The offerings in the 2017 Dancing on the Edge Festival's first mixed program, Edge 1, were, well, mixed. Reversing the order in the printed program, the first piece presented was local choreographer Chick Snipper's Phasmida & Scorpiones: a study. Performers Jess Ames and Julianne Chapple wear matching coral-coloured lyotards with cross-hatched stitching on the backs, and also black leggings. While one of the dancers lies supine on the floor upstage right, with one hand stretched above her head, the other moves out of a lunge she is holding centre stage and into a deep plie, the first phase in her own eventual trajectory floorwards. Here she will begin a series of crawling patterns across the stage, her body low to the floor, her arms outstretched and bent at the elbows, feet flexed: in other words, an approximation of the morphology of the predatory arachnids in Snipper's title. By contrast, the other dancer's orbit is upwards, her physical vocabulary and locomotion more vertical, with her limbs tending towards a series of extensions: and thus do we discover (with the aid of a bit of post-show Googling) that phasmida are a class of stick-like insects. Of course, arachnid and insect must meet, and in Snipper's study they do so twice: once on the floor, rolling onto and over each other in some contact-inspired phrasing; and once while standing, leaning into each other's chests, entwining their arms, syncing two of their knees together, and beginning an approximation of a slow, three-legged walk upstage. I'm not sure if this meant that the scorpion wins out over the phasmid, but it did register to me as one more way in which this piece was a bit too literal and representational in the physical phrasing it was deploying.
Representational gestures also figured in Yvonne Ng's Weave ... part one, a solo in which she tells the story of her mother's complicated patrimony through speech and movement. However, for every rocking back and forth of Ng's arms to indicate a swaddling baby there was also a through-line bodily grammar of more formally repetitive and non-expressive gestural sequences, the patterning of Ng's limbs, when combined with her talk, putting me in mind of the mathematically-inflected work of Sarah Chase. Additionally layered over top of this is a meta-commentary in which every so often Ng will comment on either the appropriateness or the ridiculousness of the particular movement she is executing. The approach works, and not just because the petite Ng, artistic director of the Toronto-based tiger princess dance projects, is such a charismatic performer. The combination of deconstructed formalism and emotional lyricism captures the complicated story of Asian feminine identity that Ng is trying to tell, which we discover is as much about finding an anchor for herself where her mother had none.
Last on the program was Tedd Robinson's Logarian Rhapsody, a commission for the Winnipeg-based dance artist Alexandra Elliott. A duet that Elliott dances with Ian Mozden, it begins with the performers whispering offstage. Eventually they enter, their eyes rimmed in black kohl, and dressed like lounge singers from the 1970s in white leisure suits. Mozden appears to be holding some orb-like object in one hand. That object turns out to be a green apple and via snippets of the live whispering of the dancers, and also via the voiceover that eventually joins this whispering, we learn that both dancers wish to eat the apple. However, it takes a very long time for either of them to do so, and first we must cycle through a series of anticipatory tableaux: Mozden coming downstage to show us the apple and comment on how desirously delicious it looks; Elliott placing the apple on Mozden's shoulder for them and us to admire, or be in fearsome awe of; Elliott and Mozden trading the apple back and forth; Elliott rolling the apple on the floor; and so on. We go through variations of this sequence many, many times, and while I normally find Robinson's conceptual imagination highly engaging, here the conceit felt tedious. Adam and Eve: we get it. Just someone please bite the apple already. Spoiler alert: they both eventually do so, and the choreographic effect is decidedly anti-climactic. There is, however, a final saving grace: a fantastic lighting cue to end the piece.
P
Showing posts with label Edge 1. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Edge 1. Show all posts
Saturday, July 8, 2017
Friday, July 8, 2016
Edge 1 at DOTE
On a cold and rainy Thursday in Vancouver, with no cab in the city to be found, Richard and I made it to the Firehall a minute before curtain. This year's Dancing on the Edge Festival kicked off with an eclectic line-up: three very different pieces that offered up a mix of kinetic pleasures and conceptual challenges over the course of a somewhat too long evening.
Leading off was Here on the ground, a collaboration between Julia Carr and Meghan Goodman, of Body Narratives Collective, and Hornby Island choreographer Sarah Chase. The piece tells the story of Carr and Goodman's friendship through some of the surprising coincidences in their life histories and careers: both are longtime company members of the aerial dance company Aeriosa (performing a site-specific work in Stanley Park as part of DOTE this coming Wednesday and Thursday); both are new moms (plaster body casts of each woman's pregnant belly figure at a certain point and there is a very sweet moment near the top of the show in which each performer races to pack up the baby-related items needed for a day out in the park); and both have several family members who tend to share the same name. All of this is related to us through Chase's trademark cross-lateralizing of verbal speech with different combinations of physical gestures, which the dancers cycle through as they tell their stories. At different points in the piece, Carr and Goodman even let us in on the system by which the individual gestures are chosen and paired with different parts of speech: as she did with SFU's rep dancers during her Iris Garland residency in the School for the Contemporary Arts earlier this spring, Chase will pair a word or sometimes just a syllable with a gesture in whose articulation there will be embedded some physical or verbal mnemonic. For example, the wiping of invisible "slime" off of one's thigh will be cued to a word that rhymes with it, like "time." Knowing this, when the dancers then go on to repeat the gesture phrases, whether silently or while singing a John Denver song, we concentrate more intently, which fits with Chase's theory that the combining of verbal and physical scores in performance makes audience members as lucid in their reception as performers become in their expression. In a similar way, Carr and Goodman later show us some of the technique that underscores a few of the named moves they use in their aerial dancing (e.g. "Superman" or "The Bird"). It was fascinating to see what normally would be happening off the side of a building, with the dancers' harnessed bodies tilted 90 degrees and with our gazes tilted up, translated to a traditional proscenium setting: at the very least it was a reminder that aerial dancing is in fact dancing, and that just as we come to recognize the patterns of a story, so are we able, over time, to discern those that send--and keep--a body in flight.
Following a pause, we were treated to a solo by MOVE: the company's Josh Beamish. A choreographic collaboration with Toronto's Ame Henderson, Radios sees Beamish enter upstage left. He wears a baggy black jacket over a loose blue shirt and black skirt (with silvery shorts underneath); on his feet are green socks and black trainers. With bored nonchalance, Beamish slowly begins to move, folding one foot in on itself, then slowly lifting it up and letting it hover in the air before bending the other leg, twisting his torso and extending the raised leg in an off-axis and flexed arabesque that is as much a study in durational posing as it is an exercise in balance. The piece continues in this way, with Beamish slowly moving horizontally in front of the upstage white backdrop as he tests different movement possibilities: dropping suddenly to the floor with his legs splayed precariously behind him; or slowly arching his back and extending one arm behind his head, then letting the same arm upon its return first graze and then lazily drape along the back of his neck, fingers unconsciously tickling the fuzz of his buzzed hair. Mostly this is done in silence, but occasionally industrial-style rock fades in from what at first appears to be a speaker positioned in the wings. All of this suggests a club kid practising in his basement or his bedroom, and the pauses between the different poses, in which Beamish displays absolute indifference to his audience, frequently turning his back to us, were just as watchable as the Trajal Harrell-styled voguing riffs I was put in mind of by Beamish's pop preening and slow studied traversing of the stage. Near the end of the piece a stagehand wheels on that hidden speaker from the wings and the music returns; this is the cue for Beamish to ramp up his physicality and to become much more presentational in his movement, his now hyper-kinetic dancing veering suddenly towards more recognizably balletic technique, as if he and Henderson felt obliged to foreground the classical training underscoring a movement narrative they had previously seemed to be deconstructing. Even the speaker is revealed to be a chimera, with Beamish retrieving a small clock radio from his jacket pocket at the conclusion of the work and silencing the sound emanating from it.
Following the second pause I was getting restless. And it didn't help that the last piece on the program was a long conceptual work that in its durational slowness and repetitiveness tested my patience. Isaac y Diola, directed, choreographed and interpreted by Belgian artists German Jauregui and Anita Diaz, begins with the two dancers lying naked, one on top of the other, downstage right. In the shadows upstage are a number of overturned chairs. Juaregui begins to drag his (and, by proxy, Diaz's) body in the direction of the chairs. Eventually Diaz is discarded, like a second skin, and Juaregui begins the slow process of retrieving his clothes and then righting and rearranging the chairs about the stage. While he is doing this, Diaz starts crawling backwards to the chair positioned upstage left, upon which are draped her clothes. Quotes by Marguerite Duras, Jacques Lacan, George Orwell and Ayn Rand, among others, play in voiceover while all of this is happening. Only after this prolonged set-up do we get to the most interesting part of the piece: two paired solos that play off of the materiality and animacy of the chairs as objects of kinetic sculpture. That is, as Juaregui begins sawing the two front legs off of the chair upon which he is standing upstage centre, Diaz begins a gorgeous solo on her back. Then, after Juaregui tumbles to the floor, Diaz begins piling the remaining chairs into a stacked tower downstage left; following her delicate placement of the last chair, Juaregui begins his own solo. To the driving beat of a drum score, he throws himself about the stage in a remarkable off-balance and mostly backwards series of knee squats, at the end of which he places the final broken chair at the top of the ziggurat Diaz has made. Maybe because we did something similar in my play The Objecthood of Chairs, or maybe because I was just super-hungry by this point, I found this architectural culmination to the evening less impressive than it was clearly meant to be--at least judging by the response of the rest of the audience.
P
Leading off was Here on the ground, a collaboration between Julia Carr and Meghan Goodman, of Body Narratives Collective, and Hornby Island choreographer Sarah Chase. The piece tells the story of Carr and Goodman's friendship through some of the surprising coincidences in their life histories and careers: both are longtime company members of the aerial dance company Aeriosa (performing a site-specific work in Stanley Park as part of DOTE this coming Wednesday and Thursday); both are new moms (plaster body casts of each woman's pregnant belly figure at a certain point and there is a very sweet moment near the top of the show in which each performer races to pack up the baby-related items needed for a day out in the park); and both have several family members who tend to share the same name. All of this is related to us through Chase's trademark cross-lateralizing of verbal speech with different combinations of physical gestures, which the dancers cycle through as they tell their stories. At different points in the piece, Carr and Goodman even let us in on the system by which the individual gestures are chosen and paired with different parts of speech: as she did with SFU's rep dancers during her Iris Garland residency in the School for the Contemporary Arts earlier this spring, Chase will pair a word or sometimes just a syllable with a gesture in whose articulation there will be embedded some physical or verbal mnemonic. For example, the wiping of invisible "slime" off of one's thigh will be cued to a word that rhymes with it, like "time." Knowing this, when the dancers then go on to repeat the gesture phrases, whether silently or while singing a John Denver song, we concentrate more intently, which fits with Chase's theory that the combining of verbal and physical scores in performance makes audience members as lucid in their reception as performers become in their expression. In a similar way, Carr and Goodman later show us some of the technique that underscores a few of the named moves they use in their aerial dancing (e.g. "Superman" or "The Bird"). It was fascinating to see what normally would be happening off the side of a building, with the dancers' harnessed bodies tilted 90 degrees and with our gazes tilted up, translated to a traditional proscenium setting: at the very least it was a reminder that aerial dancing is in fact dancing, and that just as we come to recognize the patterns of a story, so are we able, over time, to discern those that send--and keep--a body in flight.
Following a pause, we were treated to a solo by MOVE: the company's Josh Beamish. A choreographic collaboration with Toronto's Ame Henderson, Radios sees Beamish enter upstage left. He wears a baggy black jacket over a loose blue shirt and black skirt (with silvery shorts underneath); on his feet are green socks and black trainers. With bored nonchalance, Beamish slowly begins to move, folding one foot in on itself, then slowly lifting it up and letting it hover in the air before bending the other leg, twisting his torso and extending the raised leg in an off-axis and flexed arabesque that is as much a study in durational posing as it is an exercise in balance. The piece continues in this way, with Beamish slowly moving horizontally in front of the upstage white backdrop as he tests different movement possibilities: dropping suddenly to the floor with his legs splayed precariously behind him; or slowly arching his back and extending one arm behind his head, then letting the same arm upon its return first graze and then lazily drape along the back of his neck, fingers unconsciously tickling the fuzz of his buzzed hair. Mostly this is done in silence, but occasionally industrial-style rock fades in from what at first appears to be a speaker positioned in the wings. All of this suggests a club kid practising in his basement or his bedroom, and the pauses between the different poses, in which Beamish displays absolute indifference to his audience, frequently turning his back to us, were just as watchable as the Trajal Harrell-styled voguing riffs I was put in mind of by Beamish's pop preening and slow studied traversing of the stage. Near the end of the piece a stagehand wheels on that hidden speaker from the wings and the music returns; this is the cue for Beamish to ramp up his physicality and to become much more presentational in his movement, his now hyper-kinetic dancing veering suddenly towards more recognizably balletic technique, as if he and Henderson felt obliged to foreground the classical training underscoring a movement narrative they had previously seemed to be deconstructing. Even the speaker is revealed to be a chimera, with Beamish retrieving a small clock radio from his jacket pocket at the conclusion of the work and silencing the sound emanating from it.
Following the second pause I was getting restless. And it didn't help that the last piece on the program was a long conceptual work that in its durational slowness and repetitiveness tested my patience. Isaac y Diola, directed, choreographed and interpreted by Belgian artists German Jauregui and Anita Diaz, begins with the two dancers lying naked, one on top of the other, downstage right. In the shadows upstage are a number of overturned chairs. Juaregui begins to drag his (and, by proxy, Diaz's) body in the direction of the chairs. Eventually Diaz is discarded, like a second skin, and Juaregui begins the slow process of retrieving his clothes and then righting and rearranging the chairs about the stage. While he is doing this, Diaz starts crawling backwards to the chair positioned upstage left, upon which are draped her clothes. Quotes by Marguerite Duras, Jacques Lacan, George Orwell and Ayn Rand, among others, play in voiceover while all of this is happening. Only after this prolonged set-up do we get to the most interesting part of the piece: two paired solos that play off of the materiality and animacy of the chairs as objects of kinetic sculpture. That is, as Juaregui begins sawing the two front legs off of the chair upon which he is standing upstage centre, Diaz begins a gorgeous solo on her back. Then, after Juaregui tumbles to the floor, Diaz begins piling the remaining chairs into a stacked tower downstage left; following her delicate placement of the last chair, Juaregui begins his own solo. To the driving beat of a drum score, he throws himself about the stage in a remarkable off-balance and mostly backwards series of knee squats, at the end of which he places the final broken chair at the top of the ziggurat Diaz has made. Maybe because we did something similar in my play The Objecthood of Chairs, or maybe because I was just super-hungry by this point, I found this architectural culmination to the evening less impressive than it was clearly meant to be--at least judging by the response of the rest of the audience.
P
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