FFWD Weekly
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| DANCE Send In a dance as much about being moved as performing in movement, Newfoundlander Gwen Noah fashions an improvisation that delights in taking its sweet time. Her new work Send slowly mounts an emotional scale on its way to what Noah considers a kind of kinetic supplication. "I really look at it as a prayer," she says. "My very first inspiration was that notion of being moved by something. There's that saying, 'It really sends me,' and I think that's very present in the piece." Send is also about losing and finding yourself on a voyage. In fact, in the process of creation, Noah discarded a lot of workshopped choreography, feeling her way in and out of dead ends to discover the piece. Part of what complicated the process was the charged personal subtext that motivated the work - the deaths of two people close to her. Noah's sister-in-law died the day before the show's Halifax premiere and, perhaps more tragically, a young boy she knew also died. "I often think of him. He died at the age of three and he didn't have a very happy life. He's one of the people I pray for. Giving him the love he never had allows me to be vulnerable in the piece and to really open myself up." In Send, that notion of prayer influences form as well as content. "The idea of dance as prayer suits me very well as a choreographer and a dancer," says Noah. "I really become a vessel. It just goes through me." In a sense, Noah's aspirations in the piece are very Buddhist in principle. There are no specific, designated goals. The idea is that movement simply has its own wisdom. "The piece is not about conscious desire. There's a sense of infinity at both ends. For me, that means that there's an expansion. I'm able to be in a place where I'm connecting with an infinite line of energy... like the energy between heaven and earth." But there's another side to Send - one that defies language and shrinks from analysis. Amidst the musical intermezzos and angular improvisations, it's that feeling of transport that passes mysteriously from performer to audience. "It's difficult to talk about dance," says Noah. "It's so rooted in the moment. It's not like a CD you can listen to whenever you want, or a painting that always hangs there. But the special thing about dance is that it is so connected and so live." As she moves into her third season performing with Norman Adams, principal cellist of Symphony Nova Scotia, Noah has taken the opportunity to explore the relationship between their work. Set to a taped score by Paul Cram, the dance allows Adams to improvise live cello into the recording. "Send is a duet," says Noah. "There's an intimacy and there's a lovely sharing and taking between us.... Norman is present the whole time." |
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