My Vancouver Dance History: September 11 Artist Salon with James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam (plastic orchid factory)

Friday's MVDH artist salon was with plastic orchid factory's James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam. They Zoomed in from their co-op in Kits. We talked about the uncanny prescience of two pof works I discuss in the book (Digital Folk and I Miss Doing Nothing), how they and their two boys have been coping the past six months, and why despite everything they remain hopeful for the future. 

As with Tara Cheyenne's video, the file size is too big to upload here. But you can access the the Vimeo link here.

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

Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 20

Yesterday at my Woodward's office I had the pleasure of interviewing Natalie LeFebvre Gnam for our Vancouver dance histories project. Earlier that day plastic orchid factory had just begun the load-in to the Wong Theatre of their set and equipment for their newest show, Digital Folk, which they will be rehearsing for the next three weeks in advance of its September 21 opening. Natalie, with her son Finn in tow, graciously took time out to talk with me about all things terpsichorean that had led to this significant moment.

Among other things, that meant talking about her childhood in Prince George, where as a young 11-year old dance student a light bulb went off when Joe Laughlin came through town and taught a workshop. "Oh," Natalie suddenly thought, "this is what dance could be." Mary Louise Albert followed, and it was she who encouraged Natalie to apply for a summer scholarship position at Montreal's École supérieure de ballet du Québec. Eventually Natalie began studying there full time, which led to an apprenticeship at Les Grands Ballets Canadiens and, eventually, a professional contract with the company under the artistic directorship of Larry Rhodes (now head of the dance division at Julliard). It was at LGB that Natalie met her husband, James Gnam (she told him she admired his legs). However, she and James suddenly found themselves out of a job when Rhodes left (the details of his departure still remain unclear to Natalie) and most of the company dancers' contracts weren't renewed.

Feeling broken physically and emotionally, Natalie and James moved across the country to Victoria with the intention of taking an early retirement from dance. But while studying naturopathy, Natalie began taking class again at Linda Raino's studio and rediscovered her love of dance. Coincidentally, James made his first solo for Natalie, "Jim on the Phone," at this time. Following a showing in Victoria at Linda's studio, they brought the piece to Vancouver as part of a presentation series at the Moberly Arts Centre organized by Desiree Dunbar. Lola McLaughlin would see it, which would have important consequences for when Natalie and James began plastic orchid factory.

But that was still five years away. In the interim, Natalie had accepted a contract to dance with my colleague Judith Garay's company, Dancers Dancing, which precipitated her and James's full-time move to Vancouver. Soon after James was hired by Ballet BC and the two began settling into the dance community here, which included, for Natalie, taking class with Wen Wei Wang and at Arts Umbrella with Grant Strate and Yannick Matthon, among others. A highlight during this time was also dancing in the 2007 Vancouver Opera production of The Magic Flute, where Natalie got to work with Michelle Olson. Then, in 2007-2008, things started happening in rapid succession: Natalie and James's son, Finn, was born; Ballet BC exploded; and plastic orchid was incorporated as a company. 

Natalie said to me that the combination of having Finn and working on Endorphin, pol's first major work, changed her relationship to her body and to dance, and that as a result it remains a watershed moment in her career. Certainly the piece seemed to punctuate a transition for both Natalie and James from the world of ballet to the world of contemporary dance, a transition underscored by the fact that just prior to her death, having seen an early version of the piece, Lola McLaughlin nominated James and Natalie for a Mayor's Arts Award. And now, eight years later, about to premiere pol's most ambitious piece to date (and also coincidentally once again with child!), and with the renovations on pol's new shared space with MACHiNENOiSY and Tara Cheyenne Performance set to begin this fall, it would seem that Natalie's place in Vancouver's contemporary dance scene is not just secure, but absolutely integral.

P

Digital Folk 3.0 at the Shadbolt

Yesterday, on perhaps the single best day we've had so far all summer, I hiked it out to the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts for a beta test of the latest version of plastic orchid factory's Digital Folk. I've been following the various incarnations of the performance, which began with a residency at the Cultch in 2014 (and which I wrote about here), and which continued with a presentation as part of Boca del Lupo's Micro Performance Series at the Anderson Street Space in October of last year (more on that here). For the past three weeks plastic orchid's James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, together with their collaborators, have been refining the work at the Shadbolt in advance of the piece's premiere at SFU Woodward's at the end of next month (September 21-25 in the Wong Theatre, to be precise).

Digital Folk has evolved into a fully immersive experience that combines video game design, a bit of cosplay, music and dance, and an interactive installation. The main conceptual and scenographic advance in this version of the piece is that pol has built a set that places the audience in the middle of the action, and my understanding is that for the Woodward's performances the hour-long show will play on a loop, with spectators invited to come and go as they please. The cast of performers has also gotten bigger, with pol having engaged several members of the School for the Contemporary Arts' Dance program (three of them my former students) as interns. However, the core of the piece remains concerned with how we interact, cognitively and kinaesthetically, with myriad screen avatars, and how this in turn affects and/or disrupts our live bodily engagements with others. This conceit plays out in various instances of mirroring, including a few new ones for this version: I was particularly taken by the synchronized smartphone folk dance, and also by the virtuoso vocal call and response sequence shared by James Gnam and Jane Osborne. That all these screens are in turn mediating audience response is strikingly evidenced by how passive we generally were yesterday. After the first few minutes of dress-up and exploration of the site and its different play stations, most of us took up a fixed standing or sitting position and watched the action unfold around us. It's true, there is a group dance at the end; however, I wonder the extent to which more (or perhaps less) participation will be encouraged in the final version.

There is much more I could say, including all the different explorations of folk stories and folk dance in the piece--to say nothing of those bumbling musical folklorists from the future, The Sally Field Project. But I think I'll save further discussion for the September performances.

It's going to be fun.

P

The Indexical, Alphabetized, Mediated, Archival Dance-a-Thon! at WAAP

Prior to last night's Ballet BC performance, my colleague Roxanne and I hiked over to the Wil Aballe Art Projects (WAAP) space to take in artist Evann Siebens' exhibition The Indexical, Alphabetized, Mediated, Archival Dance-a-Thon. Siebens is a former National Ballet of Canada and Bonn Ballet dancer; she has also studied filmmaking and philosophy at New York University, and as part of her multi-media practice has made several award-winning dance films. For this show Siebens has ransacked her archive of dance footage to create a video installation that via multiple monitors and projections showcases the movement of a range of local and international artists. Mixed media collages featuring image and text, along with a reproduction of Yvonne Rainer's famous "No Manifesto," accompany the installation, contributing to Siebens' own "personal manifesto and mediated lexicon" on how to translate dance to film.

And yesterday she showed us how in an accompanying performance series called "Moving Camera Improv," which took place at her nearby studio. Following a mass choreographic walk to the studio, spectators encountered plastic orchid factory's James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam performing a structured improvisation to a recorded audio score of John Cage reciting an interview with Robert Rauschenberg. A camera with a live projected feed was perched on a rolling dolly; every now and then James would move it to so as to zero in on Natalie's feet, or else to project different sized and configured images of his own body on different parts of the studio walls. Justine A. Chambers followed with a mashed-up reperformance of two iconic postmodern works from the Judson Church era: Trisha Brown's Homemade, in which she famously danced with a projector mounted via a baby carrier on her back, her live movements synchronizing with mediated images of the same dance that played across the studio's walls, ceiling and audience; and Yvonne Rainer's Duet, which ends with a series of 19 poses that she and Brown first cycled through in 1963. In Chambers' combining of these works, the recorded images of her performing Duet further recombine in uncanny ways with her fully present and fluidly embodied movements, not least because she does not pause between each pose, so that in concert with the doubly ambulant projections (that is, Chambers moving on screen, but also moving the screen around the studio) there is produced what it only seems appropriate to deem a wholly new concept of montage.

Finally, the series concludes with Siebens herself taking up a camera to capture the live improvised movements of her three collaborators. In so doing, she demonstrates not only that her movement training is still deeply embedded in her body, but also--and likely as a result--that she has an intuitive feel for how to maneuver a camera both in relation to the bodies maneuvering around her (including those in the audience) and the general ambient environment (as when, in a wonderful moment, she gently palpates the camera in response to the thrumming soundscore and James' pulsating arm and wrist).

P.

The Value of Things at The Dance Centre

What is the ROI (return on investment) of art? If, as we are wont to under global capitalism, we measure such things purely in financial terms, then it is always going to be a zero sum game. As I have argued in a recent article in Canadian Theatre Review, and as plastic orchid factory's presentation of Grand Poney's production of The Value of Things, currently on at the Dance Centre through this evening, makes abundantly clear, dance and theatre artists always spend more than they have--a principle, manifestly evident at the end of any show (including this one), that extends to the performers' extra outlays of physical and emotional energy. There is simply nothing left. Until the next evening when, from this nothing, there is suddenly, magically, something more.

It is this kind of resourcefulness--making something out of nothing, which we used to call creativity--that co-creators Jacques Poulin-Denis and James Gnam, together with fellow performers Gilles Poulin-Denis and Francis d'Octobre, explore and honour on stage in this sixty-minute work of dance-theatre. In a world where money flows inequitably and, above all, immaterially between scarcity and abundance (brilliantly illustrated by Jacques in a rant on the "disappearance" of the penny); where the distance between need and want in the cultural sector is best summed up by the dangling carrot of grant funding that always seems at once within and somehow just beyond reach (which we see enacted in a hilarious and also heartbreaking opening solo by James); where artists are increasingly asked to justify--and literally account for--their use of what in voiceover is referred to as "other people's money" (a sound bite from the Sun News reporter who infamously asked Margie Gillis why taxpayer-funded cultural projects aren't commercially viable, and thereby providing the inspiration for this piece); and where arts producers are forced to become more and more entrepreneurial (witness plastic orchid Artistic Producer Natalie Lefebvre Gnam pushing the raffle tickets and drinks pre-show), what other resources--one's body, one's imagination, a bit of cardboard--are immediately and materially to hand? More importantly, how might we use these resources to develop works of art that are built from, and help to model, different systems of value: ones based, for example, on a shared aesthetic and affective experience, or on a kind of performative instruction in the ethics of living?

Indeed, among the many things I appreciated about this piece--in addition to its abundant humour, the amazing charisma and genuine camaraderie of the performers, and its virtuosic movement sequences (which I will get to shortly)--were the lessons in valuation, not least economic, that it provided. Thus, for example, Jacques quotes to us Adam Smith's famous remarks in The Wealth of Nations on the "paradox of value," how, for example, there is no direct correlation between an item's "use-value" and its "exchange-value": water, which we need to live, comes free of charge from our taps, whereas diamonds, pretty to look at but hardly needed for survival purposes, command huge prices on the market. As Jacques goes on to point out, in the twenty-first century, with drought-ridden California being the prime example, water--long something to be traded in the global south--has now also become a commodity in North America. But this does not obviate the basic point Smith is making with his water-diamond example: exchange-value is tied to labour. As Smith wrote, "The real price of every thing, what every thing costs to the man [sic] who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it." This helps to explain why one person's detritus--the cardboard boxes which merely serve as the disposable containers for one's capital accumulation of things--becomes another person's entire world, providing shelter, warmth, security. It also explains--as demonstrated via another brilliant sequence in which James scrambles for, grabs at, and tumbles over a series of boxes he worries Gilles is eyeing--why the latter person will do anything to hang on the that world.

The cardboard boxes, which are piled into a massive architectural installation downstage left (and into which the performers occasionally disappear), also figure in the show's climactic set-piece. It is rap about acquiring more that is led by Jacques and that eventually sees all the men dancing gangsta-style in fur coats, moving back and forth across the stage--sometimes quite vigorously, and often in delightfully coy displays of unison--while their feet are planted in four of the shallower of said boxes. The sequence is hysterically funny, but the beats and rhymes (which one must absolutely listen to) are musically complex and also pack a satirical punch--not least in exposing (down to Gilles' red skivvies) what we might call the deficit equation of compensatory white masculinity (although I'm not even sure I know what I mean by that).

Following this comedic high-point, the piece ends with a surprisingly tender floor duet between Jacques and James. As Francis plays a song at the piano stage right (all the music in the piece, composed by Francis and Jacques, is performed live by Francis, including a long ukelele solo at the beginning as the audience files into the theatre and we're waiting for the house lights to dim), these two independent dance artists who have now become good friends and collaborators come together in a shared state of exhaustion that also serves as a final physical punctuation to the issues being explored in the piece as a whole. If, to go back to Smith, the value of things lies in the labour that goes into them, then these two spent bodies lying together on the floor point very materially to what it is we should be valuing in the work of art that they have laboured to create for us.

P.

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.

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.

Edge 2 at DOTE

Richard and I ended our 2014 Dancing on the Edge Festival by taking in the final Edge 2 mixed program. Not only were we looking forward to each of the pieces, we were grateful to escape the heat.

First up was Natalie, a solo (of sorts) for plastic orchid factory's Natalie Lefebvre Gnam that serves as a companion piece to the company's earlier James, about husband James Gnam's relationship with The Nutcracker (and about which I have previously blogged here). As Lefevbre Gnam explains via a series of oversized title cards at the top of the piece, in a conceit reminiscent of the famous black and white video of Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues, both works were born out of the detritus of what was to have been a duet choreographed for the couple by Lee Su-Feh. However, when Natalie sustained a knee injury just two weeks prior to the premiere, the work went ahead as the aforementioned solo for James. The plan was then to create a companion piece for Natalie, also choreographed by Lee; however, after a series of delays, Lee eventually dropped out, and the work on the program is now the result of a creative collaboration between husband and wife and brothers Jacques and Gilles Poulin-Denis.

Like James, Natalie adopts a discourse of theatrical representation reminiscent of what we find in the work of Jérôme Bel (especially his [auto]biographical dancer portraits) in order to expose the institutional frames of dance and the dancing life. Also as in James (not to mention Bel's Véronique Doisneau), one of those frames is classical ballet, with the music from Adolphe Adam's Giselle swelling at various moments throughout the piece as, for example, Lefebvre Gnam rounds her arms into first position and demonstrates with her hands and fingers an expert arrondi. Mostly, however, the piece is concerned with the funding institutions that govern--and put limits on--the creativity of contemporary dance artists. A digitally manipulated voiceover loop of emails to Lefebvre Gnam from various government agencies detailing their application, disbursement, and reporting requirements plays throughout the piece, accounting (in more ways than one) for both its form and content. To this end, a series of hula hoops are employed in increasingly clever and comic ways throughout the piece, with Lefebvre Gnam not just jumping through them, but also playing games of hopscotch and pick-up with them, encircling her body with ring after ring in a telling visual metaphor for everything else she is balancing in her life in addition to her creative practice (husband James and son Finn figure at key moments). By the end of the piece, however, Lefebvre Gnam is able to turn this plastic bureaucratic enclosure into something aesthetically beautiful and potentially liberating, the hoops eventually arranged along her arms and back in such a manner as to suggest the fairy wings of Giselle or, even more powerfully, the entire celestial sphere that the Titan Atlas holds up with his shoulders. On such a tiny frame as Lefebre Gnam's, the latter image speaks volumes about how much artists can achieve with so little.

The second piece on the program was Starr Muranko's Spine of the Mother, a solo excerpt from a larger work-in-progress by Starrwind Dance Projects involving Indigenous dance artists in Canada and Peru. The gorgeous and charismatic dancer Tasha Faye Evans begins downstage left, her back to us, and with her right arm stretched out to the wings. No music plays, but we hear a clicking sound, and eventually it is revealed that she holds some talismanic stones in her hand. A source of energy, the stones unleash in Evans a torrent of movement, including an opening series of spiraling turns that I could have watched go on forever. Eventually two of the stones get placed at different points on the stage; a third is offered, at the close of the piece, to an audience member, a gift that via Evans' powerful kinesthetic connection with her audience we are all able to share.

Finally, the evening closed with Ziyian Kwan and dumb instrument Dance's a slow awkward, a duet created in collaboration with James Gnam (who has certainly been busy this DOTE Festival). The piece begins with Gnam entering upstage left, dressed in overalls and carrying an old blue suitcase. He walks towards the centre of the stage on tip toe. There he is met by Kwan, who has emerged from the wings upstage right, also in overalls, but on her knees pushing a bright orange suitcase and, crucially, wearing red high heels. For, among other things, the work is an exploration of gender, one that in the context of danced movement recalls the famous maxim about Ginger Rogers--that she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels.

Not that a slow awkward is so binaristic. When their respective suitcases eventually touch, the contact unleashes in Gnam and Kwan a tsunami of highly physical movement, with each picking up the other on their backs, or rolling about the floor in a style reminiscent of contact improv, or miming the fight and martial arts choreography of action films (there's even a High Noon-like whistle in the sound score and at various moments Kwan and Gnam cock their handss on their hips like guns). Eventually the overalls come off, revealing Kwan in a men's dress shirt and underwear and Gnam in a full-length skirt, a visual conceit that nicely highlights questions of cross-gender embodiment and the mix of masculinity and femininity within us all. Nowhere is this more compellingly staged in the piece than in the moment near the end when Kwan and Gnam step into the same set of overalls, threading their arms through the sleeves and dancing a slow waltz.

There is a final brief coda after this, which repeats an earlier sequence involving the positioning of the suitcases into a chair back, and leading to a tentative embrace (except Kwan is missing from the picture this time). As moving and conceptually integrated as this bit was, I think I would have preferred the work to have ended with that zipped up waltz. Regardless, a slow awkward was one of the highlights of the Festival for me and it's so exciting to see Kwan, such a compelling interpreter of others' work, move into this new phase of her career as a choreographer.

P.