Preview
INDEPENDANCE SERIES
MEMVRANI
Choreographed by Neah Kalcounis
The Corridor
Choreographed by Maya Lewandowsky
Runs April 7 to 9
Dancers’ Studio West
Neah Kalcounis is thrilled about showing me her socks. Long, stretchy, bright green and decorated with red fabric roses, these socks are more than just a funky fashion statement – they’re also part of her multicoloured costume for MEMVRANI: A Physical Poem in Five Parts.
Kalcounis is half of this year’s spring indepenDANCE series at Dancers’ Studio West. She is paired with Maya Lewandowsky’s company La Caravan Dance Theatre.
Kalcounis returns to the Calgary stage from Ottawa to present MEMVRANI.
The Greek word memvrani is defined as a web, says Kalcounis, adding she wants "the imagination of the audience to sort of inter-loop its own ideas of (the) relationship between a dancer and a web, and a shadow and a web."
This web concept is featured in a set design by Alberta College of Art and Design graduate Robert Andryka, which is complemented by a lighting design by Brian O’Neil. The web has a quilted quality to it, with colourful fabric folded into layers. This could be seen as a metaphor for the cultural mosaic Kalcounis taps into, as well as the personal narrative she weaves into her work.
"My piece is not necessarily about any one thing," she says. "It’s more of a portraiture of myself personally, and a portraiture of what I hold dear to myself, and what I believe to be important as a human."
A contemporary dance piece, it features music by acclaimed Iranian-Canadian composer and santour player Amir Amiri.
"I listened to the music for a year before I started choreographing to it," says Kalcounis. "I took the music as the basic inspiration and motivation behind (the piece). Because I use music that has a foreign quality to it, I wanted to honour that and not appropriate it."
For the other half of this double bill, Lewandowsky’s La Caravan brings The Corridor back to DSW. Besides Lewandowsky, who performs as well as choreographs, the troupe features Kalie Hunter, Gary Lucich, Linnae Bellay and Christie-Joy Cunningham. The dancers, who performed an excerpt from this work at the recent Alberta Dance Explosions, were trying on Cirque du Soleil-style costumes designed by Lisa Oehler when I spoke to Lewandowsky.
"The inspiration is the corridor, the passage, the passage in life," she says of the work. It touches on the many metaphorical meanings of the word – "the corridor between life and death, the light at the end of the corridor," she says, as well as the path from the womb to the outside world.
With these meanings in mind, Lewandowsky has created an abstract narrative, using imagery, primal movement and expressions of energy.
The piece asks, "Who are the people, or the unit, or the creature that’s coming through this corridor, coming in and going out?" she explains. "This is like peeking into something that’s going on in life, where there is no certain beginning or certain end."
ALBERTA BALLET SEASON
Alberta Ballet will return to the Jubilee Auditorium in style next season. The company has just announced its lineup for 2005-06 in the refurbished venue, which includes such classics as Romeo and Juliet and Swan Lake (by guest troupe the National Ballet of Canada), as well as George Balanchine’s George Gershwin ballet, Who Cares? and a new dance adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.
Alice, choreographed by ballet member Edmund Stripe, ups the company’s family-fare quotient next season, which will also see the return of the annual Nutcracker production. The money-spinning show was forced to go on hiatus locally this season due to the Jubilee renos.
The ballet and the Jube’s other big arts tenant, Calgary Opera, join forces in the fall for a special homecoming celebration on September 9 and 10, followed on September 16 and 17 by the National’s tour of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in the 1999 James Kudelka version. After that, Alberta Ballet artistic director Jean Grand-Maître’s Romeo and Juliet will get a lavish, big-budget staging in co-production with The Banff Centre. The show, choreographed to the classic Prokofiev score, runs October 14 and 15.
After The Nutcracker (December 14 to 18), the ballet goes Balanchine in the new year with An Evening of Gershwin, featuring Who Cares? – set to 17 of Gershwin’s show tunes – and Divertimento No. 15, set to the music of that other popular composer, Mozart. It runs February 10 and 11, 2006.
Stripe’s take on Lewis Carroll, to be choreographed to music by Ravel, Debussy and Vaughan-Williams, closes the season with performances from March 24 to 26, 2006. |
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