Never Still at The Firehall

Fresh from the premiere of last year's Wells Hill, and with the aid of the Yulanda Faris Choreographers' Program, Vanessa Goodman and her company Action at a Distance opened the Firehall's 2018/19 season last night with another ambitious full-length creation. Never Still is about water: both the natural element that covers nearly 70% of the earth's surface and the physiological element that makes up over half of humans' bodies (the Borg to Captain Picard: "You bags of mostly water!"). Not that you need to know this to enjoy the work, and when the curtains parted and the lights came up on dancer Lexi Vajda jerking and twitching her limbs amid a sea of white Tyvek (ironically the material used to wrap houses in order to prevent water penetration) as fellow dancers Shion Carter, Stéphanie Cyr, Bynh Ho, and Alexa Mardon sunk their already partially immersed bodies deeper into its folds, I was actually put in mind of a waterless lunar landscape.

Albeit one that still ripples with movement: both from the submerged bodies that, over the course of Vajda's almost ten-minute solo, are slowly sending the Tyvek, like ebbing sea surf, upstage, and from the lighting and visual effects (courtesy of James Proudfoot and Loscil/Scott Morgan, respectively) playing across the Tyvek's surface. And I have to say that the monochromatic palette of the piece's design concept is truly compelling. When the other dancers emerge from underneath the Tyvek to join Vajda, we see that like her they are wearing baggy tennis whites; set against the projected black and white images of their floating bodies on the video that plays behind them (again by Loscil, featuring additional underwater footage by Ben Didier), the colourless blur of live bodies sets in motion Goodman's liquid choreography in a manner akin to beads of water on a flat, sloping surface--chasing after each other and occasionally forming into a single mass, but also breaking apart and hovering near each other in trembling anticipation. Such effects were especially brought to light in a duet between Cyr and Ho in which Goodman continues her experiments with non-touch partnering, and also in a group sequence in which all five dancers come together in a slowly shifting huddle, spelling the placement of each other's limbs and subtly changing their facings in a manner that challenges our conception of what is liquid and solid.

What I most appreciate about Goodman as an artist is that she creates complete performance environments. She is a choreographer of immense intelligence and talent, but she's equally interested in sound and lighting and visuals and design. With Never Still we get the integration of all of these elements into a work that while staged proscenium-style nevertheless feels immersive. I encourage folks to dive in.

P

I Miss Doing Nothing at Left of Main

Hard to believe, but plastic orchid factory turns ten this year. Rather than marking this milestone with a bold, forward-looking new production, or throwing a celebratory party, pof principals James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam are using the occasion of their company's anniversary to intervene in what theorist Elizabeth Freeman has called "chrononormativity": the yoking of time and bodies to a neoliberal emphasis on productivity through work schedules, appointment calendars, deadlines, even show opening and closing dates.

In I Miss Doing Nothing, James and Natalie, together with collaborators Nancy Tam, James Proudfoot, and Vanessa Goodman, attempt to interrupt the serial- and output-oriented logic of time and labouring bodies in two ways. First, rather than using their rehearsal and development process to make a "new" work, they have chosen to play with the kinetic repertoires that continue to linger within their bodies, re-calling over the course of this piece bits of choreography from past works, and seeing how this movement in, through, and across time can create different kinds of affective rhythms and flows. Watching James and Natalie feel their way into how something felt, the slow and often surprising real-time discovery of where an arm was positioned, or in what direction one is meant to be facing, imbues time with a layered, ludic quality, in which the past and present can be made to touch. As with the reverberating echoes and feedback loops of Nancy's live mixing of sounds--a combination of field recordings, rearrangements of old pof music scores, and miked noises from outside the Left of Main studio--such uncanny perceptual relays are also available to the spectator, as an energetic bounce up and down by James or a bit of subtle finger work by Natalie will trigger flashes of memory for those audience members familiar with the company's repertoire.

And it is in their invitation to audience members to self-curate how they wish to be with them in this space experiencing this work that James and Natalie and company have made their second intervention against the organizational march of time-as-usual, not least in terms of how dance and performance works are often shoehorned into hour-long presentation slots. As with Digital Folk, there is no obvious beginning or end to I Miss Doing Nothing. Subtitling the piece "a lived retrospective installation for experiencing time differently," the work unfolds durationally over a three-hour period. Upon entering Left of Main, the first thing one is invited to do is pause: sitting down on the steps up to the studio and affixing a pair of headphones to listen as Natalie gives instruction in what it might mean to open up an interval--even a small one--in the routine pace of our daily lives. Thereafter, and with a lazy mid-afternoon spritzer mixed by David McIntosh in hand, we are free to watch and linger with James and Natalie in the studio for as long as we like, lounging in various states of languorous repose against a chosen bit of wall (as I and most other attendees yesterday opted to do), or moving freely about the space, or coming and going as we see fit. In this respect, it is not as if time stops completely. Whether or not we choose to look at our watches, we are made aware of time's passing via the movement of sunlight and shadows in the space, a choreographing of natural illumination that is slowly revealed via James P and Vanessa's expert manipulation of a set of louvered vertical blinds on the west-facing windows, and the successive removal of the shimmery panels and wooden frames initially covering up the south-facing windows. These panels and frames, together with additional rolling screens, are moved about the room and configured into various architectural formations by Vanessa and James P, whose purposeful--and purposefully timed--activity contrasts with the seemingly more unplanned and aimless progress of Natalie and James G.

And yet it is precisely in the different kinds of attention solicited by these parallel movement scores that we discover that being "in time" together does not have to be reduced, if you'll forgive the boy band metaphor, to being "in sync": with each other, or with the prescribed rhythms of daily life. At different moments yesterday I was alert, sleepy, bored, stimulated, contemplative, anxious, worried, bewildered, absorbed, distracted, and transported. At no moment, however, did I think there was anywhere else I would rather be. Watching Natalie move in and with the last slat of light from the middle of the west-facing windows as its slow disappearance marked the approach of six o'clock (yes, I stayed for the whole three hours), I thought of how productively this time doing nothing had been spent.

In arguing for a more longitudinal approach to time, especially as it relates to the historical survival of different collectivities, Freeman invokes the term belonging to refer not just to identification with a group, but to denote a way of "being long," of a group persisting over time. Artistically and affectively, pof and its extended family of collaborators are definitely peeps I want to grow old with.

P

Digital Folk at SFU Woodward's

I have been following the evolution of plastic orchid factory's Digital Folk for the past three years: first as initial concept showing during the company's residency at the Cultch in 2014; then as an adapted micro-performance at the Anderson Street Space on Granville Island in 2015; and finally as a test run of version 3.0 last month at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby (you can check out past writing on the piece here, here, and here). Now the show arrives, in all its immersive glory, at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, where it opened last night, welcoming members of the paying public for the first time. During its long gestative journey (the metaphor seems appropriate given that two core collaborators on the show are now pregnant), Digital Folk has never lost sight of some key ideas it wished to probe through the research and creation process: how interactive media technologies have fundamentally altered patterns (cognitive and kinetic/physical) of group socialization; and how to transfer and interrupt such patterns within a live performance environment.

The first idea plays out through a proliferation of mirroring techniques in the piece. There are, for example, the myriad screens with which performers and spectators interact: the television monitors that play the Xbox dance and music games with which we are invited to interface, mimicking the grooves of various cross-species avatars; the larger screens upon which the record of these efforts is sometimes streamed; even the screens of performers' smart phones, which they take out at one point in order to attempt a hilarious real-time reenactment of a group folk dance posted to YouTube. But Digital Folk complicates this particular feedback loop of connectivity by including other kinds of mirroring, including that which takes place all the time in a studio between dancers practicing their technique or learning new choreography. At various points throughout the piece, one performer will begin following another, attempting to reproduce the other's improvised movement as their partner wends this way or that way throughout the space; after a while, however, it becomes difficult to tell who is following whom. Then there is the outstretched palm used to start up the video games that in one powerful moment of stillness magically becomes a gestural hail to all the performers. Mirroring is also transferred to the grain of the voice, with the deliberately awful vocal mimicry of The Sally Field Project house band to classic tunes called up through software memory contrasting with the virtuosic display of human memory as Jane Osborne and James Gnam take turns echoing each other during a shared recitation and riff on a scientific article dealing with perceptual and spatial recall. The event of the echo, a vocal delay, returns sound to one altered, changed, so that the singular voice becomes double, something also neatly captured in this performance through the polyphonic--and polyglot--telling of a folk tale in multiple languages by Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, Diego Romero, Shion Carter, and Vanessa Goodman.

In Digital Folk the audience becomes a fundamental part of the tale being told. Invited to don various bits of costume as we enter the performance space--an immersive installation built within the Wong Theatre--we are then free to roam about the wonderful set designed by Natalie Purschwitz and lit by James Proudfoot, taking a seat on the stacked blocks in the centre, lying down on a bit of indoor-outdoor carpet, joining the performers and fellow audience members in a group dance to one of the videos, or just standing and watching in the corner. And while there are certainly moments in the piece--for example, at the end when Romero and Bevin Poole Leinweber perform a duet of David Bowie's Starman on the ukulele--where the audience is prompted to adopt the spectating habits of a traditional proscenium setting, becoming silent and still and directionally attentive, what struck me in this version of the show is how much I wanted to participate: twice getting up to shake it, shake it alongside Goodman and Lexi Vajda and others to different dance videos; and accepting without hesitation a slow dance to Freebird with fellow audience member Walter. And it is in these unscripted--or rather, unprogrammed--bodily encounters that Digital Folk as a live performance interrupts the one-way circuitry of human-computer interaction. Nowhere was this more apparent to me than in that space of free play that occurs between the end of one nightly iteration of the performance and the start of another. To explain: Digital Folk, which is about an hour long, runs on a loop at 7, 8 and 9 pm over the course of an evening. Audience members are free to come in and out and to stay for as long as they like. While Richard and I, having both had long days, chose to leave after an hour, in ceding our show garments to new arrivals we were able to pass on a bit of recently acquired folk wisdom about how to be with others in this truly amazing performance space.

It has been fascinating to watch the development of Digital Folk. Just in the month since its penultimate test run at the Shadbolt the piece has undergone a superb edit in both content and form--though I do wish The Sally Field Project were still ethnomusicologists from the future. Transitions between different bits have tightened and all the performers have become freer and looser in improvising with the always shifting rules of this particular game. This includes the student interns from SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, who in a unique arrangement facilitated through SFU Woodward's Cultural Programs (a co-presenting partner on the show) have gained valuable artistic experience through this project. Carter, Kayla DeVos, Rachel Helten, Hannah Jackson and Rachel Silver have all proven their chops alongside the more seasoned professional performers mentioned above. That three of them also got to see their former professor lamely execute a familiar repertoire of pop choreography (pelvic thrusts and finger points included) is something I'm more than happy to live with.

Digital Folk continues tonight through Sunday. I highly recommend checking it out. It's the first great dance party of the fall.

P

Vanessa Goodman and Idan Sharabi at Chutzpah!

Last night at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre, the Chutzpah! Festival presented a double bill of dance. The evening opened with the premiere of a new work by local choreographer and SFU Contemporary Arts alum Vanessa Goodman. Wells Hill takes its name from the street in Toronto where Marshall McLuhan lived before moving to Wychwood Park, and where he wrote three of his most famous works: The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium is the Massage. (It helps that I live with, and was sitting beside, a noted McLuhan scholar.) Goodman takes inspiration from McLuhan's ideas about mass communication and, especially via his collaborations with Glenn Gould, how media affect the ways we produce and consume art.

To a recording of Gould performing The Goldberg Variations, a sextet of incredibly gifted Vancouver dancers (Lara Barclay, Lisa Gelley, James Gnam, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, and Jane Osborne) begin moving in formation stage right, their deconstructed white tuxedo shirts and grey skirts and slacks evoking elite private school uniforms (the costumes are by Deborah Beaulieu), an image reinforced by the evocative floor and overhead florescent lighting design by James Proudfoot. The five dancers, initially tightly grouped and moving their arms synchronously and geometrically to frame their heads and torsos, slowly break apart and fan out across the stage. At this point, Barclay begins weaving in and around them, our focus drawn to her different movement patterns, the amount of space she is covering relative to the others, and, in this instance, the deliberate showcasing of her virtuosity. If dance is a performance medium that also in some senses performs us, Goodman seems to be asking, in this opening sequence, a key structural question: how, to paraphrase W.B.Yeats, do we separate the dancer from the dance?

This parts/whole, content/form equation was what I kept focusing on throughout the remainder of the piece. For example, following the opening group sequence we get a gorgeous duet between Gnam and Poole; as they finish, they move upstage, making way for the pairing of Gelley and Osborne. As kinetically compelling as the the downstage duo is (and these women are truly exceptional movers), our attention is necessarily divided between them and the upstage duo, a reminder that in contemporary dance our awareness and sensory-motor perceptors are being hailed in multiple ways, and often simultaneously. So too is it when Martin joins the group a bit later in the piece; he is moving differently than the others, more fluidly, and as he floats in and out between the others' bodies we cannot help but follow his progress. Finally, there is the stunningly arresting final tableau that Goodman gives us: Barclay, having first been grabbed from behind by Gelley, is steered stage left, as one-by-one the other dancers attach themselves to her body (and to each other) from the wings, manipulating her limbs like she is a marionette (an image with obvious dance-world resonance). However, Gnam remains apart from this group, dancing a solo in counterpoint to the larger group machine.

A lot is going on here. On the one hand, Goodman seems to be suggesting that if the dancer's body is a medium, then it is the choreographer who ultimately works it over. But sometimes even the most disciplined bodies can resist being conscripted for a particular message--hence Gnam dancing alone off to the side. Then, too, the dance-as-performed works on us (including kinaesthetically), a reminder that in the feedback loop of communication it is the audience that completes the circuit of both the medium and the message. This is something Gould recognized. Influenced by McLuhan, he famously gave up live performance for the perfectibility of the recording studio. But he never forgot who was at the other end of "his master's voice," that his records needed to be played and listened too. (Gould and McLuhan both appear at various points in screen projections curated by Goodman and Ben Didier). Likewise, in this very smart and important new work, Goodman recognizes that if, in McLuhan's words, "Art is anything you can get away with," that art nevertheless demands a response.

Idan Sharabi's Interviews/Makom is a set of twinned works based on a series of conversations the choreographer conducted with Israeli residents (and members of his own dance company) based on the concept of home. Excerpts from the interviews play throughout both pieces and in Makom (Hebrew for "a place") dancer Ema Yuasa, originally from Japan, speaks about her feelings of displacement--even after eleven years, and despite pursuing her dance dreams--living in Holland. Interviews, the newer of the pieces, is staged first; the conversations, recorded during the most recent conflict in Gaza, are filled with moments of quite tension that the dancers occasionally respond to through physical gestures. For example, when Sharabi makes a reference on the tape to the balled up fists of the woman he is talking to, we see Sharabi and fellow dancer Dor Mamalia shake their own fists at each other on stage. Later, in Makom, another interview subject also references his hands, stating that he routinely walks with his hands in his pockets as a defence against having to shake anyone else's hand. At this point, we see Mamalia take off his pants, turn them inside out, and put them back on, the interior flaps of his front pockets now plainly visible to us.

These moments of theatricalizing the interview tapes were less satisfying to me than the otherwise mostly non-representational movement. All the dancers (the fourth of whom is Dafna Dudovich) are superb in interpreting Sharabi's alternately propulsive and flowing choreography. The complex floorwork in both pieces is a particular highlight, with the dancers sometimes sinking liquidly into jointless splits and at other times throwing themselves aggressively onto their backs, legs and arms angled awkwardly about their torsos. The threat of violence is never far from the surface in both works, with a transfer of chokeholds between Sharabi and Mamalia featuring in the first part, and with Sharabi moving Yuasa about rather wildly by the back of her neck in the second part.

Trauma--the trauma of exile and migration, as well as the trauma of a homeland that is contested and under perpetual siege--is an important through-line in Interviews/Makom. And, as Diana Taylor has noted with reference to theatrical responses to Argentina's Dirty War (in The Archive and the Repertoire), the structuring motif of trauma, like that of performance, is repetition. Thus it should come as no surprise that Interviews and Makom are to a certain extent mirror halves, with the male and female dancers further twinned along gender lines. Sharabi and Mamalia begin both pieces by walking from the wings onto the stage (in the first work backwards and more slowly, in the second facing front and much more quickly), eventually meeting in the centre and extending but not touching their hands. The women, however, never dance together. Instead, they exchange over the course of both pieces each other's roles. Yuasa lies prone upstage left at the beginning of Interviews, before eventually taking a seat in the audience to watch the proceedings--including, eventually, Dudovich dancing up a storm alongside both men--along with us. In Makom the women's positions are reversed: it is Dudovich, likewise initially lying inert on the stage floor, who watches Yuasa and the men from the audience. Maybe this was Sharabi's comment on the important role of the witness in traumatic events; but his explicit gendering of this role was a concern for me, as was how much less, as a result, the women had to do relative to the men.

While both pieces had moments of outright silliness, Makom, created first but staged second, was far lighter in tone. This is a reminder that trauma can produce moments of spontaneous comedy, not least in bodily eruptions of what Henri Bergson would call "mechanical inelasticity" (when, for example, our brain tells us to do one thing, and our body responds by doing the opposite). There were many funny moments when one marvelled at the apparent incongruity of what the very elastic bodies of Sharabi's dancers were able to do. That said, I was a bit surprised by the degree to which Makom elicited outright guffaws from some quarters of the audience, including for the songs of Joni Mitchell that Sharabi incorporates into the score.

Sharabi, in his choreographer's notes, admits that for him Interviews/Makom is still a riddle. I tend to agree, and while I'm not all that concerned that the riddle be solved, I would suggest that as the piece evolves not only should it be edited for length (each half is about 10-15 minutes too long), but also for the overall quality of feeling the choreographer is seeking to provoke in his audience.

P.

things near & far at The Firehall

As they indicate in a note included in the program to things near & far (on at the Firehall Arts Centre through this Saturday), Anne Cooper, Ziyian Kwan, and Ron Stewart have been friends and dance colleagues for three decades. During that time, they have collaborated in separate pairings on many works for local choreographers. Yet until now they had never danced together on stage as a trio. Seeking to remedy this, they collectively commissioned two choreographers whose work inspired and challenged them to build new pieces on and for them. That one of these choreographers, Josh Martin, was younger and local and the other, Tedd Robinson, older and from Quebec, was also a deliberate choice. The resulting commissions are at once in dialogue with each other (both are called dwelling) and with the embodied dance histories of their performers, revealing in their own distinct ways how separate parts fit into a whole.

For Martin this means beginning with the accumulated dance repertoires that already reside in the dancers' bodies from a lifetime of performance. Walking out on stage with both the stage and house lights up, Cooper, Kwan and Stewart pause and adopt distinct poses, or make a specific gesture, before quickly exiting. They do this a couple of times before eventually coming together to help each other remember a succession of moves, using their bodies and their voices to indicate how their arms are meant to be held, or in what direction they are meant to travel across the floor. At a certain point, however, they actually drop to the floor, their heads and arms and torsos pierced by the shafts of bright white light that lighting designer James Proudfoot sends across the stage. To a gorgeous score by Stefan Smulovitz, Martin infuses his own choreographic sensibilities into the work by having the trio engage in extended floor work that draws on and adapts several of hip hop's trademark moves: rolls into suspensions anchored by an isolated and locked arm; a wrapping around of the legs and circling into verticality before a liquid and seemingly boneless collapsing at the joints sends the dancers' bodies back down to the floor. What I especially liked about this work is how the patterns approached but never quite fully meshed into full-on unison movement: which is to say that the dancers were moving together but also in response to each other. I also liked seeing what Martin's choreography looks like slowed down; this is, dare I say it, his most mature work to date.

In his piece, Robinson takes the metaphor of building a work and literalizes it for us on stage. It begins with Stewart, clad in a white canvas shift and bodice, shuffling centre stage on his toes. Positioned there is a thin length of builders' wood, supported by two tiny foot stools. Balancing his body over the wood, Stewart takes a hand saw and proceeds to cut the wood in two. Cooper, having emerged upstage left, her body also wrapped in a similar tarpaulin-like garment, balances the two bits of cut wood on her head and then exits from whence she came. Finally, Kwan's bit of balancing consists of stepping onto the two footstools, now inevitably orientalized into the distinctive Geta platform sandals worn by traditional Geisha, shuffling on them towards the downstage left footlight, and then blowing some glittery confetti off of the piece of paper she is holding. After this ritual preparation of the space, it is now ready for a collective act of creation, which in Robinson's case means demonstrating the choreography inherent in carpentry. Donning plaid work shirts over their white dresses, the dancers grab additional planks of wood leaning against the stage right wall, take up nail guns and with the precision and timing we associate with the best group dancing erect a perfect square enclosure. Into which they eventually step, enacting a final act of balancing via the successive wearing of the footstools on their heads. Featuring the contributions of longtime musical collaborator Charles Quevillon, Robinson's work is typically elliptical, but also firmly grounded in the material world.

As are each of these wonderful dancers, who bring both works on this unique and satisfying program to  life through their embodied collaboration.

P.

At the Culture Lab with Plastic Orchid Factory

Yesterday evening Richard and I, along with 15 or so other invited guests, were given a behind-the-scenes glimpse of plastic orchid factory's new work-in-progress, Digital Folk. The invited showing was the culmination of a three-week creative residency at the Cultch that involved an interdisciplinary collaboration between dance artist James Gnam, visual artist Natalie Purschwitz, sound designer Kevin Legere, and lighting designer James Proudfoot. The work also features the expert simulacral movement and air guitar skills of Natalie Lefebvre Gnam, Vanessa Goodman, Bevin Poole, Dario Dinuzzi, Jane Osborne and ... (I know I'm missing somebody).

As James explained in answer to a question from Dances for a Small Stage's Julie-anne Saroyan, and as Natalie put it in her email invitation to the showing, the work seeks to explore "the role that immersive movement and rhythm based videos games have played in defining a generation’s approach to identity, physicality, social dance and performance." James sees these video games as in many ways defining the folk identity of a generation of millennials who have become virtuosic adepts of mimicked musicality and movement (holy alliteration, Batman!), but in ways that paradoxically alienate them from a kinesthetic awareness of their own bodies in time and space, and that thrust them into an isolated feedback loop with the technology that then becomes an extension of themselves.

In what Saroyan usefully suggested was a "reverse engineering" of the video games themselves, we thus see in the 35-minute piece as it currently stands the dancers responding to different dance routines supplied by various immersive videos, before turning the cameras on themselves as, in a series of slow duets, they start to mirror each other's movements in more intimately responsive ways. We also see the six dancers call upon the arsenal of standard club grooves that gets repeated in many of these videos (fist pumps and hip thrusts and booty shakes) as they respond collectively to the same set of repeated instructions in digitally altered voice-over. A similar repertoire of rehearsed and stored moves is called upon by Dinuzzi in a standout solo to "Pump Up the Jam" that certainly made me see the Ballet BC company member in a brand new light.

There's a whole circuit (as it were) of additionally complex ideas at play in the piece, and it's gratifying to know that the Canada Council, together with the Cultch, is still willing to support this kind of research phase to the building of a piece--in which a lot of smart and talented artists can get in a room together and play. It was a privilege to be able to witness the results thus far, and I look forward to seeing the finished work.

P.

Back in the Groove with Ballet BC

Ballet BC's 2012-13 season opened in bravura style on Thursday, introducing audiences to some bright new faces on stage, as well as behind the scenes. I had a chance to speak with recently hired Executive Director Branislav Henselmann following last night's show, and was very impressed by his already considerable knowledge of the local performing arts scene, not least the PuSh Festival.

In/verse opens with the North American premiere of Jacopo Godani's A.U.R.A (Anarchist Unit Related to Art). An independent artist who is a self-described polymath, Godani is responsible not just for the choreography, but for the costumes, lighting design, and overall dramaturgical concept of the piece. It shows, as the moveable florescent lighting tubes, together with the TRON-like body suits worn by the dancers, lend the work the feel of a three-dimensional, animated video game. Set to a pulsating electro-acoustic score by the experimental German duo 48nord, the choreography is--as the work's title suggests--at once physically anarchic and conceptually integrated. The 15 dancers (including apprentices Emily Chessa and Scott Fowler, and standout guest artist Thibaut Eiferman) whirl about the stage with controlled abandon, breaking apart in patterns that defy any logical bodily line or grid, and coming back together in tableaux that are always off-centre, cores rooted but limbs splayed.

Next up was the world premiere of American choreographer Nicolo Fonte's Muse, which opens with a lone female dancer on point in a vertical shaft of light emanating from an open doorway upstage right. Over the course of the piece's opening movements, the men in the company interact with her and other of the women who occupy this space, but only from either side of it. They themselves never jump into the light, only over it. Until, that is, the light starts to get rolled up, and we realize what we have been observing is a clever trompe l'oeil effect created by the careful placement of some white stage matting, and its even more subtle illumination by lighting designer James Proudfoot. Rearranged horizontally along the stage, the mat then occasions the central movement of the piece, a duet between Dario Dinuzzi and the excellent new company member Darren Devaney. As technically complex as it is tender, the sequence features the men traveling the length of the mat and back again, guiding each other by the ankles, willing themselves to walk together, though only one of them will walk away.

Finally, the evening concludes with Artistic Director Emily Molnar's own world premiere, Aniel, a crowd-pleasing, eye-popping feast of danced whimsy set to the klezmer-inspired music of John Zorn. Into an empty, all-white box set the full company of 17 dancers race out, wearing Linda Chow's neon-coloured costumes, a riot of oranges and pinks and yellows and blues and greens. From this literally dazzling opening, which was greeted by instant applause, to Gilbert Small's closing kiss to the audience, this is a dual valentine from Molnar, one directed not just to her patrons, but also to her dancers. And those dancers are clearly having a lot of fun, bobbing and shuffling and grooving on and off stage in ways that telegraph their own personal kinesthetic responses to the music, but also coming together as a company for some highly structured choreography, especially with respect to Molnar's rhythmically complex hand and arm movements.

From beginning to end this was a program that announced: we're back.

P.