| If there’s a danger one faces while watching the Alberta Dance Explosions Festival of Choreography, it’s sensory overload.
I was overwhelmed with modern dance after the third and final week of Dancers’ Studio West’s 22nd annual festival, which came to a close on February 28. I fear that my recap of the event will be tainted by foggy memories, not doing justice to many of the great pieces seen this year.
That stated, I saw both some phenomenal, and some feeble, performances in the third week.
The program started with Maya Lewandowsky’s In Proximity, a work in which all movement stems from the breath and the body’s variations of it. Performed by three dancers (Lewandowsky included), it struck me as an original, innovative and interesting blend of sound and movement. The lighting and costumes were visual eye candy, with Matrix-like spines holding in the wires for the microphones used to echo the dancers’ sounds. Lewandowsky chose not to include a specific description in the program of the meaning or motive of her piece, leaving it open to interpretation.
Pulse, by Shelly Hering, was quite enjoyable due to its element of play and the interaction of the dancers. More serious was Amy Meyers’s Joan’s Prayer (Excerpt from Joan of Arc), in which all movement originates from the isolated gesture of the hands. Meyers plays with variations of a prayer and the levels of movement within the act of praying.
Helen Husak’s Litost begins by suggesting a narrative involving a hitchhiker. Each time a car – represented by a wave of sound – passes her, she is frozen backwards in her movement. The piece plays with the push and pull of the body, with the implication that the character is trapped by her own movement, but it felt as though this entrapment could be explored further.
Also in need of more work was Gina Janus’s Lost by Separation, which was weak and lacked definition. Set to the tunes of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Radiohead, it offers a very clichéd take on a relationship, with repetitive movements from the dancers.
More rewarding was Stephen Thompson’s MINOR fantasy, which plays with isolated movements, from small to large. The piece merges S&M, gender bending, music subcultures, pop, gay and rave culture, rhythms and patterns. In short, it is a play on opposites, which included juxtaposing excerpts from Mozart’s "Fantasy in D Minor" with the music of Amir Amiri. The work was a bit lengthy, but offered an impressive look at how one can push the boundaries of dance.
Hannah Stilwell’s Senegalese dance-inspired Wow-Wow Studies #2 and #1 is upbeat, beautiful, and a good example of the phrases and movement vocabulary that modern dance has to offer.
Edward Mitchell and Wojciech Mochniej’s Less Contact, which examines working relationships, is a splendid piece. As a woman in the audience stated, "Who would ever idealize two males in suits?" Mitchell and Mochniej succeed by using theatrics (there are moments when Mitchell is eating a burger and Mochniej continues to flip through a magazine, or tries to sleep on a couch), contact improvisation, gesture and interaction.
The strive for normalcy continues in Sarisa Figueroa’s Touch. This piece had also been performed in the second week, with costumes that resembled hospital scrubs and straitjackets. This time, the troupe of dancers looked like the inhabitants of a distorted Gap ad, wearing fitted T-shirts and pants, and dancing to the strains of Mr. Bungle and Nick Drake. From its group scream to Figueroa’s intimate hushing of the audience, this was a diverse piece that truly deserved Dancers’ Studio West’s acknowledgment as "Best of the Fest ’04." |
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