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!

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Launching My Vancouver Dance History: Artist Salons and Zoom Interviews

This week I am launching my new book, My Vancouver Dance History: Story, Movement, Community, in a series of COVID-safe salons with the dance artists I write about.

Details: September 6 – 12, 2020 | Daily: 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM @ Morrow (Dumb Instrument Dance’s pop-up venue, 336 West Pender Street, Vancouver).

The schedule is as follows:

Sunday, September 6: Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi (Kokoro Dance)

Monday, September 7: Rob Kitsos

Tuesday, September 8: Ziyian Kwan (Dumb Instrument Dance)*

Wednesday, September 9: Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg (Tara Cheyenne Performance)

Thursday, September 10: Lesley Telford (Inverso Dance)

Friday, September 11: James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam (plastic orchid factory)

Saturday, September 12: Justine A. Chambers and Alexa Mardon

*Vanessa Goodman (Action at a Distance) is unable to make it due to a prior commitment.

I will be conducting brief Zoom conversations with each of the artists about how they have adapted to the strange and unsettling times we're currently living through. I'll post the videos (and/or links) here daily.

Here's my brief introduction to the series:

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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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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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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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Threshold at EDAM

EDAM's 2014 fall choreographic series featured new work from Artistic Director Peter Bingham alongside premieres from Serge Bennathan, of Les Productions Figlio, and dumb instrument Dance's Ziyian Kwan. If there was a theme connecting the works, we might say it had something to do with the choreographer-as-observer, at once inside and outside of the work, looking in.

Bennathan's just words opens with the choreographer in a spotlight, flanked by dancers Karissa Barry and Hilary Maxwell. He begins a humourous address to the audience, at one point even singing--badly. In the meantime, Barry and Maxwell have begun to move, flailing their arms and slowly encircling Bennathan, who eventually recedes stage right as the piece gives way to a highly physical and increasingly aggressive duet. Martial arts moves combine with early La La La-esque running falls that make canny use of the cavernous depths of the EDAM space (another common theme among the works). At the same time, there are several affecting moments of quiet tenderness in the piece, as when the two dancers, slowly walking downstage with their backs to the audience, reach out their arms, find, and then clasp their hands together. The juxtaposition of velocity and stillness in the movement finds its corollary in the two other texts that Bennathan reads to the audience, in which we are reminded about both the ephemeral beauty and the labourious pain of dancing. At one point in one of Bennathan's recitations, a port de bras is mentioned, and the image triggered in my head encapsulated the dialectic of the piece: among the simplest of movement phrases from an audience perspective, it is nevertheless one over which the dancer labours and strains--precisely in order to make it seem effortless.

Kwan's bite down gently & howL--which, full disclosure, I was privileged to have glimpsed in advance as it was being built in the studio--is the choreographer's quixotic take on the story of "Goldilocks and The Three Bears." It begins with the lights (expertly overseen, as always, by designer and technical director James Proudfoot) slowly coming up on the four dancers in the piece, each hibernating on (or over or beside) a chair placed strategically about the stage. Going counter-clockwise, Barbara Bourget, as Mama Bear, is tucked into a ball upstage left; Vanessa Goodman, as Baby Bear, is bent at the waist upstage right and facing the backstage wall; James Gnam, as Papa Bear, is sprawled sexily over his overturned chair stage right; and, centre stage, perched on a stool and with her bare back turned to us, is Kwan, hair of course dyed blonde, and from the waist down clad in a brown bear costume. (The brown fun-fur onesie, complete with detachable paws, was designed by Diane Park, who along with her musician husband, Mark Haney, is dancing in Le Grand Continental with me.) As the music begins, Kwan slides her hands down the length of her back, first flipping out the stubby bear tale upon which she has been sitting (a witty gesture somewhat obscured by the still dim lighting at this stage), and then throwing the arms of the costume over her shoulders before slipping into each, tying up at the front, and turning to face us. This sequence importantly establishes the dreamlike state governing the piece as a whole, a liminal space (to adapt the title of Bingham's piece) between sleep and wakefulness in which we are watching Kwan-as-Goldilocks-becoming-bear. It's a sleight-of-body that gets telegraphed immediately in the deliberately awkward, lumbering gait that Kwan adopts as she trudges toward and eventually slams into the backstage wall. Needless to say, such a move is likely to rouse fellow slumbering bears, and the piece eventually unfolds as series of signature solos for Bourget, Gnam, and Goodman, each set to--wait for it--an iconic Nancy Sinatra song. Thus, Bourget, in a fur-collared black dress and pill-box hat with veil momentarily casts off a lifetime (or maybe it's only a winter's worth) of regret and rediscovers her bossa nova moves to "As Tears Go By." Gnam, sporting a toque and aviator sunglasses, is all thrusting pelvis and sexy swagger, during "Indian Summer." And Goodman, in her herky-jerky twitching and casual abuse of her Teddy Bear to "Bang Bang," hints at some possible childhood trauma. Indeed, all is not cosy and tender in this family ménage, and when the three dancers do eventually come together in a clinch at the climax of the work, their previously functional solo movement morphs into fractious verbal dysfunction. Throughout, Kwan is watching expectantly, and occasionally intervening, the dreamer at once fascinated by and seeking to make sense of her own dream.

The evening concluded with Bingham's Liminal Spaces, a trio danced by Walter Kubanek, Olivia Shaffer, and Chengxin Wei. The piece begins as a vertical corridor of movement along the stage left wall, each of the dancers experimenting with different levels as they move in response to and close proximity with each other (and the adjacent wall). But apart from the occasional hand on back for support, or to telegraph spatial distance, the dancers do not touch. It is only when they move out into the rest of the space and they give themselves over to the contact improvisation that forms the core of Bingham's aesthetic that we begin to see and apprehend the previously invisible kinesthetic awareness and structures of bodily support undergirding the movement. The score to this work is comprised of a cello solo by Peggy Lee, over which Bingham speaks text, soft and not quite intelligible during the stage left corridor section, but gradually becoming more clearly enunciated as the contact phrasing gets more vigorous and complex. At one point in the text, Bingham asks whether or not a tree knows it's doing a good job as a tree (or something to that effect). As the dancers arrange and rearrange themselves into a bodily stack upstage at the conclusion of the piece, the question becomes explicitly self-reflexive. But hardly rhetorical. In this gorgeous and sublimely danced work, the tree/trio performs magnificently, each of its rings in perfect sync.

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Edge 2 at DOTE

Richard and I ended our 2014 Dancing on the Edge Festival by taking in the final Edge 2 mixed program. Not only were we looking forward to each of the pieces, we were grateful to escape the heat.

First up was Natalie, a solo (of sorts) for plastic orchid factory's Natalie Lefebvre Gnam that serves as a companion piece to the company's earlier James, about husband James Gnam's relationship with The Nutcracker (and about which I have previously blogged here). As Lefevbre Gnam explains via a series of oversized title cards at the top of the piece, in a conceit reminiscent of the famous black and white video of Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues, both works were born out of the detritus of what was to have been a duet choreographed for the couple by Lee Su-Feh. However, when Natalie sustained a knee injury just two weeks prior to the premiere, the work went ahead as the aforementioned solo for James. The plan was then to create a companion piece for Natalie, also choreographed by Lee; however, after a series of delays, Lee eventually dropped out, and the work on the program is now the result of a creative collaboration between husband and wife and brothers Jacques and Gilles Poulin-Denis.

Like James, Natalie adopts a discourse of theatrical representation reminiscent of what we find in the work of Jérôme Bel (especially his [auto]biographical dancer portraits) in order to expose the institutional frames of dance and the dancing life. Also as in James (not to mention Bel's Véronique Doisneau), one of those frames is classical ballet, with the music from Adolphe Adam's Giselle swelling at various moments throughout the piece as, for example, Lefebvre Gnam rounds her arms into first position and demonstrates with her hands and fingers an expert arrondi. Mostly, however, the piece is concerned with the funding institutions that govern--and put limits on--the creativity of contemporary dance artists. A digitally manipulated voiceover loop of emails to Lefebvre Gnam from various government agencies detailing their application, disbursement, and reporting requirements plays throughout the piece, accounting (in more ways than one) for both its form and content. To this end, a series of hula hoops are employed in increasingly clever and comic ways throughout the piece, with Lefebvre Gnam not just jumping through them, but also playing games of hopscotch and pick-up with them, encircling her body with ring after ring in a telling visual metaphor for everything else she is balancing in her life in addition to her creative practice (husband James and son Finn figure at key moments). By the end of the piece, however, Lefebvre Gnam is able to turn this plastic bureaucratic enclosure into something aesthetically beautiful and potentially liberating, the hoops eventually arranged along her arms and back in such a manner as to suggest the fairy wings of Giselle or, even more powerfully, the entire celestial sphere that the Titan Atlas holds up with his shoulders. On such a tiny frame as Lefebre Gnam's, the latter image speaks volumes about how much artists can achieve with so little.

The second piece on the program was Starr Muranko's Spine of the Mother, a solo excerpt from a larger work-in-progress by Starrwind Dance Projects involving Indigenous dance artists in Canada and Peru. The gorgeous and charismatic dancer Tasha Faye Evans begins downstage left, her back to us, and with her right arm stretched out to the wings. No music plays, but we hear a clicking sound, and eventually it is revealed that she holds some talismanic stones in her hand. A source of energy, the stones unleash in Evans a torrent of movement, including an opening series of spiraling turns that I could have watched go on forever. Eventually two of the stones get placed at different points on the stage; a third is offered, at the close of the piece, to an audience member, a gift that via Evans' powerful kinesthetic connection with her audience we are all able to share.

Finally, the evening closed with Ziyian Kwan and dumb instrument Dance's a slow awkward, a duet created in collaboration with James Gnam (who has certainly been busy this DOTE Festival). The piece begins with Gnam entering upstage left, dressed in overalls and carrying an old blue suitcase. He walks towards the centre of the stage on tip toe. There he is met by Kwan, who has emerged from the wings upstage right, also in overalls, but on her knees pushing a bright orange suitcase and, crucially, wearing red high heels. For, among other things, the work is an exploration of gender, one that in the context of danced movement recalls the famous maxim about Ginger Rogers--that she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels.

Not that a slow awkward is so binaristic. When their respective suitcases eventually touch, the contact unleashes in Gnam and Kwan a tsunami of highly physical movement, with each picking up the other on their backs, or rolling about the floor in a style reminiscent of contact improv, or miming the fight and martial arts choreography of action films (there's even a High Noon-like whistle in the sound score and at various moments Kwan and Gnam cock their handss on their hips like guns). Eventually the overalls come off, revealing Kwan in a men's dress shirt and underwear and Gnam in a full-length skirt, a visual conceit that nicely highlights questions of cross-gender embodiment and the mix of masculinity and femininity within us all. Nowhere is this more compellingly staged in the piece than in the moment near the end when Kwan and Gnam step into the same set of overalls, threading their arms through the sleeves and dancing a slow waltz.

There is a final brief coda after this, which repeats an earlier sequence involving the positioning of the suitcases into a chair back, and leading to a tentative embrace (except Kwan is missing from the picture this time). As moving and conceptually integrated as this bit was, I think I would have preferred the work to have ended with that zipped up waltz. Regardless, a slow awkward was one of the highlights of the Festival for me and it's so exciting to see Kwan, such a compelling interpreter of others' work, move into this new phase of her career as a choreographer.

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