There is a moment in 7 Important Things, on at SFU Woodward's Studio T in a PuSh Festival co-presentation with Neworld Theatre, when performer and co-creator Nadia Ross turns to George Acheson, whose life story the two are telling, and points out a deeply ironic truth. Having been kicked out of his home by his father at age 16 in the 1960s for refusing to cut his hair, George, the quintessential hippie-turned-anarchist-Punk, now makes his living as a barber.
In this exchange two parallel threads explored in this work of documentary theatre from STO Union come together. On the one hand, the play is a moving yet unsentimental account of posthumous forgiveness between father and son, whose different versions of martial versus libertine masculinities set the course for George's restless wanderings. At the same time, Ross, as Acheson's interlocutor and surrogate amanuensis, is interested in casting an equally sober eye on not just how George, but western society as a whole, got from there to here. Given the promise of the 60s counterculture, with its anti-consumerist ethos of peace and love, what went so horribly wrong?
In answering this question, Ross and Acheson, who have been performing this show for eight years now and who have refined its spare and suitably low-tech dramaturgy into a fine conversational art, take care not to romanticize George's decision to drop out--especially where his treatment of women is concerned. At the same time, there is a certain smugness of tone to this piece, not least in the improvisatory bits when, for example, Ross riffs on the price of real estate in Vancouver and the "efficiency" of our post-Olympic city, only to rush to assure us that she hopes she's not offending anyone. Offend away, but don't apologize for it; such a move presumes that the audience is so immersed in and duped by the capitalist "society of the spectacle" that we can't understand let alone appreciate a critique of it.
In the talkback following the show, Ross, in explaining her cynicism about the world in which we live today, said that hope is a drug, offering an illusive promise that things will get better in the future while distracting us from fixing the present. Point taken. However, I would just add, in the context of the overwhelming sense of stasis that pervades this show, that nostalgia is an equally powerful--and paralytic--drug.
Following 7 Important Things, I made my way over to the Vancouver Art Gallery for the PuSh edition of FUSE. Usually FUSE is so packed and I arrive so late that I'm unable to see anything. Last night, however, I did get to bust a few moves on the rooftop deck to Sonic Elder, who played a sold-out show at Club PuSh on Thursday. And, on the fourth floor of the gallery, amid its prized collection of Emily Carr paintings, I was thrilled to be able to watch--and dance with--Emily Johnson. Emily, an Indigenous choreographer and dance artist from Minneapolis, is PuSh's current artist-in-residence. I get to have a conversation with her and Marie Clements (whose The Road Forward opens at the York Theatre next week) at the PuSh offices tomorrow, excerpts of which folks will hopefully get to see next Friday morning should they wish to drop by the York.
P.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Friday, January 30, 2015
PuSh 2015: Le Cargo
This year's PuSh Festival represents a long overdue milestone: our first presentation of work from the continent of Africa. Faustin Linyekula is a dancer and storyteller who heads Studios Kabako, based in Kisangani, in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is in town with the solo Le Cargo, a co-presentation with The Dance Centre that runs through this Saturday.
The piece begins with Linyekula entering from the backstage wings carrying a small wooden stool and two books. He walks downstage and pauses before a microphone; a laptop computer is on the floor before his feet. Then comes an invocation, spoken almost as much to reassure the performer as to inform the audience: "I am Kabako. It is me, Kabako. Again Kabako. Always Kabako." Sitting down on the stool, Linyekula tells us that he is an internationally acclaimed storyteller, but that tonight he has come "simply to dance." However, that task proves anything but simple, as how and what to dance involves the recovery of a kinaesthetic repertoire long buried in his body and his imagination.
At first, as Linyekula tells us, he had thought that he could relearn to dance by seeking the answer in books. But he does not find his answer there. That is because he wants to dance the dances he remembers from his childhood, the ones performed at night that, having been sent to bed, he was not supposed to have watched. And so begins the journey back to Obilo, the town where Linyekula's father worked as a primary schoolteacher, served as the local choirmaster, and tended goal for the soccer team. It is thus fitting that Linyekula, unable to afford the time needed to make the trip by rail, is driven to Obila on the back of his father's motorcycle.
It is only at this point that Linyekula begins to dance--in a diagonal shaft of light coming from a shin positioned stage left. His body, too, seems tilted on an axis, bent at the hips, the head and torso angling forward, legs and feet driving to the floor. Later, Linyekula will dance in a circle of illuminated shins stage right, swinging his pelvis backwards and forwards in the fast-paced manner many of us may be familiar with via various images of dance ethnography from Africa, but that for Linyekula is very specifically associated with the Congolese dance form of Ndombolo. Even here, however, audience members might, given certain preconceived expectations, be surprised at the overall spareness and contained exuberance of Linyekula's dancing.
I would hazard to say that this is for two reasons. First, Linyekula's recovery of these dances necessarily becomes an elegy for a lost tradition. Back in Obilo, with a Christian evangelicalism having swept through the town, ritual dancing and drumming of the sort Linyekula is interested in reviving has been ruled satanic; as a result, the choreographer has to call upon drummers from an adjacent village. Then, too, the hybrid form of Le Cargo subtly upends our disciplinary expectations. In the piece, despite telling us otherwise, Linyekula spends as much, if not more, time telling stories as he does dancing--to the point where a recorded loop of his live narration at the beginning of the show becomes the score to his movement at the end. However, in this merging--which is also accompanied by a slideshow of images that loops on the laptop computer--what we are being let in on is something we should have been aware of from the very beginning: dance is storytelling and storytelling is dance.
And, in hindsight, there is as much to marvel at in Linyekula's delicate movement of his hands and fingers when he is talking to us from his stool at the top of the show as there is in his swinging hips at the end.
P.
The piece begins with Linyekula entering from the backstage wings carrying a small wooden stool and two books. He walks downstage and pauses before a microphone; a laptop computer is on the floor before his feet. Then comes an invocation, spoken almost as much to reassure the performer as to inform the audience: "I am Kabako. It is me, Kabako. Again Kabako. Always Kabako." Sitting down on the stool, Linyekula tells us that he is an internationally acclaimed storyteller, but that tonight he has come "simply to dance." However, that task proves anything but simple, as how and what to dance involves the recovery of a kinaesthetic repertoire long buried in his body and his imagination.
At first, as Linyekula tells us, he had thought that he could relearn to dance by seeking the answer in books. But he does not find his answer there. That is because he wants to dance the dances he remembers from his childhood, the ones performed at night that, having been sent to bed, he was not supposed to have watched. And so begins the journey back to Obilo, the town where Linyekula's father worked as a primary schoolteacher, served as the local choirmaster, and tended goal for the soccer team. It is thus fitting that Linyekula, unable to afford the time needed to make the trip by rail, is driven to Obila on the back of his father's motorcycle.
It is only at this point that Linyekula begins to dance--in a diagonal shaft of light coming from a shin positioned stage left. His body, too, seems tilted on an axis, bent at the hips, the head and torso angling forward, legs and feet driving to the floor. Later, Linyekula will dance in a circle of illuminated shins stage right, swinging his pelvis backwards and forwards in the fast-paced manner many of us may be familiar with via various images of dance ethnography from Africa, but that for Linyekula is very specifically associated with the Congolese dance form of Ndombolo. Even here, however, audience members might, given certain preconceived expectations, be surprised at the overall spareness and contained exuberance of Linyekula's dancing.
I would hazard to say that this is for two reasons. First, Linyekula's recovery of these dances necessarily becomes an elegy for a lost tradition. Back in Obilo, with a Christian evangelicalism having swept through the town, ritual dancing and drumming of the sort Linyekula is interested in reviving has been ruled satanic; as a result, the choreographer has to call upon drummers from an adjacent village. Then, too, the hybrid form of Le Cargo subtly upends our disciplinary expectations. In the piece, despite telling us otherwise, Linyekula spends as much, if not more, time telling stories as he does dancing--to the point where a recorded loop of his live narration at the beginning of the show becomes the score to his movement at the end. However, in this merging--which is also accompanied by a slideshow of images that loops on the laptop computer--what we are being let in on is something we should have been aware of from the very beginning: dance is storytelling and storytelling is dance.
And, in hindsight, there is as much to marvel at in Linyekula's delicate movement of his hands and fingers when he is talking to us from his stool at the top of the show as there is in his swinging hips at the end.
P.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
PuSh 2015: Dark Matter
Kate McIntosh is my kind of performer: deeply curious about the world and endlessly inventive on stage. Indeed, it is the very question of how the theatre might help answer some of the deeper mysteries of the universe that forms the core of her show Dark Matter, which opened at SFU Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre last night as part of this year's PuSh Festival. A fusion of theoretical physics and practical dramaturgy, the show proves that science has more in common with performance than we might at first think. The big bang, like a small black box production, is an event situated in time and space that requires a quantum leap of the imagination.
Thus, McIntosh and her two fellow performers, the alternately deadpan and vaudevillian Thomas Kasebacher and Bruno Roubicek, mostly marshal a few simple props to give material dimension to what otherwise remains immaterial in our daily lives. Ping pong balls bouncing across the stage are atoms and black balloons the invisible energy that surrounds them. An empty paper bag opened out to the audience makes darkness visible and a simple wooden plank becomes a portal to a parallel universe. On a portable lab table time is poured into a glass like water and later crushed with a brick. A lasso of rope sends McIntosh ricocheting across the stage like electrons in a superconductor and moistened fingers on the rims of glasses sends sound singing out into curved space. By the end of the show, the stage is littered with the detritus of the performers' experiments. (As with White Cabin, which played the Festival a few years back, I wouldn't want to strike this set.)
In between these visual set pieces, McIntosh poses a series of questions to the audience (the text was written by McIntosh in collaboration with the great Tim Etchells). Most of these have to do with the time-space continuum and the myriad alternate scenarios that might be going on without us as we sit in the theatre. How to rip a hole in the universe so that we might catch of glimpse of what we're possibly missing? In the work's closing tableau McIntosh suggests a method. First she sets down on stage three metronomes ticking at different speeds, amplifying their sound with microphones; then she lifts the upstage blackout curtain to reveal a sliver of bright orange light, like the halo of the sun during an eclipse. Grabbing a twinkling star from the curtain she then stills in turn each metronome as the backstage illumination that has leaked through is gradually extinguished. If our existence is mostly made up of a sequence of moments that we cannot see, then I am grateful to performers like McIntosh for hazarding a guess as to how we might nevertheless still experience them.
P.
Thus, McIntosh and her two fellow performers, the alternately deadpan and vaudevillian Thomas Kasebacher and Bruno Roubicek, mostly marshal a few simple props to give material dimension to what otherwise remains immaterial in our daily lives. Ping pong balls bouncing across the stage are atoms and black balloons the invisible energy that surrounds them. An empty paper bag opened out to the audience makes darkness visible and a simple wooden plank becomes a portal to a parallel universe. On a portable lab table time is poured into a glass like water and later crushed with a brick. A lasso of rope sends McIntosh ricocheting across the stage like electrons in a superconductor and moistened fingers on the rims of glasses sends sound singing out into curved space. By the end of the show, the stage is littered with the detritus of the performers' experiments. (As with White Cabin, which played the Festival a few years back, I wouldn't want to strike this set.)
In between these visual set pieces, McIntosh poses a series of questions to the audience (the text was written by McIntosh in collaboration with the great Tim Etchells). Most of these have to do with the time-space continuum and the myriad alternate scenarios that might be going on without us as we sit in the theatre. How to rip a hole in the universe so that we might catch of glimpse of what we're possibly missing? In the work's closing tableau McIntosh suggests a method. First she sets down on stage three metronomes ticking at different speeds, amplifying their sound with microphones; then she lifts the upstage blackout curtain to reveal a sliver of bright orange light, like the halo of the sun during an eclipse. Grabbing a twinkling star from the curtain she then stills in turn each metronome as the backstage illumination that has leaked through is gradually extinguished. If our existence is mostly made up of a sequence of moments that we cannot see, then I am grateful to performers like McIntosh for hazarding a guess as to how we might nevertheless still experience them.
P.
Monday, January 26, 2015
Le Grand Continental: Day 2 Performances
No rain. A bit of sun even. And warm. What a difference a day makes. Sylvain seemed a bit disappointed that the inclement weather hadn't continued; he says it makes the dance really beautiful. However, I have to say I much preferred staying dry yesterday--or at least finishing both dances dripping only with sweat.
I also didn't mind the later call time. Gathering in the green room (which was a lot roomier minus all of our rain gear) at noon, we checked in with each other about our evenings--and our bodies. A bit of stiffness and soreness here and there, but mostly people seemed ready and eager for round two. Before that, however, Sylvain had us gather outside to practice the opening, as he said the day before we were late with our counts on the bit where the two lines rush towards each other in the centre of the square. The few folks who had turned up early to watch must have been a bit confused when the music cut out abruptly at the beginning of "Gogoprado" and we all trudged back inside.
As for the 1 pm performance itself, Sylvain said afterwards it was our best yet, especially in terms of keeping our lines. Funnily enough, I felt I had turned in my own worst performance, with a myriad of small, stupid mistakes--most egregiously in "India" when I forgot to do the second of the two waltz turns when the Group A and B lines merge. It also seemed like the group's overall energy was lower; for one thing, we didn't make as much noise as usual. As for the audience, I tried to whip up a bit of fervour by yelling at them to make some of their own noise at the start of "Cumbia." I got a few half-hearted whoops and claps, but they tapered off pretty quickly. As Jane Heyman said to me after the show, it's not that people weren't enjoying themselves; rather, they were just behaving like the typical Vancouver audience. Still, I now get how this can be definite energy suck for a performer and I've made a note to myself to be more boisterous from now on if I'm watching something that I really like.
A bit despondent with myself over my mistakes, I went for a long walk between shows, which I mostly spent going over the choreography in my head. There was a brief panic attack when I blanked on a whole section of "Champagne," but by the time I checked in for our 3 pm call I had resolved to just enjoy myself and give it my all for this last show. That seemed to be the general consensus with everyone else as, gathering in small groups to watch the crowds assemble and the sun peak through the clouds, we told ourselves to have fun--and, most importantly, to let the audience know it.
Which we did. As soon as the wave sounds started in the intro section I was in a calm place. And by the time we got to "Gogoprado," I knew this was going to be my best run. Even the fact that my pants kept falling down couldn't deter my enthusiasm. Checking in with friends in the audience afterward, they all had massive praise, which was a great high on which to end. PuSh Festival Artistic and Executive Director Norman Armour jokingly asked for my autograph, which I gladly wrote on his hand; then he said that the Festival was so pleased with how the whole Le Grand Continental experience had unfolded that there were very tentative plans afoot to possibly bring an even bigger and better version back next year. If so, I'm there in a heartbeat.
Partly that's because this experience has been about making a connection with a wonderful group of people I otherwise would never have gotten to know. And while, over the past 10 weeks, we've mostly been focused on learning the choreography, at last night's after party (generously organized by Mark and Diane) there was a chance to have some proper conversations with my fellow dancers. Speaking with Marion in my rusty French, I learned that she hailed from Sherbrooke, and so I was able to tell her that I lived there when I was six and seven. Eewa showed me her wounds from her job as a cook for the Glowbal restaurant chain. And Brenda, who is from Mexico City and completing a doctorate in urban planning from Amsterdam, talked to me about her fascinating research on housing in Nanjing, China. I talked with Lara about how hard it still is to make a living as a working dancer in Vancouver, and with Caroline about the merits of doing an MFA.
And, of course, we danced. It's funny, I've always been an incredibly self-conscious social dancer, even in clubs. But something about participating in LGC has loosened me up--and I'm not just talking about my hips. Last night, as Ling spun classic 80s tunes on her iPod, you couldn't hold me back, and I'm so grateful to Sylvain for inspiring us keep dancing together as a group.
Stay tuned.
P.
I also didn't mind the later call time. Gathering in the green room (which was a lot roomier minus all of our rain gear) at noon, we checked in with each other about our evenings--and our bodies. A bit of stiffness and soreness here and there, but mostly people seemed ready and eager for round two. Before that, however, Sylvain had us gather outside to practice the opening, as he said the day before we were late with our counts on the bit where the two lines rush towards each other in the centre of the square. The few folks who had turned up early to watch must have been a bit confused when the music cut out abruptly at the beginning of "Gogoprado" and we all trudged back inside.
As for the 1 pm performance itself, Sylvain said afterwards it was our best yet, especially in terms of keeping our lines. Funnily enough, I felt I had turned in my own worst performance, with a myriad of small, stupid mistakes--most egregiously in "India" when I forgot to do the second of the two waltz turns when the Group A and B lines merge. It also seemed like the group's overall energy was lower; for one thing, we didn't make as much noise as usual. As for the audience, I tried to whip up a bit of fervour by yelling at them to make some of their own noise at the start of "Cumbia." I got a few half-hearted whoops and claps, but they tapered off pretty quickly. As Jane Heyman said to me after the show, it's not that people weren't enjoying themselves; rather, they were just behaving like the typical Vancouver audience. Still, I now get how this can be definite energy suck for a performer and I've made a note to myself to be more boisterous from now on if I'm watching something that I really like.
A bit despondent with myself over my mistakes, I went for a long walk between shows, which I mostly spent going over the choreography in my head. There was a brief panic attack when I blanked on a whole section of "Champagne," but by the time I checked in for our 3 pm call I had resolved to just enjoy myself and give it my all for this last show. That seemed to be the general consensus with everyone else as, gathering in small groups to watch the crowds assemble and the sun peak through the clouds, we told ourselves to have fun--and, most importantly, to let the audience know it.
Which we did. As soon as the wave sounds started in the intro section I was in a calm place. And by the time we got to "Gogoprado," I knew this was going to be my best run. Even the fact that my pants kept falling down couldn't deter my enthusiasm. Checking in with friends in the audience afterward, they all had massive praise, which was a great high on which to end. PuSh Festival Artistic and Executive Director Norman Armour jokingly asked for my autograph, which I gladly wrote on his hand; then he said that the Festival was so pleased with how the whole Le Grand Continental experience had unfolded that there were very tentative plans afoot to possibly bring an even bigger and better version back next year. If so, I'm there in a heartbeat.
Partly that's because this experience has been about making a connection with a wonderful group of people I otherwise would never have gotten to know. And while, over the past 10 weeks, we've mostly been focused on learning the choreography, at last night's after party (generously organized by Mark and Diane) there was a chance to have some proper conversations with my fellow dancers. Speaking with Marion in my rusty French, I learned that she hailed from Sherbrooke, and so I was able to tell her that I lived there when I was six and seven. Eewa showed me her wounds from her job as a cook for the Glowbal restaurant chain. And Brenda, who is from Mexico City and completing a doctorate in urban planning from Amsterdam, talked to me about her fascinating research on housing in Nanjing, China. I talked with Lara about how hard it still is to make a living as a working dancer in Vancouver, and with Caroline about the merits of doing an MFA.
And, of course, we danced. It's funny, I've always been an incredibly self-conscious social dancer, even in clubs. But something about participating in LGC has loosened me up--and I'm not just talking about my hips. Last night, as Ling spun classic 80s tunes on her iPod, you couldn't hold me back, and I'm so grateful to Sylvain for inspiring us keep dancing together as a group.
Stay tuned.
P.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Le Grand Continental: Day 1 Performances
Yesterday was the big day: our first performances before an audience at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Plaza! When we arrived for our first 9:15 am call time, it was still pouring out, as the first weekend of PuSh has just happened to coincide with the arrival on the West Coast of that meteorological phenomenon known as a Pineapple Express, bringing warm temperatures (yay!) but also lots of moisture (boo!).
Leaving home after a restless sleep (nervous, I, like Peggy, had basically spent the night running through all the choreography in my head), I had dumped most of the contents of my drawers and closet into two big bags: two pairs of shoes; extra socks and underwear; three pairs of pants; three different coloured ball caps; various combinations of outer layers in anticipation of different levels of precipitation; and, of course, a towel. However, when I arrived at the old restaurant on the east side of the Plaza that was functioning as our green room (overseen with genial aplomb by Barb Clausen), I discovered that I was traveling relatively light. Several of my fellow dancers were trailing large suitcases, not surprising given the weather and the elaborateness of some of their costumes (I think Susie takes the prize with her beautifully embroidered traditional Irish dress). With racks and hangers having been set up on which to hang our various outfits, the room soon looked (and, given the general dampness, smelled) like the bargain basement of a department store.
It was still raining pretty hard when we began our dress rehearsal at 10:15 am. As a result we were allowed to forgo lying down on the ground during the "Fatboy Slim" section. Nevertheless, we still got pretty wet and my trusty, supposedly waterproof Treetorn shoes were no match for the various puddles that had welled and formed on the Plaza. As for the run-through itself, it was pretty much the worst I'd ever danced the piece: "Cumbia," especially, was a disaster. But I tried to put it out of my mind, reminding myself of the performance cliche that a terrible dress means a great show. After changing out of our wet clothes, Hilary and I and several others grabbed our lunches and headed over to Library Square to chill and chat in the covered atrium--which, as I mentioned to Peter Cox, wouldn't have made a bad space in which to hold our performances.
Back in the green room for our 12 pm pre-performance call time, excitement (and, to be sure, a little bit of anxiety) steadily mounted as we changed into the first of our costumes, helping each other out with accessories (thanks, Kerstin, for the adjustment of the bow tie), borrowing hair dryers, sharing food, offering stretching tips, and the like. Two of our members (Kuei-Ming and Lynda) even handed out personalized messages and gifts to the entire company, which was incredibly touching. And then, before we knew it, it was time to line up for our entrances. Peaking out beyond the curtains that had been put up in the green room, I was surprised to see how many people had assembled. The rain had tapered off a bit, but it was still coming down pretty steadily. Okay, then, if they had all come out to watch us despite the inclement weather, then we had to give them something to remember. Go team! And leave it to Taz to lead us out with an appropriate cheer.
The performance itself was a bit of a blur. I do remember freaking out a bit that in our south-facing line after our entrance I ended up looking directly at Vancouver dance artist Bevin Poole, saying as much out loud to Caroline, who was standing next to me. But soon the wave sounds from the opening began, and there was no time to worry about who else might be lurking in the crowd. I know I made mistakes, but nothing major, and nothing that I couldn't quickly recover from. The point was that I was having fun and giving it my all, which included the frying bacon bit on the ground. After all, it wouldn't be an authentically Vancouver experience of Le Grand Continental if we didn't get wet. What was most surprising for me was how quickly it was all over. Thirty minutes felt more like fifteen, which was an interesting lesson in the temporality of performance, and how audience and performers might experience the duration of an event very differently.
In the green room afterward, everyone was pretty stoked; at this point, most of us forwent all modesty as we peeled off layers of wet clothing and changed into our outfits for the second performance in front of each other. I snuck away to the Library once more for a few minutes of alone-time. And then it was back for our 3 pm call.
By the 4 pm show, the rain had pretty much stopped and the crowd that had assembled was about double the first, with spill-over from the just-exiting matinee of Séquence 8 no doubt helping to swell our numbers. PuSh Operations Coordinator Christopher Gauthier, who was counting both audiences for grant reporting purposes told me afterwards that he put the morning group at about 300 and the afternoon one at 650! There were several recognizable faces in the crowd (thank you Tiffany [and Spirit] and Alana and Carole, plus all the wonderful PuSh staff and my fellow PuSh Board members who were there). But this time it didn't freak me out; it energized me. I know I still screwed up in a couple of places (including a stupid mistake in "Stockfunk"), but the 4 pm show was an even bigger high than the 1 pm.
At the end of each show we invite audience members to come into the performance square and dance with us. Needless to say, there were far more partakers after the 4 pm show than the 1 pm--although Voetvolk's Lisbeth Gruwez and Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, in town with their wonderful show It's going to get worse and worse and worse, my friend, were jiving up a storm following the earlier show. I regret I couldn't stay for long after the second performance; Richard was picking me up as we had to rush off to another event. But, on the topic of audiences, I will say that I was a bit surprised that folks watching us didn't make more noise. Sylvain had prepared us for the fact that friends and family would be calling out our names (which, to be fair, did happen once or twice), and clapping and shouting and whooping all the way through the show--and that we musn't let that distract us. On the whole, however, I think both groups were relatively sedate--not an uncommon response among visiting artists when they present here. In the case of the 1 pm show, it could have been that most folks were holding umbrellas. But today, I think, the weather should be pretty good.
So there's no excuse, Vancouver. If you're at the Queen E Plaza this afternoon at 1 or 4 pm, you have a simple task: MAKE SOME NOISE!
P.
Leaving home after a restless sleep (nervous, I, like Peggy, had basically spent the night running through all the choreography in my head), I had dumped most of the contents of my drawers and closet into two big bags: two pairs of shoes; extra socks and underwear; three pairs of pants; three different coloured ball caps; various combinations of outer layers in anticipation of different levels of precipitation; and, of course, a towel. However, when I arrived at the old restaurant on the east side of the Plaza that was functioning as our green room (overseen with genial aplomb by Barb Clausen), I discovered that I was traveling relatively light. Several of my fellow dancers were trailing large suitcases, not surprising given the weather and the elaborateness of some of their costumes (I think Susie takes the prize with her beautifully embroidered traditional Irish dress). With racks and hangers having been set up on which to hang our various outfits, the room soon looked (and, given the general dampness, smelled) like the bargain basement of a department store.
It was still raining pretty hard when we began our dress rehearsal at 10:15 am. As a result we were allowed to forgo lying down on the ground during the "Fatboy Slim" section. Nevertheless, we still got pretty wet and my trusty, supposedly waterproof Treetorn shoes were no match for the various puddles that had welled and formed on the Plaza. As for the run-through itself, it was pretty much the worst I'd ever danced the piece: "Cumbia," especially, was a disaster. But I tried to put it out of my mind, reminding myself of the performance cliche that a terrible dress means a great show. After changing out of our wet clothes, Hilary and I and several others grabbed our lunches and headed over to Library Square to chill and chat in the covered atrium--which, as I mentioned to Peter Cox, wouldn't have made a bad space in which to hold our performances.
Back in the green room for our 12 pm pre-performance call time, excitement (and, to be sure, a little bit of anxiety) steadily mounted as we changed into the first of our costumes, helping each other out with accessories (thanks, Kerstin, for the adjustment of the bow tie), borrowing hair dryers, sharing food, offering stretching tips, and the like. Two of our members (Kuei-Ming and Lynda) even handed out personalized messages and gifts to the entire company, which was incredibly touching. And then, before we knew it, it was time to line up for our entrances. Peaking out beyond the curtains that had been put up in the green room, I was surprised to see how many people had assembled. The rain had tapered off a bit, but it was still coming down pretty steadily. Okay, then, if they had all come out to watch us despite the inclement weather, then we had to give them something to remember. Go team! And leave it to Taz to lead us out with an appropriate cheer.
The performance itself was a bit of a blur. I do remember freaking out a bit that in our south-facing line after our entrance I ended up looking directly at Vancouver dance artist Bevin Poole, saying as much out loud to Caroline, who was standing next to me. But soon the wave sounds from the opening began, and there was no time to worry about who else might be lurking in the crowd. I know I made mistakes, but nothing major, and nothing that I couldn't quickly recover from. The point was that I was having fun and giving it my all, which included the frying bacon bit on the ground. After all, it wouldn't be an authentically Vancouver experience of Le Grand Continental if we didn't get wet. What was most surprising for me was how quickly it was all over. Thirty minutes felt more like fifteen, which was an interesting lesson in the temporality of performance, and how audience and performers might experience the duration of an event very differently.
In the green room afterward, everyone was pretty stoked; at this point, most of us forwent all modesty as we peeled off layers of wet clothing and changed into our outfits for the second performance in front of each other. I snuck away to the Library once more for a few minutes of alone-time. And then it was back for our 3 pm call.
By the 4 pm show, the rain had pretty much stopped and the crowd that had assembled was about double the first, with spill-over from the just-exiting matinee of Séquence 8 no doubt helping to swell our numbers. PuSh Operations Coordinator Christopher Gauthier, who was counting both audiences for grant reporting purposes told me afterwards that he put the morning group at about 300 and the afternoon one at 650! There were several recognizable faces in the crowd (thank you Tiffany [and Spirit] and Alana and Carole, plus all the wonderful PuSh staff and my fellow PuSh Board members who were there). But this time it didn't freak me out; it energized me. I know I still screwed up in a couple of places (including a stupid mistake in "Stockfunk"), but the 4 pm show was an even bigger high than the 1 pm.
At the end of each show we invite audience members to come into the performance square and dance with us. Needless to say, there were far more partakers after the 4 pm show than the 1 pm--although Voetvolk's Lisbeth Gruwez and Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, in town with their wonderful show It's going to get worse and worse and worse, my friend, were jiving up a storm following the earlier show. I regret I couldn't stay for long after the second performance; Richard was picking me up as we had to rush off to another event. But, on the topic of audiences, I will say that I was a bit surprised that folks watching us didn't make more noise. Sylvain had prepared us for the fact that friends and family would be calling out our names (which, to be fair, did happen once or twice), and clapping and shouting and whooping all the way through the show--and that we musn't let that distract us. On the whole, however, I think both groups were relatively sedate--not an uncommon response among visiting artists when they present here. In the case of the 1 pm show, it could have been that most folks were holding umbrellas. But today, I think, the weather should be pretty good.
So there's no excuse, Vancouver. If you're at the Queen E Plaza this afternoon at 1 or 4 pm, you have a simple task: MAKE SOME NOISE!
P.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
PuSh 2015: It's going to get worse and worse and worse, my friend
It's going to get worse and worse and worse, my friend, on at The Dance Centre through this evening as part of the PuSh Festival, was one of my advance must-see picks when Festival Associate Curator Joyce Rosario told me last summer that the show was coming to town. First of all, there's that title, apocalyptically suggestive, but in an amiable don't-sweat-it-just-accept-it sort of way. Then there's the concept of the piece: a solo by Belgian dance artist Lisbeth Gruwez to a sermon by Jimmy Swaggart, from which the title derives.
As Gruwez and her partner in the company Voetvolk, composer and sound designer Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, explained following the show, the origins of the piece began with Gruwez's interest in the gestural vocabulary accompanying speeches made by political leaders from Hitler to Obama. After watching a raft of YouTube videos and assembling a range of movements used to punctuate and emphasize words and phrases, Gruwez went into the dance studio thinking she would build a piece just from the gestures themselves. Very soon, however, she and Van Cauwenberghe realized that they needed words to accompany the movement, and vice-versa. And so, after happening upon a recording of a Swaggart sermon on what the Bible has to say about the perfidy of drugs, Van Cauwenberghe went into the recording studio to create a soundscape. What is so remarkable about the results is that Van Cauwenberghe plays this soundscape live, responding to Gruwez's movements manually from the tech booth by playing a keyboard programmed with a series of sound-words cued to Gruwez's repertoire of gestures and movements. It's a virtuosic display of kinetic and sonic symbiosis in which the text most definitely is not functioning as a score whose lexical meaning Gruwez then illustrates mimetically through corresponding movements; rather, as I rather clumsily tried to suggest in my own contribution to the post-show conversation, Gruwez's movements somatize or enflesh the words, rendering them more sensual and sense-able than sensible--which in the context of religious proselytizing couldn't be more appropriate.
However, the piece actually begins in silence. Gruwez appears at the upstage edge of a piece of carpet illuminated by a shaft of white light. She is dressed androgynously in tailored slacks and a white button-down shirt; her hair is slicked into a Tin-Tin-like quiff. She slowly walks downstage, taking the measure of the audience, holding our gaze for what seems like five or more minutes. Eventually she moves her right arm forward and cuts, or rather caresses, the air before her horizontally with her hand; she repeats this gesture several times, eventually alternating with her left arm, and then adding a lunge with her leg. During this sequence we are gradually aware of guttural sounds that seem to be accompanying the gestures; they get louder and faster as Gruwez accelerates her movements and adds to their repertoire, swinging her arms and bouncing to her knees and turning and bending her torso. What we are witnessing is a double form of rapture, the syllables from Swaggart that Van Cauwenberghe has stretched and manipulated and layered over seeming to prompt these ecstatic eruptions in Gruwez's body--that we then, in turn, become captivated and moved by (as in the best of rhetorical deliveries by both idealists and ideologues).
In the piece's second section, after a most effective costume adjustment, the syllables become full words, each of which has a corresponding movement located in Gruwez's body. But, again, it is Van Cauwenberghe in the tech booth hitting the keys to match Gruwez's movement, rather than the other way around. Thus, while we gradually become aware, via the accretion of and connections between the word-movements, that together they comprise both a grammatically correct sentence and a satisfying movement phrase, language and intelligibility are not really the points. To this end, the movement is deliberately abstracted, and its repetition renders the words a refrain that sways our bodies as much as our minds.
This idea is taken up in the next section, where the speech by Swaggart is distorted by Van Cauwenberghe into muffled noise of the sort that we might hear coming from a stadium off in the distance, sound we cannot fully distinguish but that nevertheless compels and draws us. In other words, the text has fully entered into Gruwez's body, literally shaking her from the inside out--a form of ekstasis (from the ancient Greek, meaning a displacement of the mind) that culminates in a mesmerizing coda in which Gruwez jumps up and down over and over again, and with absolute grace and precision, while a string quartet composed by Van Cauwenberghe plays in the background.
One cannot help but be seduced by this piece, nor by the artists, who were so funny and warm and generous in sharing their process with the audience following the show. A shout-out to local dance artist and Brief Encounters impresario Kristina Lemieux, who led the talkback/danceback. In launching the conversation, Lemieux invited audience members to dance as well as speak their questions should they so desire. While the concept momentarily flummoxed Lisbeth and Maarten, I have rarely been to a post-show discussion in which the conversation flowed so freely and spontaneously.
P.
As Gruwez and her partner in the company Voetvolk, composer and sound designer Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, explained following the show, the origins of the piece began with Gruwez's interest in the gestural vocabulary accompanying speeches made by political leaders from Hitler to Obama. After watching a raft of YouTube videos and assembling a range of movements used to punctuate and emphasize words and phrases, Gruwez went into the dance studio thinking she would build a piece just from the gestures themselves. Very soon, however, she and Van Cauwenberghe realized that they needed words to accompany the movement, and vice-versa. And so, after happening upon a recording of a Swaggart sermon on what the Bible has to say about the perfidy of drugs, Van Cauwenberghe went into the recording studio to create a soundscape. What is so remarkable about the results is that Van Cauwenberghe plays this soundscape live, responding to Gruwez's movements manually from the tech booth by playing a keyboard programmed with a series of sound-words cued to Gruwez's repertoire of gestures and movements. It's a virtuosic display of kinetic and sonic symbiosis in which the text most definitely is not functioning as a score whose lexical meaning Gruwez then illustrates mimetically through corresponding movements; rather, as I rather clumsily tried to suggest in my own contribution to the post-show conversation, Gruwez's movements somatize or enflesh the words, rendering them more sensual and sense-able than sensible--which in the context of religious proselytizing couldn't be more appropriate.
However, the piece actually begins in silence. Gruwez appears at the upstage edge of a piece of carpet illuminated by a shaft of white light. She is dressed androgynously in tailored slacks and a white button-down shirt; her hair is slicked into a Tin-Tin-like quiff. She slowly walks downstage, taking the measure of the audience, holding our gaze for what seems like five or more minutes. Eventually she moves her right arm forward and cuts, or rather caresses, the air before her horizontally with her hand; she repeats this gesture several times, eventually alternating with her left arm, and then adding a lunge with her leg. During this sequence we are gradually aware of guttural sounds that seem to be accompanying the gestures; they get louder and faster as Gruwez accelerates her movements and adds to their repertoire, swinging her arms and bouncing to her knees and turning and bending her torso. What we are witnessing is a double form of rapture, the syllables from Swaggart that Van Cauwenberghe has stretched and manipulated and layered over seeming to prompt these ecstatic eruptions in Gruwez's body--that we then, in turn, become captivated and moved by (as in the best of rhetorical deliveries by both idealists and ideologues).
In the piece's second section, after a most effective costume adjustment, the syllables become full words, each of which has a corresponding movement located in Gruwez's body. But, again, it is Van Cauwenberghe in the tech booth hitting the keys to match Gruwez's movement, rather than the other way around. Thus, while we gradually become aware, via the accretion of and connections between the word-movements, that together they comprise both a grammatically correct sentence and a satisfying movement phrase, language and intelligibility are not really the points. To this end, the movement is deliberately abstracted, and its repetition renders the words a refrain that sways our bodies as much as our minds.
This idea is taken up in the next section, where the speech by Swaggart is distorted by Van Cauwenberghe into muffled noise of the sort that we might hear coming from a stadium off in the distance, sound we cannot fully distinguish but that nevertheless compels and draws us. In other words, the text has fully entered into Gruwez's body, literally shaking her from the inside out--a form of ekstasis (from the ancient Greek, meaning a displacement of the mind) that culminates in a mesmerizing coda in which Gruwez jumps up and down over and over again, and with absolute grace and precision, while a string quartet composed by Van Cauwenberghe plays in the background.
One cannot help but be seduced by this piece, nor by the artists, who were so funny and warm and generous in sharing their process with the audience following the show. A shout-out to local dance artist and Brief Encounters impresario Kristina Lemieux, who led the talkback/danceback. In launching the conversation, Lemieux invited audience members to dance as well as speak their questions should they so desire. While the concept momentarily flummoxed Lisbeth and Maarten, I have rarely been to a post-show discussion in which the conversation flowed so freely and spontaneously.
P.
Friday, January 23, 2015
PuSh 2015: Séquence 8
Montreal is the undisputed world hub for circus arts. In addition to being the home of the National Circus School and the venerable Cirque du Soleil, the city hosts an annual festival of international circus acts every summer and is also the base of two other acclaimed companies: Cirque Éloize and Les sept doigts de la main. The latter is in town this weekend as part of the PuSh Festival, in a co-presentation with Théâtre la seizième and Tom Lightburn.
Founded in 2002 by alumni of Cirque du Soleil and San Francisco's Pickle Family Circus, among others, Les sept doigts eschews the large scale spectacle and Las Vegas showmanship of Guy Laliberté's various Soleil franchises. Instead, they create shows that are more intimate, designed to play venues the size of the Vancouver Playhouse and to appeal in part because they showcase the individual personalities--alongside the incredible physical talents--of their performers. In the case of Séquence 8, a young, polyglot cast of eight comprises the ensemble. Colin acts as our impresario, keeping up a running comic banter throughout the evening, when not doing backflips or flying through a series of stacked hoops, or crooning a moving ballad as Camille leaps and flips through the air, alighting on Tristan's shoulders or upturned hands. Eric juggles blocks of wood with the dexterity and virtuosity of a master sculptor, so that it is impossible for us to determine where wood, air and arms come together and come apart. Dev scales the pole planted upstage right like he is running up the side of a wall, only to wrap one lonely limb around it before sending his whole body sliding downward, somehow stopping and suspending himself before crashing into the ground. Alexandra does impossibly high somersaults and half pikes off of a springy Russian bar perched on the shoulders of two of the men, landing each time with the precision and elegance of a trained gymnast on a balance beam; later she will also twirl and spin through the air in a dizzying display of acrobatics on a circle that descends from the rafters. Finally, even though they only joined the cast two weeks ago, Guillaume and the smallest male member of the troupe (whose name I've forgotten) prove themselves as adept as their cast mates at defying gravity, with Guillaume working a trapeze with fluid grace before later sending his companion vaulting and spiralling through the air by jumping with Colin onto one half of a see-saw.
The circus, premised as it is on the live performance of risk, is a profoundly kinetic form. We marvel at the agility and physical prowess of the artists, but there is also a way in which their daring literally moves us to the edge of our seats. In this physiological or muscularly empathic connection between performers and audience, circus shares something with dance. Thus, it is fitting that amid all of the more traditional acrobatics in Séquence 8 there is also a lot of choreography that would not look out of place at a contemporary dance show (this is, after all, the troupe that choreographed the acclaimed revival of Pippin that just finished its run on Broadway). In this respect, the transitions between individual routines were, for me, a particularly compelling aspect of the show; here we saw, through the execution of more pedestrian--though no less complex or agile--movement sequences, that this ensemble, like fingers on a hand, is very much the sum of its parts.
P.
Founded in 2002 by alumni of Cirque du Soleil and San Francisco's Pickle Family Circus, among others, Les sept doigts eschews the large scale spectacle and Las Vegas showmanship of Guy Laliberté's various Soleil franchises. Instead, they create shows that are more intimate, designed to play venues the size of the Vancouver Playhouse and to appeal in part because they showcase the individual personalities--alongside the incredible physical talents--of their performers. In the case of Séquence 8, a young, polyglot cast of eight comprises the ensemble. Colin acts as our impresario, keeping up a running comic banter throughout the evening, when not doing backflips or flying through a series of stacked hoops, or crooning a moving ballad as Camille leaps and flips through the air, alighting on Tristan's shoulders or upturned hands. Eric juggles blocks of wood with the dexterity and virtuosity of a master sculptor, so that it is impossible for us to determine where wood, air and arms come together and come apart. Dev scales the pole planted upstage right like he is running up the side of a wall, only to wrap one lonely limb around it before sending his whole body sliding downward, somehow stopping and suspending himself before crashing into the ground. Alexandra does impossibly high somersaults and half pikes off of a springy Russian bar perched on the shoulders of two of the men, landing each time with the precision and elegance of a trained gymnast on a balance beam; later she will also twirl and spin through the air in a dizzying display of acrobatics on a circle that descends from the rafters. Finally, even though they only joined the cast two weeks ago, Guillaume and the smallest male member of the troupe (whose name I've forgotten) prove themselves as adept as their cast mates at defying gravity, with Guillaume working a trapeze with fluid grace before later sending his companion vaulting and spiralling through the air by jumping with Colin onto one half of a see-saw.
The circus, premised as it is on the live performance of risk, is a profoundly kinetic form. We marvel at the agility and physical prowess of the artists, but there is also a way in which their daring literally moves us to the edge of our seats. In this physiological or muscularly empathic connection between performers and audience, circus shares something with dance. Thus, it is fitting that amid all of the more traditional acrobatics in Séquence 8 there is also a lot of choreography that would not look out of place at a contemporary dance show (this is, after all, the troupe that choreographed the acclaimed revival of Pippin that just finished its run on Broadway). In this respect, the transitions between individual routines were, for me, a particularly compelling aspect of the show; here we saw, through the execution of more pedestrian--though no less complex or agile--movement sequences, that this ensemble, like fingers on a hand, is very much the sum of its parts.
P.
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