For Body and Light Presents: Coming and Going

 
 
For Body and Light Presents: Coming and Going
 
Choreography and Lighting: Stephanie Morin-Robert
 
Spoken Word and Musice: Ian Ferrier  http://ianferrier.com/ian_bio.html 
 
Performers: Allison Elizabeth Burns, Ian Ferrier, Linnea Gwiazda and Stephanie Morin-Robert 
 
Randolph Theatre
July 3-11 2015
(in Toronto Fringe)
 
Reviewed by Ted Fox for www.evidanceradio.com
(Quotes from Coming & Going  texts for body & light  Ian Ferrier  (Popolo Press)
 
Stephanie Morin-Robert's production Coming and Going was created in residency on the Bay of Fundy. Not surprising then that the dancer's sea creature movements appear to be choreographed by their underwater home, the tides that affect it and the onslaught of a hurricane.
 
They sway side to side. Are pulled back and forth with the tides. Hands become wavy tentacles and the fronds of undersea plants. A raging wind soundscape heralds a hurricane in which their bodies react in agitated turbulence.
 
One flails about over and over like in a nightmarish sleep.
                      "This creature sleeps one-third of her life     
                       In vivid dreams she travels
                       to the same far country where she lives."
 
Awaking perhaps forgetting:
                      "Tide and tide again
                       Forgetfulness washes at memory"
 
Spoken word poet Ian Ferrier delivers his text in a ghostly whisper just loud enough to hear. It evokes a young man's voyage on a research trip into a dreamlike undersea realm. It counterpoints the dancers' movements
 
The only lighting source is a mobile. It is attached to a rope which is controlled by the dancers, who pull it back and forth like the tides. At times it becomes the moon.
 
I have not seen many pieces like this that skillfully weave spoken word and dance. Ferrier does not just read his text; he is emotionally present within it. The mobile light gives a rich texture to the darkness and the faces, and at times luminates the edges of their bodies and turns them into shadows
 
For me his words also address the human condition and all endangered species:
                    "None of these creatures are here forever, not even us
                     We are in the midst of mass extinction."