light breaking broken at KW Studios

Yesterday, as part of the Vancouver International Dance Festival's presentation series at the new KW Studios at Woodward's, I attended an early evening performance of light breaking broken, a new duet by Karen Jamieson and Margaret Grenier, Artistic Director of Dancers of Damelahamid. A collaborative exploration of what it means to move through and occupy space (and particular emplaced spaces) trans-temporally and cross-culturally, the piece saw Jamieson and Grenier adapting their different dance histories and vocabularies to specific points of kinetic intersection and crossing. It begins with the two women walking slowly around a single projected amoeba-like image on the floor; as a drumbeat begins and Elder Betsy Lomax begins to speak in voiceover, the image starts to expand, turning into a swirling spiral (the projections are by Josh Hite). Eventually Jamieson will step into the eye of the spiral, with Grenier continuing to move about its edge, her arms outstretched towards Jamieson, whose body alternates between slow sinuous sways and rapid staccato shakes as she absorbs the energy of this particular force field.

For most of the piece the two dancers continue in a similar manner, their bodies always contiguous in space, but their pathways mostly traversing separate trajectories, at least at the beginning. This seems an apt metaphor for the "broken historical narratives and contemporary connections of hope" that the dancer-choreographers say they are channeling in their program note. On the latter front it was particularly compelling for me to register how, in the moments when the two performers did come together in a shared movement pattern, they did not try to make their execution of that pattern seamless and exactly the same. In the animal shapes the two women would make, Karen would hold her hands in a slightly different position over her face. And in their jumps to Andrew Grenier's recorded drumbeats, Karen would tend to anticipate the beat, whereas Margaret would respond to it.

At the end of the piece, having brought their respective bodies more than once to the threshold of a shaft of light that bisects the dance floor, the dancers eventually cross over to the other's side. Thereafter they come together in the centre, both now extending their arms toward the other, but not quite touching. Again, it seemed an appropriate physical representation of the work of connection that has been undertaken in this piece, but also the work that is still ongoing. And on that note it was interesting to hear from Andrew Grenier after the dancers had taken their bows and exited the stage that light breaking broken, which was created in consultation with Cree/Gitxsan Elder Margaret Harris, brought the three women full circle from their first collaboration on Gawa Gyani (1991), a piece choreographed by Karen that the younger Margaret danced in, and on which the older Margaret and her late husband, Chief Kenneth Harris, also consulted.

P

Edge 3 at Dancing on the Edge

Two legendary Vancouver dance artists. Two one-word titles. Two additional firecracker performers. You couldn't ask for a better line-up as part of the Edge 3 program at this year's Dancing on the Edge Festival.

First up was Oxygen, choreographed by Kokoro Dance's Jay Hirabayashi as a commission for dancer Billy Marchenski, and set to the industrial "no wave" music of the Swans. The twenty-minute piece unfolds on a single vertical plane, beginning with Marchenski in a crouch justly slightly up of centre stage. He slowly unfurls his body to standing, pointing skyward with one index finger, before collapsing to the ground and beginning the phrase again, this time extending the opposite finger. The movement is simple but in its execution anything but pedestrian, with the strain in Marchenski's calves attesting to the effort required to unfold and bend, unfold and bend in such a controlled manner, such that the slight suspension with the pointed index finger at full verticality feels like time itself is being suspended, forced to conform to the rhythms of Marchenski's body, his breath, rather than the other way around. No doubt Barbara was after something similar with the statue poses that started off our Wreck Beach Butoh piece this past weekend, but I can say that after last night I for one still have much work to do when it comes to slowing down time through movement.

Eventually Marchenski begins his slow butoh walk downstage: legs bent, torso forward with heart centre open, an invisible orchid cupped in his throat. Arching his body backwards, Marchenski descends to the floor for a series of weight-transferring poses on elbows and knees, but never on all four at one time. Next, he stands upright with his back towards us. Slowly he begins to shake: first just his buttocks, then his hips and legs, finally his torso and arms and head, until a succession of tremors ripple like waves up and down his entire body. Again, what is so fascinating to watch about this is how the shaking accumulates in intensity over time, with Marchenski not so much becoming possessed by the gradually distributed movement as choosing to possess it from the beginning and redistribute it at will.

So, too, with how the piece ends, which sees Marchenski incorporating a series of arm waves and jumps into a hypnotic score that had me straining to register their trajectories via the trace visual residue of their arcing flights through the air. And such was the power of the choreography that it wasn't a strain at all to believe that the dancer before me really was flying.

The second piece on the program was Trickster, a collaboration between Karen Jamieson and the San Francisco-based bouffon artist Nathaniel Justiniano. The piece began as a Brief Encounters pairing back in 2013. So successful was that early version that Jamieson and Justiniano decided to develop the piece further, this time inviting Stefan Smulovitz to perform the viola live with them on stage.

Essentially the work unfolds as a structured improvisation, with Jamieson exploring a series of movement phrases anchored in different parts of her body and Justiniano (who wears a traditional bouffon costume, complete with double-sided ass and a hump at his back) burlesquing those explorations both physically and in words--often via hilarious direct address to the audience. However, this conceit would quickly wear thin if the movement itself weren't compelling to watch, with Justiniano matching the precision of Jamieson's classical ballet steps from Giselle, for example, with his own deft and extremely light-on-his-feet traversing of the stage.

Indeed, the piece ends with the two performers arriving at a mutually agreeable rapprochement between their two different physical vocabularies, launching into a final duet that--to reference their own concluding conversation--may not be conceptually "deep," but is nonetheless deeply satisfying to watch.

P.

solo/soul at DOTE

Karen Jamieson is a Canadian dance legend who has been making work under the imprimatur of the eponymous Karen Jamieson Dance for more than 30 years. This includes the legendary Sisyphus, named one of the ten Canadian choreographic masterworks of the 20th century. She was also an early pioneer in community-based dance and site-specific dance, bringing both together in The River (1998), about which my student Alana Gerecke is writing in her doctoral dissertation.

Now in her sixties, Jamieson has begun exploring the effects of aging on the dancing body, moving (conceptually and kinetically) from what she calls the muscular body to the energy body (Jamieson has long used yoga as a foundation of her dance practice). The result is solo/soul, premiering at this year's Dancing on the Edge Festival, and developed over three years in "danced conversation" with other leading talents in the local dance community, including Serge Bennathan, Peter Bingham, Margaret Grenier, Meredith Kalaman, Lee Su-Feh, Darcy McMurray, Josh Martin, and Jennifer Mascall. We see excerpts from these studio experiments playing on video monitors in the upstairs and downstairs lobbies of The Dance Centre before we enter the auditorium, with Jamieson drawing from what she calls the "generative power" of her dance interlocutors to anchor both the work's "process and [its] choreographic outcome."

For, as DD Kugler, the dramaturg on the piece, said to me at lunch earlier in the day, what we are seeing in solo/soul is essentially a staging of process. Encircled by freestanding spotlights, against a screen on which visual artist Josh Hite has projected a looping black and white negative of the video images we glimpsed in the lobby, and in both live and recorded dialogue with composer John Korsrud, Jamieson externalizes in performance not just the internal architecture of the body (its breath and energy), but also the internal rehearsal and workshop dynamics and energies of the studio.

It's a brave choice, but for those outside Jamieson's dual energy circles (the one she's dancing inside on stage and the one we watch on the screen) the results can seem at once opaque and overly literal. In other words, we are invited but at times struggle to "interpret" Jamieson's movement in light of the video footage and snatches of conversation (mostly from Lee) that we hear from it. Not that this effort is entirely misspent; the energy required is, after all, part of what we are (or should be) bringing to the conversation.

P.