My Vancouver Dance History: September 8 Artist Salon with Ziyian Kwan (Dumb Instrument Dance)

Yesterday I spent time chatting and hanging out with Dumb Instrument Dance's Ziyian Kwan, whom I write about (along with Action at a Distance's Vanessa Goodman, who unfortunately couldn't be with us) in Chapter 4 of the book.

Ziyian also oversees and runs Morrow, the pop-up venue at which I am hosting my book launch and artist salons this week. In the video below you get some sense of the space, including the noise from the construction that was happening next door!

P.

Random Thoughts on Performance in the Age of COVID

I hadn't anticipated writing a "performance in the time of COVID" blog post, especially on a site that's supposed to be retired. But this past Sunday afternoon's live-streamed all-request concert by local legend Veda Hille has prompted me to weigh in--if only to work through my own wildly shifting performative responses to some of the effects of this pandemic. As one of the more personal of those effects has been a temporary stymying of my ability (or desire?) to write (beyond the heaps of emails and memos and letters that have proliferated as a result of my administrative position at SFU), at the very least the following will hopefully prove a useful exercise in translating the jumble of my thoughts into slightly more coherent prose (though, no promises).

Like many the world over, I have spent the last ten weeks consuming a lot of online performance. Some of it has been fantastic, as in the case of Theatre Complicité's Encounter, in which the amazing binaural sound design seems especially suited to this headphones-wearing moment of Zoom videoconferencing--where the fixed perspectivalism of visual space has been replaced by the immersive absorption of acoustic space (that last bit of McLuhanism was mostly for Richard, but I defy anyone in a Zoom meeting of more than four to figure out instantly where to look when someone is speaking in Gallery view). But for every transportive experience like Encounter there have been reams of dreary live-streamed staged readings of cancelled productions; no matter how important or laudable the message of these works, they can't really compete with the medium (okay, that's it, I promise, but really there's a qualitative difference--including which is better suited to telling a story--between a podcast and a YouTube tutorial).

Which brings me to Sunday's concert, "Veda Hille Haunts The Cultch." Organized through Dan Mangan and Laura Simpson's Side Door Productions, the event was broadcast live from The Cultch's Historic Theatre via Zoom. Beyond the fact that it was Veda, and that she was at the top of her game in terms of singing and piano playing and storytelling, for me performer-audience intimacy transcended to a certain degree the live-digital divide by making this an all-request concert. You could email Veda your favourite songs from her catalogue, and even the odd cover suggestion, and she would draw titles from a hat (actually a coral-coloured water pitcher that sat atop her grand piano), or else spin a hand-made wheel of fortune on which several additional requested songs had been listed. When Veda picked a song and read out who had requested it (which was often more than one person), the chat box--which was lively throughout--would light up with comments and emojis, and following this thread was as entertaining as watching Veda sing. As exemplary, however, was how Mangan and his production team were able to capture the eventness of the event through their savvy camerawork. Two cameras were trained on Veda, and cut between close-ups of her singing and talking and of her fingers on the keyboard. But there was also another bird's eye view of the venue, and whenever the camera cut to this angle, I got a shivery feeling, both in the sense of momentarily feeling like I was there at the back of the house along with Veda and her crew and also perceiving a pang at the otherwise empty auditorium (and one can only note the material significance of that emptiness for Veda, who would otherwise have been performing to packed houses with a scheduled tour of her knock-out show Little Volcano, which premiered at the PuSh Festival this past January). Then, too, there were those moments--one coming during Veda's beautiful rendition of one of the songs that I had requested (Yaz's "Only You")--when Mangan cut to a montage of the screens of the online audience, which prompted enthusiastic waves and cheering, and very occasionally some displays of frolicsome exhibitionism.

Not that the success of this event has made me a full-fledged devotee of the digital dissemination of live performance. I've spent too much time looking at a screen over the past two months to accede willy-nilly to the many possibilities afforded by live-streaming (including affordability and accessibility). At the same time, I don't want to essentialize or romanticize the special co-presence between performer and spectator that supposedly comes with a live performance event. As much as sheltering in place has taught me that, introvertedly inclined though I be, I actually crave and need the company of others--especially to witness and talk about art--I find the instant nostalgia for "how things were" in theatre and performance to be specious. As many of us know, there were/are a lot of things wrong with standard performance production and presentation models, and the following debate articulated here and here about the "forgotten arts" of assembly and disassembly as they relate to the theatre is instructive about divisions within the broader global community. I am not taking a stand one way or another. These past few months I have gorged on iconic shows I would not otherwise have been able to see (hello Pina Bausch's Palermo, Palermo!), and as an educator I find video documentation of live performance to be incredibly valuable pedagogically (and our students at the School for the Contemporary Arts, seeing their scheduled end-of-semester productions and exhibitions and graduation projects evaporate one after another have adapted to various digital platforms with grace and wit and incredible ingenuity). But I also know that after all of this is over I also want to gather with others and share in all of the embodied rituals--from hugs in a crowded lobby to the sharing of laughter and applause--that come with attending (and tending to) live performance. Another thing I know, however, is that some companies may not have the means post-COVID to issue such an invitation, and so digital modes of production and dissemination might become key to survival. I refuse to make predictions or recommendations. There are too many prognosticators taking up too much space already as a result of this crisis, one that we're still very much in the middle of.

Incidentally, those two links on assembly and disassembly that I mention in the preceding paragraph came to me via an online conversation organized two weeks ago by P. Megan Andrews as part of her residency at The Dance Centre. She asked Justine A. Chambers, Olivia C. Davies, Vanessa Goodman, and Erika Mitsuhashi to talk about the "shift to the digital" in relation to their own practices. The conversation was wide-ranging and lively: how some folks were adapting in terms of projects and teaching and taking class, whether out of necessity or desire; and how others were hitting pause, using the radical stillness and enforced house arrest and new kinds of social choreography that have been imposed on their moving bodies (and the movement of bodies more generally) to ask deeper questions of their practice, their previous ways of making, and where they might want to go/what they might want to do differently in the future. It was all done via Zoom, of course, and following the online choreography of the conversation was as captivating as that conversation's content.

But I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge that after I left said meeting (which seems like such a weird Zoom sign-off, given that I haven't really gone anywhere) I didn't grieve a little. I so miss the company of these smart women and pre-COVID we would ideally at this very moment be celebrating the publication of my book about the Vancouver dance community. It was scheduled to be released last week, and while copies have arrived at my publisher's warehouse (I've seen the photos of the physical copies, as the attached image attests), they have delayed distribution until August. By that time, I fear that what was meant to be a celebration of the vibrancy of the dance community will already read like a period piece. Lockdown came during the middle of VIDF and one by one, dance events in this city have been cancelled. As The Dance Centre and other spaces prepare to open their doors to limited use under enhanced protocols, I worry about the futures of so many of the artists and companies I love. I also lament that the Dance Studies Association Conference that I was organizing with Allana Lindgren and Ahalya Satkunaratnam for this October at SCA, and at which Olivia and Justine were to be featured performers/presenters, has had to be postponed; I was so looking forward to introducing the Vancouver dance community to international dance scholars and artists. At the same time (and to borrow from the theme of the conference, which should be back in 2022), I know this community is so resilient. Just look at Dumb Instrument Dance's Ziyian Kwan, whom I write about in my book, and who in her response to a rise in anti-Asian racism in the city has refused to be cowed, peacefully claiming her and others' just rights to assembly and movement.

So instead of moping about what might have been, here's to looking forward to when we can all gather and dance together again (in hot pink lycra, of course).

P

Interplay 2018 at Moberly Arts Centre

The 2018 rendition of Interplay is on this weekend at Moberly Arts Centre. Produced by Mutable Subject's Deanna Peters, the annual event is a great chance to see the first iterations of works-in-progress by a range of very talented multi-disciplinary artists. Plus it's a nice social atmosphere in a great (if somewhat remote) venue that has been showcasing important cultural programs (especially by dance artists) for years.

Six works are divided neatly into two halves, with Peters additionally spinning a series of 45s for us as each set is struck. First up was Alexa Mardon, performing an as yet untitled solo that combines her skills as a writer and a dancer, and that asks how we can be in two places at once, and if it's possible to re-experience an event, or its trace, retrospectively through the body. Mardon cannily marshals two chairs to aid her in exploring these questions, this particular piece of furniture always to my mind bearing the doubled imprint of who has sat there before and who will yet do so in the future. This is brought out in two moments that stood out to me: first, when Mardon sits in the stage right chair and begins a series of hiccupy upper-body movements, as if rehearsing how to lean into a remembered conversation with an invisible interlocutor, or, as we subsequently discover, how to remove her orange windbreaker, which she then makes magically bloom in her hands; and, second, when at the end of the piece she slips said windbreaker over the back of the stage left chair and inflates it with an air pump underneath the seat.

Slant Rhymes is a collaboration between dance artist Carolina Bergonzoni and writer and filmmaker Joel Salaysay. To a voiceover of a male and female couple talking about dreams, Bergonzoni crafts a movement score that asks us to reach into space to consider how the conversation we are listening to might be perceived differently, that is, as also unfolding kinaesthetically. What I liked about the work was that the collaborators allowed their complementary scores to both work together and independently of each other. There were moments when we were allowed to just listen to the text, and also moments when, in silence, we could watch Bergonzoni moving.

The final piece in the first half of the program was Ziyian Kwan's The Odd Volume, the first study in what is planned as a new solo work by the artist. Working with the music of Henry Purcell, Kwan emerges onto a set that features an upright piano and a fuzzy, fur-covered piano bench wearing boxing shorts, a hoodie, and trainers. Indeed, at first the somewhat pugilistic movement seems at odds with the music, and Kwan's own bodily relationship with the piano appears antagonistic, as she first pushes against it, and then climbs on top of and over it. The piece concludes, however, with Kwan making peace with her various instruments; having moved the piano bench in front of the piano, she lifts up the seat cover, which seems to unlock something within her. She then disrobes and after first curling up on the furry bench turns her attention to the piano keys, which she proceeds to play with delicate grace.

Following intermission we were treated to The Memory Palace, a work created by Nathan Marsh, Yian Chen and Clara Chow. An interactive electroacoustic installation that also featured movement, a recording of Roy Orbison's Only the Lonely, and several plastic cup versions of old-fashioned tin can phone lines, the mash-up of ideas didn't quite come together for me. With its books and candles and various listening and playing devices scattered about the stage, it might have worked better as a full-fledged immersive installation into which an audience might be encouraged to wander and durationally linger. In its current proscenium staging it was not particularly engaging.

Patrick Blenkarn followed with Donkeyskin, a lecture-performance and mixed-media work that combines aspects of first-person video games. Based upon ongoing research Patrick is conducting on politics under late capitalism, the disappearance of skilled manual labour, and the cultural history of donkeys, the premise is that three donkeys awaiting slaughter in China (their rendered skins now a valuable commodity in the health market) convene to discuss the reasons for this breakdown in their relations with humans. Patrick reads the text of the first donkey's disquisition aloud, which is a kind of Platonic apology for what their species might have done better in their communications with humans; the second donkey's fuck you to the human world, and also his own kind, is projected onto a screen; and the third donkey, we learn, decides to escape, at which point we're launched on a careening projected gallop through forests and rolling hills. What becomes of this last donkey we'll have to wait to see.

Finally, the evening concluded with Syn(es)thetic Nature, a collaboration between sound artist Michelle Helene McKenzie and media artist Brady Marks. Improvising from a table that was piled with an impressive array of technical gear, the two artists mixed a live soundscape into corresponding visuals that morphed in and out of different geometrical shapes on two screens. At one point early on in the piece the visuals cut out due to a glitch in the projectors, but with suitable sang-froid Marks got up, went behind the two screens and used a pocket flashlight to create some interim magic. It worked beautifully.

Interplay continues tonight at 8 pm.

P

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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Shiny at Left of Main

Kelly McInnes' Shiny, on at Left of Main through this Saturday, is a bold and timely work. Given the ongoing fallout of sexual harassment and assault in the entertainment industry that continues to dominate the news, it feels prescient that McInnes should be tackling in this piece the related (although admittedly not new) issue of representational violence perpetuated by the impossible standards of white feminine beauty circulated within glossy women's magazines--and consumed and internalized by readers of all genders. That pages from said magazines are themselves incorporated into the work and very materially structure the movement of bodies within it only helps to make physically manifest the problem of fit between flat images and live bodies that McInnes and her collaborators are trying to draw our attention to.

To this end, we enter the performance space to a striking tableau. McInness sits at a sewing machine stage left, decoupéd and laminated magazine pages covering her private parts, and with what looks like a film strip of more cut out pages hanging above her. Sitting on a stool centre stage is a clothed Maxine Chadburn; her back is to us and she is combing her long shiny mane of hair. In front of her is a lumpy quilt of even more stitched together magazine pages. Occasionally it seems to rise and fall, suggesting a body underneath. Stage right of Chadburn is something even more striking: what looks like a series of body parts, again made out of magazine pages, hanging from a makeshift clothesline. Further to the right there is also the hollowed out frame of a full-length mirror and some kind of body suit on the floor; it is also made out of magazine pages, the finished prototype of what we might assume to be the assembled parts hanging from the clothesline.

Sound cues--almost all of them related to stereotypically female domestic activities--are important in Shiny. Thus, following an opening address to the audience from McInness (to which I will return), when McInnes begins to sew this is the signal for Chadburn to turn around, a winning smile plastered to her face. She starts to disrobe, and then to draw the items on the clothesline towards her. One by one she slips them onto or wraps them around different parts of her body: a shoulder epaulet here; a shin guard there; one half of a breast plate; and then the other. All the while as Chadburn is donning her armour (a fitting image used by McInnes to describe this sequence during the post-performance talkback), her smile never wavers. But, as disturbingly, her movements become stiffer and more constrained: legs and feet have to be shifted and manipulated externally, as if Chadburn has become a mannequin. The effacement of Chadburn's real body is completed when she puts on the last item from the clothesline: a head mask with no visible holes from which to breathe or see, but with several pairs of photographed and airbrushed eyes and lips and noses nevertheless staring eerily back at us. (There is also the fact that this second skin into which Chadburn binds herself, combined with the sound and image of McInnes sewing throughout, put me in mind of the Buffalo Bill character from Silence of the Lambs, who wishes to stitch together a new skin for himself from the flayed corpses of his female victim.)

This sequence ends with Chadburn pulling the quilt on the floor before her towards her lap, attempting to attach it like a skirt with a needle and thread. But there is indeed someone under there, and she is not keen to give up her cover--or, perhaps more properly, to be exposed to our scrutinizing and sexualizing gaze. This is the third performer in the piece, Rianne Svelnis, who does end up losing the fight for the blanket to Chadburn. In exchange, Svelnis takes Chadburn's magazine helmet and places it on her own head, her subsequent blinded movements accompanied by the sound of McInnes using scissors to cut up another magazine. Eventually McInnes turns those scissors on Svelnis, cutting off the cubist montage of newsprint she had been wearing and dressing her in the French maid's outfit we are meant to understand she had been sewing all this time. This image is complete when McInness places a vacuum cleaner beside Svelnis.

The final section of Shiny involves all three performers attempting to reject, only to reincorporate (quite literally in one case), the proscribed images of white femininity to which they have become shackled. McInnes tries to feed the magazine pages hanging above her sewing machine into a paper shredder, but the laminate makes it jam, and so she decides to eat what little detritus she has made instead. Chadburn throws off her amazing technicolour magazine coat in a robust bit of floor thrashing, but ends up trying to tape herself into the abandoned body shell off to the right. Svelnis tries to suck everything up with her vacuum cleaner, including McInnes and Chadburn. The final image is of all three women sitting topless underneath the magazine quilt staring out at us with fake smiles that gradually grow more and more nervous and questioning.

Shiny has been workshopped over the past two years, and that clearly shows within the thoughtfulness and integrity of its dramaturgy. That extends beyond questions of design and mise-en-scene to the careful way McInnes has thought about the vulnerability of her co-performers (both of whom were eloquent in the talkback in elaborating on the physical and emotional demands of the process). My only real critique of the piece has to do with that opening address from McInnes. It comes in the form of an acknowledgement of her own (and her performers') privilege, that as a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered woman she cannot presume to be speaking for or representing in this work the experiences of all women. I get that, but framing the show with this statement has the effect of overdetermining our interpretation of it, something that was confirmed for me by the fact that PuSh Festival Director of Programming Joyce Rosario asked a question about it in the talkback, and then talkback facilitator Ziyian Kwan invited McInnes to repeat it at the end of this post-show conversation. For me, opening with this statement suggests something of a lack of trust in the audience to do the work to arrive on their own at the same conclusion--or perhaps nervousness on the part of the creator that the work won't lead them to this conclusion. At the same time, it betrays the much harder work that the statement is standing in for: including non-white, or trans, or differently abled bodies into the piece itself.

P

Long Division: Second Closing

Today's matinee is the last performance of this remount of Long Division. It would be wonderful to have a second week of shows, but I am grateful to have had the opportunity to revisit the work at all. The play is definitely stronger as a result, the actors have made new discoveries in the text and with their characters, and the work--especially Lauchlin's set and Lesley's choreography--looks great in the Annex space. Immense thanks to Richard Wolfe for making all of this happen.

Later this evening, after our strike, the cast and crew will come over to our place to celebrate. In the meantime, I thought I would share a response to the play by my friend Ziyian Kwan. I have enjoyed writing about Ziyian's work in this space over the years and it is a treat for me to receive her sensitive response to my own creative efforts.

P

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Dear Peter,

Rodney and I attended Long Division last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. So I thought it would be a fun exercise to do as you do and write about the experience the morning after. And to limit the writing to within 500 words, in a tone inspired by yours. Herewith:

On the day I saw Long Division, playwright Peter Dickinson’s partner Richard visited my husband’s bookshop, The Paperhound, to purchase a precious pamphlet. Later that evening, upon arriving at the Annex Theatre, I ran into David Kaye, an actor I haven’t seen for years, who lives in my building of 18 units. Then as I found my seat in the theatre, I realized that Jimmy Tait, whom I hadn’t seen since attending a showing of Misunderstood, was beside me. Hugs were exchanged.

All this to ask, what are the odds of running into people who are on the periphery of our lives – in places where we share common interests, in remote cities yet untraveled, or in our dreams? Are these collisions accident or fate? I think of times when the course of my life was changed as a direct result of such chance meetings.

Long Division invited me to consider the gravity and levity of encounters with people. I found myself wishing to remember exact lines that were pithy analogies of math and human exchange. The text, which was delivered by a fine cast of actors, was recognizably Peter Dickinson’s: the sing-song syntax and dry lyricism of precise words that captured potent questions about life. Throughout, the clever use of phrases such as “in addition” to describe events.

Whereas much of the play was a silky cocoon of existential inquiry, the story revealed a tragedy. This tension worked, yet I occasionally wished for a less emphatic treatment of human drama. But then, I know nothing about theatre….

I do know a little about dance and found choreographer Lesley Telford’s work bang on. Without being illustrative or literal, the actors moved through space to navigate circumstances in time. The dance, though abstract, seemed natural, and added texture to characters and scenes. And, the movement was styling!

I also liked the projection of mathematical formulas on a backdrop of Pythagorean 3D triangles. Coming from dance, where projections are often used but usually ignored, I appreciated that the actors actually looked at the projections to confirm that, indeed, complex equations attend the sum total of life’s many variables.

My favorite of the play’s many equations and corresponding metaphors was this: the empty set is a subset of every set.

Like many people, I often feel like the outcast quality in a mass quantity of digits that belong. But Long Division helps me with this affliction, suggesting that the nothingness of my empty set is part of a greater equation: humanity.  

This morning I woke up and thought about my life as an artist and realized that if nothing else, I have at my side and within me, the exponential prowess of zero.

Thank you for the beautiful work, Peter.

With love,

Ziyian

The Mars Hotel and Kwan Yin at The Firehall

This week marks the return of Ziyian Kwan and dumb instrument Dance to The Firehall Arts Centre, this time in a presentation of Kwan's first full evening of dance. Included as part of the program is the return of The Mars Hotel, a piece based on a work of flash fiction by writer P.W. Bridgman that premiered on the same stage at the 2015 Dancing on the Edge Festival. An exuberant, whimsical, muscular and ultimately joyous ode to and deconstruction of that biggest of cliches, love, the work's many strange and delightfully askew set-pieces (including the deflating and blowing up of a giant white love ball) are structured around a duet Kwan performs with Vision Impure's Noam Gagnon.

In Gagnon Kwan has found her impish and physically fearless dance soulmate and I think this work remains such a hit with audiences in part because of the obvious improvisatory chemistry between both performers. Then, too, there is the crackerjack three piece musical ensemble, Handmade Blade, that accompanies the dancers on stage, including Aram Bajakian on electric guitar, JP Carter on trumpet, and the incomparable Peggy Lee on cello. You wouldn't normally think that a trio made up of these instruments would work, but their jamming last night (following a bit of a technical issue at intermission) was fantastic, the hypnotic admixture of sound contributing to the overall dreamlike quality of the piece. Indeed, if anything I think this work has gotten even tighter and more sharply focused since its premiere (about which I wrote at more length here); some bits have gone by the wayside and some bits have been added, but the unique combination of movement, music, text, and visual and costume design which remains Kwan's signature continues to offer so many different and rewarding ways into the piece. Not that all went according to original plan on the latter front last night, about which I will have more to say in a moment.

But before that let me mention the first and newest work on last night's program. Kwan Yin is a twenty-minute duet that Kwan has created with her 77-year old father, Lihuen Kwan. Wanting to explore the idea of patience via the heart sutra of the Chinese Buddhist Bodhisattva who gives the piece its title, Kwan decided to work with the person with whom she is most often impatient. What has resulted is a tender father-daughter exploration of the "colour of emptiness," again accompanied by the live on-stage cello stylings of Lee. The piece begins with the three performers in separate moons of half-light; Lihuen Kwan, sitting on a chair, is the furthest downstage. His daughter, whom he will come to identify as his shadow, slowly advances towards him, taking first one and then the other arm before letting each drop, the weightless thud of Lihuen Kwan's hands on his thighs at this point signalling how far apart these two yet remain. But the pair will eventually come together, including in some very moving bits of unison and partnering late in the piece. It is a testament to the reserves of patience Kwan ended up finding and drawing upon in the making of this piece that, in these sequences, she let's her father (who is certainly a spry mover) take the lead.

Last night's audience was filled with local high school students, who were very engaged and attentive throughout these two challenging works of contemporary dance. And while none of them stayed for the talkback that I was invited to lead after the performance, a concession that Kwan was asked to make in relation to their presence became the focus of some conversation. To be specific: there is a moment in The Mars Hotel when Kwan, clad only in black panties and pumps, inserts an industrial strength inflater into the love ball and lets loose. It's an image that calls up and simultaneously subverts any number of gendered stereotypes around sexuality and power. However, last night Kwan was asked by Firehall Artistic Producer Donna Spencer to cover her breasts in deference to the attending high school students. After much consideration, Kwan decided to comply, but also posted about the decision on Facebook. The response, she said during the talkback, generated a lot of debate, some of which carried over into our conversation last night--and which, to Kwan's credit, she refused to characterize as a simple matter of an artist being censored or having to compromise her feminist principles. As she has since put it to me in an email message about the matter, there were other, equally important, issues at play. And so I will end by quoting Ziyian herself, because she states things so eloquently: "This is what I want to share, after performing to a sold out house of 60% high school students. My dilemma about censorship was secondary. The schools were Magee and Templeton – representing the Vancouver East Side and Shaughnessy, two conversely different neighbourhoods in terms of perceived demographics. It was a small sacrifice to alter my costume so that I could share my work with this audience. What a gift to have these people witnessing Noam and Ken kiss, watching my dad dance, listening to the wild and poetic sounds of Handmade Blade. The students held my work in their gaze and felt to me, ageless. Fully present as much as they wanted to be, they infused the performance with energy and the night was magical. What more could I ask? They didn’t stay for the talk back but they stayed to receive the work. They stayed to share the beautiful transparency of their eyes and to see what they saw. This resonates with me and eclipses my questions that were founded in the politics of gender and power. At the end of the day, the reciprocal nature of art is boundless. It is love."

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Simile at The Dance Centre

Today is The Dance's Centre's annual fall open house, which officially marks the launch of its 2016-17 season. Last night Richard and I, along with other donors and invited guests, got a sneak peek of tonight's mainstage show, Simile. A collaboration between Ziyian Kwan, of dumb instrument Dance, and Vanessa Goodman, of Action at a Distance, the evening is made up of two solos and a duet.

Kwan leads things off with a reprise of "Still Rhyming," which she premiered at VIDF this past spring, and which pairs her with local musician Jo Hirabayashi, who plays electric guitar and sings. An homage to Patti Smith, and especially her writing in M Train, the piece asks, among other things, what it means to embody creative influence. How, for example, do you dance a book's possession of your soul? In Kwan's case, this leads to a provocative opening duet with the book as choreographic object. Lying prone on the floor with a hard-cover book covering her face as Hirabayashi picks out a riff on his guitar in the upstage right corner, Kwan slowly arises from her slumber, her eyes peeking out over the edge of the book. The book begins to slide down Kwan's torso, but she is careful not to let it fall to the ground. Indeed, in the movement that follows Kwan is at pains to keep the book in as close proximity to her body as possible: she passes it through her legs like a basketball; she clutches it under her chin; and, most extraordinarily, she grips the spine between her teeth, jumping up and down so that the white pages fan open and close, open and close, like a huge gaping mouth waiting to suck us into its world of mystery and pleasure. This first part of the piece was most captivating. I was less sure about what to make of Kwan's subsequent dialogue with a chair, which via its draping with a black leather jacket and bits of Kwan's conversation we are meant to surmise stands in for the absent presence of Smith. It's always tricky addressing an invisible interlocutor on stage, much less dancing with them--though embedded in Kwan's goofy mistake about how to spell her own name there does seem to be an interesting comment about whose signature ultimately belongs on the work, one that is also extended to the audience.

Goodman followed with a solo called "Floating Upstream," a work that once again showcased how beautifully and intuitively she moves to the original electronic soundscapes created by frequent collaborator Locsil. The piece begins with Goodman in a crouch centre stage, her back towards the audience. Clutching each of the long billowy white pant legs of the costume she is wearing up around her thighs, she slowly bounce-shuffles up stage, like she is wading through a heavy current or a soupy swamp. Following Goodman's program note, we can read the white pants as a nimbus of clouds through which she has thrust her body, keen to explore a different view and set of spatial orientations. At the same time, I couldn't also help seeing the hitched up pants as Victorian-era bloomers, symbol of gendered bodily constraint that in Goodman's efforts, having reached the upstage wall and turned to face the audience, not to let her cuffs fall means she literally has to keep her knees together. Either way, the initial isolation of Goodman's upper body means that we are able to marvel at the simultaneous flow and precision of her movement, her arms undulating in waves through the layered wash of Locsil's score only to jab suddenly at the air in response to successive musical pulses. Later, having freed up her legs and let loose her pantaloons, Goodman is also able to transition seamlessly from a rubbery Gagaesque style of inside-out lines and limbs into a version of a robot dance that, when placed in the context of past solo work (I'm thinking especially of Container), suggests a recurring theme of moving within, as well as busting out, of prescribed convention. Whether or not this is intentional, it's utterly compelling to watch.

After a short intermission, the evening concluded with a duet between Kwan and Goodman called In Vertebrate Dream. A rumination on the differences--as well as the productive synergies--of each artist's creative process, the work sees the dancemakers tapping into their inner animals by donning polar bear (Kwan) and zebra (Goodman) masks respectively. It is truly uncanny how the donning of a mask changes one's approach to a body on stage. Initially when presented with the tableau of Goodman standing upstage right and Kwan sitting downstage left I couldn't tell who was who (though, in retrospect, Kwan's furry high heels should have perhaps been a clue). Eventually, the dancers' different movement vocabularies register as identifying markers. However, I found myself most interested in the moments of stillness on stage and how traditional theatrical (and anthropocentric) perspectivalism can be upended through a simple act of turning a mask around on one's head. Here embodied inter-species encounter and contact (as when Goodman's zebra cradles Kwan's polar bear head in her hands) is very much about new ways of looking at creative exchange and sustainability--in artmaking and worldmaking. By contrast, when the human speaks through the animal and the latter is used as a metaphorical resource then there is a danger of reinforcing certain entrenched ways of thinking about animacy and our relationship to the material world. Not that I didn't enjoy those moments of silliness when Kwan's polar bear starts to sing an Edith Piaf song, or when Goodman's zebra narrates all the endings to the piece that the duo couldn't agree upon. I just think they need some editing--and perhaps also a bit more careful theorizing.

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The Romans in Britain at the Jericho Arts Centre

The plays of Howard Brenton are performed far less regularly in North America than those of British New Left contemporaries like David Hare and Caryl Churchill. That's a shame, because Brenton's work is every bit as formally inventive, historically capacious, and politically hard-hitting--and on the latter front often more so. So it comes as welcome news that Ensemble Theatre Company is presenting Brenton's 1980 play The Romans in Britain as part of its fourth summer season in residence at the Jericho Arts Centre; the play runs in repertory with Ensemble's productions of Harold Pinter's Betrayal and William Wycherly The Country Wife through August 20th.

The conceit of Brenton's play is to juxtapose and invite historical comparison between the Roman invasion of Britain in 54 BCE and England's military occupation of Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 70s; he also throws in some scenes depicting the Saxon invasion and war with the Romano-Celts in the 4th century AD, though wisely decides to forgo a staging of the Norman conquest in 1066. The play opens with two petty criminals (Yurij Kis and Matthew Bissett) on the run. Having killed a man and stolen his iron and wine, they are hoping to make it to the Irish Sea ahead of the advancing Romans, terrifying stories of which are already sweeping the land--including the fact that the Romans are said to have eagle heads, an allusion to their iconic centurion helmets (duly reproduced by expert costume designer Julie White). Publicly, however, one Celtic family, led by a formidable matriarch played with assured command by Rebecca Walters, is having none of the rumours, arguing that the Romans are just a ruse to get them to abandon their land. The folly of such thinking is brought to stark and brutal light in the next scene, when the sons of said family, having just enjoyed a pleasant afternoon swim, find themselves staring down the swords of three Roman centurions. What follows earned the play lasting notoriety when it premiered at London's National Theatre, the graphic depiction of an attempted rape of one of the sons--also a Druid priest, and here played by Ensemble company member Ennis Hannah with a palpable mix of defiance and vulnerability--having provoked a legal charge of "gross indecency" by one offended and over-zealous patron, Mary Whitehouse. While director Richard Wolfe does not shy away from foregrounding the physical violence in this scene, what shocks the most is Brenton's language, liberally salted with obscenities that transcend historical time periods and reflecting the casual brutality of the soldiers' actions: indeed, the Roman rapist is most upset that his victim's soiling of himself has caused him to lose his hard-on. (Brenton is quite fond of the scatological, and there is a running joke about the building of latrines that spans the play's different temporalities.)

At the end of the first act, one lowly female slave, having just avenged herself by killing her own rapist (one of the criminals from the first scene), raises a rock against the anonymous hordes who will surely continue to come. And, indeed, this is the cue for a coup de théâtre that will also serve as Brenton's transition to his depiction of more contemporary "troubles" on the British Isles: for the slave woman's rock-wielding arm is immediately answered by the arrival of half a dozen fatigues-clad and machine gun-toting British paramilitary. Plus ça change. What makes the second half of Brenton's play continue to resonate, even after the Easter Accords and almost 20 years of tenuous peace in Ireland, is that he doesn't force the historical parallels; he merely lays bare the evidence by counterpointing scenes. Thus, in the 1970s we are presented with Tom Chichester, an English intelligence officer attempting to infiltrate the IRA by posing as a sympathizer and runner of illegal Communist weapons having uneasy dreams in a wheat field of past atrocities, including the death of a Saxon soldier, an act of patricide by two Celtic sisters, and the murder of a Romano-Celt lady by her servant-turned-lover. (At last night's performance the role of Tom, as well as that of Julius Caesar in Act 1, was taken on with last-minute aplomb by the on-book Ensemble AD, Tariq Leslie, who was subbing for an absent cast mate.) Tom's own eventual murder by the IRA members who expose him underscores the brutal logic of endless wars begat by self-perpetuating imperial powers, a lesson as applicable to Iraq and Syria and the DRC and the Ukraine and the war against ISIS today as it was to Northern Ireland or Vietnam or any number of African states in the 1960s and 70s: as one of the IRA cell members puts it, in war the rules are simple, whereas in peace they are much less clearly defined.

Nevertheless, Brenton ends his play with an epilogue that takes us back to the 4th century, where the two sisters form an alliance with two runaway cooks, formerly part of the retinue of the murdered lady. The male cook starts to tell a story of a legendary king in whose name a long peace is established in the land; when the sisters ask the name of this king, the male cook turns to his female companion, who says: "Arthur? I don't know, Arthur?" That Brenton has to turn to myth to construct a plausibly perfectible narrative of national solidarity for Britain--just as successive generations from the Middle Ages to the Victorian era would likewise recycle Arthurian legend to shore up their sense of identity--is telling. Indeed, this scene and the play as a whole had special resonance for me post-Brexit, when the political chimera of a united (and ethnically pure) Albion is also being returned to as justification for anti-immigrant sentiment and ugly acts of racism. As interesting to me is that Brenton begins and ends his play with scenes depicting members of the lumpenproletariat (criminals, slaves, refugees and other members of the lower orders whom Marx theorized could not be trusted to achieve class consciousness and join the workers' struggle), suggesting perhaps that if the revolution continues to perpetuate the crimes of the imperial state, then perhaps it's best to eschew organized system of power altogether. In our present post-Occupy and hacktivist era, with multiple forms of precarity (economic and otherwise) extending through various strata of society, it's a bracing sentiment that likewise continues to resonate. And it offers lessons to those guilelessly angry followers of Donald Trump who continue to think he has even the remotest clue (let alone a genuine desire) about how to make America great again. Faded empires do not return to past glory; they simply sputter on, mired in the detritus that is their legacy.

All of which is to say that this production deserves to be seen. Mounted in the round, and with Ensemble's incredibly hard-working cast of 16 taking on a remarkable 45 different parts, the staging is as sensorially affecting (dirt and stones litter the floor, we hear the howling of dogs and the cawing of birds, and live drums beat throughout) as it is intellectually invigorating. Sitting in the front row, I was able to feel the pulsating physicality underscoring so many of the performances--even when characters are cowering behind rocks or bushels of wheat, hoping to remain unseen. The simple yet highly effective choral movement that Ziyian Kwan has choreographed for the opening of each act helps to telegraph this reciprocal kinaesthetic bond between the performers and spectators, something amplified by Wolfe's decision to have most of the ensemble, when not onstage, remain visible and seated alongside the audience on opposite risers--as if they, too, are powerless to stop the terrible onslaught of history.

From 1978-1980, Hare, Churchill and Brenton scored a theatrical trifecta with plays that deconstructed, in both form and content, the legacy of British imperialism. And yet while Hare's Plenty and Churchill's Cloud Nine have definitively entered the Western dramatic canon and are often remounted (with a revival of Plenty starring Rachel Weisz scheduled for New York's Public Theatre this fall), Brenton's Romans in Britain remains more on the fringe. Kudos to Ensemble and director Richard Wolfe for giving Vancouver audiences a rare opportunity to see this important and still powerful work.

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Edge 3 at DOTE

Last night's Edge 3 program at the Dancing on the Edge Festival was made up of three solos by three Vancouver artists/companies who like to explore the porous boundaries between dance, theatre and performance/installation art.

First up was dumb instrument Dance's Ziyian Kwan, remounting the neck to fall, which she first presented at Dance in Vancouver in 2013, and which I have previously written about here. The piece's movement has changed over time, as has Kwan's costume (I recall a black suit and heels from the premiere). But the core set of objects with which Kwan interacts remain; these include two cardboard boxes, one small and one large, two sets of chopsticks, a large plastic bag into which she sinks her head and body, and a furry stool, upon which Kwan at one point mimes a virtuosic cello solo, an ode to composer Peggy Lee's wonderful musical score. Each object anchors a set of external commands (delivered by a recorded Asian female voice) against which Kwan struggles to adapt her body, the piece being as much a rumination on perceptions of racialized and gendered comportment as it is a tribute to the pioneering work of somatic practitioner Amelia Itcush.

The second piece on the program was The Biting School's Helmeat. To the pounding beat of the classic song "War: What Is It Good For?," the curtain opens upon Aryo Kkakpour kneeling at the downstage edge of a red-taped square; he wears a red jumpsuit reminiscent of prison garb and wrapped around his head is a turban of tinfoil. At a certain point Khakpour unplugs the cable of the speaker to his right and the music stops; he begins to methodically lay out tiny squares of tin foil in a grid just on the other side of the downstage edge of the red tape. Retreating upstage and calling for the lights to dim, the next thing we see is Khakpour rolling about the stage, crushing the tinfoil atop his head into a face-masking silvery balaclava, minus the eye and mouth holes; thus blinded our hero staggers about his enclosure, feeling his way from object to object (two stacks of wrapped helmets upstage, a full-length mirror, a shopping cart, and that speaker) via the tape on the floor. However, the signature moment in the piece must surely be the extended bit of coitus that Khakpour engages in with the shopping cart, grinding his pelvis into its handle as he slowly positions it in front of the mirror. Climbing in, he takes out a kazoo and proceeds to hum out the tune to "The Ride of the Valkyries." The piece concludes with Khakpour turning over an actual helmet to reveal a mess of hamburger meat inside. Telling us that this is what we've been waiting for, he then proceeds to roll the ground beef into individual meatballs, which he slowly and deliberately places upon the squares of tinfoil from the top of the show. While this is happening, Arash Khakpour--Aryo's brother and the other half of The Biting School--emerges from the wings and begins striking the set. The link established by the two brothers between consumerism, petroleum products and war might seem a bit obvious were it not for the charisma of Aryo as a performer. He commits utterly to everything he does and so is eminently watchable. In turn, the strangeness of the world that he and Arash create, in which everyday objects and tasks are turned into exceptional and even alienating phenomena, reminds us of how thoroughly we have internalized war into our daily diet.

Finally, the evening concluded with a short excerpt from Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg's work-in-progress, I can't remember the word for I can't remember, a collaboration with local actor/writer/director John Murphy. Loping on stage on all fours like a chimpanzee, Friedenberg opens her big expressive eyes wide and blinks blankly out at the audience before climbing into the lap of one front-row spectator and proceeding to pick invisible gnats out of his hair. Already we are putty in her hilarious hands. After a short blackout, Friedenberg stands fully upright centre stage in a square of white light. She launches into a monologue, or at least one side of two potential dialgogues, about how she can't remember with whom she was having a conversation. This theme of waning memory, linked closely by Friedenberg to our current age of multiple electronic devices, social media and general information overload (who can remember anyone's phone number anymore, she asks), alternates with the piece's other big concern, namely the categorical boxes into which we slot different people, and into which we in turn are slotted (or slot ourselves). On the one hand, Friedenberg seems to be suggesting, there is the forgetting that happens as a result of benign neglect--that is, because we have ceded the task of remembering to software and big data. And then there is the more wilful forgetting we do, the things (or people) we put into boxes and then hide away at the back of our closets or underneath our beds. There's no suggestion at this point which kind of amnesia is more harmful, although (to go back to her opening entrance) Friedenberg does hint that both are evolutionary processes. And that each has bodily effects--which she ably demonstrates through a series of physical scores that accompany her text. I look forward to how text and movement evolve together in this piece as Friedenberg and Murphy continue with its development.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 17

Yesterday was my first solo interview. I met with Ziyian Kwan in my office at SFU Woodward's for a trip down dance memory lane and though she claimed at first to be flummoxed by the video recording (an unexpected surprise), the stories eventually came pouring out. Starting with Ziyian's decision at age 17 to head to Penticton for a beginner summer dance intensive (where she was the oldest dancer in the class). Upon her return to Vancouver, Ziyian enrolled in Main Dance at its original location in the old Arcadian Hall at Main and Sixth, where she studied with Gisa Cole, and where two giants in Vancouver dance, Karen Jamieson and Judith Marcuse, had their offices. Interesting fact: though the Arcadian Hall, a former Odd Fellows Lodge that had become a dance studio and live music venue in the 1980s, burned down in 1993 (the arson attacks and subsequent gentrifying real estate developments in Mount Pleasant date back that far), it literally remains a part of Ziyian's body via a wood sliver from the studio floor that is permanently lodged in her knee.

Soon after her training at Main Dance, and following some supplementary grounding in Graham technique in Toronto, Ziyian launched her professional dance career with Special Delivery Moving Theatre. Since then she has danced for almost every choreographer/company in Vancouver, including Kokoro Dance, Lola Dance, Susan Elliott and Anatomica, Alvin Erasga Tolentino, and Jennifer Mascall, for whom Ziyian has appeared in numerous works over the years. Indeed, Ziyian's recollections of dancing in Mascall's Housewerk at Hycroft Mansion, alongside Dean Makarenko and Ron Stewart and others, brought back a flood of memories for me. It's a measure of the length and variety of Ziyian's career that she told me she has appeared at least once a year on the Firehall stage since she began dancing professionally and that she has performed in all but one of the Dancing on the Edge Festivals. Over the years, as she has watched dancers pass through each other's work and different trends ebb and flow, Ziyian movingly described how she has increasingly come to recognize and value the importance of community, particularly as, with the formation of dumb instrument Dance in 2013, she has started to create her own work.

Equally moving was Ziyian's description of performing in the remount of Lola McLaughlin's Provincial Essays in Toronto during the last days of the choreographer's life. Just as the company was about to go on stage, they were informed that McLaughlin had passed, which was obviously some incredibly emotional news to process. However, in the performance that followed Ziyian said it was the first time she felt and understood what it means for the spirit of someone to live on in her work.

My interview with Ziyian turned out to be something of a serial exercise. Soon after we turned off the camera she remembered another anecdote about the first time she served on a Canada Council jury; so we turned the camera back on and she revealed this wonderful story about the late Grant Strate listening to everyone's deliberations, not saying anything and refusing to take sides, but finally and magnificently reminding folks that their job was to reward risk. Then, over drinks afterwards at the Charles Bar, Ziyian talked about Kokoro's vodka-fuelled tour to Poland, which gave me a new perspective on Anne Cooper... And, finally, there was one last anecdote that featured James Proudfoot in fuzzy bear slippers. For that one we also turned the camera back on!

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Edge 4 at Dancing on the Edge

Now in the homestretch of this year's Dancing on the Edge Festival, yesterday evening at the Firehall saw the debut of the Edge 4 program. Halifax-based Mocean Dance led off with Body Abandoned, a trio choreographed by Sara Coffin and danced by Coffin, Jacinte Armstrong, and Rhonda Baker. The piece continues Coffin's explorations in live digital motion capture. Cameras record the dancers' movements, with the ghosted, quasi-holographic images then projected--sometimes simultaneously, sometimes with a significant delay--on two scrims positioned, one in front of the other, upstage left. The effect can be quite haunting, as when, following an opening solo prelude by Coffin, the dancers emerge together from the stage left wings, moving horizontally between the two scrims in a tight formation, a statue of the three graces come to life, as the white negative outline of their bodies appears behind them. A similar outline would have appeared before them as well, but for the fact that someone had forgotten to remove the lens cap from the camera stationed at the lip of the stage, and so the downstage scrim initially functioned simply as a sheer canvas screen.

That problem solved, the rest of the dance unfolded without any technological hitches, and as a study in the kinaesthetic relations between the live and its digital archive, the piece was conceptually fascinating. The motion capture, focusing at times on one dancer or all three, recording their entire bodies or discarnating certain limbs, functions at once as an instant dance score and as a form of performance documentation, the trace digital outline of a given movement phrase as it floats onto and recedes from the scrims answering the paradox of dance's disappearance with an incitement to its repertory repetition. That said, I didn't find the choreography itself all that interesting, nor the individual and collective relationships between the dancers in the trio clearly defined. I understand that some of the movement was obviously composed with its video afterlife in mind; however, as there are long stretches of the piece where nothing is being projected on the scrims, what we are witnessing live on stage needs more dynamic force and tension. Are these women, all clad in white, as much physical avatars of one another as their respective digital images are of each of them individually? The ending of the piece hints at some kind of connection along these lines between the live dancing bodies on stage, but up until that point I was frankly more interested in the lines of connection on screen.

After a brief intermission, the audience settled in for the second piece on the program, The Mars Hotel, a duet choreographed by Ziyian Kwan, of dumb instrument Dance, for herself and Vision Impure's Noam Gagnon. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I have been following Ziyian's progress in the studio as she has been building this piece, and so part of my interest here is in accounting for how she and dramaturg Maiko Bae Yamamoto have tackled certain conceptual and technical issues that arose in the creation process.) A commission by the writer P.W. Bridgman, the piece takes its impetus from a similarly titled work of flash fiction that Bridgman wrote for his wife, and that is helpfully included as an insert with our programs. Reading Bridgman's prose, one discovers that he has condensed a lifetime's journey toward love into a couple's romantic and inevitable rendez-vous in Paris. Kwan--here collaborating with composer Peggy Lee, who performs the cello live on stage alongside trumpet player JP Carter and guitarist Aram Bajakian--has wisely chosen not to interpret Bridgman's words at face value. Instead, she has taken them as creative license to tackle head-on some of the bigger cliches surrounding that grossly overdetermined word we call LOVE.

Among other things, this means that following Carter's entrance from the Firehall's foyer and his pause to survey the audience with mild disdain, like an aloof lounge singer, before the closed stage curtains that lighting designer James Proudfoot has lavishly bathed in a velvety reddish-purple hue, the first thing we see after the curtains part is Gagnon, lying supine on the floor. A giant white, partially inflated air ball with the word LOVE in black letters on it is positioned atop of him. As the band launches into the first of its improvisatory riffs, Kwan emerges from the wings, pauses to quizzically survey Gagnon underneath the love ball (designed by Wendy Williams Watt, and available for purchase on-line), before retrieving an air pump from behind said ball and beginning to play/dance with it in a haphazard, almost mechanical manner. Clearly we are in a surreal, dreamlike space, one from which Gagnon, still underneath the ball, attempts to awaken Kwan. When his verbal entreaties won't work, he gets up and flings the love ball at her. This is the cue for the band to launch into a faster, louder and altogether more aggressive register, and for Kwan and Gagnon to physically launch themselves into a duet that matches the music in its propulsive energy. The dancers march across the stage--Kwan along a vertical axis, Gagnon along a horizontal one--narrowly missing each other before flinging their bodies to the floor, doing a series of side-by-side leapfrog jumps, and coming together in a succession of embraces and collisions that literally knock them both off their feet. LOVE as a delicate waltz of courtship this is not; this is love as competition, as contest--one that, for the moment, sees Gagnon winning, as this section culminates in him performing a frenzied air guitar solo to Bajakian's actual accompaniment while Kwan languishes dazed and confused on the floor against the air ball.

Later on in the piece Kwan and Gagnon will partner each other much more tenderly, the companionate besideness of their bodies--first one, then the other taking the lead or falling back in a charming shuffle-walk pattern, or else both offering their heads and backs as ballast for the transfer of weight--additionally textured by the lush notes of Lee and her bandmates, and in the process offering a portrait of danced intimacy based on another kind of coupling and mutual support. Bracketing these two duets there are also moments when Gagnon and Kwan separately address, and make themselves vulnerable before, the audience: Gagnon first whistles and then sings a bit of Dean Martin's famous "Birds and Bees" song, strategically changing the gender of one of the words in the second verse; and Kwan offers a catalogue of responses from friends and intimates based on her appeal for their personal one-word definitions of LOVE. She ends with her husband's response of "amateur," which as she tells us first flummoxed her, until her husband supplied a dictionary definition that contextualized the word as referring to one who practices an art, and especially a fine art, not for professional or financial reasons, but purely for the love of it.

In these and other vignettes that make up the piece what stood out most for me (and for my partner Richard, who was beside me in the audience last night) was how Kwan set about "queering" the (hetero)normative conventions of romantic love. Sometimes this is overt, as when Kwan wades into the audience to retrieve Gagnon's boyfriend; the two men share a long and steamy kiss while Kwan, having put on high heels and stripped to her black panties, leans over seductively at the waist to pick up the coat and dress she had to that point been wearing. Asymmetries of gender and sexuality are further played up when Kwan, still topless, is handed an industrial-strength blower by Gagnon, which she promptly inserts into the flaccid air ball's opening, pumping it up to maximum inflation in a parody of so many cultural symbols of masculine tumescence.

But really what I mean by Kwan's queer take on love in The Mars Hotel is that she is interested in exploring its tropes in a manner that is deliberately askew, one that resists any totalizing grand narrative in favour of a slow accretion of episodes that are consistently off-kilter, that keep us off-balance and throw us off-course. Like that big love ball that she and Gagnon fling across the stage at each other near the end of the piece. Indeed, like LOVE itself. Kwan even extends this principle to her treatment of Bridgman's source text, an excerpt of which she reads out only at the very conclusion of the piece, following a final interaction with that retrieved air pump. Thus displaced, and with the air having literally been let out of the dance, the text becomes one element in the work's overall score--a score that is unapologetically promiscuous, polymorphous and perverse--rather than this sacred thing to which the choreographer's vision must somehow be faithful.

It's a risky move, especially if the writer is sitting in the audience. But when Kwan brought him on stage to take a bow, it was clear that Bridgman loved it.

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12 Minutes Max at The Dance Centre

After a little bit of a hiatus 12 Minutes Max has made a welcome return to The Dance Centre this past year. This is thanks in large measure to dancer and educator Kathryn Ricketts, who has overseen the last few Vancouver iterations of this unique process of research-creation facilitation and presentation of work-in-progress. The concept of 12 Minutes Max is that selected dance artists are given access to studio time and outside curatorial/dramaturgical eyes in order to explore and play with ideas for new work; they are then given the opportunity to present some of the results of their research before an audience at a public showing in which they have a maximum of twelve minutes of stage time.

Back in town from her new gig as a faculty member at the University of Regina, Kathryn was joined by fellow curators Kat Single-Dain and Maiko Yamamoto yesterday evening as they welcomed the artists chosen for this latest edition of 12 Minutes Max: Con8 Collective (Charlotte Newman and Georgina Alpen); Julianne Chapple; MAYCE (Robert Azevedo, Marisa Gold, and Antonio Somero); and Ziyian Kwan of dumb instrument Dance. It was great to see former students who make up MAYCE and one half of Con8 experiment in different--and very intelligent--ways with unison movement (about which there was an interesting question in the talkback), gestural repetition, and audience recognition. Julianne Chapple used an interesting ovoid steel sculpture designed by multidisciplinary artist Ed Spence to explore movement within and without its limits.

But mostly I was there to support Ziyian, who had invited me into the studio last week to witness and give feedback on some of the ideas she was exploring. Those ideas centre around love, which provides the framework for a commissioned piece that, as a duet with Noam Gagnon, will premiere later this July at the Dancing on the Edge Festival. For now, Ziyian was working on her own with various props to tackle head-on the outsized conventions and cultural cliches associated with romantic love. I won't spoil things for folks who intend to see the finished piece in July by identifying what those props are; but I will note here that they combine to contribute in multiply interesting ways to the intentionally "precarious" (Ziyian's word) movement vocabulary that Ziyian is exploring in her research.

Because love buoys you and it throws you off balance. You chase after it and sometimes it chases after you. Even if you're standing still, you can't help but feel its force--like Cupid's arrow piercing your flesh (another idea Ziyian is working with). It's been a pleasure seeing the development of these ideas, just as it was a pleasure to listen to Ziyian talk about them last night. I look forward to the next phase of the work's evolution.

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things near & far at The Firehall

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

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

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

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

P.