DOTE 2018: Mascall Dance's OW at St. Paul's Anglican Church

Yesterday evening I trekked to the West End to take in one of Dancing on the Edge's "Edge Off" presentations, that is, works not taking place at the Firehall or Dance Centre. The piece was Mascall Dance's latest ensemble creation, OW, created by Jennifer Mascall in collaboration with 20 (yes, that's right, 20!) incredible dancer-performers, and presented as always at Mascall Dance's home base at St. Paul's Anglican Church on Jervis Street.

OW is a study of the relationship between sound and the body. Working from a libretto made up of vocalized syllables, cries, noises, and utterances that are deliberately non-sensical--similar to improvised scat singing in jazz music--the piece is made up of a series of interconnected vignettes that explore how, why and from where our bodies produce sound, and how that additionally reverberates in movement. (The vocal coach for OW is DB Boyko, and additional musical composition is provided by Stefan Smulovitz.) While Mascall takes pains in her brief program note to explain that OW is non-narrative, structurally it is styled like a work of musical theatre, at least in its groupings of dancers (the soundtrack playing before the start of the work is also a clue).

Our would-be romantic principals are Billy Marchenski and Molly McDermott, although the mostly hissing sounds that emanate from their mouths when they are near each other, and their wary circling of each other on the in-the-round stage floor--not to mention the way Molly climbs over Billy's body during their climactic duet--mostly suggests a tonal dynamic of repulsion rather than attraction. Comic relief comes by way of a quartet comprised of Anne Cooper, Walter Kubanek, Vanessa Goodman, and Eloi Homer, who banter back and forth with each other in an exuberantly demonstrative phonetic glossolalia, their strung-together plosives and fricatives and diphthongs and glottal stops accompanied by a range of popular dance styles, from a virtuosic tap sequence to a chest- and shoe-thumping folk dance circle in which the dancers' vocal communication is now filtered through kazoos.

Finally, there is a large chorus of younger dancers whose mostly unison and canon choreography is complemented by an enunciated score of call and response: with each other, and also with the other groups of dancers. Here, especially, it was fascinating to take note of the ways in which certain sounds seem intuitively to call forth distinctive styles of physical expression, with harsher noises (guttural cries and shouts) often accompanied by more martial movements (marching and foot stomping), whereas softer sounds (coos and whistles) seem to produce kinetic ripples that are more flowing and undulating. On this front, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the impressive cameo appearance made by Eowynn Enquist, who together with Molly McDermott and Vanessa Goodman forms a gorgeous trio, one whose sinuous arm waves and buffeting back and forth in space of each other's bodies is held aloft through a softly sung three-part harmony. (That Enquist thereafter becomes a kind of avenging angel, moving between different chorus members and miming a series of eye plucks that produce from each a version of the work's title is a whole other matter.)

Watching OW, and how much fun the dancers seemed to be having (despite the obvious complexity of having to learn two different scores), I was reminded of those moments of pure kinetic joy one experiences on a dance floor, when the feeling of being transported by the energy and rhythm of movement and music can only be answered by a whoop of delight. Kudos to Jennifer Mascall and her entire ensemble for reminding us so brilliantly and blissfully of the somatic connection between sound and movement.

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VIDF 2018: Dancers Dancing and EDAM at the Roundhouse

The Vancouver International Dance Festival continued last night at the Roundhouse with a double bill of works by local companies that were linked by themes of memory and reconstruction. The free seven o'clock show in the exhibition hall was choreographed by my colleague Judith Garay, whose company Dancers Dancing celebrates its twentieth anniversary next year. In Confabulation, Garay is joined on stage by former students and DD company members Jane Osborne and Bevin Poole. In them, Garay appears to be watching versions of her former self, and after beginning the piece with a simple gestural hand sequence that somehow managed to combine feelings of both supplication and worry, Garay roams the stage in her long brown coat watching from both the inside and the outside as Osborne and Poole make their progress through space and time. (Garay quotes Tennessee Williams on memory in her program note, and there is definitely a sense in which she is functioning, like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, as both narrator and character in this piece.)

As for the progress of Osborne and Poole, it begins in the upstage left corner of the stage as a gorgeous slow motion and on-the-spot run. To recorded sounds of street noise and muffled conversation and babies crying and the general hubbub of life, the two women--at first together, and then separately--lift one leg and extend it in front of themselves, while the other kicks out behind. Garay has always been meticulous about the technique of her dancers, and one of the pleasures of this simple opening is revelling in the detailed articulation of feet and toes, and the striving, unhurried reach of pumping arms. Much of the rest of the piece operates as a duet for Osborne and Poole, with the similarly dressed dancers working in counterpoint, and often at different vertical and horizontal axes, but also coming together in moments of effortless unison. But Garay does more than just circle the stage. She has a stationary solo that sees her stretching for the sky, and she joins Osborne and Poole on a bench for a highly satisfying reprise and extension of the her opening gestural sequence. Soon after this, Garay exits the stage; but she reappears at the end of the piece in a most unexpected way to offer a final benediction on those whom she has so wisely mentored.

The mainstage show last night spotlighted EDAM and was a mixed program featuring highlights from company director Peter Bingham's choreographic career. It began with Hindsight, from 1995, a duet here featuring company veteran Olivia Shaffer and Kelly McInnes. It is set to songs by Berlioz and Richard Strauss that are sung by Jessye Norman, and begins with the two dancers standing upstage, fluttering their arms up and down like they are birds trying to fly. But thereafter most of the movement takes place on the floor, with an extended opening sequence in which Shaffer and McInness roll back and forth across the stage, simultaneously moving towards and away from each other, and managing to locomote from upstage to downstage by every now and then launching their rolls on a diagonal axis. But it's the coming out of and the pauses in between the rolls that are the most captivating, with the two dancers arresting their momentum with an amazingly graceful placing of their hands on the floor, their bent elbows and bowed heads suggesting a prayer of repair for broken wings. Equally amazing is how Bingham has essentially constructed a non-contact work of contact in this piece. Not that Shaffer and McInness don't eventually come together or make it to vertical (once downstage, positioned against two oppositely placed door frames); but even here the contact is fleeting and the piece ends with McInness back on the floor and Shaffer executing a painfully beautiful series of fluttering changements, desperately willing herself to lift up off the floor and soar through the air for both herself and her partner.

Sinking SuZi is a solo for Ziyian Kwan that was originally commissioned in 2002. It is the perfect showcase for Kwan's technical artistry and compelling stage presence. Beginning upstage left, and with her back to the audience, Kwan moves horizontally across the stage, arcing one arm out from her torso and then upwards into the air. This will be followed by a diagonal series of tilting pirouettes, at first with Kwan's hands resting on her thighs, and then circling about her body. But the most beguiling--and also the most extended--of the repeated movement sequences choreographed by Bingham for Kwan is the one in which she sinks to the floor in a deconstructed lotus position, one leg in front, the other behind, from which she then propels herself upward, turning once around as she lifts one arm upwards in a hail hello and places one foot over the other. I could have watched that one move go on forever.

The final piece on the EDAM program is also the most recent. Engage the Feeling Arms is a trio from 2016 that I first wrote about here. In this iteration Diego Romero (replacing Farley Johansson) joins Shaffer and Walter Kubanek in a dynamic display of virtuosic contact, but one that begins as a quasi-Orientalist shimmer of floating and ever-shifting intertwined arms before exploding into the dynamic physicality of thrown bodies and caught and distributed weight that is Bingham's signature. Watching this work again in combination with the other pieces, and also thinking about the different generations of dancers represented on stage, is to register just how instrumental Bingham and EDAM have been to the dance ecology of this city. Kudos to VIDF for showcasing these contributions in this mixed program.

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After the Fall at EDAM

Last night I dashed from a board meeting to make it to EDAM's latest choreographic series presentation, After the Fall. Am I ever glad I made the extra effort to be there. Not only was the Western Front teeming with people I knew, but the program was excellent (albeit with minor caveats about one piece). It was just the restorative re-immersion I needed into the amazing performance work of this community after so many weeks with my head up my butt working on my own show.

First up was Julianne Chapple's Self Portrait, a work created and performed in collaboration with Maxine Chadburn and Francesca Frewer. With the windows on the western wall of the first-floor EDAM studios left uncovered, and thus admitting a degree of extra sparkle from the streetlights outside, a dancer enters from the open upstage left door. She is wearing black shorts and a white push-up bra; her long mane of hair tumbles down in front of her face. As she begins a slow journey across the width of the upstage wall, we gradually become aware of another figure seated downstage in shadow watching her progress along with us. And what fascinates about the upstage woman's slow and sinuous movement is that it is as much vertical as it is horizontal. That is, more than once she dips her torso downward and first raises one leg in a gorgeous arabesque, before resting it against the wall and then raising the other leg to join it and pausing there in a pose that put me in mind of all those surrealist photos of disembodied, upside-down mannequin legs by the likes of Man Ray and others (and the fact that all the dancers were clad in a similar underwear model-like manner and rarely showed their faces only reinforced this image). But the first dancer does not remain in this position; she continues her curious walk on/along the wall, exiting through the open door upstage left. Soon another dancer emerges from the opposite door and begins to traverse a similar gymnastic journey along the upstage wall, also observed by the downstage figure in repose. And so the pattern continues, with, on the third go round, the downstage dancer walking upstage to take her turn at the wall, and the other two dancers remaining on stage--one observing downstage, the other repeating a version of the wall dance along the floor upstage, and with all three dancers aligning themselves in a vertical centre column whenever the wall dancer reaches a resting point in the middle of her journey. This trio, so compelling in its spatial geometry when the dancers are apart, becomes even more watchable when the dancers swap each other's bodies for the surface of the wall, coming together in a series of fluidly intertwined configurations that combine the strength and balance and flexibility of gymnastics with the weight-sharing of contact. Every now and then during this sequencing the dancers will hold a shape, usually with one of them perched atop or supported by the other two, at which point the dancer being posed will sweep her hair away from her face and gaze out distractedly and maybe also with a touch of disdain at the audience: the one who is looked at looks back and, unimpressed by what she sees, continues on with the work at hand. Which culminates in one final walk on walls, this time begun horizontally along the stage left studio wall, before ending where we began, back on the upstage wall. This time, however, the dancer doing the walking is supported by the other two: so she can go even higher. And because all three women are working together we know she will not fall.

For the second piece on the program, Peter Bingham's Engage the Feeling Arms, the blinds had been lowered on the windows, though the slats remained open, which produced a nice constellation of light pinpricks along the upstage wall. The audience was treated to another trio, this one featuring EDAM stalwarts Farley Johansson, Walter Kubanek and Olivia Shaffer. In terms of Bingham's trademark contact choreography, the piece begins somewhat unusually. All three dancers are in a horizontal line upstage and remain vertical for far longer than we might expect: Johansson and Shaffer are engaged in a vigorous duet, but there is no offering of backs or legs to tumble over or slide down, just a complex intertwining of arms and cupping of heads that put me in mind of ice dancing or tango. Meanwhile Kubanek is off to the side, stage left, improvising a solo, his arms also extending with abandon about his head as he does a series of pirouettes on his feet and knees (the Indian-themed music made it seem at times that all the dancers were multi-limbed Hindu gods). Soon enough Kubanek bumps Johansson and begins his own duet with Shaffer, and then Johannson does the same with Shaffer, the two men partnering while Shaffer performs a solo beside them. Eventually the three dancers break out of this pattern, and their line, beginning a run downstage which serves as the initiation of a series of repeated lifts, contact with other parts of their bodies and, of course, those at once supremely athletic and graceful leaps and tumbles and rolls to/along the floor for which EDAM performers are known. It always takes my breath away to watch dancers trained by Bingham fall: there is a suspension and yet simultaneous giving into gravity that seems to defy the rules of physics, but as satisfyingly there is always such a beautifully soft landing. Such is the case here with these three expert fallers and the image that will stay with me longest from last night's performance is the sequence (repeated twice) in which each dancer falls successively into the outstretched arms of another who lies prone on the floor. Feeling arms indeed.

The final piece, The Way, was choreographed by Shay Kuebler and by this point in the program the stage blacks had been pulled entirely across the windows on the western wall. The lights come up slowly on dancer Nicholas Lydiate, who starts twitching centre stage. Dancer Lexi Vajda soon appears in the upstage right doorway, walks toward Lydiate with purpose, and begins pushing him about the stage. It was great to see the diminutive Vajda be the controlling force at the start of the duet that ensues, which gradually gets more and more physical, and ends up with the two dancers collapsed on the floor upstage. This is the cue for Kuebler to enter, stepping gingerly between the bodies of the other dancers, slowly lowering himself to his knees, and finally initiating a gestural sequence with his arms that the other dancers join in. The unison becomes more and more captivating as it picks up speed, but also because in so doing it begins to break down. Lydiate's twitches from the top of the piece are hear reintroduced as glitches, with first Kuebler and then Vajda and Lydiate splaying one leg jarringly to the side, or else knocking themselves over with a miscued arm. Extremity has always been part of Kuebler's aesthetic, which draws as much from martial arts as from hip hop and contemporary dance. Nowhere is this more evident in this work than the solo Kuebler gives himself in the middle of the piece: it begins as a pantomime of boxing moves and ends with Kuebler thrashing back and forth violently on the floor. There is a suggestion of self-parody in the "dudeness" of this scene as, at its end, Vajda begins a slow clap, as if to say "Good for you, what next?" But, in fact, rather then ending things there, Kuebler takes up the bait, rolling back and forth along the floor as the rhythm of Vajda's clapping--now joined by Lydiate--picks up speed. Wait, there's more! The piece ends with this final trio throwing their bodies against the upstage wall, each reverberating slap of skin registering as a wince in my own body. I so appreciate what Kuebler and his dancers can do physically; but because I worry about how much it hurts, I'm just not sure I support the philosophy of doing it. To that end, I left longing for a return to the silent tableau that concluded Chapple's piece.

P.

The Secret Life of Trees at VIDF

In The Secret Life of Trees, which is on at the Roundhouse as part of this year's Vancouver International Dance Festival through this evening, EDAM's Peter Bingham takes his choreographic inspiration from the idea that trees communicate with each other (and presumably their environment) through their "intricate entwining root systems." Likewise, in creating this piece, Bingham and his dancers have worked to develop "different sensory pathways to connect to each other" in the space and time of performance.

Such communication begins when dancers Walter Kubanek, Chengxin Wei, Anne Cooper and Olivia Shaffer enter through one of the three square archways--one stage left, two stage right--positioned in front of the wings, portals one imagines to the forest that lies just beyond. Kubanek and Wei slide to the floor upstage, sitting back-to-back, with Wei facing the audience. Cooper and Shaffer lie supine on the floor in two rectangles of light stage right. Wei begins to move his feet, turning them in and out, left and right; he raises his arms and domes his hands, rotating them at the wrist, first this way, and then that, as if telegraphing some secret gestural message. It's one that Cooper and Shaffer pick up on, their feet responding in kind to Wei's proffered address (which we also hear, briefly, in a bit of voiceover).

Just how in sync these three dancers are becomes clear after Kubanek exits the stage and, following a robust contact sequence, the trio separates for some isolated unison floorwork. The dancers are positioned so closely to one another, and their movements are so complicated and physical that it is a wonder they don't hit each other when blindly extending a leg into space, or when rolling backwards in this or that direction. But then just as trees seem to be able to make room for one another on a crowded forest floor, so are dancers of this caliber able to draw on a highly honed kinaesthetic awareness, a keen sense not just of back and front but also, in this case, of beside.

There then follows two gorgeous duets. The first, featuring Shaffer and Delia Brett, is faster and more vigorous and covers much more stage space in its incorporation of lateral lifts and rolls, and in the dancers' explorations of different surfaces of bodily contact and support. The second, between Brett and James Gnam, is slower and more still. It begins with the two dancers walking downstage and matter-of-factly removing their shirts. As the voiceover tells us that we are about to hear a selection of plant songs, Brett slowly begins to trace her fingers in looping and intertwining patterns along Gnam's back and arms, like a childhood game of spelling out letters and words up and down a friend's spine. Brett's touch is delicate and tender, like a lover's, and Gnam's vertebrae and ribs respond to the intimacy by undulating like tree branches swaying in a gentle breeze. When Gnam reciprocates he also reaches around to touch the small and vulnerable area between Brett's throat and breastbone, which struck me as an especially solicitous moment. After this sequence the dancers move further upstage, and amid a series of black and white and colour video projections by Chris Randle that are accompanied by a voiceover narrative written and spoken by Bingham, Brett and Gnam cycle through several semi-lifted poses, their limbs a tangled system of support and ballast.

The piece concludes with a final trio, this time with Kubanek, who has been something of a silent observer up until now, joining Shaffer and Wei in a bit of balletic parody before moving into a final and highly satisfying contact sequence. If, in their rhizomatic structural threading, tree roots have a mostly horizontal orientation, and if they further work to stabilize not just the tree trunks to which they are attached, but also the soil around them, then they are an apt metaphor for the connection to and from ground that is at the heart of contact.

P.