Wreck Beach Butoh 2018

Owing to unexpected summer teaching commitments, I was unable to participate in Kokoro Dance's annual Wreck Beach Butoh process. This was disappointing, as I had hoped to make it three years in a row. That said, I did drop in on a couple of free morning classes down at KW Studios over the past two weeks, and so I got a glimpse of what Barbara and Jay were putting together this year. I also got to say hello to some of WBB's returning crew: Tuan and Keith and Bronwyn and Leslie and Noriko and Yvonne. It was a kick to be dancing in KW's new atrium studio, as we had a built-in audience from everyone who happened to be hanging out or wandering through the basketball courts at SFU Woodward's.

This morning, I made my way to Wreck Beach to see the weekend's final performance. I'd told Barbara that I would volunteer to carry one of Kokoro's red donation buckets, and also to police anyone trying to take photos. I proved to be a surprisingly good enforcer on both counts. Otherwise, I just generally enjoyed being a spectator, which I admit meant indulging in some relief at not having to go into and (even worse) get out of the water this year: though the sun was out and things got progressively warmer as the performance went on, there was a strong wind throughout.

There was some repeat choreography that I recognized: the pirate laughs and the tick tock walk and the ecstasy jumps, for example. But the core of this year's work was a central section that involved the dancers torquing their torsos toward the sun and gently turning in the breeze, and then drawing one arm up the other and across the face in a sequence that initiates a danced exploration of the senses. It was quite moving and tender to watch, especially in the way that the dancers moved into and out of unison. However, there was also some cheekiness--quite literally--as Barbara led the dancers in a group ass grab and wiggle directed at the audience.

The start of each WBB is always memorable, and this year I was struck by the fact that the slow and sensuously gestural unison walk toward the water by the clustered group of white painted dancers was accompanied by a chorus of sounds. Various other whoops and caws recurred throughout the piece, but this opening sequence of movement and sound was especially unique.

One final thing I noted was the way in which I was able to anticipate the directional flow of much of the choreography. To be sure, Barbara and Jay generally begin with a southward trajectory along the beach following the dancers' emergence from the water, before doubling back on themselves. However, I also think my instinctive knowledge of when and where to walk contained within it residual kinetic memories of having danced in previous WBB performances. Whatever the case, it was a nice feeling to have.

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Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Sunday Performance

Bronwyn was right. I was actually awakened by the sound of the wind, which at first I mistook for pouring rain. By the time Dana and I gathered at Molly's, the sun was shining and it was pleasantly warm--but definitely very breezy. And by the time the three of us plus Irene got to the top of the stairs at Trail 4 we could hear not just the wind, but the crashing waves. Half-way down we saw the whitecaps, which were pretty high and moving fast--so fast that they propelled an adventurous (and presumably well wet-suited) windsurfer back and forth across the horizon multiple times as we stared out at the waters, mouths agape. Meanwhile, a kayaker had apparently had enough, depositing his boat just at the mouth of the pathway on the beach we use to descend toward the water (where it remained throughout our performance--at the very least I hoped he stayed to watch given the visual interruption his vessel caused). One benefit of the powerful surf was that our pathway had been more or less swept clean of rocks; but also laying across it there was now a massive log, washed ashore by the waves, and forming a natural proscenium arch for our performance.

We were the first to arrive on the beach and as more and more people gathered there was one question: would we still be going in the water to swim at the beginning? When Barbara and Jay arrived they very generously confirmed that we would not start in the water, simply running instead to where we begin the dragging and rolling sequence at the south end of the beach, crawling to our respective positions once we neared the spot. A sigh of relief went through the ensemble when we heard this news, as to have begun the piece wet and shivery would have been distinctly unpleasant. Instead, having the sun shine on us while we were moving about the sand was actually quite pleasant, and during Sunday's performance I felt I could finally let go of the mechanics of the movement and really get into the experience of my body merging with the beach, so much so that I really let things rip during the super-fast rolls back and forth. Likewise, with the teeter-totter step that moves (quite literally) from the end of Jay's section into the beginning of Barbara's, I stopped counting and overthinking the steps leading into the leg swing and just went with the momentum generated by my off-axis body--and I think what resulted was perhaps the best I've ever done that move.

Not that everything was perfect. Just before this, Barbara forgot the eight fast pivoting hand claps between partners following the "picking-up-a-seed-and-putting-it-back-on-the-tree" sequence. I wasn't going to remind her about this, and so we were way ahead of everyone in motoring down the beach. And our interior circle went in the wrong direction with our rooster walk, which I'm sure caused the outer circle more than a little confusion as they reoriented themselves for our cross on the backwards crab walk. But I'm sure the audience, which was a lot bigger than Saturday's, didn't notice.

We did still go in the water at the end of the piece, but by that time I was ready for some cooling-off, and some help in washing the sand off my body, and just generally being buffeted by the waves.

Then it was time for a group picnic and reflective decompressing after two weeks of extremely intense work. Brie and Michael and Yvonne, who were doing WBB for the first time, all said it was an amazing experience and that, time permitting, they would definitely consider coming back next year. For me, partly as a result of the choreography this year and partly because of the storehouse of embodied and environmental knowledge I had retained from last year, I felt more than ever how truly unique WBB is as a work of site-specific dance: because of its sustained investigation of a singular but ever-changing site; because of the reciprocal material exchange between performers and site embedded into each iteration; and because of how much kinetic awareness (and locomotive energy) it also demands of its audience.

Then, too, Barbara and Jay, in their own inimitable tough-love way, give us through this process a lesson in what it means to come together as an ensemble. So, after all the hours of rehearsal, all the stairs descended and climbed, all the white paint applied and (imperfectly) removed, all the sweaty clothes and wet towels washed and dried (none of which I will miss any time soon), here's to us in before and after shots:


Left to right: Yvonne; Peter; Keith; Brie; Jay, Dana; Bronwyn; Molly; Irene; Michael; Tuan; Henry; with Barbara kneeling in front.


Look, even Barbara is smiling this time!

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Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Saturday Performance

What a difference a day makes. A later start time, warmer temperatures, and even some sun: all combined to make today's performance much more pleasant than yesterday's undress rehearsal. In fact, I would hazard to say that this morning approached near ideal conditions: not so hot as last year, but also no really gusting winds, and with the sea mercifully calm. There are contradictory reports on what it will do tomorrow: Jay says it will be even nicer, but the paper is predicting a chance of showers; and Bronwyn (spelled correctly this time!) says that westerly winds will push in colder air and water. I guess we'll have to wait and see. I'm just happy that the call time on the beach is even later.

Speaking of the beach, Jay and Barbara remapped our trajectory across it before the start of today's show. Following the end of Jay's section we now move further south on the teeter-totter walk, rather than north, as we did yesterday, to form our circles for the start of Barbara's choreography. Having walked us through all of this before we started putting on our make-up and doing our warm-up, there was nonetheless some dispute between Barbara and Jay near the conclusion of our opening swim about where exactly we were to alight on the beach for our dragging and rolling sequence. The shouts back and forth between them ("Jay, we said here"; "No, Barbara, we said over there") got quite loud, though Dana, Molly, Irene and I confirmed via Molly's partner, David, on the car ride home that no one in the audience could apparently hear.

Those of us downstage (that is, facing towards the cliffs) during this sequence made sure to position ourselves closer to the audience so that folks further upstage weren't rolling back into the water. However, there were tiny tide pools dotting the sandbar on which we were performing, and I somehow managed to position myself right smack in the middle of one, which made for lots of wet muckiness and water in the ears during the rolls. But I have to say, I did like the sloshy, suction-y sound our bodies made when they slapped over these pools as the rolls sped up. By the time we moved into the turning handstands it felt like the spiralling of my body had succeeded in digging a two-foot well, so deeply did my palms sink into the sand.

I think the performance went very well. I made a slight mistake in the choreography at the start of the dual circle sequence, and the timing of the two circles crossing was a bit off. But collectively we remembered to include all of the movement this time, and overall my balance was much better today than yesterday--no doubt because I wasn't shivering so violently.

I just wish there had been more people watch us. Jay said it was probably the smallest audience they'd ever had--perhaps as a result of this year's performances falling on a long weekend (and also not being tied to the Dancing on the Edge Festival, as they had been last year). Here's hoping more spectators come out tomorrow. But even if they don't, and in spite of all the pain and toil over the past two weeks, Sunday will be the culmination of a truly sublime experience.

That's the gift that Barbara and Jay give us each year through WBB, and while it may be hard to explain to friends and partners and family ("You're doing what?!," my niece Erika, a dancer herself, asked me when I told what I was doing this long weekend) why we do this, I certainly don't regret signing up for a second year.

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Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Undress Rehearsal

The water turned out to be quite warm. It was getting out that proved most bone chilling, as by that time (around 9:30 am) a wind had picked up and it had started to sprinkle. The first part of Jay's choreography, where we dragging and rolling ourselves across the sand was a special kind of torture given the pools of water we were forming with our bodies, and then promptly rolling over. Poor Irene, who was in the back row, closest to the ocean, said in the car on the way home that every time she had to roll west, or upstage, it meant she was plunged back into the surf--which musn't have been pleasant.

Just when I thought I had my shivering under control, another wind would come up that would send my body into spasm yet again. At a certain point my fingers and toes started to go numb, which meant balancing in the sand (especially when walking backwards) and flicking ones hands proved extra tricky. Everyone's teeth were chattering loudly, and Brie said at a certain point she thought her jaw had locked. Barbara said she couldn't remember the last time it had been so cold for the undress rehearsal, and she must have been in a lot of discomfort because not only did she find it difficult to eat afterwards, but she also gave us no notes--which is more or less unheard of. At the end of the piece no one bothered to go back in the water to wash off the white make-up; we just dried off and wore it home, with Bronwen looking the most ghostly among us.

Despite all of this, and despite the fact that we were far from perfect, I did lose myself in the elemental experience of it all in several moments. We danced for over an hour, but it felt like the time flew by. In addition to official videographer Chris Randle, photographer Peter Eastman, and Tuan's wife, our audience included a lazily swimming seal and a great blue heron, who set off in flight from his perch on a rock just as we were emerging from the water to begin the opening of Jay's section--as if saying, "Yes, alright, you now have my permission to move in this space." And by the end of the piece, with our bodies a camouflaged tapestry of white make-up, brown sand and pinky-orange skin, it did seem that we had merged in some fundamental way with the natural landscape.

Which is why, I guess, we do this. Notwithstanding this fact, I do hope that, as forecast, the sun does emerge tomorrow and Sunday.

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Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 9

Yesterday was our last class and rehearsal at Harbour Dance. After a relatively quick warm-up, the morning was again spent refining specific moves, including the rotation of our heads and torsos on the monkey step, and then the leg lifts (or swings, as Barbara would say) on the sixes that follow. Given how long we spent on each move, I'm guessing we didn't succeed in perfecting anything to either Jay or Barbara's satisfaction.

After an early lunch we talk-walked the piece through once, and then ran it for the first time without music from start to finish. According to Barbara, we were "terrible." In fact, I think there was only one big disaster, and that was when the two circles are meant to cross in the first part of her section--which in this case got a bit chaotic and messy. We went back over that bit, and improved the second time around, but it's likely to be a whole other story on the beach--in part because I'm still a bit unclear of our directional orientation for all the different sections.

I also still don't know for sure how many turns we're supposed to do at different speeds during the picking-up-a-seed bit and whether "Molly going first with the sixes" means we in her quartet in the canon go at the same time, or wait a bit. I'm hoping I can clarify all of this in the car ride to the beach in two hours...

Of course, after all of the brutal criticism, at the end of yesterday's rehearsal Barbara turned into the sweetheart that she secretly is. She told us that we should take pride in all of the hard work that we've put into the process, especially given that the choreography is all new material and, in her words, is a real "Kokoro piece." Then we formed our car pool groups, confirmed our call time for the beach for this morning's "undress rehearsal" (8 a.m.!), and what to bring for supplies and gear.

It's just getting light out as I type this and the forecast is for overcast skies and a coolish 16 degrees for when we're meant to begin the run-through on the beach. At least it looks like the chance of rain has diminished. And we may even have a bit of sun for the performances on Saturday and Sunday.

Frankly, right now my only real concern is how cold the water is going to be!

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Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 8

Today it was all Barbara, and as often happens at this stage in the process nothing we did was right. It lacked energy, it lacked character; it was too fast, it was too slow; we were too much in unison, or not enough. I have learned, by now, that this is Barbara's way of pushing us, towards the end of the rehearsal period, once we more or less have the choreography in our bodies, not to become complacent and to keep striving to meet or surpass her impossible expectations, despite our exhaustion.

But it can still be dispiriting to be told, after the fourth or fifth stop and re-do, that "professional dancers learn to do it right the first time." Last time I checked most of us in the room wouldn't self-identify as "professional dancer." Not that I'm asking to be cut any slack. Just acknowledging that part of being a feeling body who can interpret complex choreography means that one also has feelings--and they can be hurt.

Then again, as Barbara would say, "boo hoo!"

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Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 7

Yesterday I was tired. So I was grateful that, after our warm-up, Jay's morning class was devoted mostly to refining the detail and quality of some of the less physically taxing movement: the cat-cow back and arm waves on our walks to find our partners; our teeter-totter steps; and the arm bumps.

But in the afternoon we ran through Jay's section twice and Barbara's once, this time with the additional knowledge of our spatial orientation vis-a-vis the beach--with upstage the ocean, downstage the cliffs, stage left the north shore, and stage right south. We also were instructed on how we will emerge from the water at the beginning of the section to find our assigned places on the sand prior to the beginning of the dragging sequence. But no word yet on how we actually get into the sea to begin with.

Finally, we were assigned partners for the seed picking and arm bumping sequences. I was briefly with Molly, which I was very happy about, as this meant when it came to timing and counts (two things I still am not clear on with respect to these two moves), I could just follow her lead. But in the afternoon I was reassigned to Barbara! Talk about pressure--including on my shoulder. She puts a lot of weight and force into what I thought were supposed to be gentle taps...

Of course this gorgeous sunshine we've been having isn't supposed to last. We may be lucky for Friday's undress rehearsal and the first performance on Saturday. But they are predicting rain for Sunday--and cooler temperatures all around. Brrrr!!!

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Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 6

Week 2 and but for the stressed IT bands as a result of yesterday's half-marathon, the body is holding up. I do wish I were getting more sleep; I think, paradoxically, all of the physical activity makes it more difficult to fall into immediate and sustained restfulness. Then there's the fact that I keep rehearsing in my brain at night all of the choreography we've learned (in between worrying about everything else I have to do this week); Barbara thinks the choreography-as-counting-sheep idea is actually a good thing, as it will embed the movement even more thoroughly into our bodies. But if the rehearsing of it in one's mind over and over again actually prevents one from ever dozing off, then surely that defeats the purpose.

Speaking of the choreography, having learned all of it by the end of week one, Barbara today proceeded to do what she apparently always does (at least judging from last year and from more veteran participants' testimonials), which is revise it. Most of her edits were minor and involved jettisoning various phrases rather than adding others. However, there was one major new move she gave all of us that had me more than a bit flummoxed for several minutes--a variation on the boxed monkey step that in the third iteration she now wants us to do with alternating raised legs. While Barbara's demonstration of the move seemed reproducible enough, the count she gave for it struck me as counter-intuitive, and it wasn't until I figured out that there was essentially one extra step for nothing included in her count that I was able to get how to alternate the raised legs. Not that this accomplishment means that the movement is any more fluid or that I am now an expert. I wish I could commit more intuitively and fully from the get-go to the choreography Barbara and Jay give us, but there is something about my overly analytical nature that tells me I have to get it right before I can actually do it.

Of course there is no time or room for second-guessing in performance on the beach. Which is both the beauty and the terror of this process.

In the second half of this afternoon's rehearsal Barbara also let us in on how the first section of her choreography will unfold in two separate circle formations, one contained inside the other. I'm part of the inner circle, with Barbara as leader, which means the choreography as she claims to now have definitively set it will inevitably change yet again on the days of performance. Because Barbara has a habit of spontaneously changing her mind and also, though she'd likely not admit it, simply forgetting some of the phrases that repeat. As Bronwen whispered to me at one point after I queried the dropping of one move, being in Barbara's group means you follow Barbara, not what you learned in rehearsal.

Today was also eventful because just prior to entering Studio 1 at 1:30 pm one of the students in another class at Harbour Dance dislocated her shoulder. The cries of pain were truly arresting, as were those that accompanied the resetting of the poor girl's shoulder a half hour later when the paramedics arrived. My throbbing IT bands seem positively benign in comparison.

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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.

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Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 4

Morning class with Jay yesterday was less physically taxing than Tuesday, but also more philosophically enlightening. That's partly because Jay spent much of the time refining the smallest of details related to the very basic elements of his choreography and, in doing so, explaining what distinguishes engaged movement from pedestrian movement. Much of this centred around our practicing of different versions of the butoh walk, which I was happy to see return. One image that Jay gave us was to imagine ourselves as Buddha walking on water while holding a tray of water on which we, again each our own Buddha, were in turn walking on water, and so on ad infinitum. As we completed our slow steady tours across the studio floor, Jay kept repeating this mantra, while also inviting us to feel the farmers threshing wheat on our calves, the forest growing from our shoulders, and the orchid we were also holding at our throats. Thinking about how all of those images combine to move one's body with intention rather than moving the body mechanically to approximate some perceived external representation of said images is what distinguishes butoh from other kinds of dance. As Jay reminded us, his choreography is mostly pretty simple, and frequently repetitive; if it's performed mechanically, without bodily engagement and mental intention, it will look boring. But when one is engaged and intentional it can be beautiful and it can feel, for both performer and spectator, that time has in fact expanded to open up "the space between," or what in Japanese is referred to as ma.

After lunch we devoted the entire afternoon to putting most of Jay's choreography together, from the dragging and rolling sequence on the floor through to the arm bumping with our partners. We didn't get to the tick-tock sequence that follows the bumping, and there may me more yet to come, but it was nice to see how most of the parts are linked and, more especially, how we are meant to transition between them. It was a bit of a slow and laborious process as Barbara, working from a print out that she'd asked Molly to type up, had us go through each sequence over and over again, insisting that we get every detail into our bodies before moving on. This meant a lot of stopping and starting, and also some tense back and forths between she and Jay, but at the end of the day I was certainly more confident in my knowledge of the material (if not entirely competent in its actual execution). As Barbara said just before our dismissal, she knows that her methods can seem harsh, but it's the only way she knows to get us to learn an hour's worth of demanding choreography in nine days. And she added, with atypical generosity, that we should applaud ourselves for even making the effort, as many professional dancers wouldn't consider submitting to the process.

Not that Barbara got all warm and fuzzy. As I was leaving Jay had me show her my hip bruises from all the floor rolling we've done, and whose robust mauve tones he was fascinated to discover he had caused in the morning. Barbara's response: "Boo-hoo."

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Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 3

More bruises in more places. And in a rainbow hue of colours. It's surprising, stripping off at home in front of the bathroom mirror, to discover when and where new ones occur and, more to the point, not to be able to remember them being incurred. The work is physically hard, particularly Jay's floor rolling sequence, but in the moment you're concentrating so intently on learning the movement that you're not consciously registering the pain it's causing. That comes the next morning, as you try to roll your stiff and tired body out of bed. But, I have to stay, so far I'm surprised at how the old carcass is holding up. The day to day recovery is proving easier than last year and I haven't pulled anything major yet. I also haven't had to take any epsom salt baths yet, and I'm hoping to keep it that way. Notwithstanding Barbara's undeniable claims about their therapeutic value, I just can't stand sitting in a bathtub for any length of time; I get bored and intensely claustrophobic.

I really felt for Molly yesterday. When both Jay and Barbara forget their own choreography, which they inevitably do, she is the one who has to remember for them. This usually means demonstrating different sequences more than once in addition to participating as part of the general ensemble. On top of this, at break most of us cluster around her, peppering her with questions about when this move comes, and how exactly to do that one, etc. She handles it all with equanimity and grace and, selfishly, I have to admit that it is a treat to be able to watch such a talented dancer up close in the studio.

One thing I haven't quite wrapped my head around yet is the spatial orientation of the beach vis-a-vis our rehearsal of the movement in the studio. Last year at EDAM the west wall was always the ocean, and Barbara and Jay both made a point of emphasizing how the movement we were learning would translate directionally to the Wreck site. However, this year not only are we going back and forth between two different studios at Harbour Dance, but in doing so we are also switching our downstage facings. And with no indication as yet about how all of this gets mapped onto the beach. At least we know we will have a lot more space for our rolling on the sand. And Barbara did let us know that the corkscrew move we do at the end of the canon sequence is what locomotes us into the water.

That canon sequence had to be reset as we have apparently lost two members, taking the number of participants down to 12. I discovered last year that this happens; for various reasons people drop out. More often it's because of the time commitment than the physical rigours of the process. I'm discovering the consequences of that commitment as the number of tasks facing me keeps piling up. We'll see how I manage to revise that essay by July 1st...

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Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 2

And then we were fourteen: Brie joined the process yesterday. The even number makes for a nice bit of symmetry, especially in the canon sequence that Barbara is developing, and that we tried out for the first time in formation yesterday afternoon. Brie and Michael and Yvonne are the newbies this year, and they are all faring much better than I did at this stage last year. Yvonne actually has a long connection to WBB as one of Kokoro's preferred photographic documenters of each year's event. It's nice that she's now decided to join the performance.

Jay led class in the morning, and while I find his preferred warm-up routines easier to follow than Barbara's I had forgotten what a workout they are: all those sit-ups and leg squats that seem to never end. The second half of class was devoted to a continuation of Jay's choreography for this year. The particular sequence we learned was all on the floor and involved a lot of dragging and rolling of our bodies, with the latter gaining in speed over time. This will be easier on the beach, but even with long pants the parquet of Studio 2 at Harbour Dance was pretty punishing--I have the bruises this morning to prove it. We're also required to do some squat handstands, which proved particularly challenging for yours truly.

After lunch Barbara took over, beginning with her setting of the aforementioned canon sequence, which necessitates a lot of counting, another weakness of mine. Let's just say that I'm glad that for now I've been placed in Molly's group!

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Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 1

I guess I like pain. How else to explain my decision to fly back earlier than planned from a sojourn in Europe in order to put my body through the rigours of another Wreck Beach Butoh boot camp? Or maybe it's just that, after last year, I have a better sense of what lies on the other side of the nine-day rehearsal process in the studio: a truly transcendent experience on the beach.

A few things are different this year. We are a smaller group: 13 instead of 21, with all but two of us returnees. We're also rehearsing at Harbour Dance instead of EDAM, which makes for a slightly longer commute (but also more lunch options). (Originally the plan was to work out of the new Kokoro space at the Woodward's complex, but Barbara had said in class weeks ago that the renovations wouldn't be complete.) Then there's the fact that the actual performances this year will be in the morning, which regardless of whether or not the sun is shining means that it will be colder--because, as Barbara put it, at that hour the sun hasn't actually made it over the side of the Tower Beach cliff edge. Finally, we were informed that most if not all of the choreography this year would be new, so no relying on past storehouses of corporeal memory, even for WBB veterans like Tuan and Irene and Henry and Bronwen and Molly.

In fact, Molly is somewhat at an advantage. Not only, as a professional dancer of innate and distinctive talent does she absorb kinetic instruction more quickly than the rest of us, but as a Kokoro company member who takes class regularly with both Barbara and Jay, she has experienced and been involved over the past few months in testing out the movement ideas of each for this year's WBB performance. As someone who tries to take Barbara's Friday morning class as often as possible, I have had a taste of this, having learned and practiced with her at least three different movement phrases that she is considering for the piece--my favourite, despite how exhausting it is, being what I'll call the monkey step. But it appears that Jay, together with Molly, has already developed much more material--almost 35 minutes worth, we were told. That perhaps explains why he took the lead in instruction yesterday, teaching us five different sequences he's been working on: some partnered bumping; a tick-tock walk in second position demi-plie that also involves full turns en dehors (something I have to work on); a series of backwards and forwards lunges and arm waves; an upright cat-cow walk, also with arms; and a bit that involved miming the picking up of a seed and putting it back on the tree from whence it fell. We repeated all of these sequences several times, receiving constant notes for improvement (as expected), and with Jay and Barbara yelling as much at each other as at us (also as expected).

A unique part of Jay and Barbara's process is, as I've partially outlined above, the fact that despite always collaborating on the choreography of each WBB piece (like most of the work they develop with Kokoro), they work on their sections separately, only bringing them together in the actual two-week boot camp rehearsal process. That means they, like us, are each experiencing the other's choreography for the first time; it also means they feel free to criticize that choreography, or at least the delivery of it, openly and loudly. Such was the case yesterday with Barbara, who especially had much to comment on regarding the timing of the bump sequence. This lead to the first all-out screaming match between she and Jay; it came a little earlier in the process than usual, but it definitely won't be the last. As Jay explained their working method yesterday, we'll experiment with lots of different ways of doing the movement over the next two weeks, and throughout he and Barbara will fight about what works best. And then, in the end, we'll do it Barbara's way.

None of us would have it any other way.

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My Year in Vancouver Dance (a review) + Vancouver Dance History, 2006-2016 (a preview)

Hard to believe that this time last year I was in the final stages of rehearsal for Le Grand Continental. The free outdoor performance on the plaza of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre--choreographed by Montreal's Sylvain Émard, programmed as part of the PuSh Festival, and featuring 70+ community dancers strutting their stuff--recently made Deborah Meyers' year-end Vancouver Sun list of top 2015 dance shows in the city. That was nice to see.

Who would have thought that the experience would go on to launch something of a parallel community site dance career, what with the Mountain View Summer Solstice and Wreck Beach Butoh experiences following in quick succession this past summer? Certainly if you'd said to me last January that I'd now be taking weekly class with Barbara Bourget, I'd have laughed in your face. Though, if we're pointing fingers, I should probably place much of the blame for all of this at the feet--quite literally--of Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, who has certainly spoiled me for thinking that dancing and laughing naturally go together. (Sorry Barbara!)

There were a lot of laughs yesterday on the sixth floor of The Dance Centre, where I gathered with Artistic Associate Justine A. Chambers and Alexa Mardon to brainstorm a planned project on recent Vancouver dance history that Justine is spearheading as part of her two-year DC residency. Part living archive, part dance ethnography, part an exercise in kinaesthetic mapping and performance kinship, the collaboration is still in its very early stages. But the general idea is that the three of us will, over the next year or so, conduct video interviews with several of the city's leading dance artists in order to document the story of Vancouver dance over the past decade. Or I should say, stories. Because we are particularly keen not just to include as many voices as possible, but also to note where those voices converge and diverge on common anecdotes or topics of discussion, be they related to specific works, creation processes, tours, presenters, etc.

The temporal period we've imposed on the project coincides with Justine's arrival in the city, but also with something of a generational shift--or perhaps, more properly, supplement--in/to Vancouver dance practice, with many younger artists (several of them, like Justine, relocating to Vancouver from elsewhere) beginning to form companies and make new work and get noticed locally, nationally, and internationally. To be sure, we are also expecting that fissures will automatically open up in this timeline, with questions of aesthetic influence, and dance training, and performance collaboration and mentorship necessarily pointing backwards as much as forwards. We envision the process being rhizomatic rather than linear; as Justine put it yesterday, by the end of this we should have a constellated web of Vancouver dance-world connections in which there are zero degrees of separation between anyone.

Oh, and did I mention that all of this will culminate in a performance, and that I have agreed to participate in said performance? That part of it makes me a little sick to my stomach, not least as it will almost surely be at the Dance Centre in front of an audience made up of many of the artists whom we'll have interviewed. That's far in the future, though, and for now I can compartmentalize it in my mind as something comfortably abstract and on the distant horizon. However, I was relieved to hear from Justine and Alexa, both experienced performers, that they still want to throw up before most performances.

Watch this space--and possibly others--for updates on the progress of this project. My first task: to dig through the last decade of my collected programs.

P.

Wreck Beach Butoh: Second Performance

Waking up to yesterday's hazy orange dawn was a bit of a shock. As was discovering, once outside, a thin layer of ash covering the cars on the street. The wild fires burning in the interior and along the coast had blanketed Vancouver in a filmy layer of acrid smoke. While the sun eventually shone through yesterday and it became very hot on the beach, we couldn't help looking with dismay at the north shore mountains, which were becoming increasingly obscured by the sooty air. Our chalk white bodies against that vista must have looked eerie.

As for the performance itself, Barbara kept delaying the start because she wanted more available beach on which to move. In the end, we cut things pretty close, as by the end of the piece the tide had already started to come back in. That said, I was very pleased with how things went. I was more relaxed this time, which meant I wasn't over-thinking the choreography or my place in the group; instead, I could concentrate more on embodying the quality of the movement and giving myself over to the feelings associated with it, and with the site. The audience was maybe a bit sparser than on Saturday, perhaps put off by the smoke; but they seemed no less enthusiastic in their response, and one man, on leaving, said to us that it was the best WBB yet.

It has certainly been an amazing two weeks: I don't think I have worked so hard, nor learned so much in such a short amount of time. As Barbara would say, the experience is not for the faint of heart, and as  dance pedagogues she and Jay certainly have very different styles (holy understatement, Batman!); but those styles, when put together in the studio, are combustive in the best possible sense, sparking a desire among everyone in the room--from the newbie community movers like me to professional dance artists like Molly--to inhabit the choreography to the best of their abilities.

That's the kind of fire I can get behind and, schedule permitting, I'll be back again next year.

P.

Wreck Beach Butoh: First Performance

Waking up yesterday I discovered I still had white paint from our undress rehearsal on various parts of my body: between my toes; on the inside of my arm; between my shoulder blades. I took that as a good sign.

And, indeed, yesterday's performance was very successful, notwithstanding some last minute changes. Barbara reset the opening so that we descend to the water's edge in our statue group formations, staring out at the sea until she gives the signal to turn to face the cliffs/audience. It does make for a more coherent opening, especially given the fact that the audience had already clustered around us when we were still in our warm-up circle following Jay through various breathing and stretching exercises. I think many just assumed that given we were moving together as an ensemble that the performance must have started; needless to say, it was a bit disconcerting during the knee bends and stretches to note, when one put one's head between one's legs, that among the first glimpses the audience was getting was a full-on shot of one's ass.

A half-hour before the start of the performance, while we were putting on our make-up, it seemed to me that there weren't all that many people on the beach. However, during the warm-up I was surprised at the crowd that suddenly swelled around us: they seemed to come from out of nowhere, in various states of dress and undress. Once the performance began I was conscious of the audience only as an assembled mass; granted I didn't have my glasses on and so couldn't distinguish individual features very well (sorry Tiffany and Bertrand!). Still I think it had less to do with the relative proximity or distance of the spectators (some of whom got very close to us) than with the fact that I had actually found that butoh space-time nexus where body and environment and event became as one--to the point where, at the end of "Crumbling," emerging out of one move in which I couldn't see the rest of my group, I realized I was rather too much in the ma-zone of my own pace.

Not that, amid all of this, there weren't the occasional quotidian jolts of reality that brought me back to the piece's practical mechanics--and the spontaneous adjustment of them: as when, for example, amid Barbara's barking under her breath at us to get tighter as a group in advance of "Seagulls," Jay decided to launch our squawking count with the cry for nothing that is usually given by Barbara. If looks could kill ... but what could we do but all eventually join in? Then, too, the "Pirates" bit that follows this sequence was altogether different when, upon approaching my first audience member, I suddenly had an out-of-body "emperor's new clothes" moment, realizing that this person before whom I'm about to thrust forward my pelvis, throw back my head and laugh, knows that I'm naked, but is just going to ignore that detail for now.

The same went for the various friends in the audience I spoke to after the show, including several LGC and Mountain View Solstice alums. Given our casual banter about the performance, you'd have thought I'd just stepped off a concert stage fully clothed rather than out of the sea naked and painted white. But then that's the magic of Wreck Beach Butoh. There is something about the sublimity of the natural setting, which requires as much work (and, arguably, submission) from the audience as it does from us as performers, that makes physiognomical self-consciousness superfluous. Really, as a species we are all so puny amidst this vastness. What else is there to do, then, but dance?

P.

Wreck Beach Butoh: Undress Rehearsal

So, as Barbara had warned, the beach really does change everything. Different surface, different geographic relationships and distances, added natural variables. All of which combines for an experience that is as much about endurance and being able to make adjustments on the fly and maintaining acute spatial awareness as it is about performing the piece with presence and to the best of one's ability. Not that the latter still isn't expected of us, as we were reminded after our run-through, which included more than a few hiccups on my part, one semi-disastrous collective mistake at the end, and which according to Barbara lacked energy from start to finish. In her words, it was "too easy."

It didn't feel easy to me, starting with negotiating on one's bare feet the rocky forebeach closest to the cliffs, where we stored our gear and set up a quasi-green room. The Tower Beach part of Wreck has always been much rockier than the more visited southern part; however, I don't remember it being quite like what we encountered yesterday. It's like some gardener had come in with a truck full of landscaping stones and dumped them all over the beach. When Noah and Molly and I arrived, Jen and Salome were duly clearing as smooth and sandy a pathway as possible through them from our encampment to the water's edge.

Speaking of the water, it was pleasantly warm-ish. But also quite choppy. When we did the Mad Chefs bit, we were being buffeted about and swept off our feet like bowling pins by the waves crashing into us from behind. To say nothing of the energy required to swim against those waves in even getting to that section. Exiting the water was far less difficult, as one just had to let the tide sweep one ashore.

As for moving on the wet sand, I found it had plusses and minuses. Falling onto it rather than onto a parquet studio floor (however well sprung) was certainly more pleasant on the joints. However, there was also the tendency to sink into it during certain moves, which played occasional havoc with my balance. Traversing it butoh style, with one's weight forward and sliding rather than lifting one's feet, was also a bit challenging, depending on how fast or slow we were going. But doing the cat/cow gallop (a weird menagerie of a metaphor, I know) was certainly easier than on a hard floor. And while one wasn't able to get as much rebound from the sand in propelling into the ecstasy jumps, I actually enjoyed the experience of performing them. Embracing the actual sky does help.

Other things I hadn't anticipated: the cold from the wind when one first comes out of the water, and how it takes a great deal of will not to shiver uncontrollably while also trying to do the choreography; having to squint into the sun during the last of the statue poses; the labour of applying and taking off the white body paint; feeling so self-conscious in front of what amounted to an accidental audience.

Oh yeah, and how tired I felt afterwards. So much so that I decided to forgo the Dancing on the Edge show for which I had tickets last night. But I'm feeling refreshed this morning; it's another beautiful day and I'm pumped for the first performance.

P.

Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp: Day 9

Barbara worked us pretty hard during our last morning class: lots of running and hopping and shimmying and jumping across the studio; and a plank I swear she made us hold for a full two minutes. Then we practised various transitions between sections, including multiple iterations of my least favourite: the squat walk from the beasts section to our second entrance into the water before seagulls.

After lunch break it was one final run-through of the piece in the studio, this time without music. Apparently we remained pretty close to our normal time. Not that that meant that Barbara was pleased. The opening canon was a bit off, we needed to be drilled on our trajectory during the birds section at the end of "Crumbling," and she couldn't feel our ecstasy during the ecstasy jumps.

So, there's still work to do--which we have today at the beach to get through. I'm counting on actually seeing the sky when I reach up to embrace it during those final jumps being the added element I need to channel my inner butoh bliss.

P.

Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp: Day 8

No day off because of the holiday yesterday. Instead, we ran through the piece twice in its entirety, once with Jay watching and taking notes and once with Barbara doing the same. Apparently we were a few minutes longer the second time around, maybe because it was the end of the day and we were tired, but more likely because we didn't have Barbara inside the piece as our timekeeper.

Now that we have the structure of the piece locked down, it's a matter of refining the quality of movement in individual sections. For Jay, that starts with our walking, which still feels pedestrian to him, and which requires more resistance and energy in our bodies--especially as it leads into the ecstasy jumps at the end. Barbara's notes were many and incredibly detailed, but I liked the fact that she didn't just give us physical tasks to accomplish more precision, but also what we should be thinking to enable us to inhabit the movement with greater presence and dynamism.

Unfortunately, we learned that we've lost one ensemble member. Patricia Morris, who danced with me in Le Grand Continental and the Mountain View Solstice piece, has had to withdraw due to injury. This is disappointing, but Barbara didn't let us get sentimental and among other things very quickly re-choreographed the final duet sequence so that one group is now a trio.

One more day in the studio and then it's onto the beach on Friday for a test drive of the piece.

P.

Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp: Day 7

So we now all have a sense of the complete structure of the piece, beginning with the statues and progressing all the way through to our concluding duets. We haven't yet performed the piece from start to finish, instead splitting things up into two halves yesterday. Maybe it's my new butoh sense of time, but I actually have no idea how long the piece is--close to 50 minutes or so I think. But when Barbara joins us as our metronome (as she did briefly yesterday), that may well stretch even further. "No one gets ahead of Barbara," to quote another of her maxims.

We practised our gallumphing cat/cow beasts quite a bit in the afternoon, as it is the point in the second half when group 2 (which is actually group 1--don't get me started) has to catch up to group 1 (formerly group 2). On the beach we'll be travelling in just one direction (west, I think--there was also a lot of "Who's on first" bickering back and forth between Jay and Barbara about direction yesterday); but in the studio we have to go back and forth across the room on all fours, gradually accelerating until we find our partners. It's a killer on the joints and quads, and because we didn't do it right the first (or second or third) time, Barbara had us run through it until we were all quivering pools of sweat.

But in our circle at the end of the day Barbara also offered praise, thanking us for how hard we had worked and assuring us that the piece would be beautiful. It's not exactly my pedagogical style, but I do admire the way Barbara works--or, perhaps more to the point, the way she makes us want to work. She has a vision of what she wants her dances to be and she is uncompromising in achieving that vision, including in her motivation of community dancers like me to raise our standards to hers and those of the other professional dancers in the room, rather than the other way around.

Two more days of rehearsal (including today, Canada Day), and then it's our "undress rehearsal" on the beach on Friday.

P.