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

To Colour Thought at the Shadbolt

To Colour Thought, a mixed program by Vanessa Goodman and her company Action at a Distance, played at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby from Wednesday through Saturday of this past week. Goodman has been in residence at the Shadbolt for the past six weeks developing the second half of her piece Wells Hill, which is scheduled to have its full-length premiere at SFU Woodward's in 2017.

First up, however, was the solo Container, which I first saw at last year's Dancing on the Edge Festival, and which I wrote about here. The work has changed quite a bit. It still begins with Goodman clad in nude dance semis and combat boots; but the music at the beginning is now a Yiddish folk song ("Chiribim Chiribom," to be precise, here played instrumentally). In the horizontal line of upstage light that traverses the stage Goodman raises her hands and starts to shimmy her shoulders, a trace smile playing across her lips as a kinetic memory of collective social dancing takes hold of her body. But she doesn't give herself over to this memory completely, and as the folk song is gradually superseded by Locsil's original sound composition, the shoulder shimmy becomes more of a twitch, a phantom bit of tradition (shades of Fiddler on the Roof, which feels appropriate) that remains written on Goodman's body even as she moulds herself into a modern dancing machine. For the sequences that follow, which include Goodman robotically moving forwards and backwards in crosshatched diagonals of light, seem to explore the tensions embedded within prescribed pathways of embodiment--not least with respect to gender, as the visual juxtaposition of Goodman's semi-naked body and fierce footwear would seem to suggest, and as her self-conscious foregrounding of the semiotics of erotic display indeed confirms.

Then, a surprise: returning upstage, Goodman kicks off her boots, lets loose her hair, kneels on the floor and withdraws from somewhere behind her a folded white cloth. She turns the cloth around ceremonially and then unfolds it with careful precision before holding it up to her torso. Slipping into the simple shift, Goodman is instantly recognizable as girlish and feminine. That this transformation coincides with the return of "Chiribim Chiribom," this time with the lyrics sung by The Barry Sisters, glamorous stars of the Klezmer circuit in 1950s US, reinforces what I read as Goodman's danced exploration of the co-imbricatedness of gender and cultural identity.

Following intermission we were shown the second half of Wells Hill, Goodman's riff on the interface between art and information as theorized by Marshall McLuhan and Glenn Gould (I wrote about the first part, which premiered at last year's Chutzpah! Festival, here). In this part Goodman is working with McLuhan's notion that all media are fundamentally extensions of human faculties (whether psychical or physical), with electronic media, in particular, being an adjunct to our central nervous system (the quote to this effect, from The Medium is the Massage, is referenced at the end of this 30-minute excerpt). All of this is brought out quite viscerally in the piece via the immersive lighting and media designs of James Proudfoot and Ben Didier. Fluorescent and neon tubes flash stage left and right and pixelated projections wash over the white Marley floor. According to McLuhan, information overload is a condition of electronic media and Goodman takes this maxim seriously, keeping all five of her gorgeous dancers (Lara Barclay, Karissa Barry, Dario Dinuzzi, Alexa Mardon and Bevin Poole) on stage throughout the piece, and likewise keeping them in constant motion. Moreover, our attention is purposefully divided between the workings of the group, which includes simple patterns of unison movement, more complex partnering sequences, and whole body chains and collective lifts, and that of different individuals who occasionally break off to improvise on their own in an upstage or downstage corner, often punctuating their movements with signature repeated gestures.

In his Laws of Media McLuhan wrote that "The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation." In Wells Hill Goodman is showing us, through the medium of dance, just what such a bridging might look like.

P.

You Are Here

Last night at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby Crystal Pite presented her company Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM in a Mixed Repertoire of works in progress. It was a rare opportunity to see the acclaimed local dancer-choreographer not just talking about, but actively soliciting feedback on, four pieces she's currently building as part of a full-length evening of dance called The You Show. That show will premiere next month at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, which has stepped in where no Canadian institution or government agency has, and provided Pite and her company with a two-year residency to create new work. Thereafter, the show will tour, eventually ending up back in Vancouver at The Cultch in May.

But audiences this week at the Shadbolt were treated to a sneak peek in an intimate studio setting. Even better, a visibly pregnant Pite was on hand to chat with the audience and welcome commentary on the work in between pieces.

Pite introduced the evening's program by saying that the idea behind The You Show was to think about how one would compose works of dance in the second person, and how this might in turn enable audience members to locate themselves in a dancer's movements, and see their own stories and conflicts and losses reflected in the physically embodied language on stage. Her basic architecture for each piece is the duet, and the evening began with the only previously performed piece in the repertoire, "A Picture of You Falling," created in 2008 for Anne Plamondon and Peter Chu. Both dancers were back together on stage last night, and as precise and articulate as ever in their telegraphing not just of Pite's deconstructionist choreography, but of the narrated text (written by Pite) to which that movement is con-/dis-joined: "This is a picture of you falling--knees, hip, hands, elbows, head." Continuing Pite's fascination with the body's marionette-like qualities, the collapsings and strivings of which we are not always the agent (see Dark Matters, which also featured Chu as the puppet-master who comes to be controlled by his creation), the work establishes the leitmotif for the evening, which Pite has elsewhere described as a "kinesthetics of rescue," and which we might translate here as finding the you in me (and vice-versa).

That process can involve a descent to some very dark places, as the second piece in the program demonstrated. Going back and forth for the time being between two possible titles--"The Brother You Thought You'd Lost" or "The Other You"--Pite paired longtime collaborator Eric Beauchesne with new company member Jiří Pokorný in a study of increasingly high stakes brinksmanship and animal aggression that culminates in a surprisingly tender pas de deux to Moonlight Sonata. Afterwards, Pite said that she had no idea she would end up choreographing to that piece of music, but that when it became clear she would, she felt the prelude to it had to be even darker, in order to "earn," in her words, the romantic climax.

Then came an untitled work for Cindy Salgado and Yannick Matthon that began with an image of shattering glass, to which Pite then asked longtime musical collaborator Owen Belton to compose a score. Intensely physical and featuring an amazing lighting design by Robert Sondergaard, this was the one work of the evening that Pite herself labelled still unfinished. In the feedback she solicited, I couldn't help much with the movement, but I did, as per her instructions, suggest a title: "Pieces of You" is perhaps a bit kitschy and cliched, but she promised to write it down.

Finally, the evening concluded with the longest work, "A Picture of You Flying." It begins with dancer Jermaine Spivey sitting on a chair (!) talking to the audience about sacrifice, strength, endurance, the body's armor, and the physical and mental toll exacted by his line of work. At first you think this is a bit of self-reflexive commentary on his profession as a dancer, especially when he mentions the drawbacks of wearing tights. But then he lifts his pant leg to reveal a bit of red lycra underneath. And then dancer Sandra Garcia picks a bit of red cloth up from the floor and wraps it around Jermaine's neck, like a cape. When he mentions flying, you know he's talking about being a superhero, not a dancer. But then, as this piece (and others by Pite) reveals, what precisely is the difference?

In this 35-minute work, Pite has a great deal of fun playing with various iconic poses and movement imagery associated with comic book superheroes, and their related pop culture offspring. There's a lot of slow motion "ka-pow!" sequences and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger moves. And the highlight is the Transformer-esque duet between Spivey and Garcia, these two friend-foes and possible lovers raised aloft, their arms and legs and heads shielded and manipulated by other company members as they dance/fight to the death--or sheer exhaustion. But, again, as Pite's work repeatedly suggests, what's the difference?

All in all, a thrilling evening of dance. I can't wait to see the finished work next May.

P.

Cellular

Yesterday Richard and I hiked it out to Burnaby’s Shadbolt Centre for the Arts to see Move: the company’s presentation of The Cell, a new full-length work that was being presented as part of the Vancouver International Dance Festival (which has been going on since the beginning of this month—although I’m embarrassed to say that this is the first event we’ve managed to get to). Move is presided over by Josh Beamish, the 21-year-old wunderkid of the Vancouver dance scene, who in addition to creating and touring his own work has collaborated extensively with other young local choreographers and dancers, including Simone Orlando and Amber Funk Barton. That collaborative impulse is in fact the raison d’être of The Cell, for which Beamish has solicited contributions from six co-choreographers (joining Orlando and Barton are Heather Dotto, Alison Denham, Crystal Wills, and Rachel Poirier), each of whom collaborates with Beamish on one of the piece’s seven movements (a solo created by Beamish with dancer Lara Barclay is credited as the seventh collaboration).

Some of those movements are more successful than others. Exploring the idea of physical confinement and containment, and drawing imagistic inspiration from the campy 2000 Jennifer Lopez sci-fi flick of the same name, The Cell begins with Beamish and Dotto’s exploration of dance mitosis. Two same-sex couples (one female, one male) appear in alternating soft spots, their extreme bodily attachment and small, shared gestures (a raised hand that is met, weight that is distributed equally front to back, steps made so as to minimize the risks of separation) gradually giving way to the inevitable and painful splitting of each pair. A promising beginning, to be sure, with composer Kristopher Fulton’s appropriately symbiotic soundscape contributing to the overall effect (although a technical glitch right at the start with the tape resulted in an unscheduled blackout while the problem was fixed and the dancers began again from the top). However, I was frustrated by the lighting design for this sequence. If you’re going to divide the spectator’s attention on stage, then at least do so in a way that compels us to make an informed choice as to where to look. Spots alternated between each couple, but when the lights were down on one this didn’t mean they stopped dancing. This made one strain to see what was going on with the unlit couple when, logically, one should have been paying attention to what was happening with the lit couple. I get that this gets at nucleic processes themselves being invisible to the naked eye, but it was nevertheless too much of a tease for those of us who were hungry to see the no doubt complex bits of co-dependent dance that were actually being performed in semi-darkness.

I remained mostly under-nourished through the next two movements, as Beamish and Denham’s collaboration took the form of a dance film shot and edited by David Raymond, and as Beamish and Poirier’s collaboration, while having the virtue of filling the stage with live, moving bodies, felt to me to be overly burdened with theatrical busyness (flared condom-like costumes, a pair of shared boots, and a suspension cable that bore aloft dancer Tiffany Tregarthen). It took Barton, living up as always to her middle name, to jolt the audience with some pure dance adrenaline by choreographing with Beamish a go-go-style ensemble sequence around and upon the Shadbolt Studio Theatre’s rafters that had audience members literally twisting in our seats. I enjoyed as well the precision of Beamish and Wills’ collaboration, which included a spectacular pas de deux (at once aerial and grounded) that made better use of that suspension cable, as well as a coffin-like white box. Beamish’s solo for Barclay likewise allowed us to revel at length in some virtuosic displays of technique, Barclay’s tall, lithe frame well suited to the various extensions and floor work Beamish tasked her with executing.

But it was the final collaboration, between Beamish and Orlando, that really took my breath away. Featuring the entire company (minus the younger apprentice performers who were employed in some of the other movements), and choreographed around a square of white light whose borders the dancers would variously broach, this sequence brought us back to the themes of separation and attachment, and also served as a something of a self-reflexive comment on the whole collaborative process behind the creation of The Cell. We are each other’s mitochondria, the enzymes that fuel creative metabolism. But we still have small compartments within ourselves that are not as porous, places where we utterly and completely alone.

P.