Reviews

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Evi-Dance is now providing space for reviews of dance performances; the hope is that there will be ongoing insightful reviewing of dance and physical theatre shows. Watch this space!

episodes | andscapes

Choreographed by Jesse Dell and Tracey Norman

Performed by Jesse Dell, Jordana Deveau, and Sky Fairchild-Waller

A JDdance and Tracey Norman Co-Production

Dancemakers Centre for Creation, Toronto
April 4-6 2013
 
REVIEWED BY TED FOX FOR EVIDANCERADIO.COM
 
episodes | andscapes features three dance pieces by choreographers Jesse Dell and Tracey Norman that explore landscapes of life experiences.
 
In Tracey Norman's Witness, two women (Jesse Dell and Jordana Deveau), become aware of each others' gaze. One moves in on the other, triggering an attraction-repulsion interaction. Circling and assessing each other. Imitating each other's moves. Physicality that becomes aggressive and violent. Until the moment when one falls, and the other picks her up by clasping her around the shoulder and lifting her to a position not unlike that of a war casualty. Throughout the piece a muffled voice suggests an observer witnessing them and commenting. Are they aware of this? Is being observed affecting their interaction?
 
In Jesse Dell's pushed, a woman (Jordana Deveau), stands alone in a space furnished with opened and unopened boxes suggesting that she is moving in. She examines the walls like a prisoner would. Constructs a habitat for herself with the boxes. Creates a shelf for her meager possessions. Even a window which lets in a beam of light. Fascinated by the light on the flesh of her hands. Calmness. A sense of elasticity of tension building. She suddenly and violently lashes out with her feet, destroying her carefully constructed abode. Emotionally drained, she huddles in an open box. Is her expression one of defeat? Is she contemplating her future? Or perhaps a shattered relationship?
 
In Tracey Norman's 43ºN 79ºW, a couple (Jesse Dell and Sky Fairchild-Waller) navigate through life reacting to the signals sent out by the body language and facial reactions of each other. Some of these signals are misinterpreted and threaten the codependence and trust. Result is, at times, like a face-off where the players measure each other and work out their next moves. Ends with each lying exhausted, backs to the wall, reaching out to each other.
 
Lighting designer Gabriel Copley uses shades of light and darkness to reflect the inner landscapes or souls of the dancers. In Witness, the couple is first seen in a blur of darkness, brightening gradually as each gets more involved with the other. The lighting for each piece gives the back wall a hard metallic grey texture. Soft bodies pushed against it. Sliding down. Resting against. The long back wall in the space at Dancemakers has windows. When covered, the windows further give an aura of imprisonment in space and in the relationships.
 
Choreographers Jesse Dell and Tracey Norman evoke insightful moments of intimacy, codependence and miscommunication in relationships with compelling emotionally intense body language. Including one possible unfortunate casualty. A woman. Alone. Boxed in. Her inner landscape rife with a mix of resignation, rage and hope. Rebuilding her life.
 
 

 

Allison Cummings' Final Savage Land

 

Final Savage Land

Choreographed by Allison Cummings

Performed by Linnea Swan and Luke Garwood

Sound Designer and Guitarist: Lyon Smith

Production/Lighting Designer: Gabriel Cropley

Costume and Curtains: Cheryl Lalonde

Presented by Sore for Punching You

Oz Studios, 134 Ossington Avenue, Toronto

January 23-27 and January 29, 2013

 

REVIEWED BY TED FOX FOR WWW.EVIDANCERADIO.COM

Final Savage Land starts in the window of Oz Studios as we wait to be admitted. Peering through the window, we see a magical scene of a loving fairytale couple in harmony. A heavy wine-coloured curtain acts as a backdrop, evoking wonder as to what is behind it.

A man (Luke Garwood) and a woman (Linnea Swan) enter through the curtain. Holding hands, they move sinuously back and forth through the gallery. A farming couple is suggested, as each alternates in holding a pail and scattering seeds on the ground.

Outward appearances are deceptive. His body is rigid, wooden and upright, radiating forceful power and control. He leads. She follows. Her willowy fragility. Her eyes lifted in passive, devoted submission.  

Soundscape. Geese calling. Murmuring wind. Sense of open prairie space.

His arm swings back, hand claw-like grasping her shoulder. Pulling her head back. Covering her mouth. Covering her eyes. The unspoken. 

Movement becomes circular. They dance closely together. There is now the sound of static, of a record skipping. 

Their interdependence is broken when he slides away from her body. Loses balance. Lies face up on the floor. Legs open. Clasps her legs as she falls forward and up. Arms spread like wings about to take flight. Poised like the figurehead of a ship.

A violent sonic outburst. Total loss of attachment.  Movement suddenly angry, aggressive. Swan’s and Garwood’s physicality is rivetting. A portrayal of bodies in turmoil, unbalanced and no longer co-dependent. Gradually descending into the realm of a nightmarish dream.

She puts a Scold’s Bridle over his head as he sits on his throne (a lowly chair in this case). This instrument was used primarily on women in the 18th century as a form of torture, humilation and punishment.

She savagely bites into a roasted fowl and feeds him bits of it through the bars. He munches it like a caged animal. The effect is blackly humourous with a sense of the macabre.

She leaves. Now she is outside, looking through the window at us. Her face expresses silent manic laughter. There is the sound of disturbing crackling flames--is she burning him alive? Is this reality, or an expression of her state of mind. A final savage landscape of her that no longer buys into his Garden of Eden image of their life together. The Bridle a vehicle of her revenge and punishment. A temporary relapse? Will the programming reset and life continue as before?

The sound designer, Lyon Smith, and lighting designer, Gabriel Cropley, are on-stage throughout. They transform the mind-space of the audience with their dream-like soundscape. They provide clever hand-held lighting that illuminates the dancers in a sunlit texture. We become so engrossed in the characters we are seeing that we are unaware of the designers’ presence.

Choreographer Allison Cummings has created a memorable work that blends the sensibilities of fairy tales, opera, and puppetry into a magically disturbing examination of co-dependency.

 

 

Lab Rats-- Forcier Stage Works at Hub 14 in Toronto

Lab Rats

Forcier Stage Works

Choreographer: Marie France Forcier

Dancers: Brendan Wyatt, Heather Berry-McPhail, Molly Johnson

January 9-12 2013

Hub 14, 14 Markham Street, Toronto

A DanceWorks Co-Works Series Event

 

REVIEWED BY TED FOX FOR EVIDANCERADIO.COM

Choreographer Marie France Forcier transforms Hub 14 into a laboratory, where she explores within a small confined space the coping mechanisms of dancers, both in isolation and in contact with others. We take on the roles of scientists or psychology students observing their behaviour.

The dancers are Brendan Wyatt, Heather Berry-McPhail and Molly Johnson. Their disoriented traumatized body movements and facial expressions alternate between aggressive controlling and compliant helplessness. There is an escalating frustration of wanting to get out-- a mind-body disconnect has set in-- but they have created their own confinement by locking themselves in.

The walls of the space are hospital white in a cold hostile way. Light is overall harsh and very bright, bouncing off surfaces onto their bodies, reflecting the internalized hauntedness of their souls. 

Scenes etch themselves in the mind.

Wyatt, palms against a wall, a position like that of a man being frisked by police. Dancers in the beginning wear hoodies, camouflaging themselves as if fearing capture on a surveillance camera.

Berry splatted on the top part of an exit door, suspended in a running position like an animated cut-out.

Wyatt lying like a corpse on a table, while Johnson checks for life. "Does this hurt?" she asks as she puts on her toque, yanks his feet, and roughly pulls his hair. Light has dimmed here with Berry, ghost-like, shining a surgical light on him. In another scene, the light harasses Berry, making her cringe against the wall, hands up in a gesture of defense.

Berry fills an aquarium with water. Made of glass, it a is a fragile, breakable living space. If they do unlock the doors and leave, can they survive as fish out of water? 

James Brunton's palette of repetitive creepy steely sounds fades up and down, creating a disturbingly hypnotic synthesized tension.

Overall this compelling production made me think of all those living isolated anonymous lives in the tiny living quarters of condo box towers. In an urban wilderness where surveillance cameras are everywhere watching.

And a driver caged in a speedy moving car with the disconnect of reality of life flickering outside the windows. Just passing through.

Forcier has created a compelling, dream-like microcosm of the world, inside and out.

 

 

 

 

The Clown of Hearts-- Helen Donnelly in Saucisse: A Foo Musical

 

 

Saucisse: A Foo Musical

Written, produced and performed by Helen Donnelly

Directed by Susanna Hamnett

Music composed by Matthew Reid

Choreography by Viv Moore

Foo Productions at Pia Bouman Scotiabank Theatre, Toronto

October 10th-20th, 2012

www.fooandfriends.com

 

REVIEWED BY BEVERLEY DAURIO

Foo lands onstage like a startled traveller from another universe, wearing cowboy boots, puffy denim bloomers, a leather vest, and a scruffy hat without a crown—unroyal, sweet and mean. Foo is in whiteface and a clown nose—immediately conveying an aura of toughness, vulnerability, and loneliness.

It’s a testament to Donnelly’s presence and performance that a bit of sand, a bunch of twigs (for a wee fire under the stars), and a postmodern cube with a large photo of a shiny rock on one side can be transformed into an entire western landscape—empty to the horizons, huge, unknown, and wanderable.

In this Beckettian world, Foo sings touching songs, and tries to make a living plying seemingly contraband gloves and souvenirs, only to suffer the indignity of great white spotlights and scary disembodied, interrogative voices yelling at Foo for doing so.

Donnelly’s Foo is tantalizingly mysterious. Boy or girl? Is Foo short for “Fool”? Why does Foo speak in a kind of mangled yet understandable personal lingo? Foo sleeps, meanders, builds fires, pratfalls or just avoids pratfalls. I wonder, not for the first time, what a clown is. A manifestation of the Id? Our emotional selves revealed in all our weak, alone, strong, inelegant, charming, desperation to be loved?

Donnelly breaks the fourth wall occasionally, escaping up into the audience, offering her wares teasingly; Foo appeals to us when the huge nasty voice of authority returns with a vengeance. But respites from her lonely wandering are brief—the quotidian cycle continues, and Foo trudges on.

And then, one day, Foo responds to a cry in the wilderness. The magic heart at the centre of Saucisse discovers itself to us: Saucisse is a buffon love story, the anti-romance between Foo and the sensitive little creature Foo rescues from the prairie: a small fluffy pig (a stuffed-toy puppet worked by Donnelly).

Their friendship—through trials and tribulations—a storm, long nights, and a difficult trek that Saucisse insists is her fate—is breathtakingly developed. Donnelly gets the audience’s hearts breaking for her puppet, and laughing out loud, as Foo pulls out the chart with Saucisse’s destiny, and Saucisse searches the map in one direction while Foo looks in another.

That Saucisse feels a destiny and fate-- Saucisse wants to go to the meatpacking plant-- and Foo helps-- is part of the black irony at the heart of the play.

Viv Moore’s choreography indelibly creates joy, clown stumbles, kicks and diagonal struts that enlarge and deepen Foo’s language of frustration, energy, and exploration. The sound, including pre-recorded accompaniment for the musical’s songs, is vibrant and a strong part of the play’s texture. The lighting creates days and nights, and spots of warmth and aloneness, subtly and supportively.

Saucisse is an evanscent, solid, peculiar and engaging experience. Donnelly’s clown is dark, but playful, and makes us laugh and think. The play is soaked in symbology that is at once light (we don’t need to think about it to enjoy the play) and intense: modern life as barren wasteland, within which love provides hope and warmth; the dailiness that Donnelly conveys so well, our struggles to get by; the powerful voices of authority, or conscience, or god, or all three combined, shouting down at us, even we, or Foo, do our best.

And we are all meat, in a strange way, as Saucisse is; so as the audience laughs and has heartleaps as Foo finally tracks down Saucisse, now a large sausage with a light pulsing from the inside—it is all so true, and sad. Yet so humanly funny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Simple Lines of Enquiry-- Julia Sasso dances at Harbourfront Centre

 

SLoE-- Simple Lines of Enquiry

Choreographer/Direction: Julia Sasso

Music: Eve Egoyan live on piano, playing Ann Southam

Dancers: Angela Blumberg, Irvin Chow, Jesse Dell, Vanessa Goodwin, Susan Lee, and Deanna Peters

Julia Sasso dances in association with Harbourfront Centre

Enwave Theatre, Toronto

September 27-30th 2012

 

REVIEWED BY TED FOX FOR EVIDANCERADIO.COM

 

In SLoE--Simple Lines of Enquiry, pianist Eve Egoyan plays Ann Southam's Simple Lines of Enquiry for solo piano, a composition that is minimalist and atonal, and has a lulling trance-like effect. Julia Sasso counterpoints this with a highly charged visceral movement vocabulary that is strongly executed by the dancers. 

When I saw SLoE I was sitting on stage in seats not far from where Eve Egoyan was playing the piano and very close to the dancers. This created an intimacy with the dancers, having the music entering my body, hearing and feeling the dancers’ exhaustion and breathing, and seeing quite clearly their facial expressions. This close viewing prevented me from seeing the visual shapes and patterns that I would have seen had I been in the tiered seating in front of the dance.

Here is ia stream-of-consciousness look at what I saw and felt, ending with some personal lines of enquiry.

Dancers as musical notes embodied in their bodies like a life force, driving their movements, caught in repetitive interconnections of bodies meeting, colliding, sliding, whirling, arms lifting skywards, legs kicking out, bodies hurling to the floor. Pushing one into the others, slamming them into the floor, elongated pauses in which a dancer here and there gently lifts, caresses an exhausted other, touching their faces, registering concern. Fixing their gazes on each other, competitive, indifferent, enticing, judgemental, trying to make connections in moments no longer there.

Why does the domino effect of the interconnections call to mind pedestrian movement in the streets--bodies brushing against the other, no connections made in the fleeting moments, isolated and lonely figures in a crowd? Why do I feel their exhaustion, sense of frustration and impending death? What is the lone male dancer feeling? Does his presence raise gender issues? Why do I feel a sense of competitive gazes in relation to this male? Would there be a difference in the texture of the piano notes had a male played the piece? Is Southam's music and the breathing and footwork sounds of the dancers directing how her body reacts and feels, how her fingers hit the piano keys?

There is always a sense of aesthetics in the way Sasso uses the long, white floor and the wide space to emphasize the psychological and physical distance between them and us. Egoyan and the piano become periodic respites for the dancers, as they move around it slowly, as if drawn to the source that feeds and controls them, waiting for direction, gazing at each other as a group but alone.

Interesting how the title of this work raised questions from a gender and societal perspective. Result is compelling and visually arresting.

 

 

 

 


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