Local Gestures
because the personal is cultural
One dancer climbs onstage, wipes the floor with her hand until she is down on her elbows, shaking her ass, at which point another dancer walks up the stage and begins to wipe the floor. There will be twenty-four of them, performing the same series of twenty-five movements, over and over again. This initial canon allows the audience to travel back in time all depending on which dancer their eyes rest on at any given moment. This is Boris Charmatz’s Levée des conflits. It is in one way chaotic because of the sheer number of performers; and yet it isn’t because each is so clearly doing exactly what they should be doing. And the first dancer begins to wipe the floor again, a loop is formed, and we understand: we are locked into this sequence. There is something of Canadian experimental filmmaker Michael Snow in Levée de conflits. Like in his movie Sshtoorrty, in which the same simple short story is not only overlapped but repeated at least ten times. And yet each time the viewer notices something different since human perception is such that not everything can ever be all taken in at once; which is why when people say that, after a certain point, they “got it,” you know they didn’t get it because it’s simply impossible. We can also think of his seminal film Wavelength, a 45-minute zoom across a mostly empty loft. In terms of storytelling, Wavelength is cheekily minimalist, but the celluloid is manipulated to such a degree that on a formal level it is so excessive as (again) to make viewers feel like they have always missed something. With its changes in lighting, no matter how seemingly few, the same could be said of Levée des conflits. And the variations occur. They perform the sequence while going in a circle in a space that progressively gets smaller. Time seems similarly condensed. Then they slow the movements down as they get even closer to each other. One could also be reminded of Michael Trent’s conceptual show It’s about time: 60 dances in 60 minutes, in which dancers repeated the same sequence of fifteen actions four times, each action first taking a minute, then fifteen seconds, then three minutes, then a minute again. Levée des conflits might be less playful than It’s about time, but more ambitious in scope. Then some of the dancers can be seen performing the sequence backwards, until they are all wiping the floor. And the cycle begins anew, abandoning the canon in favor of synchronicity. The choreography’s simplicity gets exposed, and yet it’s also more pleasurable. What is it about synchronicity? Is it because deep down we’re all order-loving fascists? Is it because it gives us something the universe doesn’t? The illusion of control, no matter how trivial? We exit Levée des conflits the same way we entered it, like the characters in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. It will have taken an hour and forty minutes to complete the cycle, but it will be with a feeling of resolution so logical that it might induce chills. I usually try to avoid saying such platitudes, but hopefully the advantage is that when I do say them you know I mean it: Levée des conflits is the best dance show that’s been presented in Montreal this past year. May 30 & 31 at 8pm Place des Arts – Théâtre Jean-Duceppe www.fta.qc.ca 514.844.3822 / 1.866.984.3822 Tickets: 48-58$ / 30 years old and under: 43-48$
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The human body is fragmented by light until it becomes unreadable as such and it becomes a poetic body, a body that means something other than itself. Having seen Lemi Ponifasio’s Tempest: Without a Body at Festival TransAmériques two years ago, I went into his new show, Birds with Skymirrors, knowing what to expect. Even though I was tired, I didn’t drink coffee before the show because I felt caffeine might interfere with my experience. Thank God, because Birds is even more meditative than its predecessor. It even feels like a dream, simultaneously meaningful and elusive; slow, yet slippery. It helps that Ponifasio is an expert at achieving otherworldliness from the get-go, with his creatures in long black robes, moving across the stage in small steps so swift they seem to float. With their synchronized movement, they still seem to function as a single entity. Unlike in Tempest, however, here they do not appear to be threatening. The dream-like state is also induced by unlikely juxtapositions, like when a bare-chested man slowly moves while holding his hands behind his back, making his torso look torturous, while we can hear astronauts communicating over radio. (Maybe the dream is about how, while men were busy trying to reach the moon, they prevented this oil-soaked pelican from flying?) Other similarities with Tempest abound. The set and costumes are entirely black, and the only lights to reveal the action are being reflected off those surfaces. It’s goth as shit. The three women are wide-eyed, with shaking hands, while their bodies remain sinuous. It is the performers’ arms that do most of the talking, turning the dance into a ritual. Ponifosia doesn’t mind making his performers cover the stage in white powder for 5 to 10 minutes, and that’s what makes Birds with Skymirrors so hypnotic. May 29-30 at 8pm Place des Arts – Théâtre Maisonneuve www.fta.qc.ca 514.844.3822 / 1.866.984.3822 Tickets: 43-58$ / 30 years old and under: 38-53$ “We’ve been waiting for you, daddy.” –Anders Carlsson, Conte d’amour “Am I in love? –Yes, since I’m waiting.” –Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse If you want love, pure love, get yourself a dummy. Sure, when you feed them chips or make them drink Coke, it will all just fall to the floor, but that’s precisely what you want. The absence of thirst and hunger means that they will never, ever leave you. In Markus Öhrn’s Conte d’amour, the other is a blank canvas onto which we can project our love, so that it can never find itself soiled by the other’s own velocity, since it has none. (I once wrote, “On veut la projection qui nous échappe par sa propre vie.”) Of course, a dummy might not fulfil all of your desires. So, alternatively, make sure that, if the one you love is human, they are as dependent on you as possible. It might be infantilizing, of course, but this works in your favour. Children are less likely to leave you than your adult partner. To make their leaving even less likely, bring them McDonald’s. Under the right light, those fries and nuggets can really look golden. “Everything is simpler in Thailand,” a character tells us. “Thai women are not as troublesome as Occidental ones.” This is the moment at which Conte d’amour becomes more than just a play loosely based on a sordid news story. This is the moment when in one fell swoop it becomes political by exposing the relationship between racism, sexism, and capitalism. The statement is of course naïve. What makes one less troublesome has nothing to do with race or gender. It has to do with one’s economic dependency. Eve was not made from Adam’s rib. She was made from his wallet. If you want love, pure love, do make the dependent one feel like they have some power. Withhold your attention so they feel like they have to earn it. Let them turn a basement beam into a stripper pole. If they can seduce you, they must have some power. Ignore the fact that their survival depends on it. The saviour comes down from the ceiling as though from a helicopter, bringing chips and Coke to his grateful African children. Maintain the system that keeps them dependent on you, but let them feel like you’re being good to them when you give them the bare necessities of life. The lover comes down from the skies, bearing gifts, to save us from the catastrophe zone that our single lives were, before they came along. To keep the other dependent on you, it might be best to make sure that they are satisfied with little. Like maracas. “Gifts… and the feelings that come with them.” The sequestered children even have a video camera. It gives them the illusion of agency, like they are not just objects, but subjects shaping their own reality. They are not just victims. They are witnesses of each other’s victimization. And yet, “I am a victim!” shouts that guy from Portlandia, who plays the only female character in the play (which probably should have ended on that powerful note). For the loved becomes owned by the lover, becomes the screen against which the projection (love) violently lands. During Conte d’amour, I kept thinking that it was like witnessing an extreme version of Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse. Except that, rereading my notes, I realized that I kept using “the lover” and “the loved” to refer to all of the characters, no matter if they were the kidnapper or the kidnapped. Maybe Barthes forgot that love can also be a form of Stockholm Syndrome. May 28-30 at 7pm Théâtre Rouge du Conservatoire www.fta.qc.ca 514.844.3822 / 1.866.984.3822 Tickets: 43$ / 30 years old and under: 38$ When the city of Montreal advised its population not to drink tap water because it might be unsafe, a friend living in Turkey wrote on Facebook, “We don't drink tap water here at all. We order big fat 19 liter jugs of water that are delivered by men who carry six of them at once on their scooters while talking on their cell phones with no helmet on. True story!” One of her friends replied, “In Guatemala, we get water from the guy that delivers them by foot, 3 at a time up the hill. Guatemalans are badass! You can also get them from the tuk-tuk guy if you live in a remote area, by remote I mean on the other side of the street.” Yet another person chimed in: “It's exactly the same in India.” The first comment had been, “Yep, water is seriously taken for granted in Canada.” And maybe that’s the problem with beauty. It’s what we take for granted. It’s not less present. It’s just less noticeable. When one of the seven dancers in Robyn Orlin’s Beauty Remained for Just a Moment Then Returned Gently to her Starting Position… asks, “God, have you found your own beauty?”, the question could be understood in at least two ways. It could be about God perceiving Himself as beautiful, which would not be an irrelevant question if one believes that Man was made in God’s image. It could also be about beauty being not perceived by the mind, but produced by it. We rarely talk about it, but it’s not always human beings that fail nature; sometimes it’s life that fails us. Sometimes there is no sun, literal or otherwise, and we must shine a light of our own and pretend. That’s probably when human beings are most beautiful; when they refuse to submit to the arbitrary ways of the universe. This is but one of the many things we accomplish with art. We compensate. We make up for the lacks of the world. A performer jumps up and down and asks, “Sun, can you jump like this?” It is often hard not to feel small in the face of the cosmos. But what if we didn’t think in terms of size or quantity or time, but in terms of qualities? No, the sun cannot jump like this. Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder. It is also in the body of the mover. May 23 & 24 at 8pm Monument-National – Salle Ludger-Duvernay www.fta.qc.ca 514.844.3822 / 1.866.984.3822 Tickets: 43-48$ / 30 years old and under: 38-43$ Maybe someday I will find the words. Until then... Three choreographers, three pieces, three Canadian cities. Pale Water (Première Partie), Dorian Nuskind-Oder (Montréal) At first, but a backlit silhouette against a white screen. Then, neon strips are positioned on six sides around Nuskind-Oder, with gaps in between, so that the eye can read a hexagon, an octagon, a dodecagon, or a simple triangle depending on the lines that are lit or extrapolated. Many dance shows have live musicians onstage. Pale Water does something cheekier: it is as lighting designer that Simon Grenier-Poirier is onstage. Nuskind-Oder’s movement is quiet, slow, deliberate. Her body is controlled until it appears to be in suspension. I don’t want it to be over. Falling Off the Page, Jacinthe Armstrong (Halifax) Falling Off the Page begins with one dancer’s hand seemingly controlling the other dancer’s foot, like a puppeteer and her dummy. This is the first in a long series of clichés: -They wash their hair in pots filled with water in a purifying ritual. -They travel along a road made of light (after first appearing in a square prison of light). -They unroll a paper carpet along the lit road. -They dip their hair in paint and drag it across the paper. -They look back at the road travelled. One redemptive quality: it is not uncommon for dancers here to jump in the air and let themselves fall heavily back on the ground; in Armstrong’s choreography, the dancers instead jump into the air and let their limbs float up so that for a second they almost seem to fly. La petite mort, Maryse Damecour (Québec) Original movement emerges when a physical constraint is added to an otherwise common gesture, like when Brice Noeser walks on all fours, but with his hands covering his face so that it is his elbows that are dragging him across the floor. It is always refreshing when a choreographer is preoccupied by something other than beauty, when the dance is allowed to be delightfully awkward, and not without humour. La petite mort revels in abrupt transitions and, when it pretends to be joyful, it’s laughable because it rings false. It is always a treat to watch Noeser, who has such a distinct corporality, move. www.tangente.qc.ca www.delicatebeast.com http://damequidanse.com/ |
Sylvain Verstricht
has an MA in Film Studies and works in contemporary dance. His fiction has appeared in Headlight Anthology, Cactus Heart, and Birkensnake. s.verstricht [at] gmail [dot] com Categories
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