The Mute Canary at SFU Woodward's

The Turning Point Ensemble's 2018-19 season opener was a program at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre that featured four works by the Czech-Canadian composer Rudolf Komorous. An added bonus was the screening of an opening short film commissioned by the Canadian Music Centre that contextualized Komorous's approach to music, and also his career as a faculty member in the School of Music at the University of Victoria, where he trained several of this country's most esteemed contemporary composers, including TPE Artistic Director Owen Underhill. As an illustrative and pedagogical tool I found the film's animation of several of Komorous's scores to be particularly effective, especially in explaining his method of spatial, or proportional, notation.

Three short works from the 60s through the 80s followed the film. In the first, Olympia, Underhill and Christopher Butterfield, from U Vic, sat on either side of a table filled with an assortment of instruments, some of them more or less recognizable (a melodica, a harmonica), some of them not (a flexatone, acolyte bells). With Butterfield having first set a stop watch, he and Underhill then combined the sounds made from these instruments into what was at once thoroughly strange and wonderfully surprising: who knew the flexatone made that kind of noise when waved in the air? How delightful to insert the nightingale whistle there! Fuman Manga, a woodwind quintet from 1981/85 followed. From a fluttery flute opening it gradually built in complexity, incorporating the deeper tones of the bassoon and french horn near the end in a way that jolted me out of my seat. This first half of the program culminated with 23 Poems about Horses, Komorous's setting of a suite of poems by the Chinese poet Li-He. The English translation of these poems was narrated by Butterfield as Underhill conducted the TPE musicians in another widely eclectic but sonically rewarding score.

Following intermission we were treated to Canadian premiere of a new chamber opera written by Komorous. The Mute Canary is based on a play by the Dadaist Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes (in a translation by Butterfield) and received its world premiere earlier this summer at New Opera Days Ostrava in the Czech Republic. TPE was able to bring the Czech directors (Jan Horák and Michal Pĕchouček) and choreographer (Markéta Vacovská) to Vancouver for this restaging of the work, which features Alexander Dobson as the baritone Riquet, Anne Grimm as the soprano Barate, and Daniel Cabena as the countertenor Ochre. The deliberately non-sensical libretto largely revolves around a bored husband and wife: Riquet wants to go hunting, while Barate wants to know what time it is, while also decrying love and trying to entice Riquet, who is wont to hurl abusive epithets at her, to take notice of her. Into this dysfunctional relationship steps Ochre, a kind of satyr-figure (Cabena clops across the stage in cloven hooves and a swishy white tale). Barate is instantly smitten and wants to know his name; Ochre says he's the composer Gounod, which registers as equally strange to Barate and us in the audience. But then Dadaist operas aren't really supposed to make sense, are they? Much better to revel instead in the sensuous pleasures of the music and the staging, both of which are in this case simultaneously spare and lustrous. Watching Grimm make a perfect circle on the Wong stage floor with shaving cream was, as it were, the absurdist icing on this afternoon's delightful musical cake.

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PuSh 2018: Radio Rewrite at the Norman Rothstein Theatre

At last year's PuSh Festival, Turning Point Ensemble Artistic Director Owen Underhill put together an amazing program of music that situated the compositions of rock star Frank Zappa alongside the work of Edgard Varèse and John Oswald. For this year's festival he's done something similar, pairing work by Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood with pieces by Olivier Messiaen, Christopher Butterfield, and Steve Reich. The concerts just concluded a two-evening run at the Norman Rothstein Theatre last night.

I had no idea that Greenwood had such an interest in classical and orchestral music, let alone that he had composed numerous pieces for the ondes martenot, an early electronic instrument invented in France after WWI that Messiaen favoured, and which looks like a keyboard and sounds a bit like a theremin. Two ondes martenots were on stage last night and guest TPE artists Estelle Lemire and Geneviève Grenier were featured soloists on all but three pieces. These included a world premiere, Short Room, by local composer Christopher Butterfield, and a new arrangement by Lemire of a 1937 piece by Messiaen, Dieuxième Oraison.

I was most taken with the sound of the ondes martenot when it was paired with the wind instruments, especially the lone french horn in Butterfield's piece. It really is a remarkable instrument and once again I am grateful to Underhill and TPE for bringing to audiences' attention its unsung musical history and influence.

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PuSh 2017: Zappa Meets Varèse and Oswald

Who knew that Turning Point Ensemble Artistic Director Owen Underhill was such a Frank Zappa fan? Or that Zappa, who apparently kept putting out rock and roll records (first with his band the Mothers of Invention, and then as a solo artist) so he could keep composing his orchestral works, was so influenced by French composer Edgard Varèse, one of the pioneers of musique concrète? In fact, the answer to both questions forms the basis for TPE's latest concert, Zappa Meets Varèse and Oswald: The Present Day Composer Refuses to Die, presented with the PuSh Festival at SFU Woodward's this past weekend. The third composer in this equation of influence is Canadian John Oswald, whose early experiments in "plunderphonics" prefigured contemporary sampling practices, and who was commissioned to write a new work, Refuse, for this concert.

I don't think I've ever seen so many musicians on stage at a TPE concert, and in the large ensemble pieces by Zappa especially one really felt the swing and rhythm of the wind instruments and percussion (there were three artists overseeing that section) and, of course, guitars. Indeed, the last piece on the program, G-Spot Tornado, was accompanied by a brisk, mamboesque duet choreographed by my colleague Rob Kitsos and performed by dancers Diego Romero and Anya Saugstad. The commission by Oswald, in "emulating Varèse's ascending octaves and fifths, and incorporating Zappa's rapid-fire collage of disparate genres," takes as its starting point some of the pop songs that were at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 list in January 1966. It also blends in references to other recognizable television and movie theme songs in order to suggest that in the detritus of musical history one can also find a shared signature that transcends time and place and narrow and isolationist ideologies (Varèse, who spent many years in the US teaching and conducting, was a committed internationalist, once proposing a "League of Nations of Art").

In these bleak times that's an idea I can snap my fingers to.

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Superimposition at the Chan Centre

Turning Point Ensemble's last concert of the 2015/16 season, Superimposition, takes place this weekend at the Chan Centre's Telus Studio. TPE is sharing the stage with the Nu:BC Collective (flutist Paolo Bortolussi, cellist Eric Wilson, and pianist Corey Hamm), a trio that has been an ensemble-in-residence at UBC for the past decade.

Last night's performance opened with TPE presenting a lively septet by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa Lobos. Nu:BC followed with a new arrangement of Ana Sokolović's Portrait Parle, a violin concerto transposed to the flute. As Bortolussi indicated in introducing the piece, this involved a bit of head-scratching, including how one plays the actual scratch of a string on a wind instrument. The first half of the program then concluded with the premiere of John Oliver's Cool Cut, a jazz concerto in five songs that saw TPE accompanying the solo alto saxophonist Julia Nolan. The quotations of Billy Strayhorn's Lush Life and Dave Brubeck's Take Five, among other jazz classics, were wonderfully accomplished, and it was a great to hear TPE's crackerjack musicians getting into the swing of things.

Following intermission, we were treated to two more premieres. The first, Dorothy Chang's Bagatelles, was a series of six short studies for Nu:BC, each exploring a different theme. Finally, Aaron Gervais's Break Up or Make Up pitted the Nu:BC and TPE ensembles against each other, albeit in a way that was less about who could dominate or subdue the other musically than about Gervais's own compositional battle with Lisztian Romanticism.

I actually lied when I opened this post by saying that this was the last concert of the season for TPE. In fact, the ensemble will be premiering a new cello concerto by TPE Artistic Director and Conductor Owen Underhill on the afternoon of June 5th at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre. This will be followed by an exclusive wine tasting and reception featuring more music at L'Abattoir restaurant that will double as a fundraiser for TPE. More information and tickets can be found here.

air india [REDACTED] at SFU Woodward's

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the worst act of terror in Canadian history, the bombing of Air India Flight 182, which exploded off the coast of Ireland on June 23, 1985, killing all 329 persons on board. The criminal trial, one of the longest in Canadian history, resulted in the acquittal of the accused. A subsequent inquiry revealed, among other things, that the RCMP knew about the planned attack--and yet did nothing to prevent it. A national public trauma whose legacy of grief has yet to be fully processed or exorcised, this "act of historical violence" exists, in the words of poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, "more on the margins of collective consciousness than at the centre of [Canada's] imagination."

Thank goodness, then, for artists, whose task it is to poke at our amnesiac cocooning. Saklikar's book of poems, Children of Air India: un/authorized exhibits and interjections (2013), serves as the basis for a remarkable new chamber opera commissioned by Vancouver's Turning Point Ensemble, which is currently receiving its world premiere at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre. The last performance is tonight, on Remembrance Day, and it is not to be missed. Wedding Saklikar's words to composer Jürgen Simpson's richly layered and haunting score, this Irish-Canadian co-production strips opera down to the essential relationship between music and voice, substituting spareness for spectacle, and editing out all traces of sentimentality.

To this end, director Tom Creed has his three singers--soprano Zorana Sadiq, countertenor Daniel Cabena, and baritone Alexander Dobson--deliver their respective arias while seated at a long table. Channeling, via Saklikar's poetry, the voices of friends and family of the victims, investigating officers and court reporters, the trio does not parse out for us any harmonically resolvable explanation of narrative events. Rather, in dissonant counterpoint and textured tonal engagement, they stretch out for us "one unending song" of grief. Above the singers John Galvin's remarkable video projections unspool as an inky overlay of fathomless ocean waters, blacked-out evidentiary documents, and the scrambled lines of voicebox data recorders, the search for meaning in all of this--about sanctioned state violence, or a life ended prematurely--necessarily redacted.

This principle of obscured or selective remembering is also captured acoustically within the score. Behind the singers air india musical director and TPE artistic director Owen Underhill works with his remarkable group of musicians to find and hold the silences between Simpson's notes (the plucked minor keys of Kinza Tyrell's piano standing out early in the program), and also--at key moments--to interpolate pre-recorded bits of white noise. These moments are jarring, but also completely appropriate, jolting us out of passive spectatorship and into active witnessing. For in trying to represent sonically all that is contained within the story of Air India 182, I can think of no better metaphor than playing at equal intensity every frequency within the spectrum of human hearing.

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Music for a Thousand Autumns at the Orpheum Annex

Last night the Turning Point Ensemble opened its tenth anniversary season at the Orpheum Annex. It was my first time at this newish theatre, built--along with the Vancouver Symphony School of Music's Pyatt Hall--as one of the cultural amenities attached to the high-rise tower that went up where the old Vancouver Place cinemas used to be. Located on the second floor, with street signage that is negligible, the space can be hard to find. However, at approximately 150 seats, with a perimeter balcony around which you could squeeze about 30 more if needed, it's a nice, intimate size. And its warm, wood-panelled interior is well-suited to the acoustics of a chamber ensemble.

While devoted to the musical repertoire of the early-twentieth century onward, as TPE Artistic Director Owen Underhill noted in his opening remarks, the ensemble has always had a special mandate to commission new work. To that end, last night's all-Canadian program featured two world premieres, as well as a work newly revised especially for TPE. First up, however, was the great Alexina Louie's Music for a Thousand Autumns, one of her first commissions after returning from studies in the US in 1983. An additional special treat of this program is that all of the composers are present in Vancouver and so we got to hear from each of them in advance of the performance of their work. Among other things, Louie told us that the piece was an attempt to reconcile her Western musical training with her Chinese heritage (she grew up in Vancouver). Thus, in the interplay between the percussion, the strings and the wind instruments of this piece--especially in its second movement--we hear a beautiful take on the ancient Chinese instrument known as the chin (a sort of fretless zither). The third movement also builds to a wonderful, crashing piano cadenza, which Jane Hayes played with marvellous energy and sparkling colour.

In his remarks, Anthony Tan told us that his music is an exploration of sound on a purely sensory level. He is not interested in social or cultural influences, or having his music "represent" anything. Rather, as in the case of the piece we heard last night, On the Sensations of Tone #1 (jointly commissioned by TPE and the Ensemble contemporaine de Montréal), he is trying to foreground the physical experience of timbre. This means that Hayes plucks the strings of the piano and clacks the side of it with her nails as much as she plays the keys; that the flautist (Brenda Fedoruk) and clarinetist (Erin Fung) get up every now and then to have impromptu quasi-tuning sessions with Hayes; and that they, together with violinist Mary Sokol-Brown and cellist Ariel Barnes, all work noise-makers underneath their shoes at various points in the piece. It was certainly a most visceral experience of sound, and one that--for all its strange dissonance--was not without its tonal pleasures.

Linda Catlin Smith's Gold Leaf was created for the Glenn Gould School's New Music Ensemble in 2010. In it she was trying to think through the process of composing for a chamber orchestra, in which each of the instruments has a distinct personality, while also needing to come together to create harmonic colour. She likens the process, in her program notes, to a painter's palette, with in her case the percussion adding an outer layer of shimmer, as in the gold leaf of a painting by Klimt.

Percussionist Jonathan Bernard is certainly given a workout in this program, especially in the final two pieces. Vancouver-based Dorothy Chang's Three Windows was created in 2011, inspired by the views over the Strait of Georgia from her UBC condo (where she teaches in the Faculty of Music). The first movement is based on the motion of clouds, the second on the swirling flight of an eagle, and the third on the sights and sounds of human construction on the UBC campus. Hence the swelling scherzo-like cacophony of "metal on wood" that Bernard is charged with leading at the end of this work. Something very much approximating a drum solo for Bernard also concludes the world premiere of Louie's A Curious Passerby at Fu's Funeral, which the composer informed us started from the premise that she knew TPE's members "could play really fast." The piece was certainly played at full throttle by all concerned and was a most energetic way to concluded the evening.

TPE goes on the road with this program in the coming weeks: to Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal. Then it is back to Vancouver for another world premiere: the chamber opera air india [redacted], on at SFU Woodward's from November 6-11, and not to be missed.

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Ballet BC's Grace Symmetry

The current mixed program by Ballet BC, on through this evening at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, is the second collaboration between the company and the Turning Point Ensemble, following their "double anniversary" celebrations in April 2011.

Back from that original program is Wen Wei Wang's In Motion, his danced meditation on Turning Point conductor and Co-Artistic Director Owen Underhill's original composition, "The Geometry of Harmony." The conceit of the piece is that the musicians are on stage with the dancers, performing upstage, behind a scrim. The scrim is raised twice to allow for more focused explorations of the relationships between sound and movement. The first time flautist Brenda Fedoruk steps forward to accompany Emily Chessa in a graceful solo. The second time violinist Mary Sokol Brown is in the spotlight, guiding Gilbert Small and Peter Smida in an affecting duet that is notable for its horizontal floor work and almost contact-improv-like structures of support. The piece has definitely grown on me since its premiere, and it's a treat to see musicians and dancers responding to each other so immediately and intimately.

Next up was Prelude, a world premiere by Medhi Walerski, whose Petite Cérémonie has become a staple of Ballet BC's repertoire. This new work is set to music by Lera Auerbach, whose austere and conceptually elegant preludes for piano and violin lead to a meditation in movement on time as measure: of dance steps, as well as the imagination more generally. It begins with Darren Devaney poised on a rung of stairs below the stage at audience left; he holds one hand aloft. As a few lonely piano bars are played offstage (by the amazing Jane Hayes), the curtain rises on the rest of the Ballet BC ensemble, who are already moving. And they continue to do so even after the piano accompaniment fades out, with Walerski beautifully exploiting the spatial dimensions of silence in the same way that Auerbach had played with resonance between each of her notes. However, at a certain point Peter Kyrsa's violin comes crashing in, and this is the cue for the otherwise disparately moving dancers to form into a unified corps around Devaney and Rachel Meyer. A series of flowing yet intensely athletic duets for these two dancers (featuring lots of complex and body-hugging lifts) are accompanied by the more gestural language given to the rest of the dancers, who often frame the couple on either wing or, as at the end, along the upstage curtain, repeating a series of synchronized arm movements. The piece closes with that upstage line of bodies collapsing like an accordion to the floor as Devaney, now alone centre-stage, begins a convulsive, twitching solo, the curtain slowly descending as we see Meyer emerge as if from thin air to observe her abandoned partner from his former place on the downstage stairs.

The evening concluded with a co-commission by Ballet BC and Turning Point. In Here on End, Kevin O'Day has choreographed a full company work to new music by longtime collaborator John King. The score issues forth from the orchestra pit (where the TPE musicians are now ensconced) in blasts of strings and brass and percussion. Similarly, the dancers race on and off the stage to perform increasingly physical movement patterns in various bodily combinations: duos and trios and quartets. Both musically and in terms of the at-times Jerome Robbins-like choreography, I was put in mind of the Sharks and Jets sequences from West Side Story. In this respect, the piece is also notable for the intensely atmospheric lighting by James Proudfoot (the lighting designer for all three pieces). Overhead specials keep lowering closer and closer to the stage as the piece wears on, enclosing the dancers into ever tighter massings, until at the end of the piece we see the entire ensemble encircling, somewhat menacingly, an unsuspecting Small--who nevertheless dances on until we get a perfectly timed blackout.

Three more world premieres conclude the 2013/14 Ballet BC season in April. And already the line-up for next year has been announced. It features lots more new and boundary-pushing contemporary work, but also some classics: a re-imagined and collaboratively interdisciplinary Rite of Spring, with choreography by Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar and Gustavo Ramirez Sansano; and an evening of Balanchine works courtesy of the Miami City Ballet.

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PuSh 2013: Cinema Musica

In addition to their always brilliant playing, what I most admire about The Turning Point Ensemble is the thoughtfulness and adventurousness of their programming, which frequently involves crossing disciplines and commissioning bold new work. Both of these elements were on display yesterday in Cinema Musica, a "live conversation" between music and film that unfolded at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Theatre, as part of the PuSh Festival.

As conductor and Co-Artistic Director Owen Underhill announced in his curtain speech, the program involved some "epic" technical demands. That said, the afternoon opened simply, with the only work not involving live musicians. Stan Brakhage's "..." Reel 5 (1998) is a hand-painted 16 mm film edited to composer James Tenney's Flocking, a work for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart. While Brakhage's films are often silent, in this case the slightly dissonant call-and-response between the pianos enriches the dialogue between the two dominant visual styles of the film, which moves between images that alternately put me in mind of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings and Mark Rothko's multiforms.

By contrast, it was Paul Klee who came to mind in watching the piece that followed. Chromo Concerto (2007), a collaboration between composer Michael Oesterle and animator Chris Hinton, brought Underhill and a chamber-size portion of his musicians on stage, and featured a gorgeous piano solo by Chris Morano that added a different kind of tonal colour to the simple circle and line drawings by Hinton. This portion of the program concluded with Regen (1929), an early silent "city symphony" film by Joris Ivens for which Hans Eisler wrote a live score some 12 years later. Turning Point has been "instrumental" in researching the correct synchronization of sound and image, and yesterday the results were truly beguiling.

Following the first intermission was the world premiere of Good Night Vision (2013), a collaboration between visual artist Judy Radul and Turning Point that featured live and prerecorded video and performance. The piece begins with actor Aryo Khakpour commenting on a series of YouTube clips featuring thermal cameras (which operate on heat rather than light to produce their images), before noting the coincidence that the composer Ferruccio Busoni and the filmmaker Billy Wilder happened to live in the same Berlin apartment complex (though not at the same time). This, then, is the jumping off point for Radul's theoretical ruminations on film and death, music and elegy, turning two thermal cameras of her own on the Turning Point musicians as they play Busoni's Berceuse élégiaque, the ensemble's heat producing the equivalent of a negative film image.

Next up was Stan Douglas's Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe: Ruskin B.C. (1993), a video installation that was originally accompanied by a computer-controlled piano playing an adaptation of Arnold Schönberg's Begleitmusik. For this screening of the film, a mash-up of early silent and film noir aesthetics that also serves as an oblique commentary on racial and environmental politics, Turning Point performed a chamber version of the score by Schönberg, who for many years tried and failed to write music for Hollywood cinema.

Finally, the afternoon concluded with another world premiere, François Houle's Suspense (2013), a rumination on the great symphonic film scores from the 1940s that was counterpointed--visually and sonically--with stop-motion images of various members of the Turning Point Ensemble projected onto a rear projection screen. Additionally, projected onto a white scrim at the front of the stage were images of gymnasts flying through the air captured with high-speed cameras by American video artists David and Hin-Jin Hodge. Visually this was all very stunning, but I'm not sure in this case the suspense created by the images went with that evoked by the music.

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PuSh 2012 Review #9: Turning Point's Colourful World at SFU Woodward's

These are some of the colours I heard last night at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU Woodward's, where the magnificent Turning Point Ensemble performed a full evening of music as part of the PuSh Festival.

Morton Feldman's "Short Trumpet Piece," a solo overture played by Marcus Goddard from the back of the auditorium, heralded bright sunbursts in advance of "Rain Coming," a short orchestral work by Toru Takemitsu that was as changeable in its tonality as Vancouver weather, and that put me in mind of the way the German painter Gerhard Richter is able to capture the complexity and startling vibrancy of so many shades of grey.

Next up was a 1915 cello sonata by Claude Debussy. In this intimate and playful work in three movements, the call and response between Ariel Barnes on cello and Jane Hayes on piano, particularly in the middle movement when both set about plucking their instruments in striking ways, conjured a dance of light and shadow, as when late afternoon sun filters through a leafy tree on a windy day and dapples the sidewalk in constantly shifting patterns.

Then came the centrepiece of the evening, the world premiere of Rodney Sharman's Chamber Symphony. Written in two movements, the first was a weird and wonderful jangle of dissonant sounds, like silvery icicles crackling in a wintry landscape that can't decide if it's warming up or getting colder. Things definitely get hotter in the second movement, a rousing take on the scherzo form, the strings now alighting a red flame beneath the other instruments.

After intermission there were two more works by Takemitsu and Debussy. Takemitsu's "Archipelago S." positioned the ensemble in five separate instrumental groups--including clarinetists François Houle and Caroline Gauthier in the upper balconies stage left and right--lonely islands connected by a deep blue sea of sound. And finally we heard Debussy's "Jeux," newly arranged by Michael Bushnell. Listening to its bright tempo changes (and influenced no doubt by the original Ballet Russes commission), I couldn't help seeing tennis whites, albeit requisitely dotted with strategic grass stains.

A most enjoyable evening of music, and a fitting tribute to Milton Wong, to whom the concert was dedicated.

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Anniversaries in Movement and Music

Two out of four ain't bad.

At last night's season-ending Double Anniversary celebration of Ballet BC (25 years and teetering in the balance) and The Turning Point Ensemble (simply on fire after 5 years), we were presented with four world premieres by Canadian choreographers, each paired with original music performed live by TPE. But the first and last pieces, former Ballet BC company member Wen Wei Wang's In Motion and Gioconda Barbuto's Touch, left me unmoved--despite the kinesthetic appeal of their titles. Interestingly, both also revealed the greatest debt to classical tradition, with Wang's piece largely performed on point, and Barbuto's trading heavily on extension and line. But pretty poses are not enough if the corps lacks an emotional core, and the only time I felt a real connection to the dancers in either piece was during the gorgeous pas de deux performed by Dario Dinuzzi and Gilbert Small in Wang's piece. This was done to solo violin, with Mary Sokol Brown stepping out from the ensemble (positioned upstage, behind a scrim, one consequence of which was that the music for this first piece, a gorgeous composition by TPE conductor Owen Underhill, had to be amplified through speakers) to literally accompany the dancers centre stage.

For Serge Bennathan's Les chercheurs de dieu and BBC company member Donald Sales' Moththe TPE musicians were back in the orchestra pit and the unamplified sound was much more resonate. As was the dancing. Bennathan's piece, set to a newly commissioned score by Michael Oesterle, reminded me at the beginning of Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein's collaborations in West Side Story. The dancers were moving in packs, low to the ground, with the occasional vertical explosion, arms stretched to the ceiling, hands and fingers pulsing, quickening toward and by an energy other than their own. It was a force that transferred horizontally to the audience as well.

Finally, Sales' Moth, dedicated to the memory of his older brother, was a deeply moving meditation on grief. On a stage lit with tea candles, supplemented by the subtle artificial amber glow created by lighting designer James Proudfoot (who did a superb job lighting all four pieces), five female and one male dancer strip through the layers of denial and blame and guilt in successive solos that in their controlled abandon reveal both the vulnerability and the resiliency of the human body. A final pas de deux between Peter Smida (who has perhaps the perfect male dancer's body) and one of the female dancers (I'm sorry to say I can't remember which) to an "Epilogue for cello and piano" composed by Underhill was just stunning.

BBC Artistic Director Emily Molnar has announced the company's next season, and it is jam packed with visiting companies (including the National Ballet of Canada, which will be celebrating its own 60th anniversary) and new work (culminating in a full evening of pieces by new resident choreographer José Navas). I hope they can do a good sell, as last night's house was pretty thin, even with the added subscription base and audience from Turning Point. Granted, they were competing with a Canucks playoff game (a sad comment on this city). However, I think the company's recovery is still on very shaky ground. Despite the wobbles last night, the risks Molnar is taking in her programming, including cross-disciplinary collaborations like this one with TPE, deserve to be rewarded.

Here's hoping the company is around for at least another 25 years.

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Turning Point On Fire at the Cultch

Proving that their stunning 2009 collaborative re-interpretation of Erik Satie's Relâche was not a one-off, the Turning Point Ensemble, Simone Orlando, and Josh Beamish's MOVE: the company, have done it once again, giving us a brand new Firebird 100 years after its Paris premiere.

Winner of the 2011 Rio Tinto Alcan Performing Arts Award for Music, Turning Point's Artistic Director and resident conductor, Owen Underhill, has commissioned a new chamber arrangement of Stravinsky's original score by Michael Bushnell. This comprises the first 35-minute half of the evening's program, and this lighter, more delicate version, featuring wind instruments, harp, and timpani and percussion to wonderful effect, was received rapturously by last night's audience at The Cultch.

After a 30-minute intermission, the audience returns to discover a cleared stage and the Turning Point musicians arranged on different levels of upstage scaffolding, part of Alan Storey's amazing set, complete with spiraling staircase and moveable ledges. MOVE Artistic Director and principal dancer Josh Beamish sits at the foot of the stairs, dressed in grey, and methodically folding innumerable paper cranes, which litter the floor at his feet. As the musicians warm up and tune their instruments, MOVE company members Cai Glover, Heather Dotto, and Gavin Stewart take turns improvising movement sequences as audience members file to their seats. When the house lights dim and Underhill assumes his position in the tech box behind the orchestra seating, from whence he will conduct Jocelyn Morlock's original score, we are ready for the start of Luft, Orlando's bold and beautiful choreographic take on the quest motif in the Firebird story.

As the Prince Ivan figure, I don't think I have ever seen Beamish dance as gorgeously, his amazing technique perfectly matched to Orlando's delicate and precise (and classically influenced) movement vocabulary. The amount of muscle control alone that it takes to flutter one's arms and hands the way Beamish effortlessly appears to do is astounding. Natalie Portman, eat your heart out! (And, yes, there is a Black Swan/White Swan motif at play here.) Expertly paired with Beamish as the Firebird is Alison Denham, and their pas de deux (particularly the floorwork) was especially captivating. The other dancers provide graceful accompaniment throughout, and, indeed, one of the most pleasing aspects of Luft is how thoroughly the MOVE dancers embody the musicality of Orlando's choreography, which in turn helps to highlight Morlock's lush score.

In short, this is a cross-disciplinary artistic collaboration that I hope goes far into the future, yielding still more bold reinterpretations of the classics. I personally vote for The Rite of Spring next! We have, dare I say, in Owen Underhill Vancouver's very own version of Diaghilev. And Turning Point, in its commissioning of and collaboration with other artists, is fast becoming a Ballets Russes for the 21st century.

Firebird is on at the Cultch through this Saturday.

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Imprint and In Print

Turning Point Ensemble, Vancouver's fantastic new music collective co-directed by my SFU colleague Owen Underhill, has a new show up at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, with performances continuing this afternoon and tomorrow evening.

The program features three world premieres: Minx, a short orchestral work by Vancouver Island composer Rudolf Komorous; Cut Flowers, by Linda Caitlin Smith, a lush setting of 44 lines taken from the sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning for orchestra and soprano (the superb Phoebe MacRae); and Imprint II, an ambitious collaboration between Underhill and choreographer Henry Daniel (also a colleague at SFU) that combines music, dance, film, and multi-media installation, and that in putting all of these elements together makes fantastic use of this terrific new theatrical space.

Read David Gordon Duke's review of the evening in the Vancouver Sun here.

Meanwhile, in today's Globe and Mail we learn that the Victoria Fringe Festival, like Vancouver's event, is the latest community arts festival in the province to be denied a gaming grant this year. But not because they're a "commercial enterprise," as was claimed earlier by Rich Coleman in justifying the freezing out of festivals from eligibility for such grants. No, in the government's latest Kafkaesque (not to mention, tautological) logic, they have written (in an unsigned letter, no less) to Victoria Fringe Director Ian Case that the hugely popular 23 year-old festival does "not reflect the community, regional or cultural characteristics of [its] community," and is thus ineligible for a grant. Clearly, as with grants to municipal school boards and social programs across the province, Campbell and his band of philistines are just making their arts policy up as they go along.

In between trying to get their stories straight for the Basi-Virk trial, no doubt.

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Of Rest and Revivals

Obamamania hits Canada, as the US President and his security detail descend on Ottawa today for his first foreign visit since taking office in January. A shame that Prime Minister Harper has nixed an address to Parliament, but no doubt he fears being upstaged. Kudos to the CBC and news anchor Peter Mansbridge, then, for getting Obama to sit down for a television interview in Washington in advance of his visit earlier this week. At least questions relating to Alberta's oil sands and Canada's combat mission in Afghanistan were put out on the table in an open and frank manner. Which is more than will likely happen at any press conferences or photo ops to emerge from today's whirlwind tour and meetings. However, of note to this blog's abiding interest in issues of performance and place, apparently Obama, upon reaching Parliament Hill this morning, first commented on its Gothic architecture, and the contrast between DC's Neoclassical/Beaux Arts style. Richard wondered aloud just last evening whether Obama would register the difference and make any connections re contrasting national temperaments and histories. Sure enough, he did. Smart man. I hope he's getting some rest.

This past week, we attended two wonderful performance revivals. First up was Turning Point music ensemble's remount of Erik Satie's 1924 Dadaist Gesamskunstwerke, Relâche, which featured original music by the composer, sets and dramaturgy by Francis Picabia, a ballet by choreographer Jean Börlin, and a cinematic entr'acte by filmmaker René Clair (featuring appearances by Satie, Picabia, Duchamps, and Man Ray). The original apparently thrilled and scandalized Parisian audiences in equal measure. This remount was the brainchild of my SFU Contemporary Arts colleague, Owen Underhill, who together with his Artistic Co-Director at Turning Point, Jeremy Berkman, enlisted the talents of local artist Greg Snider (also from SFU), choreographer Simone Orlando, dancers Tiffany Tregarthen, Edmond Kilpatrick, Heather Dotto, Scott Augustine, Josh Beamish, Mackenzie Green-Dusterbeck, and David Raymond, soprano Phoebe MacRae, and actor Patti Allen, to reintroduce Satie's music and Clair's film to a new generation. It was a truly delightful spectacle, a feast for all the senses, and a reminder that, as with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring nine years earlier, the European modernists still have something to teach us about artistic interdisciplinarity and avant-gardism.

Then this past Tuesday it was to the Stanley Theatre to see the Arts Club's revival of Somerset Maugham's 1926 comedy of marital infidelity, The Constant Wife. An updating of William Wycherley via George Bernard Shaw, the play is Maugham's smart and sassy proto-feminist take on love, marriage, and sexual economics. Constance Middleton (Nicole Underhay) appears blissfully devoted to her husband of 15 years, Dr. John Middleton (Ted Cole), and apparently equally ignorant of the fact that he has been carrying on an affair with her best friend, the blonde bubble-headed Marie-Louise Durham (Celine Stubel), for quite some time. This news is presented to us at the top of the play, by Constance's vexed sister Martha (Moya O'Connell), who is determined that Constance should know the truth and divorce John immediately. However, Martha and Constance's dowager mother, Mrs. Culver (Bridget O'Sullivan), is equally determined that Martha keep her mouth shut and not upset the status quo, arguing that men are congenitally unfaithful and that where was the harm in that so long as John continued to provide for Constance the life to which she has become accustomed. Finally, Constance's widowed friend Barbara Fawcett (Katey Wright), a self-employed interior designer with a booming business, has also heard the news of the affair, and has come to offer Constance a job, seeing financial independence as a bulwark against the possible dissolution of her marriage. 

What nobody knows is that Constance is actually aware of John's affair and perfectly content to let it continue without anyone's interference. This becomes clear when Marie Louise's husband, Mortimer (Mark Burgess), enters in Act Two to accuse John of adultery with his wife, having found his cigarette case under her pillow. Constance, however, claims the case to be her own, having long ago confiscated it from her husband and mistakenly left it in the Durhams' bedroom after a day of shopping and trying on clothes with Marie Louise. Mortimer eventually accepts this explanation, but the rest are left to wonder why Constance would lie for her husband, and why she is herself not beside herself with fury knowing she has been betrayed by her best friend.

This, then, is where Maugham elevates his elegant comedy of manners to razor sharp commentary that remains as contemporary today as when it was first staged in the 1920s (with Ethel Barrymore playing the lead). For Constance proceeds to outline a theory of love, affection, and desire that is as inconstant and mutable as marriage's institutional and economic structures are reliably gendered and hierarchized. In short, Constance is herself no longer "in love" with John; but she is fond of him, and very conscious of the fact that he provides a comfortable home and lifestyle for her, and so why should she not fully buy into the pretense of bourgeois respectability that she signed up for in the first place? Maugham is not content to leave things there, and complicates this situation even further by introducing an old suitor of Constance's, Bernard Kersal (Mike Wasko), into this mix. He is still madly in love with her, and she appreciates the attention, and so having decided to take Barbara up on her offer of joining her design firm, in Act Three proceeds to buy her way out of her marriage--at least temporarily--and go on a vacation to Italy with Bernard in order to test her own response to his ardor. She announces her plan to John, who is of course apoplectic with rage, but who nevertheless accedes to her artful and witty quid pro quo logic about sexual economics: having paid her own debt to John for his long-term financial support by returning to him a portion of her own earnings from Barbara's design business, she now feels she can, like him, take out a temporary mortgage on monogamous marriage and enjoy a break with Bernard.

As I said, the play continues to have all sorts of contemporary relevance, not least in the context of same-sex marriage. Indeed, given that Maugham's own serial infidelity toward his wife Syrie (herself a designer, and the model for Constance) mostly took the form of affairs with other men, the layers of meaning are very rich indeed. This production is smart and sexy, crisply directed (by Morris Panych) and acted (Underhay is a real gem), and gorgeously designed (Ken MacDonald's all-white art deco set is the perfect homage to Syrie, who was famous for introducing the look in the 1920s, and Nancy Bryant's costumes cut the perfect silhouette on all the actors, especially the women). The show runs until this Sunday--I urge all in the area to attend.

One final bit of sad news I just learned is that local actor and playwright Lorena Gale has metastatic stomach cancer. There will be a benefit performance in her honour at the Firehall this Monday, February 23rd at 7 pm, featuring staged readings from her plays Je me souviens, Angélique, and The Darwinist. Our thoughts are with you, Lorena.

P.