Preview
MAINSTAGE DANCE ’05
University of Calgary
Choreography by Maya Lewandowsky, Melissa Monteros, Michèle Moss and Lindsay Walsh
Runs March 17 to 19
University Theatre
Melissa Monteros is not the only choreographer featured in this weekend’s end-of-the-school-year dance showcase at the University of Calgary, but from all indications, she’s divulging the most secrets.
Utilizing 10 performers, Monteros’s new work Secrets uses movement, music and text to explore the vulnerabilities of human relationships and the power that secrets hold over all of us. She’s been working collaboratively with students, offering up material for them to explore and incorporating their responses. Highly gestural, visceral and often performed in ensemble, the resulting scenes vary from the moment when a secret is passed down the grapevine to those awkward episodes we often keep to ourselves, like sniffing our boyfriend’s freshly washed laundry.
"Each person is totally different," Monteros says, "but I'd say this piece reflects how we see sharing ourselves – things we choose to share that make us vulnerable, but that allow us to know other people."
Monteros, who specializes in dance theatre, divides her time between Canada and Poland, the home base for her company W&M Physical Theatre. A guest teacher, dancer and choreographer, her work on U of C’s annual showcase usually comes every other year, and while she has adjusted well to her two homes, her work combining dance and theatre has often brought on some culture shock.
"I see the voice as part of the body," she says, "so I think it’s really natural to combine dance and theatre. In Poland, a lot of dancers have had theatre training, and I have a lot of physical-theatre friends there whose reaction has been, ‘Why are you doing so much dance?’ While here it’s been, ‘Why are you doing so much theatre?’ Yet what I most try to convey is that dance movement is expressive, that one needs to find personal and organic, emotional connections. When you rob it of those, it isn't dance or theatre."
Monteros is not alone in integrating voice and physicality onstage this year. Maya Lewandowsky’s Potence, also featuring 10 performers, explores just how "potent" voice can be within physical expression and isolation in movement. Dancers’ Studio West’s Michèle Moss will explore a new cleansing jazz experiment, Postcards From the Ethnosphere: Quixotic Quick Cuts, while Lindsay Walsh, whose own school kick-started the School of Alberta Ballet, choreographs La vie bohéme, a contemporary ballet re-creating Paris’s breathtaking and legendary boulevard Montmartre.
The showcase is a rather "potent" mix of contemporary dance, theatre, ballet and jazz, and for Monteros, a crucial step in the students’ experience. Having won awards for her contributions to dance in Poland, she recently assisted Calgary students with an inspiring travel-study exchange, and seems quite settled into the "shifts in headspace." Her recent new work with collaborator Wojciech Mochniej, Secret Places, seen at Alberta Dance Explosions, is not too far removed from Monteros’s current exploration, and as the pair expands it for a tour to Poland later this year, Monteros fesses up to one secret of her own.
"I have still been working on the closing for Secrets, and trying to find one personal thing I'd like to share," she says. "I wish I could let people know me. For now, I think my work does that, reaching out in a way that I can't do publicly." |
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