FFWD Weekly
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| Dance by Nikki Sheppy Preview Change is a constant companion at the Springboard Dance offices, but recently there’s been more of a shake-up than usual. Last fall, after the company presented Bone Driven, longtime co-artistic director Laurie Montemurro announced that she would be stepping down from her position, leaving her fellow directors Trina Rasmuson and Nicole Mion in charge. The split was amicable and by no means total. Montemurro, known for such beautiful minimalist pieces as Half-hanged Mary, will continue to work with Springboard as a dancer and choreographer. In the meantime, the company is reaffirming their commitment to innovative contemporary dance with a spring show, simply entitled Yes. The program brings together four resoundingly positive expressions of the possibilities of dance, incorporating everything from treadle sewing machines and Harley Davidsons to climbing gear and the hypnotic poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen. Among the pieces is Rasmuson’s And Then There Was This Muse, which examines the space between ordinary life and moments of pure inspiration using two characters – one grounded and one (the muse) suspended in a climbing harness against the theatre wall. The piece offers a taste of a burgeoning new genre: vertical dance. Rasmuson, an amateur climber, began thinking about dance in the vertical field after working last summer with Project Bandaloop at The Banff Centre. "The wall movement has been very interesting," she says. "The dancer does some flying, some pushing, some just sitting and smoking a cigarette. "As the muse, she wears this zebra-striped unitard, so she’s more flamboyant. She’s the bird on your shoulder or your second voice, the one you laugh at sometimes and think, ‘Oh, get real, I couldn’t really do that.’ But once in a while, you listen to that voice and you have a lot of fun." Guest choreographer Shelly Tognazzini contributes two pieces to Yes. The first, The Handless Maiden, is an ethereal solo choreographed for dancer Amy Meyers. It’s based on the ancient folktale of the same title – of which there are reputed to be over a hundred versions. Roughly, it goes like this: the Devil knocks on the door and asks the man who answers for everything in his backyard in exchange for anything the man wants. Not realizing that his daughter is in the yard, the man accepts and is forced to chop off his daughter’s hands in lieu of giving her up completely. Handless, the daughter departs alone on a journey. "A lot of traditions believe that women’s knowledge is in their hands, passed down from generation to generation whether we recognize it or not," explains Tognazzini. "There’s so much history in our hands. In the end, what the woman learns is that the wisdom of the hands can’t be lost." To compensate for the choreographic loss of the hands, Tognazzini incorporates inventive movement. She admits that she never realized just how much the hands expressed until she removed them from her movement vocabulary. For the maiden, she says, reclamation ultimately involves transferring the information from her hands to her feet. On stage, an 1896 treadle sewing machine, found at a garage sale here in Calgary, serves as a historical image of women’s work. "It acts as a metaphor for the continuance of the work," she says. "The idea is that in continuing to do the work, one goes through the processes of loss, sacrifice and reclamation." Tognazzini’s second piece, This Seat is Taken, shatters the stereotypes about bikers. Based on her recently acquired passion for motorcycles (a friend took her to a biker rodeo), this fun solo places a 1976 Harley Davidson squarely on stage. According to Tognazzini, it’s a presence rich with inspiration for movement. In full leathers and steel-toed boots, she rocks it up beside her favourite beast of burden. "It’s not a dig at the biker culture at all," she says. "It’s about passion. It’s about love. It’s about idolatry." Co-artistic director Nicole Mion contributes a final piece to the show. It’s a sculptural duet inspired by Marino Marini’s Horse and Rider sculpture series, and by the poetry of Canadian writer Gwendolyn MacEwen. Performed in a single shaft of light, The Riders explores sustained physicality. It was a scramble to replace dancer Sean Ling, who suffered an ankle injury during rehearsal at Alberta Ballet, but Mion is reputedly ready to ride again. Rounding out the creative forum Springboard calls Yes is a late show by Edmonton’s Mutare of their Fringe hit Something, and a voice and movement workshop with France’s Bernard Salva. |
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