Was I ever pumped to see aKabi! I missed the show when it played at Springdance in Utrecht, so I was pretty overjoyed to have the chance to catch it in Montreal. I try not to judge a show based on its poster images, but those shots of the dancers in giant platform shoes were so compelling for me, if only because they brought back fond memories of my rave days. The show was choreographed by Turkish dance artist Aydin Teker, who's a bit a legend in Europe, and featured among others, Ayşe Orhon who choreographed Can You Repeat, one of my favourite pieces at Springdance this year.
The show started with a long blackout. I mean a seriously long blackout. Long enough that people in the audience started asking each other if something was wrong. I did have a slight moment of panic myself, realizing that I was seated dead centre in the massive Salle Pierre-Mercure, and probably wouldn't make it out alive if there was a rush for the exits. Just when it started to seem like there was a major problem, the light began to come up on stage very slowly and we could gradually make out the shapes of the dancers, perched in their platform shoes. Once the lights were fully up, the dancers...well, they didn't do anything. Didn't fucking move a muscle, for what felt like at least five minutes. There was a lot of uncomfortable coughing and shuffling in the audience, people wondering a loud what was going on and why they'd paid to see people stand still. Then slowly, the realization dawned on us that the dancers actually were moving, albeit incredibly slowly. Slowly enough that unless you stared at them for five minutes, and realized that they had actually changed position, you wouldn't know they were moving at all.
The show gradually got more dynamic, though it was still punctuated with these intensely long moments of stillness. A least ten people in front of me got up and walked out before it was over, perhaps feeling frustrated that they had come to see dance with hardly any dancing. As I was watching the piece, I started to wonder whether or not something is worth watching, simply because it's hard to do. I've had this discussion with dance artists before, especially when it comes to works in which the dancers make incredibly difficult acts of synchronization or slowness seem incredibly easy. Am I as an audience member to find my satisfaction, not because the picture presented on stage is compelling, but because I know it was incredibly difficult to create?
It's a hard question, and one that's gotten me into more than a few drunken bar arguments. Part of me wants to say yes, that watching something that lots of other incredibly well trained dance artists couldn't do on stage, should make for a compelling evening of performance, because of the challenge that's associated with it. The other part of me, that wants to say no, feels like I need something more than that. I want to love a piece of work that's hard to perform and love artists for taking risks and doing things that are hard to do, but sometimes the work just doesn't resonate with me.
I think it might come back to how I've changed the way in which I want to understand performance works at this point in my life. In the early part of my career I was much more apt to take things at surface value, where as now I find the need to go deeper, to find out more about the artists and what they are doing, to dialogue. If I wasn't willing to do those things (and lots of people who see art are not) how would I understand the work? More specifically, if the artist hasn't provided me with the tools to understand a piece of work within the context its being presented, should I be expected to go and seek out the answers on my own? I feel like I have to do that for myself, but more because if I'm going to say that I don't like something I feel like I need to be incredibly prepared to back it up. In essence, I hate being wrong.
I got into an argument about these issues on a programming jury I was part of a few years ago. There was a particular piece that we were thinking about programming, but in order for the audience to understand it, there would need to be some program notes, clarifying what the artist was doing. I liked the piece a lot and suggested that we should include it and add the notes to the program so that people would understand what they were seeing. This sparked an intense debate in the room about whether or not a piece or art must be able to "Speak For Itself". I don't recall how programming situation ended up, though I remember the discussion ended with me walking out of the room.
So here's a question: What should we as audiences expect from artists in terms of information necessary to contextualize, understand, and presumably appreciate their work? What should we as artists be expected to give our audiences, as far as tools for understanding what we do? What role should critics (and I don't mean just me) play in this process. What do you think?
Oh, right. I have to finish writing about aKabi. As far as my final reaction to the piece, I had moments where I found it infuriating, but at the same time I walked out loving it. It's a piece of work that takes a lot of patience, and probably could do with repeated watchings. Though I spent a large part of the performance in dialogue with myself regarding the relationship between how artists create their work and how audiences understand it, ultimately I left satisfied, if only for the fact that I now had a new set of questions to ponder.
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Dispatches: aKabi by Aydin Teker, Festival Transamériques, Montreal
Dispatches: Is You Me by Benoît Lachambre, Louise Lecavalier, and Laurent Goldring, Festival Transamériques, Montreal
One of the things I often find frustrating about the integration of dance and video is that the artists often don't take full advantage of the possibilities available by merging the two forms-- namely creating a genuine interaction between them. Dancers have a degree of precision in their training that allows them to interact with prerecorded images in a way that actors simply cannot, which is why I always find it maddening when choreographers employ video simply as a visual backdrop for their work, rather than an integrated element of the performance. Is You Me is an ideal example of how to work with these two forms together. Far from being a simple background for the action, the video design in this piece is truly integrated with the movement to the degree that you occasionally forget you are watching dance, and start to feel like you are watching a computerized video projection in which the dancers are shapes being drawn along with the rest of the images. It's fitting that Goldring is credited as co-creator along with Lachambre and Lecavalier, as his design for the piece functions like a third dancer on stage. The all white space and deceptively simple set design brings the dancers and the projected images into the same visual plane and allows for a whole series of simple but brilliant trompe-l'oeil's in which their bodies are morphed, turned inside out, and wrestled into one visual paradox after another. Lecavalier is perhaps best known as the blonde-dreadlocked power house who danced with La La La Human Steps for eighteen years. Along with choreographer Édouard Lock, she helped develop that company's lighting-fast choreographic aesthetic and is maybe best known for her signature "barrel jump" (think pirouette turned sideways) one of the great defining images associated with the company. Now, nine years after leaving La La, she's turned her efforts to exploring a slower style of movement. She says in the program notes that speed and slowness are similar in that they both can indicate a lack of connection with our primal driving forces, though when pushed to the extreme they can transform our perceptions and relationships to time and our own bodies. Lest I make it sound like the choreography resonates with some kind of Butoh-like glaciality, I should be clear that both Lechambre and Lecavalier (who turns fifty this year!) both move fast, though there's a greater contrast between fast and slow movement than she was known for in the past. It's amazing to see someone who has had such an incredible career with one of the best known international dance companies in 
Is You Me, the new collaboration between
Developed over the last two years, in collaboration with video artist Laurent Goldring, and musician Hahn Rowe, the work consists of the two dancers on an all white stage, in the midst of a kinetic, colourful, and visually riotous series of video projections. Abstract in nature, the projections appear to be composed live (though the program notes indicate they are prerecorded) and resemble a drawing created in a simple computer program like Microsoft Paint. Lines are drawn around and across the dancers' bodies. Spaces are filled with colour and imitate human forms, animals, and objects, though the way they are rendered every image is suggestive, rather than concrete.
Dispatches: Springdance, Utrecht, NL, The Making of Doubt (work in progress)
One might forgive audiences for initially interpreting Colette Sadler's The Making of Doubt as a meditation on high school detention. As we entered the theatre we were greeted with six figures, clad in hoodies, jeans and runners, lounging in various positions of dejected boredom, all facing upstage. As the piece begins we realize that only four of the six figures are in fact alive--the other two being dummies clothed in the same costumes as the dancers.
As the dancers slowly come to life, they manipulate each other's bodies as if they were dolls, moving from chairs to the floor, climbing into giant heaps, and bending their limbs at strange angles. Sadler has specified in the program that the piece is a work in progress, and through the performance she is sitting in the front row of the audience, occasionally yelling out commands to the dancers. It's a bit confusing here that the dancers don't seem to be reacting to what she's saying. If the intention is for us to see them reacting, they'll need to come up with slightly more concrete ways of doing it, as it currently seems like they're just ignoring her.
As the piece progresses, the line between live dancer and dummy starts to blur. The dancers strip the dummies of their costumes, revealing flesh-toned cloth beneath, and then proceed to strip out of their own costumes, revealing body suits of the same fabric. Donning different clothes, they then sprout extra and inappropriate limbs; feet become hands, a third leg or arm appears.
The piece is chock full of these moments, which toy with our sense of the body, with engaging and frequently hilarious results. I would have never thought I'd be engaged watching someone dance with a piece of cardboard for ten minutes, but Sadler pulls it off, as she reels us deeper and deeper into this strange world of twisted bodies and logic. As fast as she makes the rules, she breaks them, leaving us constantly wondering what will be next.
One of Sadler's objectives with the piece, was to question the notion of "human" itself, and whether that can be extended to objects which take on a human form. She's definitely succeeded on that level; By the end of the piece, we start to loose track of which objects on stage are the actual humans and which are the copies. By pairing quasi-human forms with the real thing, Sadler succeeds in questioning not just the possibilities that a choreographer can explore, but the medium of the human body itself as a site for art making.
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Dispatches: Springdance, Utrecht, NL, God exists, the Mother is present, but they no longer care
I caught Iran-born Norway-based choreographer Hooman Sharifi's new full length work God exists, the Mother is present, but they no longer care tonight. Using texts from philosophers including Nietzsche, Barthes, and Handke, as a starting point, Sharifi has created a performance which he calls "a scream about the violence separating us from a world to which we would love to belong".
Admittedly, Sharifi is in dangerous territory (no pun intended) with this work. Violence is a very commonly used themes in dance creation and so a choreographer deciding to take it on needs to be absolutely sure that they have something new to contribute to the dialogue, lest their work just end up being another pile of clichés.
The group of four dancers clad in black perform a blend of choreography that's reminiscent of a theatre school movement class; Mostly very literal depictions of the theme of violence (i.e. swinging swords, throwing spears, launching arrows) as well as the obligatory faces frozen in silent screams. A video camera pointed at a square on the floor of the space projects images of text placed in front of it onto the screen. These include quotes from his source material about violence and power, (i.e. "Violence can take away power, but it cannot create power").
This might have been forgivable if Sharifi wasn't taking himself so damn seriously here, but the utter lack of humour about the clichés that he's putting on stage in front of us is a serious pitfall of the work. The one thing that his seriousness does betray is that he honestly believed that in creating this work he had something new and incredibly important to say. Given his biographic details as a refugee who fled the state of Iran under persecution, I think he would definitely have a perspective on violence far different from Western born choreographers tackling the subject whose experiences are limited to what they've read about or seen in films. With that in mind, I would have hoped Sharifi could have offered me a perspective that was totally new and enlightened, but unfortunately, this work is neither.
Though his use of video is moderately interesting, there was a whole world of potential with the camera that he didn't explore. Similarly, the lighting design which leaves one of the rigs suspended by cables mere inches above the floor, could have been incredibly interesting if the dancers had done anything with it, other than knock into it once or twice.
Overall the work made for a disappointing evening, not so much because it was conceived from subject matter used so frequently but because the choreographer, who no doubt had an incredible amount to say about the subject, chose to say so little.
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Dispatches: Springdance, Utrecht, NL, Double Bill Can You Repeat? and Les Sylphides
The first night of attending the festival I caught the double bill of Can You Repeat? by Turkish dance artist Ayşe Orhon and Les Sylphides by German choreographer Nicole Beutler. The evening itself, functioned more like a triple bill, as Beutler's piece was bookended with two different versions of Orhon's. Why exactly the two pieces were paired together is a bit of mystery, except that both address the choreographic process in certain ways, albeit indirectly in Beutler's case.
I was a bit surprised when I got to the theatre to find that the show was sold out, which is uncommon at this festival with it's largish spaces. Waiting patiently at the door, until just before curtain, I was able to snag a spare ticket from a couple who had a third for their friend who didn't turn up. Once I got inside the space, I understood why there was a shortage of seating. Rather than have the audience in the regular configuration the choreographers had placed them in a ring of chairs on the stage itself, making for fewer spaces than normal.
We sat in a circle, staring at each other in our creaky plastic chairs under the fluorescent lights until Orhon silently entered the space. Her piece was meant to retrace the choreographer's physical journey of discovery through the realization of the performance, though this didn't become entirely clear until the second half. She moved her body through a series of yoga-like postures, occasionally stopping and starting again. What was most interesting about the piece was watching, or rather listening to the audience react. At times she held us totally rapt and the room was completely silent, though you didn't actually notice this until she would break the moment, and the uncomfortable shuffling and creaking of chairs would ensue again. In that regard, the experience was very much like what a choreographer creating new material on a dancer experiences, minus the interactivity; having moments of engagement when you're really into what's happening, and then losing interest and redirecting the dancer to try something else.
At the end of the piece, Orhon simply walks out of the space, leaving the audience to sit and wonder what exactly has just happened. No lighting change. No musical signal. Simply walking out. It was a bit remenisent of Stitch in that regard, as it forced the audience to look at each other an silently ponder what we'd witnessed together.
After a recorded orchestral overture, complete with audience noise, the dancers for Les Sylphides enter en pointe. Beutler's approach to examining the choreographic process was to challenge the concept of "new", something ballet choreographers don't do that often, by remaking the classic ballet of the same name (based on Mikhail Fokine's 1907 choreography and in the repetoire of just about every ballet company in the world). She uses three dancers who, according to the program notes have either left the world of classical ballet already or not yet joined it, though it isn't clear who's who based on watching the piece. The original work was considered by some to be a first, in that it was a ballet with no plot whatsoever; just a group of white clad sylphs (forest nymphs) dancing around the figure of a poet, and I feel like Beutler may be poking a bit of fun at this history with her reinterpretation.
Working silently the three women move through the classic choreography, though they take on not the role of prima ballerina, but that of the chorus girls. There are long moments were they are totally still, as they would have been in the original version of the piece while the star of the show got to strut her stuff. Beutler is also examining the heirarchical structures that have traditionally existed within dance companies giving us for perhaps the first time ever, an opportunity to focus on the dancers who would have traditionally formed the back drop for the main action.
The movements they are using themselves are nothing new, which is exactly Beutler's intention. What is new is the context in which they are presented. Moving the classical ballet vocabulary from a traditional large proscenium space, to a studio with the audience sitting in a circle, works to challenge the distance which usually separates dancers from audience. Indeed as the piece progresses the distance is further ruptured as the dancers back-bend into the laps of the audience's and ask for help to balance as they promenade.
Though the original choreography kept the chorus on stage for the bulk of the show, they did depart for a few of the movements, and Beutler holds to this tradition. During what would have been the solos and duets for the prima ballerina and danceur, the dancers take seats in the audience, stretching, removing their pointe shoes, and grabbing some water, leaving us to watch an empty stage where the stars would have been dancing.
Beutler and Orhon have played with concepts of beginning and ending in presenting these works in conjunction. After the dancers for Beutler's piece exit, we are again left in silence; no bows, no signal that the show is over, just silence. When it feels like the audience is just about ready to leave, Orhon re-enters in a differently coloured but virtually identical costume, this time with microphone in hand. She recreates the choreography of the eariler part of the evening, though this time she speaks in the voice of choreographer to herself as dancer. Spitting out commands like "That looks akward" and "Don't move your foot so much" Orhon gives us a window to the process of creation. As she's the dancer in her own choreography, she's playing with a split brained notion of creator/interpreter, moving as one and speaking as the other, and suddenly every gesture from before becomes clear, once we realize as dancer she is moving in reaction to the directions from her choreographer, who is actually herself.
Though there were occasionally moments of confusion, ultimately the two (or three) pieces in conjuction pay off, not so much by giving you answers, but by leaving you with questions. By examining the traditions of choreography, whether it's a work originally created over a hundred years ago and reimagined many times or watching the process of developing a brand new piece, these two choreographers have created an evening of work that will leave you thinking.
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Dispatches: Springdance, Utrecht, NL
I've arrived in the Netherlands, and after brief respites at the coffeeshop/sauna I'll be heading to the Springdance Festival to cover some of the shows. Based in Utrecht, a smallish town about 30 minutes outside of Amsterdam, the festival hosts a mixture of Dutch and international choreographers each year, and present some pretty off the wall works. Last year there was a piece with a pregnant woman getting fucked on stage with a strap on. Oh Netherlands! I'll be making semi-daily posts while here about the work I'm seeing. Stay tuned. Read more!