Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 12

Today we had MACHiNENOiSY's Daelik in the house, which was the first time in this process we've had a chance to interview the other half of a dance couple, our conversation with Delia Brett having taken place just over three weeks ago. While Delia let us know when she and Daelik started making work together, and when the company was officially incorporated, Daelik filled in some other crucial details. For example, he told us that the idea for the company was first born while Daelik was living in Berlin, and that initially he had thought it would be a project that moved between that city and Vancouver. He also said that the name of the company came from the title of a show that he made in 1997 or 1998 with Antonija Livingstone and Melissa Montgomery as part of the collective Trinkets and Atrocities. Among other things the show, which toured to Seattle, involved Antonija and Daelik eating cake on stage and then throwing up.

Amazingly, this is not the only show Daelik's been in that has involved a cake and someone being sick on stage (albeit in this case unintentionally). He recounted a fantastic story about a performance of Serge Bennathan's "When Grandmothers Fly Away" for Contemporary Dancers. He and Julia Aplin were guest artists in the show, and during this particular performance Julia had the flu; at the end of a solo Julia performs Daelik is meant to carry on a cake, whose candles Julia is supposed to blow out. Except on this evening she rushed to the side of the stage to puke instead. Someone behind Daelik whispered for him to "keep going," and from there it was a frenzy of improvising who does what and when--which included Daelik grabbing a mop and pretending that his cleaning up of Julia's vomit was part of the show.

Daelik suggested he has an uncanny ability to focus during a crisis, and from the stories he told I believe him. Some of these crises have been creative, such as the time when, two days before he was to premiere a work for five men at Dancing on the Edge, one of his dancers had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized; the piece became a quartet overnight. Other crises have been physical, like the time he tore the cartilage in his knee on stage, but kept going. Or an incident Alexa brought up from a story Daelik shared during one of his teaching stints at Modus: riding his bicycle and braking suddenly, Daelik flipped over his handle bars but somehow had enough presence of mind and, more to the point, awareness of his body moving through space, to miraculously land in a seated position on a nearby bench. As Daelik suggested, talking about another time when he intuitively negotiated a collapsing ladder and landed on his bum never the worse for wear, his extensive contact training has taught him not to fear falling and to work with, rather than against, gravity.

And speaking of contact, Daelik also told a moving story about his first professional job dancing for Peter Bingham at EDAM; the piece ended with a duet between himself and Susan Elliott, and on the last evening of the run he was so overcome by emotion that he burst into tears.

Looking to the future, Daelik is hopeful for the creative opportunities that will ideally emerge as a result of MACHiNENOiSY's shared space in Chinatown with plastic orchid factory and Tara Cheyenne Performance. Like Su-Feh last week, he's also heartened by the drive and intelligence and creative energy of the younger generation of dance artists currently making work in the city. As he put it, being an established professional who has slogged for so long in the wilderness of limited resources and indifferent attention, it's easy to be affronted by young upstarts who come along and say, "Whatever, we're going to put on a festival." But then you remember that you did the same thing once.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 9

Following a debrief of the excellent Exact Vertigo conversation at UNIT/PITT Projects on Wednesday evening, and after a bit of Thursday morning chocolate cake, yesterday Justine and Alexa helped me to record a short movement-based video loop I wished to use as a supplement to an academic paper I'm currently writing. I had brought matching sailor hats for the occasion, though I'm not sure they exactly suited our physical score. We chose to cycle through a few of the poses from the end of the "Duet" section of Yvonne Rainer's Terrain, which she first performed at Judson Church with Trisha Brown, I believe, and which Justine will be reperforming as part of a collaboration with the video artist Evann Siebens this coming Saturday evening. Even with Justine beside me calling out the movements, I was pretty hopeless--but, in terms of my paper, that's partly the illustrative point.

The real challenge will come in the following weeks as we work to develop potential scores for our own project in conjunction with our interviews and writing. As Justine suggested, it makes sense to pursue these tracks together rather than tacking movement on at the very end.

In the second hour we were joined by Delia Brett, the latest Vancouver dance artist to consent to an interview. She shared some amazing stories, including the decision of her ballet teacher that Delia alone among her students was a "modern dancer," and so deserving of extra tutelage in the form--which apparently amounted to biweekly lessons in working with a theraband and flexing her feet. Delia also told us about her first encounter with Peter Bingham, which was when he came to Duncan as part of a theatre festival to give a workshop and chose Delia (who was around 14 at the time) as his demonstration partner for various contact techniques. Delia said that the moment Peter sloughed his body down the side of hers she knew she wanted to trade in her then burgeoning film and television acting career for a life in dance.

This life has meant dancing for a who's who of Vancouver choreographers, culminating in her joining forces with Daelik, following what they dubbed the disastrous "Homewreck" tour, to build MACHiNENOiSY into the company it is today. Along the way there was a hair-raising trip to Belgium in 2003 for a festival of Canadian dance that also involved Justine, and during which Delia's body went into full system collapse. Except for when she was on stage--which Justine confirmed by describing the incredible backbend accompanied by forward tendu that she still remembers Delia performing. And, I should say on this last point, that Delia was incredibly physical over the course of her interview, which gives us some added material to work with.

While Delia expressed a lot of frustration with the dance scene in Vancouver, particularly with respect to its different presentational, institutional, and financial impediments, she also said that she couldn't ever foresee a future where she wasn't dancing. Having just seen her in Bingham's Secret Life of Trees that is something to treasure.

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Dance in Vancouver: Justine A. Chambers, Vanessa Goodman, and Delia Brett

It's been such a busy week that I only got to my first Dance in Vancouver events yesterday. The biennial showcase and presenting platform for local dance artists is guest curated this year by Pirjetta Mulari, of Dance Info Finland. I've always wondered about the reasoning behind DIV's outside curatorial invitations. Presumably programming choices depend a lot on knowing who has presentation-ready work, which necessarily means liaising with local folks. And, to be sure, staff at The Dance Centre are heavily involved in the entire organization of the event, including various studio showings and presenter meetings and parallel performances.

Thus it was that I got to tag along yesterday afternoon on the second of two "Choreographic Walks" programmed by Dance Centre Artist-in-Residence Justine A. Chambers. Modelled on the soundwalks of Vancouver pioneered by R. Murray Schafer and Hildegard Westerkamp, Chambers' curated two-hour stroll through the city's downtown core invites audiences to silently observe several works of site-specific dance created by local artists, including: a lesson in directional (and accessible) navigation by Naomi Brand at the southwest plaza of the VPL's Central Branch; a spatially dispersed but acoustically proximate clapping fugue by Alexa Mardon at Victory Square; and a game of pick-up basketball underneath the Cambie Street bridge by Deanna Peters (in which there wasn't much scoring, but a lot of running and passing with elan). But the walk also invites us to place these works into larger choreographic frameworks and patterns that are part of the social infrastructure of the city, be it pedestrians crossing an intersection, kids playing in a park, or the often anonymous workers who maintain the various invisible grids and networks that buttress our daily navigation of the city in the first place. Then, too, there are the ways in which we, as a group (numbering 20+), effect and change different movement flows, from holding up traffic at an intersection to absorbing and spitting out groups of people we just happen to collect accidentally along our route. This kind of shadow choreography in which we daily and reflexively participate as urban dwellers, but which we tend to relegate to background "movement noise" (the dance with and around others we do on the bus or in line at the supermarket), is here uncamouflaged and brought to the foreground by the "openings" in our walk that Chambers and her partner Josh Hite programmed with the help of students in the Modus Operandi Training Program: that is, at moments along our route, and ably cued by our pace-setting guide Kate Franklin, all we had to do was cast a sideline glance across an alley to catch a glimpse of tandem selves matching our steps, moving us forward.

In the evening, it was back to The Dance Centre for Saturday night's mainstage presentation of Vanessa Goodman/action at a distance's Wells Hill and Delia Brett/MACHiNENOiSY's plaything. I've blogged about the original presentation of Wells Hill, as part of the 2015 Chutzpah! Festival, here. The movement is as gorgeous as ever, at once languid and sinewy and robustly energetic in a way that is equally responsive to Gould playing Bach and to Gabriel Saloman's original immersive sound score. It was also interesting to see the piece in the more intimate setting of The Dance Centre (which I gather partly inspired the new costumes designed by Ziyian Kwan), and to witness the individual embodied contributions of new cast members Karissa Barry, Dario Dinuzzi, and Alexa Mardon. I look forward to the premiere of the full piece in 2017 at SFU Woodward's.

MACHiNENOiSY's plaything is what I'll call a "collaborative solo" for co-artistic director Brett. First presented in 2011, the work is a surreal dream/nightmare based on the childhood drawings of Brett's son, Beckett. Part shadow play, part puppet show, and part experiment in live projection action painting, the work's immersive visuals are at times jaw-droppingly gorgeous and at other times queasiness-inducing. But all of this is anchored by the moving performance of Brett, who whether growing an extra set of limbs from behind a scrim or unzipping a body suit to reveal another layer of synthetic skin underneath reveals--like Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, or Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror--that motherhood is as much about the abject as the object of one's love.

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PuSh 2015: Time Machine

The always adventurous and ever-experimenting MACHiNENOiSY, co-directed by local dance artists Delia Brett and Daelik, take another risk with their latest full-evening work. Time Machine, created during the company's recent residency at The Dance Centre, and premiering there last night in a co-presentation with the PuSh Festival, pairs five adult dancers with eight child performers. What results, set to an original score by Chris Kelly that is performed live by Kelly, Peggy Lee and Dylan van der Schyff, is a whimsical yet rigorously conceptualized exploration of the porous borders between innocence and experience, art and play, fantasy and reality.

What most struck me about the work is its sensuous and material exploration of shape. At the top of the show, large geometric felt squares and cut-out circles designed by sculptor and visual artist Natalie Purschwitz are arranged into different built structures, only to be knocked down with deliberate glee by both the adults and the kids. This reminded me that one of our earliest developmental processes as children is learning to subvert, through movement, the expected outcomes of cognition and intellection: figuring out how to jam that round peg into a square hole; or adding the last building block to our tower in such a way that it will purposefully topple over. Purschwitz also designed the costumes for the show, including the stretchy black and white biomorphic bits of fabric that several of the adult dancers move inside, at once suggesting classic images from Martha Graham and the shadows kids create on their bedroom walls at night with their hands.

In some cases the children in the show are performing alongside their parents (as in the case of the family Gnam--James, Natalie and Finn), which raises additional questions of inheritance, physical and otherwise. This is something that is brought out in the kinetic juxtaposition and commingling of fully developed and still-growing bodies on stage. Sometimes this mash-up produces obvious contrasts of size and shape--as when the youngest of the performers crawl all over Daelik and pull out the stuffing from his bodybuilder costume. At other times, one is forced to do a double-take--especially when one of the larger of the youth performers is paired with Natalie Lefebvre Gnam, who herself looks like a teenager. That the whole work ends with an arresting visual tableau of many of these differently aged and sized and trained bodies melding into the busily patterned background of one of Purschwitz's large moveable felt pieces only reinforces the point that in the co-conceived world of MACHiNENOiSY, where the spontaneous creativity of children is given equal weight alongside the practised execution of adults, it is impossible to separate decorative embellishment from core structure, wallpaper from wall.

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Bamboozled at Dancing on the Edge

MACHiNENOiSY's Daelik and Delia Brett have long sought to marry the low-fi, pedestrian movement practices of Contact Improvisation with high concept theatricality and showmanship. In their latest work, Bamboozled, which premiered last night at The Dance Centre as part of the 25th anniversary of the Dancing on the Edge Festival, it's not an equal partnership. There's too much individual role-playing and not enough shared moments of dance.

Granted, as the artists note in the program, the piece is a conscious riff on the "cult of personality" that ruled the nineteenth-century stages of vaudeville, burlesque, the fairground sideshow, and even silent film. And so to the tune of composer-musician Petunia's zydeco-inflected score, we are treated to a succession of larger-than-life types--contortionists and cowboys, bearded ladies and disappearing men--and their various one-note, look-at-me schticks. The problem is that those schticks go on a bit too long, or are unnecessarily supplemented and embroidered: Bevin Poole makes an endearingly awkward chorine struggling to insert herself into the posed tableaux of the other performers at the top of the show, but we are treated to about two or three poses too many; and the conceptual force of Tanya Podlozniak's live narration of Daelik's disappearing act is undercut by Poole's narration of her narration, and, as if this weren't already stretching things, Alex Ferguson's subsequent narration of Poole's narration of Podlozniak's narration.

By contrast, the contact sequences are few and far between: an early cross-gendered duet by Daelik and Brett that ended far too quickly; a later trio that sees Poole more than pulling her weight alongside the company's co-directors; and a moving, largely prone duet between Daelik and and a pregnant Podlozniuk that yielded some of the most compelling images of the evening. These movement sequences seem to unfold independently from the main theatrical action, which struck me as odd, as the moments when dance and theatre do come together formally and conceptually in the show are among the strongest. I am thinking especially, in this regard, of the jerky cowboy trio composed of Brett, Poole and Jamie Tea, or the dual waltz between carney Ferguson and Poole and Tea as a pair of Siamese twins joined at the ankle.

I longed for far more of these instances, when the force of MACHiNENOiSY's abundant ideas about social and gender transgression, for example, cohered with their choreographic mash-up of different performance styles.

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