Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 5

Well, we made it through to the end of the first week, our bodies stiff and sore, but more or less intact, and having learned more or less the entire piece. In the afternoon rehearsal we put Jay and Barbara's sections together and ran them through from start to finish. The work clocks in at just over an hour, with our entrance and first foray into and out the water yet to be added. But Barbara said things always speed up on the beach, and how fast or slow we are next weekend will also likely be contingent on the weather. That is, if we're shivering in the rain, chances are we'll be going faster.

I experienced more than one brain fart during the run through, and I know the quality of my movement was far from refined; however, I was pleased to discover that the overall structure of the piece is now in my body. Indeed, waking up early this morning, I was running the choreography in my head and thought I must be missing something in the opening of Barbara's section; but when I checked my notes, I had everything right.

At the end of rehearsal yesterday several of us went for drinks and as I was sitting next to Jay and Barbara I asked them about their process of choreographing independently and then finding a way to mesh their material together in rehearsal. Largely it has to do with expediency, with each of them developing and testing ideas separately in the weekly classes they teach. They are also fuelled by a healthy dose of competition. When Jay announced to Barbara six weeks ago that he'd already worked up about 30 minutes of material, she instinctively went into overdrive in order to catch up--and now, in retrospect, I can see where she was developing different phrases in weekly class. The quality of the movement in both sections is distinct, but somehow the overall tone seems of a piece. No doubt this comes from Barbara and Jay having collaborated together for so long.

Speaking of which: the two of them will be performing, accompanied by composer and musician Stefan Smulovitz, this evening at SFU Woodward's Studio D, as part of the Powell Street Festival. More details here.

Our instructions for the weekend were not to be lazy and to review the material. As next week is seven full days of intense work instead of five Barbara doesn't want us to go all doughy in our two days off. No chance of that in my case, as somehow I have signed up to run a half-marathon tomorrow.

P

Edge 3 at Dancing on the Edge

Two legendary Vancouver dance artists. Two one-word titles. Two additional firecracker performers. You couldn't ask for a better line-up as part of the Edge 3 program at this year's Dancing on the Edge Festival.

First up was Oxygen, choreographed by Kokoro Dance's Jay Hirabayashi as a commission for dancer Billy Marchenski, and set to the industrial "no wave" music of the Swans. The twenty-minute piece unfolds on a single vertical plane, beginning with Marchenski in a crouch justly slightly up of centre stage. He slowly unfurls his body to standing, pointing skyward with one index finger, before collapsing to the ground and beginning the phrase again, this time extending the opposite finger. The movement is simple but in its execution anything but pedestrian, with the strain in Marchenski's calves attesting to the effort required to unfold and bend, unfold and bend in such a controlled manner, such that the slight suspension with the pointed index finger at full verticality feels like time itself is being suspended, forced to conform to the rhythms of Marchenski's body, his breath, rather than the other way around. No doubt Barbara was after something similar with the statue poses that started off our Wreck Beach Butoh piece this past weekend, but I can say that after last night I for one still have much work to do when it comes to slowing down time through movement.

Eventually Marchenski begins his slow butoh walk downstage: legs bent, torso forward with heart centre open, an invisible orchid cupped in his throat. Arching his body backwards, Marchenski descends to the floor for a series of weight-transferring poses on elbows and knees, but never on all four at one time. Next, he stands upright with his back towards us. Slowly he begins to shake: first just his buttocks, then his hips and legs, finally his torso and arms and head, until a succession of tremors ripple like waves up and down his entire body. Again, what is so fascinating to watch about this is how the shaking accumulates in intensity over time, with Marchenski not so much becoming possessed by the gradually distributed movement as choosing to possess it from the beginning and redistribute it at will.

So, too, with how the piece ends, which sees Marchenski incorporating a series of arm waves and jumps into a hypnotic score that had me straining to register their trajectories via the trace visual residue of their arcing flights through the air. And such was the power of the choreography that it wasn't a strain at all to believe that the dancer before me really was flying.

The second piece on the program was Trickster, a collaboration between Karen Jamieson and the San Francisco-based bouffon artist Nathaniel Justiniano. The piece began as a Brief Encounters pairing back in 2013. So successful was that early version that Jamieson and Justiniano decided to develop the piece further, this time inviting Stefan Smulovitz to perform the viola live with them on stage.

Essentially the work unfolds as a structured improvisation, with Jamieson exploring a series of movement phrases anchored in different parts of her body and Justiniano (who wears a traditional bouffon costume, complete with double-sided ass and a hump at his back) burlesquing those explorations both physically and in words--often via hilarious direct address to the audience. However, this conceit would quickly wear thin if the movement itself weren't compelling to watch, with Justiniano matching the precision of Jamieson's classical ballet steps from Giselle, for example, with his own deft and extremely light-on-his-feet traversing of the stage.

Indeed, the piece ends with the two performers arriving at a mutually agreeable rapprochement between their two different physical vocabularies, launching into a final duet that--to reference their own concluding conversation--may not be conceptually "deep," but is nonetheless deeply satisfying to watch.

P.

things near & far at The Firehall

As they indicate in a note included in the program to things near & far (on at the Firehall Arts Centre through this Saturday), Anne Cooper, Ziyian Kwan, and Ron Stewart have been friends and dance colleagues for three decades. During that time, they have collaborated in separate pairings on many works for local choreographers. Yet until now they had never danced together on stage as a trio. Seeking to remedy this, they collectively commissioned two choreographers whose work inspired and challenged them to build new pieces on and for them. That one of these choreographers, Josh Martin, was younger and local and the other, Tedd Robinson, older and from Quebec, was also a deliberate choice. The resulting commissions are at once in dialogue with each other (both are called dwelling) and with the embodied dance histories of their performers, revealing in their own distinct ways how separate parts fit into a whole.

For Martin this means beginning with the accumulated dance repertoires that already reside in the dancers' bodies from a lifetime of performance. Walking out on stage with both the stage and house lights up, Cooper, Kwan and Stewart pause and adopt distinct poses, or make a specific gesture, before quickly exiting. They do this a couple of times before eventually coming together to help each other remember a succession of moves, using their bodies and their voices to indicate how their arms are meant to be held, or in what direction they are meant to travel across the floor. At a certain point, however, they actually drop to the floor, their heads and arms and torsos pierced by the shafts of bright white light that lighting designer James Proudfoot sends across the stage. To a gorgeous score by Stefan Smulovitz, Martin infuses his own choreographic sensibilities into the work by having the trio engage in extended floor work that draws on and adapts several of hip hop's trademark moves: rolls into suspensions anchored by an isolated and locked arm; a wrapping around of the legs and circling into verticality before a liquid and seemingly boneless collapsing at the joints sends the dancers' bodies back down to the floor. What I especially liked about this work is how the patterns approached but never quite fully meshed into full-on unison movement: which is to say that the dancers were moving together but also in response to each other. I also liked seeing what Martin's choreography looks like slowed down; this is, dare I say it, his most mature work to date.

In his piece, Robinson takes the metaphor of building a work and literalizes it for us on stage. It begins with Stewart, clad in a white canvas shift and bodice, shuffling centre stage on his toes. Positioned there is a thin length of builders' wood, supported by two tiny foot stools. Balancing his body over the wood, Stewart takes a hand saw and proceeds to cut the wood in two. Cooper, having emerged upstage left, her body also wrapped in a similar tarpaulin-like garment, balances the two bits of cut wood on her head and then exits from whence she came. Finally, Kwan's bit of balancing consists of stepping onto the two footstools, now inevitably orientalized into the distinctive Geta platform sandals worn by traditional Geisha, shuffling on them towards the downstage left footlight, and then blowing some glittery confetti off of the piece of paper she is holding. After this ritual preparation of the space, it is now ready for a collective act of creation, which in Robinson's case means demonstrating the choreography inherent in carpentry. Donning plaid work shirts over their white dresses, the dancers grab additional planks of wood leaning against the stage right wall, take up nail guns and with the precision and timing we associate with the best group dancing erect a perfect square enclosure. Into which they eventually step, enacting a final act of balancing via the successive wearing of the footstools on their heads. Featuring the contributions of longtime musical collaborator Charles Quevillon, Robinson's work is typically elliptical, but also firmly grounded in the material world.

As are each of these wonderful dancers, who bring both works on this unique and satisfying program to  life through their embodied collaboration.

P.

Ranking Vancouver

Last Tuesday, still jet-lagged, I gathered with about 30 other invited guests in the lobby of Vancouver Community College's Hamilton and Dunsmuir campus. We were attending a short preview excerpt of Ranking Vancouver, a site-specific work-in-progress that is a collaboration between radix theatre and the visiting Swiss theatre artist Matthias Werder.

The initial idea for the project arose from the fact that Vancouver and Zurich, where Werder is based, regularly top various urban livability indices and yet also share several pressing civic and social challenges, including affordability, street homelessness, and widespread injection drug use. As I understood from the excerpt that we saw Tuesday evening, the focus now seems to have narrowed to the role of gentrification in these issues as they have specifically affected Vancouver post-Expo 86.

To this end, the specific visual focus of the work is the iconic Del Mar Inn, the low-income hotel owned by George Riste (and now his heirs) that remains as a testament to one family's belief that, as the famous epigram on its facade boldly states, "unlimited growth increases the divide." The audience has a panoramic/bird's-eye view of the building and its immediate surroundings courtesy of a bank of windows in a fourth floor VCC classroom across the street, a venue whose spectatorial assets radix AD Andrew Laurenson had long wanted to exploit.

Indeed the viewing experience was not unlike that of attending an outdoor drive-in, as through the bank of glass windows we observed various comings and goings in front of and into the Del Mar and the adjacent Or Gallery, which was doubling as a dance club in this instance. The live action on the street (and, also, in one of the hotel windows) was courtesy the company members of O, o, o, o (Dan Borzillo, Tara Harris, Chelsea MacDonald, Sean Marshall Jr., Conor Wylie); meanwhile in the VCC classroom we heard in voice-over interviews with George Riste detailing his epic battle in resisting Hydro BC's pressure for him to sell, and once it became clear he wasn't about to do so the different tactics they used during the building of their complex on the adjacent corner to make his life and those of his residents a waking nightmare. This testimony mixes with another fictional narrative of the thoughts of one contemporary female resident of the hotel, whom we spy flopping on her bed and writing a letter at her desk. All of this loops with a sound score designed by Stefan Smulowitz and is accompanied by projections--the only part of the offering I found difficult to see.

Werder and radix are seeking additional funding to turn the project into a full-scale work. To this end, the showing on Tuesday was partly in service of creating a short video trailer to attract public and private investors. If you would like to contribute, you can do so here.

P. 

PuShing Further

Since Thursday, I've attended two world premieres and one remounting at the PuSh Festival.

First up was The Passion of Joan of Arc, a screening of Carl Th. Dreyer's acclaimed 1927 silent film (starring the incomparable Renée Falconetti as the nationalist martyr) in Christ Church Cathedral, accompanied by a newly commissioned score by Stefan Smulovitz, and featuring soprano Vivane Houle singing text by poet Colin Browne. The place was packed (this was a one-night only event), and the energy in the Cathedral was electric.

The performance did not disappoint. On its own, Dreyer's film, with its famous close-ups and what my colleague Laura U. Marks (who was in the audience) would call its "haptic" qualities, overwhelms the senses. Add in Smulovitz's brilliant new score, and especially the auratic counterpoint he creates between strings and wind instruments, and the effect was positively spine-tingling. Christ Church's grand cathedral organ helped in no small measure, in this regard.

On Friday it was over to the Cultch to take in the opening of Rimini Protokoll's Best Before, another commission by PuSh. Berlin-based RP is famous for working with local "experts" to create their community-based shows. In this case, the group decided to build a piece around the Lower Mainland's video gaming industry, bringing in computer programmer Brady Marks, game tester Duff Armour, traffic flagger Ellen Shultz, and former politician and Railway Club owner Bob Williams to aid in the construction of the piece, and to guide us in the audience in our interactivity.

The animating concept of the show is an on-line world called Bestland, in which audience members are given an avatar based on where they are sitting in the auditorium, and which they then manipulate via an individual console attached to their seat. Based on a series of questions posed by our experts, we get to choose our sex, gender, and various other aspects of our identity, as well as the general social, political, economic, and ethical framework for the type of society we think Bestland should be.

As a concept, the piece is brilliant; however, the practicalities of its interactive execution still need some refining, it seems to me. First off, the piece is too long: two-plus hours with no intermission. Second, our on-screen avatars are difficult to keep track of. Brady showed each of us our positions, and pointed out the "Drop" and "Jump" buttons we could press to keep track of where we were on screen. But the general indistinguishability of the avatars (they are triangle-shaped blobs of varying colours that attain different props as the show progresses), and the chaos of movement on screen as audience members hit their console buttons with mad abandon, made it difficult to figure out where one was during several crucial moments when key questions were being posed to us. Then again, it struck me that these questions were the real crux of the performance: we were told repeatedly by Duff that it was just a game, and that we could make whatever choices we wanted, choices we wouldn't normally make in life. But, of course, in games, as in life, there are always consequences, and with each additional question posed the burden of decision became that much more fraught.

Vancouver is the first test audience for this audacious show, and I have no doubt that as it travels to Brighton and Seattle and Toronto and various other cities and festivals in the coming year it will become even more complex and intriguing. For now, I was simply thrilled to be part of its unveiling.

Finally, last night we took in the final show of Rumble Productions and Theatre Replacement's Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut at Performance Works on Granville Island. First shown at the 2008 PuSh Festival, the show concerns performer James Long's discovery, in 2005, of a suitcase full of photo albums in the alley near his East Vancouver home, and the theatrical narrative he and his collaborators proceeded to construct around the documents. When, however, the family behind the photographs gets wind of the idea, they threaten legal action, and the play becomes instead at once an hilarious and deeply moving rumination on the documentary process and the ownership of memory. All of this is revealed slowly and cannily via various visual means in the production, in a manner akin to time lapse photography, with the suck-in-the breath moment coming at the end of the performance when one realizes that all along Long had really been talking at a displaced remove about his own family. There's a lot of humour in the work, but also a great deal of self-loathing, and the first clue in this regard should be the bunny suit.

P.