DETAILS

Fluid Movement Arts Festival
Vertigo Theatre
Monday, October 15 - Saturday, October 20

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Springboard has upped the ante at this year’s Fluid Movement Arts Festival, with more performances from farther afield than ever before. A highlight of the festival is the return of Crystal Pite and her Vancouver-based company, Kidd Pivot, performing Lost Action, an exploration of war, loss and disappearance.

When she started laying the groundwork for Lost Action, Pite had just finished working on a show that focused on the ephemeral, a theme that caught her imagination. “As dance artists, our work is always in a state of disappearance,” she says. “Unless it’s actually being performed, my work doesn’t exist in the world, and there’s nothing to hang on to. What does it look like if you try to hang on to choreography? What does it look like if you try to horde movement, or rescue it from disappearing? Through that questioning, I ended up with a lot of images of rescue and images of violence.”

As Pite was mulling over these questions, she made a trip to Montreal on Remembrance Day. “An American man stopped me on the street and asked why everyone was wearing poppies,” she recalls. “As I explained it to him, I became really emotional. Some years it just goes by, and sometimes it gets you right in the chest. The idea of our veterans and their stories disappearing was really heavy for me.”

This emotional gut-punch got Pite’s creative gears turning. “I thought, maybe there’s a way to draw parallels between these ideas, the loss of a soldier and the loss of a more abstract idea, of a dance,” she says. “But it was terrifying to tackle that subject. I have such reverence for it, and I didn’t feel ready. I thought that I would just focus on the abstract and do the war piece later in my career. Then I ended up doing it anyway, almost in spite of myself.”

The result of Pite’s musings on disappearance and loss was Lost Action, which has been touring the country since 2006. “It’s wonderful to keep coming back to a work over time,” says Pite. “You get to see it with fresh eyes, in different contexts, and that process of discovery is really great. It’s changed a lot since we first premièred it, and that’s one of the wonderful things about an ephemeral art form: it has an amazing malleability and allows for change, for a deepening of the ideas.”

The dancers move to an original soundtrack composed by Owen Belton, a longtime collaborator with Pite, that contrasts scratchy archival recordings of old folk songs, with aggressive percussion and the occasional sound of four male voices arguing. “They back each other up and disagree with each other about an event that’s never really explained,” says Pite. “You get the sense that they’re on the hook for something. That’s another theme I wanted to bring out: accountability or blame.”

If past reviews are anything to go by, Lost Action promises a performance of Olympic proportions — while at the same time, Pite assures, remaining very intimate and down-to-earth. “The state of dancing is really about being in the present moment, seeing something unfold before your eyes,” she says. “It’s a heightened state of being, and I think that everyone who works in dance has that same love for it.”