>>REVIEW
HIGH PERFORMANCE RODEO
One Yellow Rabbit
Epcor Centre
One Yellow Rabbit’s 20th High Performance Rodeo ended in appropriately wild style last Sunday, thanks to the amazing vocal prowess of Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq in a breathtaking collaboration with Kronos Quartet at the climax of the latter’s two-part Nunavut concert.
It was also fitting that this, the most music-heavy Rodeo in the festival’s history, should go out with a sonic bang.
The work on which Tagaq and Kronos pulled out the stops was also entitled "Nunavut" and combined a compositional structure with improvisation, the latter being at the heart of Inuit throat singing, where the participants play a game called katajak in which they toss sounds back and forth, literally into each other’s mouths. Tagaq replicated the game by hurling her voice and its fascinating rhythms by turns at the quartet’s violins, viola and cello, in a series of increasingly frenetic duets. Kronos leader David Harrington (whose group first became famous for its string quartet version of "Purple Haze") has dubbed Tagaq the Jimi Hendrix of throat singers and, hearing her perform, you can understand why. Like Hendrix with his electric guitar, she takes her instrument well beyond its accepted bounds, producing strange, bird-like cries or staccato guttural riffs – sometimes simultaneously. She actually creates her own counterpoint. Like a Hendrix solo, it can be weird and showy, but also mesmerizing and moving.
Unfortunately, when she and Kronos played on the analogy with a blistering encore performance of Hendrix’s famous dismantling of the "Star Spangled Banner," Tagaq’s voice was lost in the mix.
The show, in the Jack Singer, also opened on a wild note, with Kronos foreshadowing the Tagaq piece by playing Derek Charke’s "22 Inuit Throat Song Games for String Quartet," in which they imitated throat singing on their instruments with a violent technique that I found at first disconcertingly harsh – until I recognized with delight that they were evoking two of winter’s most distinct sounds, the creaking of ice and the crunch of trodden snow. The concert, built around a northern theme, also contained a longer Inuit-inspired work by Charke, "Cercle du Nord III," a stunning instrumental arrangement of a song by Icelandic pop group Sigur Rós and a jaunty piece by Norwegian electronic duo Xploding Plastix, as well as marginally more traditional modern string-quartet works by composers Peteris Vasks and Arvo Pärt. For Kronos fans who found the ensemble’s previous (and first) Rodeo show, 2004’s Sun Rings, too minimalist and mellow, this was a thrilling rejoinder.
We caught three other shows in the Rodeo’s final week. Here’s what we thought:
· Sun Spirits – Toronto’s Red Sky theatre company presented a double-bill of two children’s plays with varied success. Drew Hayden Taylor’s soft and moralistic Raven Stole the Sun didn’t have the frenzied energy of Caribou Song by Tomson Highway, but the audience last Thursday night didn’t seem to care. The yelps and kiddie gurgles stopped as actor Jonathan Fisher leapt around as Raven, even busting out a few rhymes that seemed to enthrall everyone. Sandra Laronde buzzed through both shows, adept at keeping kids and adults on the same page. It was Caribou that was a genuine revelation – both fable and haunting memory, driven by Graham Hargrove and Ruben Esguerra’s percussion and kinetic choreography by the Red Sky group.
· Adventures of the Trick-Riders: During the Apocalypse While Thinking of Jesus – Sheri-D Wilson’s new work had her and fellow performer Laura Parken in strong form – by their second performance Thursday night, both had settled into a symbiotic exchange. Wilson’s hick-hop dialogue was sharp and intelligent, a mix of pop culture, sex and Albertan blues that wove together the histories of two estranged sisters. I’m sure Wilson and Parken’s swagger and raunchy dialogue pushed a few theatregoer’s buttons, heightened by Russell Broom and John Hyde’s folksy music and the cramped, intimate space of the Big Secret Theatre. The live visuals by Martin Guderna (painting behind the performers during the performance) were great – by the time the show neared the end, a Balinese horse monster had been transformed into a work free-associating the sister’s doomed meeting.
· Songs for Cello – Like Kronos and Tagaq, Hamilton-born, New York-based Rufus Cappadocia busts through the perceived boundaries of his instrument. Playing his own custom-designed electric cello on a series of original compositions, Cappadocia went from finger-plucking it like a bass to thrashing it percussively with his bow. The music bounced between jazzy improvisation and Indian and Middle Eastern-influenced melodies. Most astonishing was his penultimate piece, "Lament for Iraq," which began as a traditional low, keening wail of mourning, then suddenly burst into a chilling evocation of sirens, planes and gunfire. Pablo Casals, it ain’t. I once worked with a cheerfully raunchy pop music critic who used to tell people, "I cover everything that doesn’t have a cello between its legs." If he’d heard Cappadocia, he might’ve changed his mind. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.