Dancing on the Edge 20th Anniversary Festival
Tuesday Jul 8 DOTE update:
Sometimes when Plank writers compare their notes, they've paid attention to the same things; other times, they look at each other in surprise - "Did we really see the same thing?"
Today and tomorrow, expect more reviews of Dancing on the Edge Festival presentations - two reviews of Kokoro Dance's Ghosts, one that imagines the dancers as Scottish and one picking up on the martial arts connections, plus a second review of Solid State's Take it Back which, like the first review we posted, revels in how fascinating that show's opening scene was.
Tuesday Jul 8 DOTE update:
Sometimes when Plank writers compare their notes, they've paid attention to the same things; other times, they look at each other in surprise - "Did we really see the same thing?" Today and tomorrow, expect more reviews of Dancing on the Edge Festival presentations - two reviews of Kokoro Dance's Ghosts, one that imagines the dancers as Scottish and one picking up on the martial arts connections, plus a second review of Solid State's Take it Back which, like the first review we posted, revels in how fascinating that show's opening scene was.
Over the next week we'll be reviewing Edge Four, Edge Five, and the remaining site-specific works (by Aeriosa, Dusk Dances and Karen Jamieson Dance) as the performances unfold.
We hope you'll add your thoughts about what worked and what didn't; what surprised you and what was familiar; the moments that have stayed with you and the ones that ended up leaking into your conversations.
There will be fishhooks; there will be ghosts. There will be a full-length, newly commissioned performance about fathers; there will be movement inspired by music inspired by cartoons. When the Dancing on the Edge 20th Anniversary Festival rolls out this Thursday, ready to shake the city from July 3 – 12, the variety and depth of offerings should satisfy the thirst of any dance-lover.
Plank will cover as many of these as possible. Our experiences of the full-length works from the Brian Webb Dance Company (Edmonton, and the one about the fathers) and then from Solid State (Montreal), both Western Canadian premieres, will be mixed in with responses to as many of the multi-company nights, called Edge One to Edge Five, we can attend. Plus we’ll be writing about the site-specific works that are thoughtfully programmed so you can watch them early in the evening before taking in another show. The site specific works are free/by donation, by the way, so we hope lots of readers will take them in and give us your impressions on the relevant comments pages.
Before I get into a bit of an overview of the festival, I just want to state the obvious, to celebrate it: Dancing on the Edge has been around for twenty years this year, and that’s no mean feat for any performing arts fest in Canada. Happy Birthday, Edgers! The plethora of choices DOTE is about to offer Vancouver is a massive shift from twenty years ago, when Director Donna Spencer and her then-creative partner Esther Rausenberg first revved up the Dancing on the Edge festival as a kind of “fringe festival for dance.” Dance in Vancouver, and in Canada, has bloomed since then, and the “problem” of which performances to see is a luxury to revel in.
This year’s festival is unusually rich with commissions thanks to a one-time grant from Arts Partners in Creative Development (APCD). Last fall, Spencer called the ten dance companies to say: funding pending, we want to commission you for the twentieth-anniversary edition of the festival. She still relishes the excitement of watching the large-scale opportunity shape up over the months. Initial conversations went something like this:
“You mean you’ll write the grant for us?” “Yes.” “And we can do anything we want?” “You only have to make one choice: let us know whether you’ll do a forty-minute site-specific piece, or a twenty-minute theatre piece.”
“With my background in theatre,” Spencer explains on a hot afternoon in the Firehall Arts Centre offices, “I really appreciate it when someone says, ‘I trust your work.’ Artists have to have that support to do their work.”
The new works are grouped as the 10 For 20 Project: 10 new works created for the 2008 festival, seven from choreographers who were in the first Edge festival and three from companies that have been involved in more recent years.
“There’s been a relationship over the years with each of the seven original groups,” Donna says. “We wanted to present something about how the festival got to where it is over twenty years. And, it’s a way to say thank you for having been here.”
Even a passing glance at those groups from 1988 shows how dance in Canada has matured in the last 20 years. Peter Bingham, Serge Bennathan, Karen Jamieson, Joe Laughlin, Lola MacLaughlin, Brian Webb and Kokoro Dance have produced exciting choreography and, importantly, teaching in dance, for Vancouver and Canadian audiences and students over those two decades, with Bennathan becoming a force in Toronto and Webb shaking up Edmonton. The fact that their works in this year’s Edge festival are brand new, plus the inclusion of three newer groups – the Tomorrow Collective, Amber Funk Barton, and Alvin Tolentino – shows that the anniversary celebrationi isn’t about nostalgia, but is a reflection of the way dance has maintained its role as a genre for pushing emotional and physical boundaries.
And of course it hasn’t been a straight road from 1988 to now. At first deliberately uncurated and irreverent, Spencer says it was around year three or four that the Edge fest switched to a selection process. “We were receiving compliments and complaints about the work, and wanted to make sure we were encouraging people to see good work,” she recalls. It was a case of trying to do far too many presentations, and so not being able to present them as professionally as desired.
DOTE also switched up where they wanted to exist in the calendar year. For two years they ran in September, then moved to April for 1995 and 96. But there were more incentives to evolve into a summer festival. Choosing July allowed DOTE to work with the Vancouver’s dance ecology, avoiding conflict with other seasons or festivals. It also allowed them to bring in artists with more status as they prepped for national, European or summer festival tours. And, of course, setting outdoor, site-specific work for April is pretty risky in Vancouver’s spring-dreary climate. In 1997 the festival made the switch to the summer and it’s paid off with a festival whose audience is loyal and enthused.
I don’t want to write much about “what to expect” because there's always such a gap between the five sentences of text announcing a show and the experience of the performance itself - a challenge that non-language media like dance, visual art and music always face when language tries to summarize them.
But there are a few patterns I’m curious about. Each Edge night will present two to three complete, short dance works. Some nights, the curatorial choice is pushing for contrast. For Edge Two, Industry of Dreams (Namchi Bazaar, Vancouver/Montreal) starts with Bollywood-infused movements; photos announcing the piece seem to indicate that she uses traditional dress in at least part of the work. This will be followed by Sleeping Booty (Joe Ink, Joe Laughlin, Vancouver), described on the festival site as “inspired by archetypal female images in fairy tales and a fascinating book entitled FETISH Fashion, Sex and Power by Valerie Steele.” Is it a daring, risky combination or not? It’s certainly one I haven’t seen before.
There is also a lot of exploration about connection and disconnection. Solid State’s Take it Back asks why we don’t dance in couples anymore, while two of three works in Edge Two look at the disruptions caused by war (The Remembrance Trilogy, by Toronto’s Karen Rose, and an excerpt from What?, a work that Vancouver’s Mascall Dance is creating around the experience of the choreographers’ parents during World War II).
Edge Five, near the end of the festival, promises to be visually stunning and likely disturbing (a positive in my books). Opening with Right in Front of You by EDAM (Peter Bingham, Vancouver), two male dancers will wind and unwind their relationship. Then CoErasga (Alvin Toletino, Vancouver) pushes dances toward sculpture - in Adam/Eve-Man/Woman his dancers will press towards each other through plastic sheets that look almost suffocating (again only going by the promo photos). The evening will close out with the freshly returned-to-Vancouver Serge Bennathan, with his new company Les Productions FIGLIO, in a piece called Slam for the Traveler which is apparently built on a verbal core - a slam poem - instead of just a movement-based core
An ice cream truck is going by as I write this on an at-last-it’s-hot afternoon. The dingle of that old summer song makes me glad that some of the performances will be outdoors. First up, local nouveau-butoh troupe Kokoro Dance will perform Ghosts, a revisitation of (or from?) the spirits of the Downtown Eastside’s present and past, on the roof of the Sunrise market. Then Dusk Dances, a project coordinated by Toronto’s CORPUS, which has appeared at previous Edge festivals, will again be found in Stanley Park; while Karen Jamieson Dance’s Stand Your Ground (Act II) will start at the Firehall Arts Centre and take us (perhaps as present-tense ghosts) through the streets of the Downtown Eastside. And for the last weekend, Aeriosa, the Vancouver troupe committed to making verticals as danceable as horizontals, presents Cumulus, a dance down ropes that will dangle from the B.C. Hydro building.
I’m hardly being exhaustive here, and I hope you'll explore the DOTE website for more teasers. There are pre- and post-show talks, and another evening where you can experience the Twelve Minutes Max Sampler (12 MM). 12 MM is an inter-disciplinary Vancouver festival that started as “Shoeless Saturdays” in the early nineties. Many of the dancers in DOTE have passed through 12 MM, and the Sampler shows some of the work that were curated in 2007-08 season by Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg and Adrienne Wong.
There will be more to say as the festival get sunder way. We at Plank are looking forward to being altered, challenged, delighted, thrilled and maybe even frightened as DOTE wraps around Vancouver for the next handful of days. Check back for reviews starting Friday, and we’ll have another feature/overview article to post here next Tuesday (July 8).
As always, we want to know what you saw and thought, especially if anyone is willing to overcome that language-body gap and dance them onto a video clip for us, preferably on an edge of something. I’ll do one too if you go first.