Edge 2 at DOTE

Last evening's Edge 2 program at the Dancing on the Edge Festival was an immensely satisfying mix of very different, but equally strong, short works. Natasha Bakht's Blessed Unrest, a solo danced by Monica Shah, led things off. Bakht, who just happens to have a side gig as an associate professor of law at the University of Ottawa (!), is trained in bharatannatyam, and in this work she gives the classical Indian form a contemporary twist, not least through her choice of music. In the first and most extended section, Shah's intricate footwork, knee bends and hand gestures are performed to a bracingly fast piano composition by Alexander MacSween, and are additionally set against a projected backdrop of the blankly white looped end of a film reel. However, at a certain point the piano music cuts out, an inky black projection of what looks like a river bed comes up, and Shah slows things way down. Indeed, this section begins with the dancer splaying the toes on her right foot in such an unhurried yet utterly compelling way that I would have been content to watch this one gesture for the rest of the piece. In this fusion of tempos and tones, Bakht shows that contemporary Indian dance is as exciting and complexly varied as any western concert dance form.

An excerpt from Jennifer Mascall's work-in-progress, Quartet, was shown next. Mascall, subbing for Vanessa Goodman, served as on-stage intermediary for the audience, announcing from a downstage right stool that what we were watching was a lecture-demonstration about a process concerning what we know, and what we don't know. An exploration of voice as much as movement, dancers Anne Cooper, Eloi Homier and Walter Kubanek sing, grunt, breathe, and speak with varying degrees of intelligibility, while simultaneously and/or in counterpoint interposing their bodies between or alongside each other. Within these circuits of vocal and kinetic communication, the performers are variously in and out of sync with each other, Homier's off-beat syncopation in a tap sequence, for example, or his slightly different tonal inflections in a virtuoso grunting session with Cooper and Kubanek, indicative of the ways in which sense-making is inherently sensual. As slyly funny as it is sharply intelligent, this excerpt is hopefully the first of many iterations of Quartet.

Finally, demonstrating that she can go compositionally maximalist when she wants to, Yvonne Ng, whose spare autobiographical solo is also included in this year's Edge 1 program, serves up a boldly expressive (and even expressionist) trio with her excerpt of Zhōng Xīn. Superbly danced by Mairéad Filgate, Irvin Chow and Luke Garwood to a booming score by Max Richter, the work plays out, on one level, as a love triangle in which none of the points can connect. Indeed, it was surprising to me just how little actual partnering there was in the piece. Instead, like sub-atomic particles colliding in space, the dancers are as repelled as they are attracted by each other's energy, and the moments that registered most powerfully for me were the ones in which each performer obsessively repeated a gestural or movement pattern in his or her own isolated world: Filgate, otherwise standing still, windmilling her arms wildly in the air; Chow running from point to point on the floor like he is playing tag with himself; and Garwood, at both the top and the end of the show, waving his hands in front of his face. As with the excerpt from Quartet, what Ng showed here only wets one's appetite for more.

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Edge 1 at DOTE

The offerings in the 2017 Dancing on the Edge Festival's first mixed program, Edge 1, were, well, mixed. Reversing the order in the printed program, the first piece presented was local choreographer Chick Snipper's Phasmida & Scorpiones: a study. Performers Jess Ames and Julianne Chapple wear matching coral-coloured lyotards with cross-hatched stitching on the backs, and also black leggings. While one of the dancers lies supine on the floor upstage right, with one hand stretched above her head, the other moves out of a lunge she is holding centre stage and into a deep plie, the first phase in her own eventual trajectory floorwards. Here she will begin a series of crawling patterns across the stage, her body low to the floor, her arms outstretched and bent at the elbows, feet flexed: in other words, an approximation of the morphology of the predatory arachnids in Snipper's title. By contrast, the other dancer's orbit is upwards, her physical vocabulary and locomotion more vertical, with her limbs tending towards a series of extensions: and thus do we discover (with the aid of a bit of post-show Googling) that phasmida are a class of stick-like insects. Of course, arachnid and insect must meet, and in Snipper's study they do so twice: once on the floor, rolling onto and over each other in some contact-inspired phrasing; and once while standing, leaning into each other's chests, entwining their arms, syncing two of their knees together, and beginning an approximation of a slow, three-legged walk upstage. I'm not sure if this meant that the scorpion wins out over the phasmid, but it did register to me as one more way in which this piece was a bit too literal and representational in the physical phrasing it was deploying.

Representational gestures also figured in Yvonne Ng's Weave ... part one, a solo in which she tells the story of her mother's complicated patrimony through speech and movement. However, for every rocking back and forth of Ng's arms to indicate a swaddling baby there was also a through-line bodily grammar of more formally repetitive and non-expressive gestural sequences, the patterning of Ng's limbs, when combined with her talk, putting me in mind of the mathematically-inflected work of Sarah Chase. Additionally layered over top of this is a meta-commentary in which every so often Ng will comment on either the appropriateness or the ridiculousness of the particular movement she is executing. The approach works, and not just because the petite Ng, artistic director of the Toronto-based tiger princess dance projects, is such a charismatic performer. The combination of deconstructed formalism and emotional lyricism captures the complicated story of Asian feminine identity that Ng is trying to tell, which we discover is as much about finding an anchor for herself where her mother had none.

Last on the program was Tedd Robinson's Logarian Rhapsody, a commission for the Winnipeg-based dance artist Alexandra Elliott. A duet that Elliott dances with Ian Mozden, it begins with the performers whispering offstage. Eventually they enter, their eyes rimmed in black kohl, and dressed like lounge singers from the 1970s in white leisure suits. Mozden appears to be holding some orb-like object in one hand. That object turns out to be a green apple and via snippets of the live whispering of the dancers, and also via the voiceover that eventually joins this whispering, we learn that both dancers wish to eat the apple. However, it takes a very long time for either of them to do so, and first we must cycle through a series of anticipatory tableaux: Mozden coming downstage to show us the apple and comment on how desirously delicious it looks; Elliott placing the apple on Mozden's shoulder for them and us to admire, or be in fearsome awe of; Elliott and Mozden trading the apple back and forth; Elliott rolling the apple on the floor; and so on. We go through variations of this sequence many, many times, and while I normally find Robinson's conceptual imagination highly engaging, here the conceit felt tedious. Adam and Eve: we get it. Just someone please bite the apple already. Spoiler alert: they both eventually do so, and the choreographic effect is decidedly anti-climactic. There is, however, a final saving grace: a fantastic lighting cue to end the piece.

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