Ferenc Fehér at the Vancouver International Dance Festival

One of the great things about the Vancouver International Dance Festival are the free 7 pm shows that artistic producers Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi have always programmed in the Roundhouse Exhibition Hall ahead of the 8 pm ticketed auditorium shows. Far from mere curtain raisers, these are fully realized shows featuring local, Canadian, and international artists. Last night Hungary's Ferenc Fehér was the featured attraction.

Tao Te  is a duet for Fehér and fellow dancer Balázs Szitás, a physical meditation on being by way of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Lao Tsu (who are both quoted in the program notes). It begins with Fehér and Szitás seated cross-legged on the stage, looking out at the audience contemplatively. A loaf of crusty bread lies on a towel between them. One of the men picks up a bit of bread and begins to chew; the other man follows suit. Soon they both do a quarter turn inward on their sits bones so they are facing each other across the bread. They continue to eat and chew, until there is only one large piece of bread remaining. One of the men makes a sudden grab for the bread and this is the cue for the kinetic brinksmanship to move from mere mastication to dance as full-on (and full-bodied) contact sport. For over the next thirty minutes the dancers will: throw their bodies repeatedly--and with apparent abandon of both gravity and pain--at each other, and onto the stage floor; accelerate into barrel roles that stop just short of the two massive wooden poles around which the Exhibition Hall stage has been constructed; race each other on all fours to the edge of the stage; and circle warily before facing off against each other like boxers in a ring.

That the dancers weren't holding anything back became clear to me when, during a sequence in which the men remove their suit jackets and shirts, I saw from my vantage point in the front row a bloody cut on one of their elbows. And yet there are also moments in the piece that are downright tender, as when, having slipped back into their jackets, the dancers mirror each other in a simple two-step, traversing the stage in a manner that, though they never touch, approximates a waltz.

Indeed, to the extent that each man represents to the other both an acknowledgement of and a threat to his being, a support and an encumbrance, a force of forward momentum and an impediment to movement full stop, I couldn't help thinking of Fehér and Szitás as the Didi and Gogo of dance-theatre. Albeit with a lot more energy.

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Mountain View Solstice Dancers: Rehearsal 1

We liked it so much the first time, we came back for more! That's right, gentle readers, get ready for another blow by blow account of a new community dance project. Last night 40-odd alumni from Le Grand Continental, joined by some eager new participants, gathered at Celebration Hall in Mountain View Cemetery to begin rehearsals for an outdoor dance performance that will take place the evening of the summer solstice, June 21.

The project is the brainchild of Mark Haney and Diane Park, LGCers who also make up The Little Chamber Music Society That Could (LCMS). LCMS has an artist residency at Mountain View, and as part of their program of work, Mark will compose a new piece of music, Diane will create an installation involving mirrors, and we dancers (who presently number 52) will perform some original site-based movement. Overseeing the choreography is Jessica Barrett, also from LGC and, we soon discovered, an excellent teacher.

Even though it's been less than two months, it felt as if I were greeting long-lost relatives as I exchanged hugs with my LGC peeps in the foyer of Celebration Hall, a modernist jewel-box of a concrete building in the middle of Mountain View that I've cycled past many times but never been inside. Soon enough, however, we were catching up on gossip like old friends as we filtered into the hall, which has windows to the west and north that let in the natural light, a shiny black marble floor, and incredibly high ceilings from which are suspended light fixtures that look like they are designed by Omer Arbel. A bit different from the Ukrainian Hall, to say the least.

After Mark introduced himself and explained a bit about the project, including the other musical pieces we'll be dancing to (among them Arvo Pärt's haunting "Spiegel im Spiegel"), Jessica took us through a few introductory warm-up exercises and also gave us an overview of the composition and rehearsal process for the movement. The biggest difference for those of us who participated in LGC is that we won't be learning set choreography. Rather, we'll be creating the piece together in collaboration with Jessica, who already has several ideas for different movement structures based on the music and the site, but who will also very much be taking her cue from our improvisations in rehearsal.

To that end, we began by improvising in canon to a basic waltz step, mixing things up by leading with alternating feet, and eventually adding in some fairly simple arm movements. Somehow I found myself at the front of the group and paired, no less, with the un-upstageable Ling. It didn't help that Ian and Darren's cameras were also back, trained on us one last time for a final bit of documentary footage. But despite all the reasons to feel pressure as Jessica counted us in to the first diagonal pass, I didn't. Instead I just let myself go, attuning my body's rhythms to the rhythms of the music as best I could. And everything was fine.

I wouldn't have been able to do that before LGC.

Thirteen more weeks before our performance. Stay tuned for lots more.

P.

Par B.L.eux at Vancouver International Dance Festival

The fifteenth annual Vancouver International Dance Festival began this week, with the featured mainstage show by Montreal's Par.B.L.eux. Snakeskins, conceived, choreographed and performed by the incomparable Benoît Lachambre (last seen in Vancouver two years ago in a duet with Lee Su-Feh), actually begins in the lobby of the Roundhouse. Lachambre, clad in jeans and with a leather harness around his torso, points his feet inward like a pigeon, balancing on the outside edges of the soles of his shoes as he shifts his weight from one leg to another, twists this way and that, and slowly extends his arms and unfurls his fingers with delicate precision. As he moves, Lachambre is circled by another man who wears a face mask of the sort favoured by WWF wrestlers, but also, given Lachambre's harness, evocative of BDSM culture. This man, dancer Daniele Albanese, is tasked with taking bits of cut-up rubber strips from a nearby table and either affixing them to the clips on Lachambre's harness, or to a large transparent screen on wheels stationed behind Lachambre. As the screen slowly fills up, an image begins to take shape, but before we can determine exactly what it is, Lachambre abruptly stops dancing and Albanese begins to wheel the screen away.

This is our cue to take our seats in the Roundhouse auditorium, where we are immediately greeted by the striking spatial architecture of Lachambre's set--in particular a canopy of tensile ropes that attach to a bit of scaffolding upstage and stretch all the way up to the downstage rafters, so that they appear to hang over the first couple of rows of the audience. That's where Richard and I chose to sit and when she joined us Ziyian Kwan noted that the effect was to enclose us inside the world of Lachambre's piece. And, indeed, to the extent that the ropes function as a kind of beautiful exoskeleton one couldn't help but feel protected rather than threatened.

Once the audience is seated and composer and musician Hahn Rowe has begun to play his stunning live score, Lachambre affixes his harness to the lower rung of the upstage scaffold, takes hold of two additional leather straps, and bends his body backwards, like an insect trying to free itself from a spider's web. Eventually this is just what Lachambre does, leaving the harness attached to the scaffold, which he then climbs atop, from whence he dons a leather jacket and similar style mask handed to him by Albanese. Lachambre is above the ropes at this point and at a certain point I knew instinctively what was going to happen next: a leap by Lachambre onto the ropes themselves, which receive his weight with the appropriate softness and give, but which also threaten to spill him onto the floor depending on where and how he moves between them. But move he does, eventually climbing almost all the way to the downstage top, before slipping between the ropes and dropping to the floor.

At this point in the piece, Lachambre momentarily steps out of character, picks up a microphone and informs us that his original idea for this section was to stage a moment of real violence involving Albanese. But he decided he couldn't do that, so after first attempting to substitute an image of empathy and compassion (by lying down beside Albanese on the floor), Lachambre instead says he will mime a scene of dangerous encounter. To this end, he demands money from a relatively nonplussed Albanese, stuffs it into his pocket along with the microphone, and then begins pacing horizontally along the stage as Rowe, having also by this point put on a face mask, performs a symphony on sheet metal from atop the scaffold. Then comes something even stranger, and yet equally beguiling: an episode involving Lachambre, his head now stuffed inside a hollowed-out basketball, explaining via an allegorical story the significance of the now finished double portrait on the screen that Albanese has continued to wheel around the stage. The story involves the connection between basketball and the ancient Mayan ballcourt game of pitz or ulama--in both cases, it would seem, a sacrifice needs to precede the regeneration of life. Like a snake shedding its skin.

And wily artist that he is, Lachambre saves his most stunning transformation to the last. Having vacated the stage after the ball story, he returns, now clad in shimmery laytex leggings. He stands under the canopy of ropes, which have now gone slack as a result of Albanese having moved the scaffolding forward. Lachambre gathers the ropes in each hand and begins to shake them, the energy emanating from his core, out through his arms, and along each vibrating cord in a series of stunningly calibrated wave motions that, combined with the lighting effects, made it look as if a series of spirit souls are being released into the cosmos. You could feel a collective intake of breath from the audience when this happened, and in a piece filled with amazing moments of virtuosic artistry this was the coup de grace.

And yet Lachambre refused to let us reward him with a conventional ovation. Rather, the piece resists closure as he and Albanese, both now released from their masks, improvise movement alongside each other to Rowe's music. The dancers, eventually joined by various stagehands, begin to deconstruct the set, exposing the back wall of the auditorium, and even the night sky beyond the Roundhouse. Every now and then each performer takes a measured bow, and we duly erupt into applause. But still they keep dancing, forcing us into the position of leave-taking.

Which, in this case, one is so reluctant to do.

P.

Coastal First Nations Dance Festival at MOA

Two years ago at the Dance Centre, while sitting on a panel with Alex Lazaridis Ferguson and Deborah Meyers at the World Dance Critics-Americas Conference, the subject of locally produced dance festivals came up. Dancing on the Edge, Dance in Vancouver, and the Vancouver International Dance Festival (opening this week) were all duly mentioned. Mique'l Dangeli, co-artistic director with her husband Mike of the First Nations mask-dancing troupe Git Hayetsk, was in the audience and quickly piped up that we were leaving one prominent dance festival out.

The Coastal First Nations Dance Festival, produced by West Vancouver's Dancers of Damelahamid in connection with UBC's Museum of Anthropology, celebrates the vibrancy and sustainability of the stories, songs and dances of the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America. Drawing inspiration from the pioneering efforts of Ken and Margaret Harris, who oversaw the Haw yah hawni nah Festival in Prince Rupert from 1967-1986, CFNDF began in 2008; it brings together dance groups from BC, the Yukon, Alaska and Washington, and also features guest artists from across Canada and other countries, thereby allowing the CFNDF, in the words of Executive Director Margaret Grenier, "to connect with a global community of Indigenous dance." Among this year's invited international artists are Urseloria and Nikollane Kanuho, Dine' sisters from Arizona who, judging from yesterday's brief display of their artistry, are amazingly accomplished Fancy dancers.

In addition to its weekday series of school performances and its ticketed evening mainstage shows, the CFNDF also features two weekend afternoon programs that are accessible to anyone who buys admission to MOA. Yesterday I arrived a bit late, just in time to see the second group on the program, Dakhká Khwáan, begin a song in the main rotunda of the museum before processing down the ramp to the great hall of totems where, against Arthur Erickson's signature wall of windows, a stage had been set up. Dakhká Khwáan is an Inland Tlingit group from the southern part of the Yukon. Their lead singer and spokesperson, who in teaching us a few phrases in Tlingit insisted we weren't speaking correctly unless the spit was flying in front of us, was incredibly adept--and funny--at contextualizing the significance of each traditional dance in contemporary terms. For instance, he noted that the mask dance in which raven tries to woo a woman from the wolf clan is essentially a lesson in how to flirt; raven eventually succeeds in his task by giving the woman a shiny new purse, which prompted our MC to crack that "Tlingit ladies love their blingit."

Next on the stage were the Dancers of Damelahamid, producers of the Festival. Representing the cultural traditions of the Gitxsan peoples, the group shared four masked dances. Grenier, who was one of the group's two main singers and drummers, explained to the audience that Coast Salish singing and dancing is an intergenerational practice, which accounts for why we see very young children alongside elders on stage. In the case of Dancers of Damelahamid, a little boy of four who had only been dancing with the group for two months very nearly stole the show, especially during a song about a dragonfly and a sleeping frog; when the buzz of the dragonfly awakens the frog, this is the cue for the little boy and his older masked partner, both of whom are sitting on their haunches, to begin leaping all over the stage.

Indeed, in terms of technique it behooves Coastal First Nations male dancers to have strong knees, for the lower they are to the ground, the more accomplished the dancing. By contrast, most of the female dancers in all of the groups were more upright and their footwork more intricate. This is just one of the commonalities I noted in the different offerings; to be sure, given their regional proximity and common connection to the land, the different Coast Salish First Nations are bound to have shared stories, similarly patterned regalia, headdresses, and masks, and complementary symbolic traditions (including the use of eagle down as a marker of peace between peoples, and which by the end of the afternoon festooned the floor). However, it would be a mistake to homogenize these groups solely based on an analogous art form comprised of singing, drumming, dancing and storytelling. For one thing, they all speak different languages and have distinct cultural and hereditary protocols--which is something that George Me'las Taylor noted in introducing a traditional Kwakwaka'wakw song danced by his Le-La-La Dancers.

Then, too, there is a history of cultural displacement and recovery that is in operation here. This was brought out by David Boxley, leader of the Tsimshian group Git Hoan. At the end of their set, which included a dramatic eagle song featuring three men who roamed the audience delighting children with the clacking beaks of their masks, Boxley noted that in the 1880s his people had followed a missionary from BC to Alaska. As part of this relocation, they had to give up their singing and dancing. It was only when Margaret and Ken Harris came up from BC nearly a hundred years later to teach the community what had been lost that they began reconnecting with the traditions of their ancestors.

What this story, and the entire afternoon of which it was a part, has taught me is that in my talk about Vancouver dance in this blog and elsewhere there is a huge gap--one that is comprised largely of these ancient and yet very much alive talking dances. I've got some serious learning to do--thank you, Mique'l, for giving me the kick in the pants I needed on this front.

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BODYTRAFFIC at Chutzpah!

The immensely talented LA-based dance troupe BODYTRAFFIC is back at the Chutzpah! Festival this year. Founded in 2007 by Lillian Barbeito and Tina Finkelman Berkett, the company has built up an impressive repertoire of original commissions by top contemporary choreographers. Four shorter pieces made up last night's program, each showcasing the incredible technique and musicality of the BODYTRAFFIC dancers.

The first and third pieces, Richard Siegal's The New 45 and Joshua L. Peugh's A Trick of the Light, had a similar retro vibe and bouyant tone, with each also making use of classic jazz and pop standards as part of their scores. Siegal's piece begins with an energetic solo by Finkelman Berkett, who is soon joined on stage by Guzmán Rosado (excellent, like Finkelman Berkett, in all four works) and Andrew Wojtal. All three dancers' fleet footwork, promiscuous partnering, and gyrating pelvises are a reminder that what popular American musical and dance idioms from the first half of the twentieth century mostly gave to the concert stage was sex and speed. Peugh's piece was more theatrical, taking as its organizing conceit couples at a 1950s-era prom, with the women in pouffy dresses and the men all sporting cardigans. In between smelling their own--and occasionally each other's--feet, the couples form, break apart and reform, with one among them always, and necessarily, late to the party.

In between these two works came Kollide, by red hot choreographer Kyle Abraham. Set to haunting, cello-heavy music by two contemporary Icelandic composers, one could sense immediately how the mood had shifted. Riffing on the classic quadrille, with its strict geometric formations and turn-taking couples, what was most fascinating to me about Abraham's choreography was how an overlapping canon structure was employed to disrupt and overtake different groupings of dancers. That said, I didn't find the piece, as a whole, all that emotionally engaging.

The evening concluded with Once again, before you go, by RUBBERBANDance Group's Victor Quijada. Although Abraham and Quijada both come from a hip hop background, it was in Quijada's work that the form's signature style was in most visible evidence. The floorwork by the quartet of men (Brandon Alley, Bynh Ho, Guzmán Rosado, and Andrew Wojtal) was especially strong, with various gravity-defying one-arm freezes held for what seemed like impossible lengths of time, and with the men repeatedly floating up from their knees onto the tips of their toes in perfect fluid unison, as if invisible wires were attached to each of their backs. At the heart of this last piece, however, is a beautiful duet by Alley and Finkelman Berkett, one that I hated to see end and that, when it did, ended a bit too abruptly for my liking.

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how to be at the Anderson Street Space

Yesterday afternoon I made my way to Granville Island to take in the first of this year's Micro Performance Series, presented by Boca del Lupo. Staged at the intimate Anderson Street Space, this season's line-up of shows kicked off with Tara Cheyenne Performance's how to be. An excerpt from a larger work-in-progress, the thirty minute piece is conceived and directed by Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, who performs alongside Kate Franklin and Kim Stevenson.

After spectators are ushered into the tiny quadrangular performance space and we take our places leaning against the walls, the three women, clad nattily in men's suits, take turns entering and exiting from the lone door, sometimes muttering aloud to themselves, at other times simply taking the measure of the room. Eventually they come together in a whispered chorus of first world modal phrases: "I should juice more"; "I should do more Pilates"; "I should eat less pasta." As always with TCP, text is an equal partner alongside the movement, and in this case the interrogative mode ("Should I wax my pubic hair?") operates in dynamic tension with the declarative ("I'm very good at remembering song lyrics").

The performers, playing to the space, have fun rearranging audience members, positioning us into four groups (whose significance we discover at the end of the show). They also test the limits of our physical boundaries, inserting themselves at various points in between our own bodies, or snuggling up close for a quick nap or animated conversation with one or other of us. This is only appropriate given the intimacy of the space, as well as the larger issues Friedenberg seems to be exploring in this piece. Part of the question of "how to be"--especially in polyglot urban centres like Vancouver--is how to interact and get along and move beside others in proximate material relation: how, in other words, to share space with strangers. (And coming together as an audience has much to teach us in this regard.)

Friedenberg, who over the past decade has made her name as a charismatic solo performer, as fleet of tongue as she is of foot, builds here in how to be on her previous success in Highgate with multi-character work. She provides numerous opportunities for her fellow performers to shine. Thus, in an hilarious sequence involving the three women not only moving but speaking in unison, Stevenson emerges as a virtuoso comic mimic in the mould of her director, channeling her Jesus-loving grandmother as she laments the daily grind of trying to make her way as a single working artist in Vancouver. For her part, Franklin is given a show-stopping solo, in which she performs various ballet moves while offering advice-laden bromides to the audience: "Eat more organic vegetables"; "Call your mother"; "Don't be a dick."

All of this bodes extremely well for the full-length piece Friedenberg is working towards, not least when one considers that her other collaborators on the project include Justine Chambers, Susan Elliott, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, and Marcus Youssef. At present, what was staged as part of Boca's MPS was a more than satisfying appetizer. Watching Friedenberg and Stevenson wrestle to kiss each other while Franklin does a stationary step dance against one wall or, alternately, Franklin and Friedenberg sing and sway along to the Whitney Houston standard "The Greatest Love of All" while a head-scratching Stevenson engages in random badinage with the audience, is pure comic gold.

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Compagnie Marie Chouinard at DanceHouse

When last the iconic Montreal-based choreographer Marie Chouinard came through town with her eponymous dance company--presenting a new work, The Golden Mean, commissioned by DanceHouse under the auspices of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad--I was not a happy camper. I was vexed at having been displaced from our usual seats in the front orchestra section of the Playhouse by the long ramp jutting into the audience that Chouinard had requested as part of her set. And the compensation of being relocated to premium seats onstage with the dancers hardly mitigated my displeasure; from there I could see up close just how underdeveloped was Chouinard's choreography and how overcooked her accompanying theatricality (which, among other things, involved the dancers donning Stephen Harper masks at one point).

Let's just say with DanceHouse's latest presentation of her work, Chouinard has redeemed herself, reaffirming her place in the pantheon of major dance artists in this country and internationally. The evening was made up of two of Chouinard's more recent pieces, each experimenting in its own way with the idea of the dance score. The first, Gymnopédies, is set to the famously atmospheric piano compositions of the same name by Erik Satie. Written in 3/4 time, each with a similar structure and theme, the three works subtly juxtapose dissonant melodies against the harmony, producing an achingly melancholic effect that has influenced ambient music up to the present day (including electronic composers like Moby, who samples Gymnopédies on his blockbuster album Play). Given that the title of Gymnopédies connotes images of nude dancing (which, to be sure, Chouinard plays upon), Satie's music would seem to be a natural source of inspiration for any choreographer. But Chouinard is not just any choreographer and part of the conceit of her own score to Gymnopédies is that she didn't just have her dancers learn a new set of movement phrases; each of them also had to learn to play Satie's music, which they take turns performing live at the grand piano positioned stage left.

That the touch and caress of piano keys is an act of kinesis as virtuosic as the most complex or gymnastic of dance moves is made clear at the start of Chouinard's piece. The lights come up on a clump of draped forms stage right. A lone woman clad in black enters from the wings and crosses to centre stage. She then sinks to the floor in a split, rocking back and forth with her pelvis as she alternately domes and flexes her extended feet. Rising from the floor, she then takes a seat at the piano (also draped in cloth) and without a concomitant stretching of her fingers she begins to play the first of Satie's compositions. As she bends her body over the keyboard, communing rhythmically with the piano in a way that gives new meaning to the idea of a dancer's musicality, we notice the draped forms stage right begin to move, fingers and hands and arms slowly emerging from openings at their tops. One by one the rest of Chouinard's company of dancers reveals themselves, each nude, like a newborn butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. In pairs, the dancers then slowly walk upstage, slipping between a crack in the curtain.

Following this opening our original pianist is relieved by another member of the company, who provides accompaniment to an energetic duet between one of the male dancers and the tallest of the female dancers, whose towering leg extensions and impossibly deep and wide pliés (a Chouinard trademark) are magnified all the more by her point shoes. However, Chouinard is not only (or even primarily) interested in a serious technical exploration of the links between musical and dance virtuosity. This becomes clear when a trio of female dancers comes out sporting clown noses and, via their comically unsyncopated poses and arm movements, the pathos of Satie's music turns to bathos. Indeed, buffoonery and burlesque are key elements of the piece, with couples forming and splitting and reforming, both along and across gender lines; the action spilling into the audience; not one but several false endings; and the live playing of the Satie score being usurped at certain points by recorded versions emanating from portable CD players.

I took the latter bit to be Chouinard's acknowledgement that Satie's music, as beautiful and haunting as it remains, has become something of a cultural cliche, in part via its endless recycling and re-citation (including, as mentioned above, by DJs like Moby). On the other hand, that the archive of any artistic form eventually becomes part of the repertoire of contemporary performance was also made clear by Chouinard's own multiple references to dance history; repeated scenes of solo and mutual masturbation (including, most memorably, on an electronic keyboard) can't help but evoke recollections of another great pairing of musical and dance scores, in this case Vaslav Nijinsky's scandalous short ballet L'après-midi d'un faune, choreographed to the symphonic poem of the same name by Claude Debussy.

Debussy's own work was based on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, so it is fitting that in the second work on last night's program, Henri Michaux: Mouvements, Chouinard adapts a work by another French poet. In particular, she takes inspiration from a book by Michaux in which a long poem that's all about motility (the "Mouvements" of both Michaux's and Chouinard's titles) is accompanied by 64 pages of India-ink drawings. Looking at these drawings, which take various biomorphic forms, Chouinard had a revelation: she had in her hands a complete dance score. Her task, then, was to create a catalogue of both stilled poses and travelling movements to accompany each of the drawings.

As the drawings are projected successively on an upstage screen, Chouinard's dancers take turns "figuring" with their bodies what we see on the page, their black clad silhouettes sometimes matching with uncanny precision and at other times only suggestively approximating the series of blots. As the images speed up and become more complex, the dancers form architectural duos or trios, various extended and moving limbs or stretched out bits of leotard evoking the multiplicity of Michaux's brushstrokes. Indeed, my favourite part of the piece is when the entire company performs one of the drawings in unison, the more animated and "dancey" the movement the more cinematic and montage-like the images. Indeed, the whole piece has the feel of a flip book of Rorschach drawings brought to stunning three-dimensional life.

Chouinard even takes into consideration the blank white space of Michaux's pages, with one of the dancers crawling at a certain point under the white Marley flooring to read out the central poem of the book, and with the whole piece culminating in a sped up and simultaneous reverse negative, if you will, of the slower and more methodical serial presentation of each of the drawings. I refer to the fact that at the end the harsh white light illuminating the stage cuts to black as, under a single focused strobe, the dancers, now stripped to their underwear, improvise movements based on what we've just seen.

Henri Michaux: Mouvements is a triumph of inter-artistic dialogue, and in a way that makes neither form subservient to the other, nor that seeks to produce an exact match between them. Indeed, Chouinard shows us the utter impossibility of such a task, as with the additional elements of time, space and audience co-presence, what we think we see and what we know we feel will always be pleasurably incommensurable.

P.