After a couple of productions that were somewhat conceptual and narrative in nature, it was nice to have a new piece from Peter Bingham and his EDAM dancers that was more physical and "classically" contact.
City of Crows, on at the Roundhouse through this evening as part of the Vancouver International Dance Festival, begins with a trio. To live improvised music by Diane Labrosse, company members Delia Brett, Anne Cooper, and Monica Strehike begin individually with simple movements--bending at the knees, stretching arms out from the torso, jumping in place--before gathering each others' arms, and weight, and moving to the floor for the tumbling and rolling and shared structures of support that are a trademark of Bingham's choreography. At one point, with the three women stretched out on their stomachs, Brett pointed to a tiny spot on the floor. Cooper curled herself into a fetal position and moved into it; then Strehike did the same, only this time placing her body on top of Cooper's, followed, of course, by Brett. In another memorable moment, the women form a vertical line upstage right, swaying their upper bodies left to right in counterpoint, and then their heads forwards and backwards, as if balancing on a tree branch.
Following this opening (and a brief costume change), Brett, Cooper, and Strehike are joined on stage by Alana Gerecke, Farley Johansson, and Stacey Murchison, who sit downstage. Clad all in black, and with their heads just visible above the first rows of the audience, they look like birds on a wire, watching attentively like crows do, waiting for the moment when they will suddenly take flight. And fly the do, with Bingham's other signature--gravity-defying lifts--much in evidence in the partnering between Johansson and Gerecke and Murchison. All of this is accompanied by amazing black and white video images by Chris Randle; projected on a floor to ceiling screen, they create an added immersive sense of space that in several instances make it feel as if the birds are actually in the room with us.
The EDAM dancers are so engrossing to watch not simply because of how gorgeously they move, but also because they are clearly so comfortable with each other. There is an ease and familiarity in their movements, an understanding that when they torque this way, or leap that way, someone will be there with a limb or planar surface of their body for support. Which is in large part why I like watching Bingham's male partnering, especially when--as is the case here--it is practiced by the expert likes of Johansson and James Gnam, who joins the group from the stage left wings for the final sequence of the piece. In the playful toss and tumble that ensues (watched and eventually joined by Gerecke and Murchison), there is no competition or latent eroticism: it's just two guys showing us what their bodies can do when they agree to work together.
Like the way crows communicate and socialize, contact improv depends on collective intelligence and trust and mutual support. Having displayed theirs so compellingly in this piece, the EDAM company deservedly earns ours.
P.
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Basic Black
Like many in the city who went underground following the collective fever dream that was the 2010 Winter Olympics, I missed the New Zealand dance company Black Grace when they came through as part of the Vancouver International Dance Festival that year. Fortunately, VIDF co-producers Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi brought them back for this year's festival, and so last night Richard and I braved the rain and made our way to the Playhouse to take in their work.
Founded in 1995 by Artistic Director and chief choreographer Neil Ieremia, Black Grace combines contemporary dance with traditional Pacific (chiefly Samoan) movement scores to create an explosive and intensely rhythmic style. This was certainly in evidence during the first two pieces on last night's program. Pati Pati, an amalgam of excerpts from older works in the company's repertoire, was highly percussive, featuring phrases built around clapping, body slapping, and vocal call and response. Likewise, the excerpt from Amata that followed took its basic compositional structure and the patterns of its floorwork from the weaves found in Samoan mats.
Following intermission, the company presented the full-length Vaka, which allowed the company to display more range in its movement vocabulary, including some delicate partnering and several graceful group lifts. While I felt the piece--like the entire program--was a little long, I was swept away by many of its sections, effectively enhanced by Bonnie Burrill's subtle lighting design and, in one stunning sequence, a series of panoramic projections.
I look forward to the company's next visit.
P.
Founded in 1995 by Artistic Director and chief choreographer Neil Ieremia, Black Grace combines contemporary dance with traditional Pacific (chiefly Samoan) movement scores to create an explosive and intensely rhythmic style. This was certainly in evidence during the first two pieces on last night's program. Pati Pati, an amalgam of excerpts from older works in the company's repertoire, was highly percussive, featuring phrases built around clapping, body slapping, and vocal call and response. Likewise, the excerpt from Amata that followed took its basic compositional structure and the patterns of its floorwork from the weaves found in Samoan mats.
Following intermission, the company presented the full-length Vaka, which allowed the company to display more range in its movement vocabulary, including some delicate partnering and several graceful group lifts. While I felt the piece--like the entire program--was a little long, I was swept away by many of its sections, effectively enhanced by Bonnie Burrill's subtle lighting design and, in one stunning sequence, a series of panoramic projections.
I look forward to the company's next visit.
P.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Picnic at SFU Woodward's
William Inge's Picnic, recently revived on Broadway, is also the School for the Contemporary Arts' spring mainstage production at SFU Woodward's, directed by Bill Dow. The first thing you notice upon entering the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre is how Dow has radically reconfigured the playing space.
While the play is still technically staged proscenium-style, rather than using the well (and its hidden wings and flyspace) at the west end of the theatre normally reserved for such proceedings, Dow has shifted the axis 90 degrees, configuring his set horizontally along the south side wall, with its exposed brick, blond wood, and steel stairs leading to the balcony. This provides the perfect backdrop to Carmen Alatorre's stunning set, a see-through plywood and steel-framed scaffolding of the Potts and Owens houses, complete with swinging porch doors and a second-story window on the latter through which the men of the town spy upon local beauty Madge Owens (a quietly coiled Amanda Williamson). A row of chairs, in a range of mid-century styles, sits in the space behind and between the two houses; here members of the cast will take turns sitting when not on stage, watching the proceedings like a Greek chorus, their positioning opposite the audience providing a nice visual metaphor for the sense of enclosure, judgment, and stifling small-town surveillance felt by many of the characters in the play, not least the two Owens sisters (Kiki Al Rahmani plays the younger, bookish Millie with a perfect mixture of frustrated longing and youthful impatience). Finally, between the set and the audience risers is a long strip of astroturf, a picnic table positioned on it centre stage, between the two houses. Much of the action will take place on or around this table. But the green carpet also extends past the set, to the Wong Theatre's normal playing space. Which, we learn at the top of the play, is not empty; rather, it contains a grand piano. Here composer Janelle Reid will sit throughout the play, punctuating its action at key moments with soaring original musical arrangements of the poetry of Sappho, the perfect librettist of unfulfilled want (which, in fact, provides the play with its closing acapella refrain).
In his directorial notes, Dow says that he sees in Picnic shades of Euripides' Bacchae, with the drifter Hal Carter (a languid Sean Marshall Jr.) the sexy stranger who comes to town and unleashes in the womenfolk hitherto suppressed passions and desires. It's a persuasive reading, not least in terms of the play's strict adherence to the classical unities of time, space and action (the plot of Picnic unfolds over the course of a single Labour Day). And the female members of the cast, most playing well above their actual ages, are collectively superb in capturing the desperation and resentment that festers in women (young and old) suffocating--in different ways--under the oppressiveness of 1950s gender conventions. (Likewise, the men in the cast together embody a social obtuseness to this oppression, which they ignore at their own peril--as the bachelor Howard Bevans, played with just the right mixture of confounded humour by the lanky Jesse Meredith, discovers when he finds himself suddenly engaged to the spinster schoolteacher Rosemary Sydney [a terrific Keely O'Brien].)
And yet this production is by no means a period piece. In preparation for attending it, Richard and I recently rented the 1955 film, starring William Holden and Kim Stanley. It seemed hopelessly dated, and watching a rather long-in-the-tooth Holden spout all those "Hey baby's" was positively cringe-worthy. But under the able direction of Dow, this young cast finds their characters' inner core of "want," and in the process they make this play exciting and new.
Picnic has one more performance tonight, at 8 pm.
P.
While the play is still technically staged proscenium-style, rather than using the well (and its hidden wings and flyspace) at the west end of the theatre normally reserved for such proceedings, Dow has shifted the axis 90 degrees, configuring his set horizontally along the south side wall, with its exposed brick, blond wood, and steel stairs leading to the balcony. This provides the perfect backdrop to Carmen Alatorre's stunning set, a see-through plywood and steel-framed scaffolding of the Potts and Owens houses, complete with swinging porch doors and a second-story window on the latter through which the men of the town spy upon local beauty Madge Owens (a quietly coiled Amanda Williamson). A row of chairs, in a range of mid-century styles, sits in the space behind and between the two houses; here members of the cast will take turns sitting when not on stage, watching the proceedings like a Greek chorus, their positioning opposite the audience providing a nice visual metaphor for the sense of enclosure, judgment, and stifling small-town surveillance felt by many of the characters in the play, not least the two Owens sisters (Kiki Al Rahmani plays the younger, bookish Millie with a perfect mixture of frustrated longing and youthful impatience). Finally, between the set and the audience risers is a long strip of astroturf, a picnic table positioned on it centre stage, between the two houses. Much of the action will take place on or around this table. But the green carpet also extends past the set, to the Wong Theatre's normal playing space. Which, we learn at the top of the play, is not empty; rather, it contains a grand piano. Here composer Janelle Reid will sit throughout the play, punctuating its action at key moments with soaring original musical arrangements of the poetry of Sappho, the perfect librettist of unfulfilled want (which, in fact, provides the play with its closing acapella refrain).
In his directorial notes, Dow says that he sees in Picnic shades of Euripides' Bacchae, with the drifter Hal Carter (a languid Sean Marshall Jr.) the sexy stranger who comes to town and unleashes in the womenfolk hitherto suppressed passions and desires. It's a persuasive reading, not least in terms of the play's strict adherence to the classical unities of time, space and action (the plot of Picnic unfolds over the course of a single Labour Day). And the female members of the cast, most playing well above their actual ages, are collectively superb in capturing the desperation and resentment that festers in women (young and old) suffocating--in different ways--under the oppressiveness of 1950s gender conventions. (Likewise, the men in the cast together embody a social obtuseness to this oppression, which they ignore at their own peril--as the bachelor Howard Bevans, played with just the right mixture of confounded humour by the lanky Jesse Meredith, discovers when he finds himself suddenly engaged to the spinster schoolteacher Rosemary Sydney [a terrific Keely O'Brien].)
And yet this production is by no means a period piece. In preparation for attending it, Richard and I recently rented the 1955 film, starring William Holden and Kim Stanley. It seemed hopelessly dated, and watching a rather long-in-the-tooth Holden spout all those "Hey baby's" was positively cringe-worthy. But under the able direction of Dow, this young cast finds their characters' inner core of "want," and in the process they make this play exciting and new.
Picnic has one more performance tonight, at 8 pm.
P.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Picturing Motion
Every year the dance students in Contemporary Arts at SFU curate and produce a mixed program showcasing their original choreography, and featuring the performance and design talents of their peers. This year's program, entitled Motion, Picture, was put together under the artistic directorship of Robert Azevedo and Heather Lamoureux, and has one more performance this evening in Studio D at SFU Woodward's.
Here's what I noticed last night:
Here's what I noticed last night:
- Opposite-sex partnering that was heavy on romantic longing and bittersweet partings.
- Same-sex partnering that, albeit in very different ways, grappled with questions of doubling and the connections between self and other.
- A noticeable emphasis on gestural vocabularies that were variously conspiratorial, confessional, and confrontational.
- Ensemble work that mixed serial unison in tight bodily massings with repetition of random individual phrasings scattered about the stage.
- Some startling multi-directional lighting effects, including diagonal corridors, dappled washes from the side, and one rock star back light.
- Double endings: once with music, once without.
P.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
My Funny Valentine at the Firehall
Dave Deaveau's My Funny Valentine, on at the Firehall Arts Centre through March 2 in a Zee Zee Theatre production directed by Cameron Mackenzie, is based on the 2008 murder of Lawrence King, a gay 15-year-old murdered by the male classmate to whom he had given a Valentine's Day card. Coming exactly 10 years after the murder of Matthew Shepard, and with a similar gay panic defense being mounted in the subsequent trial, the case drew international attention.
Just as the Shepard case inspired Tectonic Theater Project to interview residents of Laramie, Wyoming affected by the killing, and to stage their voices in the much produced and multi-award-winning The Laramie Project, so has Deveau done extensive research into the press and interview responses of different members of King's hometown of Oxnard, California. However, eschewing TTP's route of producing a large ensemble work of documentary theatre, Deveau has chosen to craft a series of fictional monologues based on what I'm assuming are composite characters developed out of his research, and all delivered by a single actor, in this case the hyper-talented Anton Lipovetsky.
Lipovetsky, identified as The Collector in the program, is already on stage when we enter the theatre, unshaven and scruffily dressed, busy sifting through papers and clippings and photographs that form a circle around a small shrine of objects and artifacts (the set and costume designer is Marina Szijarto). Snatches of media reports about the shooting are broadcast as audience members settle into their seats, appropriate given that the first voice we hear from Lipovetsky once the performance begins is that of the small potatoes local reporter who first broke the story. Among other things, we learn that he interrupts some romantic canoodling with his wife in a rented motel room because, in turning on the TV to drown out the sounds of their lovemaking, he nevertheless still has enough hard news instincts to know a scoop when he sees one. Details like this reveal Deveau's own sharp instincts as a playwright: not just that one can tell King's story in this circumlocutionary way without sacrificing any of its drama, but also that our identification with each character whose voice we hear over the course of the next 90 minutes will in part stem from what about each goes on in spite or despite or even as a result of King's loss.
Those characters include an 11-year-old girl dreaming of a career in the glamourous world of high fashion; a homophobic salesman whose son went to the same school as King; and two teachers--one male, the other female--differently affected by King's murdered. The voice of the female teacher, Helen, is the only one that recurs in the play, and it is also where Deveau's writing, Lipovetsky's acting, and Mackenzie's directorial choices combine to produce the most affecting results. Helen, who is always searching in her purse for something she cannot find, or spilling coffee or wine down the front of her blouse, has been completely undone by King's death, even as she rouses herself--and others--to action, losing her feckless husband in the process. And in the course of revealing how--as a teacher, a woman, a person--her heart has been broken as a result of these events, Helen also reminds us what is so unfunny about them: that tolerance is not enough; that gun control is not enough; that even hate crime legislation, in paradoxically memorializing the crime and its victim(s), fails to interrogate adequately the violence that produced that crime in the first place.
As I have written elsewhere, also in connection with Matthew Shepard, part of this interrogation involves acknowledging that Shepard and King and Aaron Webster and Brandon Teena and Sakia Gunn and Reeva Steenkamp and the women at the École Polytéchnique and from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, died not because they were queer or feminist or prostitutes, but because their killers were all straight men. This play, in making its "gay protagonist" an absent presence, forces us to confront this issue. Like Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, it deserves to be seen every February around the world.
P.
Just as the Shepard case inspired Tectonic Theater Project to interview residents of Laramie, Wyoming affected by the killing, and to stage their voices in the much produced and multi-award-winning The Laramie Project, so has Deveau done extensive research into the press and interview responses of different members of King's hometown of Oxnard, California. However, eschewing TTP's route of producing a large ensemble work of documentary theatre, Deveau has chosen to craft a series of fictional monologues based on what I'm assuming are composite characters developed out of his research, and all delivered by a single actor, in this case the hyper-talented Anton Lipovetsky.
Lipovetsky, identified as The Collector in the program, is already on stage when we enter the theatre, unshaven and scruffily dressed, busy sifting through papers and clippings and photographs that form a circle around a small shrine of objects and artifacts (the set and costume designer is Marina Szijarto). Snatches of media reports about the shooting are broadcast as audience members settle into their seats, appropriate given that the first voice we hear from Lipovetsky once the performance begins is that of the small potatoes local reporter who first broke the story. Among other things, we learn that he interrupts some romantic canoodling with his wife in a rented motel room because, in turning on the TV to drown out the sounds of their lovemaking, he nevertheless still has enough hard news instincts to know a scoop when he sees one. Details like this reveal Deveau's own sharp instincts as a playwright: not just that one can tell King's story in this circumlocutionary way without sacrificing any of its drama, but also that our identification with each character whose voice we hear over the course of the next 90 minutes will in part stem from what about each goes on in spite or despite or even as a result of King's loss.
Those characters include an 11-year-old girl dreaming of a career in the glamourous world of high fashion; a homophobic salesman whose son went to the same school as King; and two teachers--one male, the other female--differently affected by King's murdered. The voice of the female teacher, Helen, is the only one that recurs in the play, and it is also where Deveau's writing, Lipovetsky's acting, and Mackenzie's directorial choices combine to produce the most affecting results. Helen, who is always searching in her purse for something she cannot find, or spilling coffee or wine down the front of her blouse, has been completely undone by King's death, even as she rouses herself--and others--to action, losing her feckless husband in the process. And in the course of revealing how--as a teacher, a woman, a person--her heart has been broken as a result of these events, Helen also reminds us what is so unfunny about them: that tolerance is not enough; that gun control is not enough; that even hate crime legislation, in paradoxically memorializing the crime and its victim(s), fails to interrogate adequately the violence that produced that crime in the first place.
As I have written elsewhere, also in connection with Matthew Shepard, part of this interrogation involves acknowledging that Shepard and King and Aaron Webster and Brandon Teena and Sakia Gunn and Reeva Steenkamp and the women at the École Polytéchnique and from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, died not because they were queer or feminist or prostitutes, but because their killers were all straight men. This play, in making its "gay protagonist" an absent presence, forces us to confront this issue. Like Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, it deserves to be seen every February around the world.
P.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Chutzpah! 2013: Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company
The third and final of the dance offerings in this year's Chutzpah! Festival showcases the return of the acclaimed Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, in the North American premiere of If at All, the latest evening-length work by Artistic Director Rami Be'er.
Be'er favours dramatic openings, often solos by female dancers that begin in silence. Such is the case here as the curtains part to reveal a long-limbed, raven-haired beauty in a square of white light centre stage, and with a plié that just won't quit. Slowly, she makes her way upstage, pausing under an illuminated orb that resembles a full moon. She bends deeply at the knees once more, clasping her hands in front of her and circling her arms about her torso in ever-widening arcs, as if she is stirring a cauldron.
What is conjured from this opening is another of Be'er trademarks, and what for me makes his work so compelling kinesthetically and emotionally: the full company bursting onto the stage full throttle to anthemic music, closing ranks in a circle, before breaking off into separate (and often separately gendered) group formations that showcase Be'er's full body choreography in recurring patterns of unison and canon movement, often supplemented by his own lighting and costume designs.
In the case of It at All, the sequence that really grabbed hold of me at the beginning was the one featuring the seven male company members who, clad in full blooming grey skirts, one by one break out of the circle and fall to the ground at the lip of the stage in front of individual orange floor spots (except for the man furthest stage left, who had no floor spot in front of him, and who remained motionless on his side until the very end of this sequence). Eventually the men raise themselves onto their elbows and knees, their faces now square with the floor spots, and begin to repeat a few simple movements with their arms that involve variations of support and release at the joints, and that through successive serial additions become mesmerizing. Indeed, the patterns gradually become faster, more complicated, the men rolling stage right to the next floor spot as each takes a vertical solo turn upstage before returning to the line (maybe because I'm teaching it on Friday, I was reminded a little bit of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's famous Rosas Danst Rosas here).
It is Be'er's ability to combine this kind of highly structured group movement with more free-flowing solos and duets that makes his work so unique. Not that everything last night was perfect. I think the piece as a whole was too long, and there were some awkward transitions. But it's a credit to the folks at Chutzpah!--and a boon to local audiences--that Vancouver continues to remain a tour stop for what is perhaps the best known contemporary Israeli dance company after Batsheva.
If at All continues tonight through Saturday at 8 pm, with an additional 2 pm matinee on Sunday. It is preceded by Zion, a courtship duet by Barak Marshall (of BJM's Harry fame), and danced winningly by local talents James Gnam and Rebecca Margolick.
P.
Be'er favours dramatic openings, often solos by female dancers that begin in silence. Such is the case here as the curtains part to reveal a long-limbed, raven-haired beauty in a square of white light centre stage, and with a plié that just won't quit. Slowly, she makes her way upstage, pausing under an illuminated orb that resembles a full moon. She bends deeply at the knees once more, clasping her hands in front of her and circling her arms about her torso in ever-widening arcs, as if she is stirring a cauldron.
What is conjured from this opening is another of Be'er trademarks, and what for me makes his work so compelling kinesthetically and emotionally: the full company bursting onto the stage full throttle to anthemic music, closing ranks in a circle, before breaking off into separate (and often separately gendered) group formations that showcase Be'er's full body choreography in recurring patterns of unison and canon movement, often supplemented by his own lighting and costume designs.
In the case of It at All, the sequence that really grabbed hold of me at the beginning was the one featuring the seven male company members who, clad in full blooming grey skirts, one by one break out of the circle and fall to the ground at the lip of the stage in front of individual orange floor spots (except for the man furthest stage left, who had no floor spot in front of him, and who remained motionless on his side until the very end of this sequence). Eventually the men raise themselves onto their elbows and knees, their faces now square with the floor spots, and begin to repeat a few simple movements with their arms that involve variations of support and release at the joints, and that through successive serial additions become mesmerizing. Indeed, the patterns gradually become faster, more complicated, the men rolling stage right to the next floor spot as each takes a vertical solo turn upstage before returning to the line (maybe because I'm teaching it on Friday, I was reminded a little bit of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's famous Rosas Danst Rosas here).
It is Be'er's ability to combine this kind of highly structured group movement with more free-flowing solos and duets that makes his work so unique. Not that everything last night was perfect. I think the piece as a whole was too long, and there were some awkward transitions. But it's a credit to the folks at Chutzpah!--and a boon to local audiences--that Vancouver continues to remain a tour stop for what is perhaps the best known contemporary Israeli dance company after Batsheva.
If at All continues tonight through Saturday at 8 pm, with an additional 2 pm matinee on Sunday. It is preceded by Zion, a courtship duet by Barak Marshall (of BJM's Harry fame), and danced winningly by local talents James Gnam and Rebecca Margolick.
P.
Monday, February 18, 2013
Widening Gyres and Full Body Scans
In the famous opening stanza to W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming," we are told:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I've found myself returning to these lines over the past few days as I've struggled to articulate here on this blog (not usually a problem for me) my response to Body-Scan: Sweet Gyre, a piece created by Lee Su-Feh (of battery opera) and Benoît Lachambre (of Par B.Leux), and performed last week as part of The Dance Centre's Global Dance Connections series. A work that, in the words of its choreographers, "recyles, re-uses, and re-imagines" elements from an earlier 2008 collaboration for six dancers, here Lee and and Lachambre--together with Jesse Zubot, who provides live musical accompaniment--loose the full panoply of their anarchic creative energies upon the audience. And if, like me, one cannot find a stable formal or thematic centre upon which to pitch one's interpretation of the piece, that doesn't mean one won't continue to turn and turn around in one's head its spiraling layers.
For me those layers are composed of contrasting movements and sounds and scales and textures and colours:
- Lee's slow, durational, pause-punctuated immersion of her body into the pile of sleeping bags downstage vs. Lachambre's jerky skittering of his chair horizontally upstage left to right
- or, later, Lee, now on the chair dressed in a sleeping bag skirt and vest, slowing wending her way to the microphone near Zubot in order to coo into it like a bird vs. Lachambre's manic flitting about the stage saying "I love you," the sound of aluminum clothes pins jangling in the pockets of his hoodie
- the double-sided sleeping bags themselves: vibrantly coloured on the outside when scattered on the floor, or strung together along a rope upstage; but turned inside out and affixed to a succession of step ladders of different heights, they reveal monochromatic portraits of the dancers in the original 2008 piece
- and, finally, the piece's closing tableau: blue tarpaulin pulled above the audience to fashion a synthetic sky, while below us, on stage, artificial turf is rolled out, upon which Lee and Lachambre, in custom-made outfits of oiled laytex, slowly turn and turn and turn
I couldn't always make sense of what was going on before me, but I always had some sort of sensory reaction to what I was witnessing. I was never less than fully engaged. Which is, after all, what one desires from live performance. As my friend and colleague, DD Kugler, said to me afterwards, we all owe a debt to artists like Lee and Lachambre, who in pushing the limits of what dance and performance is and can be, allow the rest of us to have room to experiment and play in our own very modest ways.
There is no lacking of conviction or passion in these two performers, and if drowning in the alchemical results causes our own aesthetic expectations to fall apart, we are the better for it.
P.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I've found myself returning to these lines over the past few days as I've struggled to articulate here on this blog (not usually a problem for me) my response to Body-Scan: Sweet Gyre, a piece created by Lee Su-Feh (of battery opera) and Benoît Lachambre (of Par B.Leux), and performed last week as part of The Dance Centre's Global Dance Connections series. A work that, in the words of its choreographers, "recyles, re-uses, and re-imagines" elements from an earlier 2008 collaboration for six dancers, here Lee and and Lachambre--together with Jesse Zubot, who provides live musical accompaniment--loose the full panoply of their anarchic creative energies upon the audience. And if, like me, one cannot find a stable formal or thematic centre upon which to pitch one's interpretation of the piece, that doesn't mean one won't continue to turn and turn around in one's head its spiraling layers.
For me those layers are composed of contrasting movements and sounds and scales and textures and colours:
- Lee's slow, durational, pause-punctuated immersion of her body into the pile of sleeping bags downstage vs. Lachambre's jerky skittering of his chair horizontally upstage left to right
- or, later, Lee, now on the chair dressed in a sleeping bag skirt and vest, slowing wending her way to the microphone near Zubot in order to coo into it like a bird vs. Lachambre's manic flitting about the stage saying "I love you," the sound of aluminum clothes pins jangling in the pockets of his hoodie
- the double-sided sleeping bags themselves: vibrantly coloured on the outside when scattered on the floor, or strung together along a rope upstage; but turned inside out and affixed to a succession of step ladders of different heights, they reveal monochromatic portraits of the dancers in the original 2008 piece
- and, finally, the piece's closing tableau: blue tarpaulin pulled above the audience to fashion a synthetic sky, while below us, on stage, artificial turf is rolled out, upon which Lee and Lachambre, in custom-made outfits of oiled laytex, slowly turn and turn and turn
I couldn't always make sense of what was going on before me, but I always had some sort of sensory reaction to what I was witnessing. I was never less than fully engaged. Which is, after all, what one desires from live performance. As my friend and colleague, DD Kugler, said to me afterwards, we all owe a debt to artists like Lee and Lachambre, who in pushing the limits of what dance and performance is and can be, allow the rest of us to have room to experiment and play in our own very modest ways.
There is no lacking of conviction or passion in these two performers, and if drowning in the alchemical results causes our own aesthetic expectations to fall apart, we are the better for it.
P.
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