Convergence x 2 at EDAM

EDAM's annual spring choreographic series featured new work from guest artists Natalie Tin Yin Gan and Shauna Elton, alongside a revival of a work EDAM Artistic Director Peter Bingham first presented a year ago.

Gan's Level 10 Life is billed as a "dance in sound and vibration." It features three performers in softly lit individual spots in three distinct areas of the stage. Alanna Ho squats in front of a laptop spinning music stage right, one leg sexily extended. Michelle Lui is downstage centre, astride a chair, a microphone positioned in front of her. An unrecognizable Aryo Khakpour (in part because, as we later discover, he's wearing giant bug eyes) lounges downstage left. As Ho continues to play music, Lui eventually leans into the microphone, quietly telling us the date and time of the performance, before calling out names of folks she recognizes in the audience. The contract between performers and audience thus having been breached, we are thus primed for anything to happen. But nothing much else does. Khakpour eventually sits and then stands up, brandishing a crop of some sort and advancing a bit downstage. Lui, meanwhile, retreats upstage and bops a little up and down to the music Ho is playing. Everything unfolds as if in a dream, or some futuristic space bar to which we have been lured on the promise of adventure, but for which we do not know the proper conventions or social codes.

Elton's Amae is a trio for Kate Franklin, Emmalena Fredriksson and the choreographer. It's a big-hearted, wide-limbed, joyous ode to bodily connection, mutual support, and psychic interdependence. The dancers run on stage in similar grey and red dresses, throw down various dance accessories (knee pads, socks, etc.), and then launch into a robust sequence of pushes and pulls and small lifts and jumps and limb-to-limb touching that combines some of the principles of contact with Elton's own contemporary vocabulary. There is, for example, a terrific moment in which Elton is carrying Franklin (or maybe it was the other way around), and Fredriksson, crouched on the floor, slides her hands between Elton's legs and beside her feet, as if giving her fellow dancer, now burdened with the weight of another body, directional guidance. Not that we don't also witness moments of tension and conflict in this piece. At one point Elton is lying on her side downstage while Franklin and Fredriksson work through who is leading and who is following whom in a series of toreador-like advances and retreats. The work concludes with the three dancers, having donned the accessories that had previously lain on the floor and simultaneously shed their outer grey frocks, in some senses becoming one single, hydra-headed body--an appropriate image for the gathering force of feminine energy and love that is at the heart of this dance.

Bingham's Pillars concluded the evening. While it has a new name, the work appears to follow the same structure as last year's Convergence, which I first blogged about here, and whose original title Bingham has now transposed to this entire evening's worth of presentations. That is, the work begins with the seven dancers (Delia Brett, Anne Cooper, Elissa Hanson, Arash Khakpour, Walter Kubanek, Diego Romero, and Olivia Shaffer) facing either side of the studio's east and west walls. At a certain point Brett peels off and begins to improvise a solo, shimmying liquidly through space, extending first one limb then another, descending to and then rolling about the floor. Eventually making contact with Kubanek on the other side of the studio, Brett drags him into her orbit, their duo expanding to a trio with the addition of Cooper, and then to a quartet when Romero feels the group's adhesive pull, and so on until all seven dancers have peeled themselves from the walls and are improvising with each other on stage. This time around, however, it seems like Bingham has removed some of the work's previous restrictions: there is no returning to the side walls for any of the dancers, and it feels like none of them is required to hew to a specific individual line in space. As such, the performers are freer to seek out another body or bodies with which to improvise a specific contact sequence. They can also do their own thing, and there was a moment last night when Shaffer, who is such a gorgeously fluid dancer, found herself separated from the group and contrived a wonderful sitting solo for herself that I could have watched all night. As she is doing this, the other six dancers have paired off and are cycling through different gravity-defying lifts and poses against the upstage wall. Which makes me think that not all the structuring principles from the previous iteration of this piece have been jettisoned. They've just morphed into something new. Above all, what made the performance so fun to watch is that the dancers themselves were clearly having fun.

An additional surprise on last night's program was the newly renovated lobby of the Western Front. I guess it's been a while since I've last been inside the building. So I was unprepared for what I encountered when I opened the doors: a bright, airy, open and modern entryway, with the box office now to the right, two loos adjacent it, and the rest a wide open space in which to linger and mingle with fellow patrons and artists. It makes the whole EDAM experience that much more enjoyable.

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VIDF 2018: Dancers Dancing and EDAM at the Roundhouse

The Vancouver International Dance Festival continued last night at the Roundhouse with a double bill of works by local companies that were linked by themes of memory and reconstruction. The free seven o'clock show in the exhibition hall was choreographed by my colleague Judith Garay, whose company Dancers Dancing celebrates its twentieth anniversary next year. In Confabulation, Garay is joined on stage by former students and DD company members Jane Osborne and Bevin Poole. In them, Garay appears to be watching versions of her former self, and after beginning the piece with a simple gestural hand sequence that somehow managed to combine feelings of both supplication and worry, Garay roams the stage in her long brown coat watching from both the inside and the outside as Osborne and Poole make their progress through space and time. (Garay quotes Tennessee Williams on memory in her program note, and there is definitely a sense in which she is functioning, like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, as both narrator and character in this piece.)

As for the progress of Osborne and Poole, it begins in the upstage left corner of the stage as a gorgeous slow motion and on-the-spot run. To recorded sounds of street noise and muffled conversation and babies crying and the general hubbub of life, the two women--at first together, and then separately--lift one leg and extend it in front of themselves, while the other kicks out behind. Garay has always been meticulous about the technique of her dancers, and one of the pleasures of this simple opening is revelling in the detailed articulation of feet and toes, and the striving, unhurried reach of pumping arms. Much of the rest of the piece operates as a duet for Osborne and Poole, with the similarly dressed dancers working in counterpoint, and often at different vertical and horizontal axes, but also coming together in moments of effortless unison. But Garay does more than just circle the stage. She has a stationary solo that sees her stretching for the sky, and she joins Osborne and Poole on a bench for a highly satisfying reprise and extension of the her opening gestural sequence. Soon after this, Garay exits the stage; but she reappears at the end of the piece in a most unexpected way to offer a final benediction on those whom she has so wisely mentored.

The mainstage show last night spotlighted EDAM and was a mixed program featuring highlights from company director Peter Bingham's choreographic career. It began with Hindsight, from 1995, a duet here featuring company veteran Olivia Shaffer and Kelly McInnes. It is set to songs by Berlioz and Richard Strauss that are sung by Jessye Norman, and begins with the two dancers standing upstage, fluttering their arms up and down like they are birds trying to fly. But thereafter most of the movement takes place on the floor, with an extended opening sequence in which Shaffer and McInness roll back and forth across the stage, simultaneously moving towards and away from each other, and managing to locomote from upstage to downstage by every now and then launching their rolls on a diagonal axis. But it's the coming out of and the pauses in between the rolls that are the most captivating, with the two dancers arresting their momentum with an amazingly graceful placing of their hands on the floor, their bent elbows and bowed heads suggesting a prayer of repair for broken wings. Equally amazing is how Bingham has essentially constructed a non-contact work of contact in this piece. Not that Shaffer and McInness don't eventually come together or make it to vertical (once downstage, positioned against two oppositely placed door frames); but even here the contact is fleeting and the piece ends with McInness back on the floor and Shaffer executing a painfully beautiful series of fluttering changements, desperately willing herself to lift up off the floor and soar through the air for both herself and her partner.

Sinking SuZi is a solo for Ziyian Kwan that was originally commissioned in 2002. It is the perfect showcase for Kwan's technical artistry and compelling stage presence. Beginning upstage left, and with her back to the audience, Kwan moves horizontally across the stage, arcing one arm out from her torso and then upwards into the air. This will be followed by a diagonal series of tilting pirouettes, at first with Kwan's hands resting on her thighs, and then circling about her body. But the most beguiling--and also the most extended--of the repeated movement sequences choreographed by Bingham for Kwan is the one in which she sinks to the floor in a deconstructed lotus position, one leg in front, the other behind, from which she then propels herself upward, turning once around as she lifts one arm upwards in a hail hello and places one foot over the other. I could have watched that one move go on forever.

The final piece on the EDAM program is also the most recent. Engage the Feeling Arms is a trio from 2016 that I first wrote about here. In this iteration Diego Romero (replacing Farley Johansson) joins Shaffer and Walter Kubanek in a dynamic display of virtuosic contact, but one that begins as a quasi-Orientalist shimmer of floating and ever-shifting intertwined arms before exploding into the dynamic physicality of thrown bodies and caught and distributed weight that is Bingham's signature. Watching this work again in combination with the other pieces, and also thinking about the different generations of dancers represented on stage, is to register just how instrumental Bingham and EDAM have been to the dance ecology of this city. Kudos to VIDF for showcasing these contributions in this mixed program.

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Convergence at EDAM

EDAM's latest choreographic series is on at the Western Front through June 2. It features new works by Peter Bingham, Vanessa Goodman and Noam Gagnon.

Talking to Bingham and dancer Delia Brett at different points during the evening's intermissions, I learned that Convergence, the work by Bingham that opens the evening, is structured around a series of restrictions the choreographer has given his seven dancers, including Brett, Anne Cooper, Elissa Hanson, Walter Kubanek, Diego Romero, Renée Sigouin, and Olivia Shaffer. The restrictions involve spending at least thirty per cent of the fifteen-minute piece hugging one of the studio's two side walls (which is how we encounter the dancers when the work opens), hewing closely to a specific individual line in space, and only engaging in contact with another body or bodies when those lines converge. Within those and a few other parameters, the dancers are free to improvise as they wish and what results is in part an almost slow motion breaking apart of some of the key principles of contact improvisation: that is, the finding of another body in space and what does or does not happen gravitationally as a result of that encounter. Indeed, some of the most enjoyable moments for me in the piece came when two or more dancers converged upon each other and humorously paused to decide who was leading and who was following whom.

Goodman's Accumulating is a trio featuring the choreographer and dancers Karissa Barry and Alexa Mardon, and showcasing an impressive sound and visual design by loscil (aka, local electro-acoustic composer Scott Morgan). The work opens with the three dancers dispersed in space upstage. Goodman is perched atop a speaker stage right. Barry is seated on a chair stage left. And Mardon hovers stationary in the upstage right doorway, her upstretched hands appearing to grip the upper lip of its inside frame. At a certain point Mardon lets go of her grip, crosses the threshold into the studio space and begins a dynamic and hyper-kinetic ten-minute solo, one in which her arms, tellingly, seem to function like antennae, propelling her forward as if in search of another door frame to attach themselves to. While this is happening, Barry is slowly crumbling forward in her chair and Goodman is turning this way and that atop her speaker, as if she is a stuck toy dancer in a malfunctioning music box. As part of the soundscore, we hear about the physiological make-up of the heart as an organ, and a video of what looks like smoke circles and rings slowly starts to creep up the backstage wall. Mardon eventually comes to rest and Barry, who by this time is slumped on the floor in front of her chair, begins her own solo, only hers is more fluid and languid, with the movement issuing more from the pelvis, hips and legs. The two dancers eventually join in a mirrored duet, their movements not quite in unison, but their hitherto distinct vocabularies now meshing in a complementary and mutually sustaining way. It's hard not to think of the figure performed by Goodman as having a hand in bringing the other two dancers together, especially when they come to rest in a seated position on the floor just to the left of her station and then collapse backward in exhaustion. This is the cue for Goodman to begin a contained mechanical sequence of movements atop her speaker, which in turn reanimates the other two dancers, who are given a final coda downstage before helping to disappear each other in a replacement series of poses in that upstage right doorway.

Gagnon's between us--what a difference a day makes is also a trio and likewise has a fantastic commissioned score, this time something a bit more industrial by James Coomber. To thrashing guitar sounds, Graham Kaplan, who is positioned downstage right, bends at the waist and grinds his shoulders forwards and backwards with such violence that I was sure one was going to pop out of its socket. Meanwhile, starting from her spot upstage left Lara Barclay begins a slow sinuous all-body crawl across the backstage wall. Positioned centre stage with her back to the audience, Heather Dotto moves forward and backward like a robot, her torso also hingeing with whiplash speed in either direction. Indeed, the extremity of each of the performers' bodily contortions and both the repetitiveness and physical force with which they executed them over the course of the piece's twenty minutes are what registered most with me in between us. At different points Kaplan partners both Dotto and Barclay, but each connection seems to be structured as much on repulsion as on attraction, with Kaplan and Dotto shoving their pelvises together like magnets, but then arcing their upper bodies away from each other like evil laughing clowns. The implicit violence in the lifts that Kaplan performs with Barclay is later completed when Barclay, chasing after Dotto and Kaplan, throws herself backwards on the floor, a discarded third wheel. And, indeed, it is possible to read the work through the lens of a love triangle. But, really, it is enough of a kinetic high just to absorb each new jolt and shock that emerges from this talented force field.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 23

Yesterday I had lunch with Barbara Bourget and then interviewed her for our Vancouver Dance Histories project. Barbara's long and distinguished career started with tap lessons at age four, before she switched full-time to ballet five years later--although not before creating her first work of choreography to Elvis Presley's "Stuck on You" at eight years old. Barbara's first ballet teacher in Vancouver was Miss Mara McBirney, who had taught Lynn Seymour, and who was also friends with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's Arnold Spohr. It was through the latter connection that Barbara was invited to join the RWB at 16 as a scholarship student, getting to study with and dance in works by such pioneering American women choreographers as Pauline Koner and Agnes de Mille.

From the RWB, and following a brief stint in Banff, Barbara moved on to Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, just missing Judith Marcuse, who had left the company the previous year. Fernand Nault cast Barbara as the original Sally Simpson in Les Grands Ballets' highly successful rock ballet of The Who's Tommy. But despite great success with the company, Barbara, at age 22, became disillusioned with dance. She wanted a boyfriend, and as she put it to me in her inimitably frank way, she took a look at the men in the company (most of them gay) and quickly realized that wasn't going to happen here. A family crisis also necessitated Barbara's return to Vancouver, and so in 1974 she found herself back in the city.

However, Barbara's retirement from dance didn't last long, and she soon found herself dancing for the fledgling Mountain Dance Theatre Company, under the direction of local legends Mauryne Allan and Iris Garland. From there, and following the birth of her first child and also the dissolution of her first marriage, Barbara went on to the Paula Ross Dance Company, which along with Anna Wyman Dance Theatre and the Pacific Ballet Theatre (the forerunner of Ballet BC) was one of the preeminent local companies in the 1970s. It was while dancing for Ross that Barbara met Jay Hirabayashi, which began a personal and professional relationship that has lasted 38 years and counting.

Jay and Barbara began creating work together in 1979, working out of the Western Front. And it was there, of course, that they met Peter Bingham, Lola MacLaughlin, Jennifer Mascall, Peter Ryan and Ahmed Hassan, all of whom would come together to create EDAM in 1982. Barbara told me that with such strong personalities all vying to create new work, the collective was doomed to failure; she said they would have meetings that lasted seven hours--just to decide what kind of cash box to buy! And then there was the fact that their styles and dance vocabularies were so different. Barbara, who says she can barely stand to be touched by anyone other than Jay, described to me doing contact improv and it was hilarious. But at the same time Barbara was proud of the amazing work that EDAM had created (none of it, unfortunately, captured on video), and said that audiences ate it up. And of course there is no denying the legacy of that work and how it has continued to shape the local dance community.

Kokoro Dance was born in 1986, its post-butoh aesthetic shaped by a performance by the Tamano brothers that Barbara and Jay had seen in the basement theatre of the VAG in 1982. Several hundred choreographed works later the company is still going strong, with so many folks in this city having been affected by the work, whether as spectators or as performer-collaborators. In my case, it's been both, and the combustible creative process that is Barbara and Jay's partnership is certainly something unique to behold; but what results is almost always an amazing experience.

Of course Barbara and Jay have helped shaped the Vancouver dance landscape in so many other ways: through the establishment of the Vancouver International Dance Festival; through their longtime teaching at Harbour Dance (which just came to an end this summer); and, most recently, through their founding of KW Studios, the new rehearsal, performance, and administrative space at Woodward's that Kokoro and VIDF shares with Vancouver Moving Theatre and Raven Spirit Dance. Barbara gave me a tour of the space before we went to lunch, and while there remains much to do, and while I know this weighs heavily upon both her and Jay, I also know from class that Barbara's tiredness contains within in it reserves of energy that the rest of us could only hope to one day harness.

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