Earlier this afternoon Kim Stevenson dropped by my SFU Woodward's office to share with me her Vancouver dance history. Like Molly McDermott and Deanna Peters and others, Kim came to the dance program at SFU via Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton, where she was heavily influenced by the teaching and mentorship of Brian Webb and Heidi Bunting. Arriving at SFU in 2005, Kim immediately connected with the aesthetic of my colleague, Rob Kitsos, and post-graduation she has continued to dance regularly for him--most recently in Death and Flying at the Vancouver International Dance Festival (about which I have blogged in greater detail here).
In addition to apprenticing with and dancing for the likes of Susan Elliott and Barbara Bourget and Serge Bennathan, Kim also joined with Molly, Cort Gerlock, Roxoliana Prus, and Ellen Luchkow to form the collective The Story of Force in Motion, commissioning work from Deanna Peters, Heidi Bunting, Shauna Elton, and also creating their own work. Most recently Tara Cheyenne Friendenberg has been a major influence on the direction of Kim's career. After appearing briefly in an excerpt of Highgate at Dance in Vancouver several years ago, Kim apprenticed with Tara as part of the process for Porno Death Cult. And she has been part of all three versions of How to Be: at the Anderson Street Space on Granville Island; at Dancing on the Edge a couple of years ago; and at the premiere of the full version of the work at the Cultch this past April. While I couldn't see the latter version, I have closely watched the evolution of this piece and I told Kim that her facility with text and movement was just amazing to watch, and also that her humour just slayed me. Interestingly, Kim said that she'd never been more terrified performing before, but that the process had also liberated something in her regarding the combination of text and movement and that there is talk of working with Tara in the future on a solo for Kim.
In the meantime, Kim is busy with running her own dance studio, The Happening, on Fraser Street. As Kim put it to me, she has always enjoyed teaching, and at a certain point decided that if she wanted to remain in Vancouver and have any kind of lifestyle to speak of that she needed to find a supplement to her life as a pick-up professional dancer--and ideally one that didn't involving serving at a restaurant. It's been a huge and at times scary undertaking, but four years in the move seems to be paying off. Kim is just about to expand her space with a second, adjacent studio and has hired Natalie LeFebvre Gnam to teach the students ballet. The goal is to get to a place where Kim can hire more additional instructors and leave the day-to-day operations of the studio to others, while she pursues a parallel performance and choreographic career.
I was immensely happy to hear that, because we need performers as talented and charismatic as Kim to continue to appear on our stages. And we also need her mentoring the next generation of dance bunnies.
P
Showing posts with label Kim Stevenson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kim Stevenson. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 19, 2017
Thursday, April 6, 2017
Next Week at The Cultch: Tara Cheyenne Performance's How to Be
I'm bummed that I am going to miss the full-length version of Tara Cheyenne Performance's How to Be at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre next week. I have been following the development of this work over the past few years (read past posts here, here and here) and was excited to see this latest iteration, not least because it unites on stage all the previous performer-collaborators, including Justine A. Chambers, Susan Elliott, Kate Franklin, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, Kim Stevenson, and Marcus Youssef.
Thankfully I was able to get a sneak peek of the work earlier today as choreographer and TCP AD Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg invited me to stop by the studio to take in a run-through. In deference to Tara and the performers--and also because the piece is still being refined in sections--I will not divulge what's in store for viewers. But I can say that there will be surprises--including from the costumes!
And also that the Prince section remains.
And, finally, that you would be a fool to miss this show.
P
Thankfully I was able to get a sneak peek of the work earlier today as choreographer and TCP AD Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg invited me to stop by the studio to take in a run-through. In deference to Tara and the performers--and also because the piece is still being refined in sections--I will not divulge what's in store for viewers. But I can say that there will be surprises--including from the costumes!
And also that the Prince section remains.
And, finally, that you would be a fool to miss this show.
P
Friday, March 17, 2017
Death and Flying at the Vancouver International Dance Festival
My colleague Rob Kitsos's latest work, a duet created with and for dancers Jane Osborne and Kim Stevenson (both of them former students of Rob's), debuted last night at the Roundhouse as part of this year's Vancouver International Dance Festival. Death and Flying combines two of Rob's latest research interests: text and movement; and embodied ethnography. To this end, the piece takes its cue from interviews with Osborne and Stevenson about memories of their families, and specifically objects and mementoes from their families that have special meaning for them (both women have lost their fathers). We hear excerpts from these interviews in voiceover, which are remixed, looped and occasionally distorted as part of the overall score by composer and sound designer Elliot Vaughn, and which the dancers also break off their movements to lipsynch to at different moments.
However, the piece actually begins with a recording of a poem by Maximilian Heinegg, about the makeshift will that his parents would always make whenever they took a plane trip together, and how their improvisatory bequeathing of their worldly goods prompts a reflection on his relationship with them, and with his siblings. Osborne and Stevenson, dressed in simple t-shirts and jeans, enter from opposite sides of the stage, meet in the middle, and then launch themselves into a series of micro-gestures, the pointing of a finger, the roll of a shoulder, or the cutting through air of a hand creating separate embodied pathways for each dancer that mirror the twin jet streams of air billowing from behind the animated air plane that traverses the screen behind them (the beguiling animations, including ink-outlined avatars of Osborne and Stevenson, that play throughout the piece are by another former student of Rob's whose name I didn't catch).
Stevenson, in her recorded reflections, more than once uses the word "resemblance" when talking about her memories of her deceased father (a former RCMP officer). In the specific phraseology of her speech the word initially struck me as an odd choice, but upon reflection it now seems an apt way of describing a kinaesthetic process of re-membering, by which the cherished tics or traits of a loved-one become physicalized in one's own body. The way we make a bed or set a table, the way we lay out a suit to be pressed or line up papers on a desk: if, as many cognitive theorists have suggested, our first and most immediate way of learning and knowing is through sensori-motor observation rather than language, then it makes sense that over our lifetimes we will have inherited and physically incorporated a storehouse of kinetic memories from our parents. In Rob's choreography these play out as felt pathways to puzzle through and decipher, often beginning with a simple isolation of a single part of the body or a quotidian gesture (like the laying of hands on an invisible countertop) that then triggers an extended line of movement that Osborne and Stevenson, sometimes individually and sometimes together, follow instinctively but also with halting deliberation, every turn in one direction or step backwards or drop to the floor reminding me of the way one feels for the light switch in the darkened room of a house to which one has returned after some time away.
Two moments in particular stood out for me from last night's performance. The first is a sequence of gestures that Osborne and Stevenson perform in unison centre stage, but facing at a diagonal from each other, alternately pivoting away from and towards each other as they cycle through a vertical hail, a horizontal reach, a hip bend, a buckle of one knee, a shoulder roll, and so on. It's a repertoire of movements at once so common and yet here, placed in quasi-canon by virtue of the performers' different facings, likewise so uniquely individual; as such it powerfully encapsulated for me how one's individual genealogy of gestures might, over time, get shared with and distributed to other kinship networks--such as, in this case, one's dance family (and here I am reminded of the fact that Rob and Jane and Kim have a working relationship that dates back to 2009's Wake, and also of some of the ideas that Justine A. Chambers is working through in her Family Dinner: A Lexicon).
The second memorable moment came near the end when Osborne and Stevenson, again working in unison, engage in a series of super fast and barely perceptible stutter steps and sideways jerkings. Maybe it was because of the preceding voiceover from Osborne, about a gift of digitized Super-8 footage of her parents that she received from her brother, or maybe I was influenced by the evocative image by David Cooper included in the program, but the sequence reminded me of the glitches or unexpected jumps in an old video recording, or of the blur of motion stilled in a photograph. Either way it perfectly captured for me the ideas of embodied or kinetic memory that Rob is playing with in this piece: some recollected actions we can call on at specific moments for comfort or solace, and some overtake us, unbidden, and convulse us with their suddenness and their force.
P.
However, the piece actually begins with a recording of a poem by Maximilian Heinegg, about the makeshift will that his parents would always make whenever they took a plane trip together, and how their improvisatory bequeathing of their worldly goods prompts a reflection on his relationship with them, and with his siblings. Osborne and Stevenson, dressed in simple t-shirts and jeans, enter from opposite sides of the stage, meet in the middle, and then launch themselves into a series of micro-gestures, the pointing of a finger, the roll of a shoulder, or the cutting through air of a hand creating separate embodied pathways for each dancer that mirror the twin jet streams of air billowing from behind the animated air plane that traverses the screen behind them (the beguiling animations, including ink-outlined avatars of Osborne and Stevenson, that play throughout the piece are by another former student of Rob's whose name I didn't catch).
Stevenson, in her recorded reflections, more than once uses the word "resemblance" when talking about her memories of her deceased father (a former RCMP officer). In the specific phraseology of her speech the word initially struck me as an odd choice, but upon reflection it now seems an apt way of describing a kinaesthetic process of re-membering, by which the cherished tics or traits of a loved-one become physicalized in one's own body. The way we make a bed or set a table, the way we lay out a suit to be pressed or line up papers on a desk: if, as many cognitive theorists have suggested, our first and most immediate way of learning and knowing is through sensori-motor observation rather than language, then it makes sense that over our lifetimes we will have inherited and physically incorporated a storehouse of kinetic memories from our parents. In Rob's choreography these play out as felt pathways to puzzle through and decipher, often beginning with a simple isolation of a single part of the body or a quotidian gesture (like the laying of hands on an invisible countertop) that then triggers an extended line of movement that Osborne and Stevenson, sometimes individually and sometimes together, follow instinctively but also with halting deliberation, every turn in one direction or step backwards or drop to the floor reminding me of the way one feels for the light switch in the darkened room of a house to which one has returned after some time away.
Two moments in particular stood out for me from last night's performance. The first is a sequence of gestures that Osborne and Stevenson perform in unison centre stage, but facing at a diagonal from each other, alternately pivoting away from and towards each other as they cycle through a vertical hail, a horizontal reach, a hip bend, a buckle of one knee, a shoulder roll, and so on. It's a repertoire of movements at once so common and yet here, placed in quasi-canon by virtue of the performers' different facings, likewise so uniquely individual; as such it powerfully encapsulated for me how one's individual genealogy of gestures might, over time, get shared with and distributed to other kinship networks--such as, in this case, one's dance family (and here I am reminded of the fact that Rob and Jane and Kim have a working relationship that dates back to 2009's Wake, and also of some of the ideas that Justine A. Chambers is working through in her Family Dinner: A Lexicon).
The second memorable moment came near the end when Osborne and Stevenson, again working in unison, engage in a series of super fast and barely perceptible stutter steps and sideways jerkings. Maybe it was because of the preceding voiceover from Osborne, about a gift of digitized Super-8 footage of her parents that she received from her brother, or maybe I was influenced by the evocative image by David Cooper included in the program, but the sequence reminded me of the glitches or unexpected jumps in an old video recording, or of the blur of motion stilled in a photograph. Either way it perfectly captured for me the ideas of embodied or kinetic memory that Rob is playing with in this piece: some recollected actions we can call on at specific moments for comfort or solace, and some overtake us, unbidden, and convulse us with their suddenness and their force.
P.
Monday, March 2, 2015
how to be at the Anderson Street Space
Yesterday afternoon I made my way to Granville Island to take in the first of this year's Micro Performance Series, presented by Boca del Lupo. Staged at the intimate Anderson Street Space, this season's line-up of shows kicked off with Tara Cheyenne Performance's how to be. An excerpt from a larger work-in-progress, the thirty minute piece is conceived and directed by Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, who performs alongside Kate Franklin and Kim Stevenson.
After spectators are ushered into the tiny quadrangular performance space and we take our places leaning against the walls, the three women, clad nattily in men's suits, take turns entering and exiting from the lone door, sometimes muttering aloud to themselves, at other times simply taking the measure of the room. Eventually they come together in a whispered chorus of first world modal phrases: "I should juice more"; "I should do more Pilates"; "I should eat less pasta." As always with TCP, text is an equal partner alongside the movement, and in this case the interrogative mode ("Should I wax my pubic hair?") operates in dynamic tension with the declarative ("I'm very good at remembering song lyrics").
The performers, playing to the space, have fun rearranging audience members, positioning us into four groups (whose significance we discover at the end of the show). They also test the limits of our physical boundaries, inserting themselves at various points in between our own bodies, or snuggling up close for a quick nap or animated conversation with one or other of us. This is only appropriate given the intimacy of the space, as well as the larger issues Friedenberg seems to be exploring in this piece. Part of the question of "how to be"--especially in polyglot urban centres like Vancouver--is how to interact and get along and move beside others in proximate material relation: how, in other words, to share space with strangers. (And coming together as an audience has much to teach us in this regard.)
Friedenberg, who over the past decade has made her name as a charismatic solo performer, as fleet of tongue as she is of foot, builds here in how to be on her previous success in Highgate with multi-character work. She provides numerous opportunities for her fellow performers to shine. Thus, in an hilarious sequence involving the three women not only moving but speaking in unison, Stevenson emerges as a virtuoso comic mimic in the mould of her director, channeling her Jesus-loving grandmother as she laments the daily grind of trying to make her way as a single working artist in Vancouver. For her part, Franklin is given a show-stopping solo, in which she performs various ballet moves while offering advice-laden bromides to the audience: "Eat more organic vegetables"; "Call your mother"; "Don't be a dick."
All of this bodes extremely well for the full-length piece Friedenberg is working towards, not least when one considers that her other collaborators on the project include Justine Chambers, Susan Elliott, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, and Marcus Youssef. At present, what was staged as part of Boca's MPS was a more than satisfying appetizer. Watching Friedenberg and Stevenson wrestle to kiss each other while Franklin does a stationary step dance against one wall or, alternately, Franklin and Friedenberg sing and sway along to the Whitney Houston standard "The Greatest Love of All" while a head-scratching Stevenson engages in random badinage with the audience, is pure comic gold.
P.
After spectators are ushered into the tiny quadrangular performance space and we take our places leaning against the walls, the three women, clad nattily in men's suits, take turns entering and exiting from the lone door, sometimes muttering aloud to themselves, at other times simply taking the measure of the room. Eventually they come together in a whispered chorus of first world modal phrases: "I should juice more"; "I should do more Pilates"; "I should eat less pasta." As always with TCP, text is an equal partner alongside the movement, and in this case the interrogative mode ("Should I wax my pubic hair?") operates in dynamic tension with the declarative ("I'm very good at remembering song lyrics").
The performers, playing to the space, have fun rearranging audience members, positioning us into four groups (whose significance we discover at the end of the show). They also test the limits of our physical boundaries, inserting themselves at various points in between our own bodies, or snuggling up close for a quick nap or animated conversation with one or other of us. This is only appropriate given the intimacy of the space, as well as the larger issues Friedenberg seems to be exploring in this piece. Part of the question of "how to be"--especially in polyglot urban centres like Vancouver--is how to interact and get along and move beside others in proximate material relation: how, in other words, to share space with strangers. (And coming together as an audience has much to teach us in this regard.)
Friedenberg, who over the past decade has made her name as a charismatic solo performer, as fleet of tongue as she is of foot, builds here in how to be on her previous success in Highgate with multi-character work. She provides numerous opportunities for her fellow performers to shine. Thus, in an hilarious sequence involving the three women not only moving but speaking in unison, Stevenson emerges as a virtuoso comic mimic in the mould of her director, channeling her Jesus-loving grandmother as she laments the daily grind of trying to make her way as a single working artist in Vancouver. For her part, Franklin is given a show-stopping solo, in which she performs various ballet moves while offering advice-laden bromides to the audience: "Eat more organic vegetables"; "Call your mother"; "Don't be a dick."
All of this bodes extremely well for the full-length piece Friedenberg is working towards, not least when one considers that her other collaborators on the project include Justine Chambers, Susan Elliott, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, and Marcus Youssef. At present, what was staged as part of Boca's MPS was a more than satisfying appetizer. Watching Friedenberg and Stevenson wrestle to kiss each other while Franklin does a stationary step dance against one wall or, alternately, Franklin and Friedenberg sing and sway along to the Whitney Houston standard "The Greatest Love of All" while a head-scratching Stevenson engages in random badinage with the audience, is pure comic gold.
P.
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