Amber Teodorovici and Catherine Hayward examine changing relationships in a longer presentation of their performance Faux at RE:VERB

RE:VERB, presented by Dancers’ Studio West (DSW), is a unique performance featuring expanded dance pieces of audience picks from the 2008 Alberta Dance Explosions Festival. It includes choreographic work by dance artists Saxon Fraser, Tracy Friesen, Amber Teodorovici and Catherine Hayward.

Friesen’s Bonding mixes popular music (in this case, Portishead, PJ Harvey and the White Stripes) with contemporary choreography. “I am an alternative music lover, so I like using some of my favourite artists,” says Friesen. She enjoys and exposing audiences to music they might not listen to and using the music in another artistic way. “For most of this piece, I created the movement first and then looked for music.”

Bonding is about a relationship between two women. “There is not a narrative structure, but there are some kinds of character ideas that connect through the piece. It’s mostly about the movement, there is a lot of contact — touching, lifting, pushing,” says Friesen. “As the piece develops, there is an evolution of how the touch goes from being consented, supportive, nurturing and playful to being non-consenting, or aggressive, demanding, manipulative and competitive. I think the touch aspect is the biggest theme through the piece.”

Bonding also touches on the idea of how women relate as friends, sisters and fellow dancers. Friesen notes there is quite a bit of humour in this work, and that it has evolved from a five-minute piece in Dance Explosions last year to a 30-minute performance.

Another choreographic work that has evolved significantly for RE:VERB is Teodorovici and Hayward’s collaborative work, Faux. Teodorovici is an independent dance artist who recently performed in DSW’s AIR, and Hayward is currently in her second season with Decidedly Jazz Danceworks. “It started as a little temperamental piece, and it’s grown into something more evolved, it’s gotten even bigger and more temperamental,” says Teodorovici with a laugh. Essentially, Faux is about a friendship gone wrong. “We were looking at some of the real-life relationships we have, and how sometimes they become a little bit false,” says Hayward.

Teodorovici and Hayward wanted to collaborate long before they finally teamed up in 2008 for Dance Explosions. They were both going through interesting times in their lives in terms of their friendships, and they decided to embody those transitions.

Teodorovici describes Faux as an intense movement-oriented work. “We went back to the basics of jazz, and worked with tension and release, and how that fit within the storyline of the characters,” says Teodorovici. “We’re trying to create almost a parallel universe.” This parallel universe includes the movement of Teodorovici and Hayward as dancers, and the dialogue their characters explore onstage.

Also included in RE:VERB is Frequency, a solo piece performed and choreographed by Fraser and set to the strains of Björk, Changeling and Gotan Project, among other artists. This piece also evolved from a quick five-minute production to its current 30-minute form. Fraser, who currently dances with Montreal hip hop company Unkut Productions, says one of the challenges of performing in and choreographing the same work is that you don’t have an outside perspective. She overcomes this challenge by using video. “I often dance in my own pieces — that’s part of the reason that I’m motivated to choreograph, because I have an idea or a movement that I want to do,” she says.

Fraser choreographed Frequency after moving to Montreal and spending a lot of time by herself, exploring who she was as an artist and as a human being. The choreography reflects some of the inner changes she explored.