FFWD Weekly
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| DANCE An Anatomy of Restlessness When it comes to love, people rarely say exactly what they mean, but entire volumes have been written on how to decipher the truth from your lover's body language. Perhaps that's what makes a love story the perfect jumping-off point for dance theatre. "Sometimes the mouth is saying one thing and the body's saying completely the other, just like in real life," says Trevor Leigh, who plays one of the two characters in "Tea With Michaela," created and directed by Darcy McGehee. The piece makes up the first half of An Anatomy of Restlessness at new dance/theatre, and uses McGehee's choreography in conjunction with the adapted words of authors Bruce Chatwin, Anne Michaels and William Saroyan. "You're moving toward someone and meanwhile you're saying, 'Get away from me,'" Leigh says. When it comes to what can be trusted, Danielle McCulloch knows which side she leans toward. She plays the other character in the literary adaptation. "The real story is in the body and then there's a sub-story in the text," she says. As a dancer, McCulloch has a certain bias in that direction. Not that she hasn't tried her hand at dance theatre before - she's practically an old hand at it by now - but she says that she still has to concentrate when it comes to combining the two. "It's kind of like patting your head and rubbing your hand on your stomach at the same time," she laughs. "You'll have the movement really well, and then you'll add the text and you forget what the movement is. And then you get the movement and you forget the text." In contrast, Leigh comes from an acting background and, for him, the dance element is the tricky part. "I'm an actor, primarily, rather than a dancer, and so I can stand and blab forever, right? But how can you speak a monologue or a story, and meanwhile, your arm is doing this...," his arm flails about as if it has a life of its own. "And everything has to be imbued with thought and meaning and emotion and life. It can't just be arbitrary movement, it has to be vested." Despite the difficulties, both performers say it seems natural to use choreography to express the emotions of the two lovers in the story. "People talk with their bodies all the time," McCulloch points out. "They're very expressive with their bodies and so it's interesting to exploit that idea - that people speak with more than just words." It seems particularly appropriate in the case of these two characters, whose feelings are conflicted, at best. Leigh plays a man who falls in love, but runs away. "He has this sort of rendezvous with this woman, but he has this deep-hearted belief in migration - that man is meant to migrate," Leigh explains. McCulloch's character has her own issues. "She falls in love with this man and knows that he is in love, too, and she wants to give herself to this relationship, but he wants to migrate - he's scared and she's really frustrated with this," McCulloch says. "And in the end, when he decides that he does want to stay and he loses his fear, then all of a sudden, she develops a fear and then it gets kind of neurotic...." It's a universal story, she says. "When one person really has no fear and loses themselves in the other, then the other person is afraid of that." The story is a perfect forum for the two performers' different skills, which McCulloch says complement each other. "My impulse is to move the body, not with the words, which makes for some interesting contrasts, I think, because Trevor's impulse is with the text," she explains. And in the contrast lies the excitement as they react to each other's performance. "I think that in dance or in drama, you don't want to anticipate anything. You want to follow impulse and be in the moment." |
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