The Party (Kyla Gardiner and Layla Marcelle Mrozowski) are throwing their latest fête, XXXX Topography, at SFU Woodward's Studio T this weekend. The bagheaded women from Fake Gems are back, but this time they're grooving inside a black box instead of a white cube, and to an improvised electronic score by Paul Paroczai. Their cryptic discourse with each other is more clearly audible to us in this iteration of The Party's process, but that doesn't mean we're included in the circuit of communication. These (gendered) subject-objects supposed to move for us reverse the standard pattern of transference between analyst and analysand, or spectator and performer; we can hear but don't necessarily understand what they are saying to each other, and furthermore I for one was unsure if the amplified voices were emerging directly from the bodies wearing the bags (via head mics, as in Fake Gems), or from audio channels filtered through the four freestanding speakers behind them--a stereophonic version of the stereoscopic method that is The Party's modus operandi.
Just as I was settling in against the wall for a long spell of vicarious movement pleasure, our hostess for the evening, Beta Pink, arrived to take a call, and then to lead us all on to the Space Bar, where, it seemed, The Party's real party was taking place. This imaginary elsewhere, this theatre of possibility turned out to be a parallax version of where we'd just been, the curtain behind the bagheaded women having been removed to reveal neither an ersatz wizard nor a fantastical Oz, but rather a landscape that was simultaneously strange and familiar, red and blue, material and metaphorical. And like so many sisters of Dorothy, we were left to explore this world and its artifacts for the next hour or so (or until last call), queer spelunkers in search of transformative alien encounters between ourselves, other selves, and things.
And what things! Rocks and adding machines dancing a tango with each other. Phallic bits of creosote edging across the floor. Smoke machines. Wooden beds to lounge on next to spongy bits of fabric in the shape of octopi. An aerie loft with a softer bed for group spooning. And a series of landline phones that sing songs of syllabic transposition to us, providing us with a metonymic vocabulary of association as we grasp for words to describe our progress through this sexy terrain.
As we exit, another surprise: party favours, including a pair of 3D-glasses, The Party's official manual, and a translucent printed insert outlining the conditions of possibility for an imaginary theatre of the sort we have just experienced.
P.
Showing posts with label Kyla Gardiner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kyla Gardiner. Show all posts
Saturday, January 30, 2016
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Points de vue at SFU Woodward's
As bipeds in an ableist society, most of us take ambulation for granted. We rarely think of the thousands of movements we daily improvise to make our way in and through this world: from the reach of an arm to clasp a coffee cup or the swivel of a head to see who is calling our name, to the spontaneous leap over the puddle on the street or the full-throttle run to catch the bus. We think even less about what, in our bodies, allows us to execute such movements in the first place--until, that is, we hurt ourselves. Yesterday evening, for example, as part of Yves Candau's MFA performance Points de vue, I learned that the simple rotation inward of one's lower arm is enabled by two pivot points--one at the elbow, the other at the wrist--that are connected along a radial axis. As Candau shows us with his physical repetition of and verbal commentary on this twisting of the arms, what dance gives us is the means--technically and linguistically--for isolating, breaking down, and understanding this movement. In classical ballet, after all, the proper "carriage of the arms"--otherwise known as the port de bras--is meant to serve as a graceful and harmonious accent to the movement of a dancer's legs.
Candau's performance takes the form of a staged field study, one where the dance studio intersects with a magical research forest both real and imagined through a combination of movement, text (Candau's voice alternating with that of Barbara Adler's), and sound (both live, courtesy of Nur Intan Murtadza, and recorded, Candau having used his own computer software program to create an eight channel electroacoustic composition based on his outdoor recordings). Kyla Gardiner's lighting design completes the immersive effect, one in which we become increasingly mindful of our own kinaesthetic responses to what we are experiencing as much because of as in spite of our sedentariness. Indeed, as Candau moved and spoke about how and why he was moving, it was hard not to take notice of how one was floating one's own head, or tilting it to the side, or what shifts in weight and energy were occurring when one crossed or uncrossed one's leg. Dance scholars have become fond of talking about the concept of "kinaesthetic empathy"--the experience of moving along with or in response to dancers on stage. But those same scholars rarely discuss the ideal set of conditions to best enable such an experience. Candau seems to have found the right mix, one in which moving and talking and listening and feeling combine to produce a true embodied mindfulness (and vice-versa).
Points de vue has one more performance this evening at 6:30 pm in the Hastings Street dance studio (room 4750) on the fourth floor of SFU Woodward's.
P.
Candau's performance takes the form of a staged field study, one where the dance studio intersects with a magical research forest both real and imagined through a combination of movement, text (Candau's voice alternating with that of Barbara Adler's), and sound (both live, courtesy of Nur Intan Murtadza, and recorded, Candau having used his own computer software program to create an eight channel electroacoustic composition based on his outdoor recordings). Kyla Gardiner's lighting design completes the immersive effect, one in which we become increasingly mindful of our own kinaesthetic responses to what we are experiencing as much because of as in spite of our sedentariness. Indeed, as Candau moved and spoke about how and why he was moving, it was hard not to take notice of how one was floating one's own head, or tilting it to the side, or what shifts in weight and energy were occurring when one crossed or uncrossed one's leg. Dance scholars have become fond of talking about the concept of "kinaesthetic empathy"--the experience of moving along with or in response to dancers on stage. But those same scholars rarely discuss the ideal set of conditions to best enable such an experience. Candau seems to have found the right mix, one in which moving and talking and listening and feeling combine to produce a true embodied mindfulness (and vice-versa).
Points de vue has one more performance this evening at 6:30 pm in the Hastings Street dance studio (room 4750) on the fourth floor of SFU Woodward's.
P.
Friday, October 30, 2015
Klasika at SFU Woodward's
Klasika, on at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's through this evening, is unlike any musical you've ever seen. First off, there is the subject matter: it concerns the strange Czech pastime of "tramping," in which citizens of the Czech Republic dress up as cowboys--or rather, their romanticized version of American cowboys--and hang out in the forest drinking Pilsner and swapping stories around the campfire. Barbara Adler, who is of Czech heritage, stumbled upon the phenomenon while doing research for her MFA in SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, of which Klasika serves as her graduating project. But that's only the beginning of the story. While doing fieldwork for her project in the Czech Republic in 2014, Adler met the Czech film director Jan Foukal, who was shooting a documentary for HBO on the tramping subculture; Adler soon found herself playing a fictionalized version of herself alongside Foukal in his film, the two of them toting around their musical instruments (he on guitar, she on accordion) as they improvised awkward conversations with themselves and the tramps they met.
In Klasika, Adler ramps the representational layers up an additional meta-level, introducing us to Bara (a winningly open and sincere Megan Stewart), a sound artist from Vancouver who wants to head to the Czech Republic to record the sounds of folks just before they put their arms around each other's shoulders. Once there, however, she falls in with Honza (Paul Paroczai), a stealth ethnographer who finds traditional interviews boring and so fashions a recording device out of his guitar so that he can capture what the tramps--and Bara herself--say in unguarded moments. We hear these recordings played back to us as part of the work's complex sound design, which also includes a framing device of Adler and her fellow MFA student Robert Leveroos (excellent as the musical's Narrator) looping their own complicit unreliability as storytellers in a radio broadcast booth.
But mostly this work is about the songs, with Adler rocking things out with her band, Ten Thousand Wolves, and drawing on her spoken word artistry to craft lyrics that are unconventionally "musical theatre-y" in the way that they elevate the conversational to the poetic--as when Bara sings to Honza about how she's just a little bit afraid of the dark. Not that we aren't also privy to some big numbers for even bigger voices--chief among them Ashley Aron's as Barb the Bootfitter. Not only does Barb give Bara some important advice about the need to grow into her cowboy boots, but she and her fellow Rodeo Queens (Dominique Wakeland and Julie Hammond) also teach Bara a lesson about the feminist fierceness of high hair, bedazzled jeans, and bluegrass--in whose lonesome sounds, just like Bara's field recordings of birdsong and sheep bleating, there is nevertheless community.
For more behind-the-scenes insight into the Rodeo Queens, as well as the composition and documentation of the musical as a whole, check out the digital archive Adler and director Kyla Gardiner have been building on the local online arts and culture magazine Vandocument.
P.
In Klasika, Adler ramps the representational layers up an additional meta-level, introducing us to Bara (a winningly open and sincere Megan Stewart), a sound artist from Vancouver who wants to head to the Czech Republic to record the sounds of folks just before they put their arms around each other's shoulders. Once there, however, she falls in with Honza (Paul Paroczai), a stealth ethnographer who finds traditional interviews boring and so fashions a recording device out of his guitar so that he can capture what the tramps--and Bara herself--say in unguarded moments. We hear these recordings played back to us as part of the work's complex sound design, which also includes a framing device of Adler and her fellow MFA student Robert Leveroos (excellent as the musical's Narrator) looping their own complicit unreliability as storytellers in a radio broadcast booth.
But mostly this work is about the songs, with Adler rocking things out with her band, Ten Thousand Wolves, and drawing on her spoken word artistry to craft lyrics that are unconventionally "musical theatre-y" in the way that they elevate the conversational to the poetic--as when Bara sings to Honza about how she's just a little bit afraid of the dark. Not that we aren't also privy to some big numbers for even bigger voices--chief among them Ashley Aron's as Barb the Bootfitter. Not only does Barb give Bara some important advice about the need to grow into her cowboy boots, but she and her fellow Rodeo Queens (Dominique Wakeland and Julie Hammond) also teach Bara a lesson about the feminist fierceness of high hair, bedazzled jeans, and bluegrass--in whose lonesome sounds, just like Bara's field recordings of birdsong and sheep bleating, there is nevertheless community.
For more behind-the-scenes insight into the Rodeo Queens, as well as the composition and documentation of the musical as a whole, check out the digital archive Adler and director Kyla Gardiner have been building on the local online arts and culture magazine Vandocument.
P.
Friday, August 28, 2015
Fake Gems/"Like Lemon" at the Interurban Gallery
Last night I went to a party thrown by The Party, who are otherwise known as the artistic duo Kyla Gardiner and Layla Marcelle Mrozowski. Gardiner and Marcelle Mrozowski are both completing their MFAs in the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU and, uniquely and somewhat amazingly given the normal bureaucracy of university administration, are collaborating on their final project. Gardiner is a director/lighting designer/scenographer (although she is so much more than this); Marcelle Mrozowski is a dancer/choreographer/performance artist (although she too is so much more than this). It might be best to call The Party stage conceptualists or, better yet, sensory fabulists: by manipulating bodies, objects, sound, light, space and time, they offer one an experience that is at once transporting and re-orienting. By that I mean that one is taken somewhere else at the same time as one is made to feel more present in, more aware of, the where of here.
In the case of "Like Lemon," the piece being premiered by The Party in the sweltering white cube space of the Interurban Gallery on the corner of Hastings and Carrall, this oscillating bodily and spatial perceptivity is initiated when four female performers already wired with head mics (Marcelle Mrozowski, joined by Deanna Peters, Rianne Svelnis and Lexi Vajda) gather together in the centre of the room, place white, semi-translucent sacks over their heads, and begin to move. Their motion is largely confined to their pelvic areas. They rock back and forth on their heels, or sway their hips from side to side, or drop to their haunches on the floor and rotate their bellies slowly and deliberately in a circle, or simply stand and undulate their legs and thighs. Occasionally the performers change levels and direction (although Peters always remained standing because, as she later told me, the floor was too dirty), responding to each other's bodily proximity--despite the fact, as I also later discovered, they couldn't see each other through the sacks on their heads. What the performers don't do is take any "steps," or worry about keeping time to the music--a deeply atmospheric electronic score by DJ Phoebé Guillemot. They move without moving per se, and it is this trick of relational being--or, rather, being in relation, both to each other, and to us--that is so mezmerizing and, dare I say, contagious. Over the course of the work's 45+ minutes, as one transfers one's gaze from pulsing body to pulsing body, watching in fascination as darker and darker holes seem to appear in the sacks where each performer is desperately sucking in air, one slowly and simultaneously becomes aware of the other bodies around one, and of how different pockets of the audience are moving in relation not just to the performance (it's hard not to begin some rocking or swaying motion of one's own), but to each other: leaning in, bending away, stretching up, ducking down and, yes indeed, actually touching. All those manifestations of besideness that constitute our being in this world together.
Not that there isn't also a score to "Like Lemon." It's just that it's a largely conversational one. Those head mics are affixed for a reason, as over the course of the piece's duration the performers don't just move together, but also talk to each other. It's not always easy to follow what they're saying, but constructing a narrative is hardly the point. To quote Gardiner and Marcelle Mrozowski's program blurb, the conversation is less about making sense than "sense making." Hence the one phrase--uttered, I believe, both near the beginning and end of the piece--that stuck with me: "sound is so hot." As coloured and shaded and stippled and, above all, warmly illuminated by Gardiner's lighting projections, the sound of this performance--by which, in the sensorially redistributive premises underscoring the work as a whole, I take to mean a total acoustic environment that encompasses not just Guillemot's music, the performers' voices, noises seeping in from the street, but also a synesthetic way of seeing-hearing-feeling--created a heat that superseded the actual physical temperature of the room.
While I unfortunately can't do them justice here, I should note that "Like Lemon" was preceded by two other engaging works that also played with space, time, and sensory perception. Daisy Thompson's "The Ongoing Wonder of..." featured Katie DeVries, Natalie Tin Yin Gan, Michelle Lui, and Ashley Whitehead moving to their own distinct rhythms and personal body scores, but also intersecting with, taking on, and sometimes taking over the movements of the others--all to the improvised violin and vocal sounds of Alex Mah. "Infinite Digressions" was a collaborative performance installation by Diego Romero and Jessica Wilkie that among other things juxtaposed successive mass manipulations of hundreds of tiny coloured figures from the board game Risk with the stationary dropping of one cigarette butt after another.
The Party definitely knows how to throw a great party.
P.
In the case of "Like Lemon," the piece being premiered by The Party in the sweltering white cube space of the Interurban Gallery on the corner of Hastings and Carrall, this oscillating bodily and spatial perceptivity is initiated when four female performers already wired with head mics (Marcelle Mrozowski, joined by Deanna Peters, Rianne Svelnis and Lexi Vajda) gather together in the centre of the room, place white, semi-translucent sacks over their heads, and begin to move. Their motion is largely confined to their pelvic areas. They rock back and forth on their heels, or sway their hips from side to side, or drop to their haunches on the floor and rotate their bellies slowly and deliberately in a circle, or simply stand and undulate their legs and thighs. Occasionally the performers change levels and direction (although Peters always remained standing because, as she later told me, the floor was too dirty), responding to each other's bodily proximity--despite the fact, as I also later discovered, they couldn't see each other through the sacks on their heads. What the performers don't do is take any "steps," or worry about keeping time to the music--a deeply atmospheric electronic score by DJ Phoebé Guillemot. They move without moving per se, and it is this trick of relational being--or, rather, being in relation, both to each other, and to us--that is so mezmerizing and, dare I say, contagious. Over the course of the work's 45+ minutes, as one transfers one's gaze from pulsing body to pulsing body, watching in fascination as darker and darker holes seem to appear in the sacks where each performer is desperately sucking in air, one slowly and simultaneously becomes aware of the other bodies around one, and of how different pockets of the audience are moving in relation not just to the performance (it's hard not to begin some rocking or swaying motion of one's own), but to each other: leaning in, bending away, stretching up, ducking down and, yes indeed, actually touching. All those manifestations of besideness that constitute our being in this world together.
Not that there isn't also a score to "Like Lemon." It's just that it's a largely conversational one. Those head mics are affixed for a reason, as over the course of the piece's duration the performers don't just move together, but also talk to each other. It's not always easy to follow what they're saying, but constructing a narrative is hardly the point. To quote Gardiner and Marcelle Mrozowski's program blurb, the conversation is less about making sense than "sense making." Hence the one phrase--uttered, I believe, both near the beginning and end of the piece--that stuck with me: "sound is so hot." As coloured and shaded and stippled and, above all, warmly illuminated by Gardiner's lighting projections, the sound of this performance--by which, in the sensorially redistributive premises underscoring the work as a whole, I take to mean a total acoustic environment that encompasses not just Guillemot's music, the performers' voices, noises seeping in from the street, but also a synesthetic way of seeing-hearing-feeling--created a heat that superseded the actual physical temperature of the room.
While I unfortunately can't do them justice here, I should note that "Like Lemon" was preceded by two other engaging works that also played with space, time, and sensory perception. Daisy Thompson's "The Ongoing Wonder of..." featured Katie DeVries, Natalie Tin Yin Gan, Michelle Lui, and Ashley Whitehead moving to their own distinct rhythms and personal body scores, but also intersecting with, taking on, and sometimes taking over the movements of the others--all to the improvised violin and vocal sounds of Alex Mah. "Infinite Digressions" was a collaborative performance installation by Diego Romero and Jessica Wilkie that among other things juxtaposed successive mass manipulations of hundreds of tiny coloured figures from the board game Risk with the stationary dropping of one cigarette butt after another.
The Party definitely knows how to throw a great party.
P.
Saturday, May 10, 2014
Neither Here Nor There at SFU Woodward's
The MFA students at SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts are staging a year-end festival of new work called Neither Here Nor There at SFU Woodward's through this Sunday. Last night I caught a double bill of very intriguing dance pieces.
Stroking the Unknown Dog is a structured improvisation for five dancers and a musician conceived by choreographer Emmalena Fredriksson. Responding to a set of instructions from Fredriksson, to the music (by Alex Mah), to each other, and no doubt to the audience (who sit in the round), the dancers make real-time movement choices of shape, proximity, massing, etc. that, in the words of Fredriksson, reveal "notions of individuality, community and the animals within."
Aril is a collaboration between dancer-choreographer Yves Candau and lighting designer Kyla Gardiner (who was also responsible for the illumination in Stroking the Unknown Dog). Exploring "the interplay between form and function in ... emergent patterns of human locomotion," Candau isolates the drive toward mobility in individual limbs and joints, crafting out of everyday activities like reaching and bending a mesmerizing tapestry of movement. Embroidering and overlaying this tapestry with live lighting projections, Gardiner adds rich visual texture as she alternates her washes of colour from inky pools of blue and black to vibrant splashes of red and wispy swirls of white.
The festival kicked off on Wednesday with a durational five-hour performance installation by Luciana D'Anunciacao called The door is open, please come in. While I could only stay for a brief half hour, it was enough time to take in a gorgeous ritual cleansing sequence involving water, herbs, flower petals and a length of white muslin--into which D'Anunciacao first wrapped and then extricated her body. Additional installation elements included a large looping video projection at one end of the studio (wrapped around the corner of the wall and showcasing D'Anunciacao's trademark play with perspective), a hammock in another corner, ripe mangos laid out on the floor, and an immersive sound score by Alex Mah. The installation was certainly a feast for the senses. I only wished I could have stayed longer.
P.
Stroking the Unknown Dog is a structured improvisation for five dancers and a musician conceived by choreographer Emmalena Fredriksson. Responding to a set of instructions from Fredriksson, to the music (by Alex Mah), to each other, and no doubt to the audience (who sit in the round), the dancers make real-time movement choices of shape, proximity, massing, etc. that, in the words of Fredriksson, reveal "notions of individuality, community and the animals within."
Aril is a collaboration between dancer-choreographer Yves Candau and lighting designer Kyla Gardiner (who was also responsible for the illumination in Stroking the Unknown Dog). Exploring "the interplay between form and function in ... emergent patterns of human locomotion," Candau isolates the drive toward mobility in individual limbs and joints, crafting out of everyday activities like reaching and bending a mesmerizing tapestry of movement. Embroidering and overlaying this tapestry with live lighting projections, Gardiner adds rich visual texture as she alternates her washes of colour from inky pools of blue and black to vibrant splashes of red and wispy swirls of white.
The festival kicked off on Wednesday with a durational five-hour performance installation by Luciana D'Anunciacao called The door is open, please come in. While I could only stay for a brief half hour, it was enough time to take in a gorgeous ritual cleansing sequence involving water, herbs, flower petals and a length of white muslin--into which D'Anunciacao first wrapped and then extricated her body. Additional installation elements included a large looping video projection at one end of the studio (wrapped around the corner of the wall and showcasing D'Anunciacao's trademark play with perspective), a hammock in another corner, ripe mangos laid out on the floor, and an immersive sound score by Alex Mah. The installation was certainly a feast for the senses. I only wished I could have stayed longer.
P.
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