Making order, and other impossible tasks
August 19, 2014
No blogging all summer! I took a break to do a big purge in my office – not a very successful one. I didn’t end up throwing much away; mostly just cursed and sweated and rearranged things. Well, sort of. There wasn’t even time to finish it all, and now life is getting busy again.
That’s fine by me. The whole undertaking invoked a cascade of depressing thoughts. Shouldn’t some library be clamouring for my archives by this time? Look at all these manuscripts I’ve been working on for years and years and years! Will anything ever get finished? And these shelves of journals filled with nothing but worries! What have I done with my life?
Etc.
But I did manage to make some fall resolutions. In the interests of making more room for what’s already there, I’ve decided to refresh this blog by covering more plays and performance events. That’s why I was delighted to hear about Light and Shadow: an exploration of lighting and choreography presented by Made in Canada Dance at the Winchester Theatre last Saturday night. The programme was the culmination of a workshop with lighting designer Arun Srinivasan, and two of the pieces were repeated, with different lighting designs.
Exploration … workshop … I’m there! I can never get enough of process, it seems. So even though it was just a one-night event, and thus, not the greatest subject for review, I’m going to cut my performance-writing teeth on it anyway.
Silencio, a Flamenco piece, opened with three dancers seated in a row on straight-backed chairs. The fourth chair, standing empty, served as a chilling symbol of loss. This piece was a study in containment and explosive release. The dancers’ bodies seemed to be packed with grief which found expression in rhythmic stomps and claps.
Peggy Baker’s Land/Body Breath was initially performed at the Art Gallery of Ontario, among the sculptures and paintings in the Thomson collection of Canadian Art. On Saturday, the repertory stream of Baker’s summer intensive program danced it on a bare stage.
The music, first performed by singers Fides Krucker and Ciara Adams, was interpreted this time by a group of people who mostly don’t identify themselves as singers. Entering along with the sixteen dancers, they gathered in a circle to one side, singing fragments from Gordon Lightfoot’s “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” which evolved into bubbling, chaotic sounds invoking running water. This gave way to a series of piercing nasal tones that made them sound like a troupe of gleeful mosquitoes. They finished with a throat-singing backup to Krucker’s rendition of Neil Young’s “Helpless.”
Away from the artworks which had originally surrounded the piece, the dancers formed a kind of shifting landscape of their own, swirling, gyrating, rolling down to the floor and getting up again as one large, complex entity before ending up in a line across the stage. Backed by the steady pulse of throat singing, Krucker’s “Helpless” carried a sense of dignity that was heartbreaking. It did not protest against helplessness or try to fix it, but merely laid it out in a matter-of-fact way. The dancers, lined up along the stage swaying like grass or young trees had a quality of immense vulnerability.
The work I wished I could have seen twice was the gorgeous Tryptich by Alias Dance Project, On its website Alias acknowledges Street Dancing as an influence and indeed the movements of these three young women looked like soft, graceful breakdancing. There was an immense solidity to these dancers, and I was continually surprised to notice that they might be supporting themselves on one leg, or even one arm rather than both feet. They seemed to be able to multi-purpose various parts of their bodies. Most admirable was piece’s emotional tone, which, for me, captured something essential about adolescence. There were moments of trouble, of disorganization both within the individual and among the dancers. They would resolve, only to destabilize again. The angst was portrayed great respect, and the mutability worked because the emotional reality of each moment was so clear.
To me, the changes in lighting design did not make a big difference. Maybe this is not a bad thing. For a lay audience-member, a lighting design which draws attention to itself surely can’t be doing its job. But in the end, seeing the two pieces repeated served as a reminder that this was a live event, impossible to reproduce, exactly, from one time to the next. It gave a sense of continuous process, a question mark rather than a full stop.
And all this brings me to my second resolution of the fall: to start keeping journals again.