FFWD Weekly
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| Dance by Nikki Sheppy Festival Dance When Allen Kaeja began dancing in the 1980s, his brand of contact dance was about as popular with the institutional powers-that-be as a Van Gogh sunflower in the days before those paint-laden canvasses set record-breaking auction highs. In 1983, considered rebellious and too independent, Kaeja was asked to leave the Toronto School of Dance Theatre where he was a student. Ironically, things have come full circle and Kaeja and his wife Karen now teach at the TSDT. The same skills and tendencies that once made him the resident bad boy now make him something of a golden boy. The recipient of this year’s Clifford E. Lee Choreography Award, Kaeja discovered dance in 1981 after nine years of competitive wrestling and judo. "I was already training about four to five hours a day so that wasn’t a big deal for me," he says. "The whole idea of being completely focused on one physical sensibility, the determination, overcoming your personal boundaries — all that had been embedded in me over years of work and competition. "But when I walked into the dance studio, it had for me the creative element. I could go a step further by moving into my imagination. There’s an expressiveness there. In wrestling, there’s the skill, the balance and the ability to read your opponent.... But you’re really there for one purpose. Dance opened up a whole new world of physicality that I had never imagined." For a young, muscle-bound wrestler whose reflexes were focused on having an opponent who offered him resistance, it was the physical transition that proved tricky. The philosophy behind the movement was simply given a twist: compatibility instead of resistance. "The nature and sensibility of Aikido is that if something is coming towards you, you find a way of directing its centre away from you and around you. It’s very circular and very jointal. One of the things the creator of contact dance asked was, ‘If somebody is coming towards me, what happens if I take their centre and move it into my centre — instead of away from it?’" Nevertheless, Kaeja’s new 12-dancer piece, Excavating ascent, destined for performance at this month’s Festival Dance in Banff, owes a lot to the concept of resistance so central to his early martial arts training. "Every moment is in fact a moment of conflict. The question is: where does that propel you? Instead of having a really organic piece where the dance continually moves from place to support to support to support -— which is also a really beautiful aspect of contact — we’re starting to explore the opposite. "In every moment in time, there is a conflict in the duality of every breath. So every breath can have a stasis or an action. Every breath is wrought with experience and the moment between either desire and struggle or decision." In Excavating ascent, 12 dancers from the Festival company incorporate movements that are both explosive and articulated, distant and tender — while keeping pace with original music by Swedish composer Frederik Hoegberg, whose work runs from the rhythmic to the operatic. Besides exploring the technical possibilities of contact dance, Excavating ascent moves from the medieval to the present in an act of historical de-layering that is central to Kaeja’s mythos. "Everything that we are now has been developed through millennia. My father came from Poland. He survived the Holocaust. There were I couldn’t say how many thousands of moments when he could have been dead. He lost all his family, but he survived. I am here due to certain moments and decisions and circumstances. The same is true of my children. We are an accumulation of our ancestors’ pasts. "In our history, there is a sense of violence, and violence is catalyst.... It’s through this stripping away of the many years of ancestral sediment that we can move into the places of spirit which are our ultimate goal." |
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