewis Hyde and Uncle Remus, a wily hare or rabbit can eventually find his or her way out. So too with this very challenging work of art. Lemon doesn’t make it easy for his audience, but just when it seems like he’s completely boxed us in as spectators/witnesses/co-supplicants, and left us “no room” to maneuver (and only one way to react), a hole opens up and a possible way forward is glimpsed.
Talk about an ethics of touch…
P.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
The Objecthood of Chairs
It’s called The Objecthood of Chairs, and it’s a physical/dance-theatre piece about the romance between two men, as told through Western culture’s historical romance with chairs. We follow the men as they meet, move in together, and eventually part as the result of a freak accident that leaves one of the men in a wheelchair and the other wracked with guilt. Along the way, and in a largely presentational style, we are provided various “object” lessons in: modernist chair design; Shaker asceticism; the revolution in sociability and sexuality inaugurated by the Thonet café chair; the inherent cruelty of childhood games of musical chairs; and Buddhist sitting practices. In this way, the men communicate to the audience what they cannot say to each other about the necessary loss of autonomy that comes with asking for, and offering, unconditional support. The text draws on architectural theory and art history, industrial design and neurophysiology, poetry and pop culture to think through the relationships and resistances between bodies—and objects—as they move through space.
However, the text I’ve written is really only the starting point for a larger interdisciplinary collaboration with much more talented colleagues from SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, in which we’re investigating intersections between scripted and devised processes of dance-theatre composition, and exploring the complementary integration not just of text and movement, but also dramaturgy, video, music, and design. As such, the theory of movement articulated by the script is being transformed and supplemented in thoroughly amazing ways by Rob Kitsos’ original choreography, Rob Groeneboer’s film, video, and image sequences, Martin Gotfrit’s musical composition, Barry Hegland’s lighting design, and DD Kugler’s direction and dramaturgy. Not to mention by the contributions of our performers, Victor Mariano and Justin Reist, a professionally trained actor and dancer, respectively (and SCA alums), who are making bold forays into each other’s disciplines. And then there are all the current SCA students working behind the scenes: as costume designer; stage manager; assistant stage manager; film production assistants; editor; video effects coordinator; etc.
We’ve been workshopping the piece since January, and no matter how the final product turns out, already it’s been an amazing process to see how the various component parts are coming together: how an independently choreographed sequence by Rob K gets married with a section of text to reveal something new about both the words and the movement; how both words and movement are transformed yet again by Martin’s free-form improvising on his electric guitar in the rehearsal studio; how a cinematic vision of independently moving chairs inside Rob G’s head gets worked through on a bare film soundstage downtown; and how lines I thought clunky or flat on the page come alive through Kugler’s coaxing of different readings and inflections and physical exchanges from Vic and Justin.
The boys will be completely off book this Thursday. Most of Rob G’s film sequences have been shot, and Rob K has set something like 10 or 11 separate movement sequences. We start intensive rehearsals in August, with an opening set for September 8th. Exact dates and ticket information still have to be confirmed, so stay tuned for further details.
P.
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