12 Minutes Max Sampler: a smorgasbord of delights

As the name suggests, the 12 Minutes Max Sampler presented works drawn from this past season’s 12 Minute Max series, a series designed to showcase the work of “emerging talents and emerging works from established artists” in Vancouver.  

The sampler, part of this year's Dancing on the Edge, was an entertaining mix of earnest ideas, thoughtful presentation, kinetic sexiness, and lighthearted fun. There was freshness to the works, a youthful energy that cannot be feigned. The ideas were whimsical and varied – clearly the product of inquisitive minds and responsive imaginations. What the works lacked in gravitas, they made up for in energy and lightness.

Hairy Lumps: An Interdimensional Allegory
A young woman in navy blue overalls walks on stage and begins unraveling a skein of rainbow-coloured yarn. Her movements exhibit a quiet grace as she creates geometric forms with the wool. One by one, other women come on stage and begin to claim pieces of yarn for themselves. The geometry of their movements and the navy-blue overalls allows the yarn-raveling to read as an allusion to collective labour – the building of an egalitarian utopia, a workers’ paradise. The moments are measured, feminine, and constructive.

Eventually the women snap the cat's cradle of coloured wool and mash it into palm-sized balls – literally individuating. From that moment on, all narrative pretense is abandoned. Instead, the six women rush about the stage, sometimes in a group with raised right arms – the arms vibrating as if they were  fish tails, a school of small fry, tadpoles, spermatozoon, or just maybe (as the title suggests), atomic particles. They were by turns reflexive and mechanical, but also organic. Sometimes a figure drops to the floor and gyrates alone on hands and knees, in postures that seem frankly sexual if it wasn’t for the anxious overtone of the pounding industrial music. Periodically, they regroup and form a large pyramid. Atop each others' shoulders, they resemble some six-headed beast – a lion or a Medusa – with their loose hair hiding their faces.  Again they flail mechanically to the music.

Though ostensibly influenced by String Theory, the work seems to set up a conflict between organic versus mechanical production: all things human and natural seem to have been swallowed by a vast machine. Throughout, the dancer's vocabulary is intriguing, if overly simple. The sharp and earnest quality of their movements at times works against the larger theme of industrial repression: the intensity of their movements suggests a struggle of the natural against the mechanical, painting a picture that is starkly black and white.

Collective creation guided by Christie Watson - The Cycling Club.

Push
Lights come up on a woman's form – Down Stage Right – her back to the audience.  She is lit from below, so that the muscularity of her legs and frame is apparent.  Her clothes – she’s wearing a black tank and briefs, knee pads and black arm bands – imply that she’s a wrestler, and her strong bold movements confirm it.  Up Stage Left lights come up on a parallel figure: another woman, similarly clad.

What unfolds is a simply gorgeous choreography of strength.  The women map and mime something that hovers perfectly between the spectacle of the fight and a subtler tale of co-dependence.  The interplay between their movements is so smooth that they appear to be striking or blocking each other, though they were actually assisting each other to move across the stage.  This theatrical wrestling paid homage to everything from Sumo to the WWF, while still firmly embedding itself in the language of modern dance.

Much more advanced in its vocabulary than Hairy Lumps, the work incorporates stylized breaks and falls.  There’s a smoothness, deliberateness, a simultaneous lightness and litheness to these dancers' movements that was absent in the first work, and it was technically subtler and far superior.

Choreographed by Rob Kitsos and performed by Vanessa and Meghan Goodman.

Ready
The only solo piece of the evening, Ready has clear narrative elements: Brett Owen dances to a sexy refrain of “don't you know that you're toxic,” while allowing himself to be pulled across the stage by his own passion and desire. This dancer was very “in his yin”, which is to say he was all fluidity and movement – as if his body offered no resistance to the whims of his mind or the music. He makes his way to the only prop on stage – a can of dark grease paint – which he uses first to mark football-player stripes on his face, then to colour his lips, and finally at the end of the performance, to cover his entire face and arms, as if scrubbing himself clean, before the lights fall to black

This was a cheeky, sexy piece. The character's uninhibited responses to the music suggest everything from drunkenness to sexual possession.  As with all of the works, the shortness of the  piece allowed for only a taste of something more, and the energy so carefully built was allowed to bleed away into a stumbling drunken refrain. But for an idea so simple – a brief essay on passion – less is more, and clarity a virtue.

Choreographed and performed by Brett Owen.

The Usual Stuff
To borrow film and musical references, this was The Triplets of Belleville meets the Logdriver's Waltz, with a dose of the Ditty Bops thrown in for good measure. It was geek chic: two female dancers dressed respectively in men's pants, suspenders, and a sweater-vest.  Playing on the comedy of scale – one tall, one short – they danced together like two old fogeys who, after a lifetime, are still in-lust enough to grab each other's behinds, albeit in a sleepy fashion.  Their creaky, wooden posturing – when one wraps her legs around the other, or when the second dancer elevates the first sideways like a stiff woman-sized doll – hints at the worn emotional grooves that couples learn to inhabit over a lifetime together.

As the narrative unfolds, the dancers break out of their stilted role-playing, into twitchy Buddy Holly impersonations and then kick up their heals for a bar or two of line dancing, before returning to their sleepy embrace. They suggest a couple happy in their set patterns, but who each possess untapped reserves of eccentric energy. 

Peppy, sly, and too-cool-for-school, the only downer in this piece was the fact that the two characters were differentiated by little more than size.  Both were androgynous and hokey, and the only other indicator of difference lay in the fact that the short one was cocky, and in her energized moments slicked back her ducktails more often than her partner.

Choreographed and performed by Bevin Poole & Amy Tao.

Idle
Idle was described very loosely in the program as exploring “the ways in which we are idle in every day life” – a description that does not entirely do justice to the overblown romanticism that underpins the work.

Following on the heels of the earlier performances, which strove for edginess and humour, Idle initially felt like an ode to languid hetronormative eroticism: a male-female couple enter through a doorway of light projected onto the floor, their hands almost clasping before they turn the grasp into an arm lock. This gesture of grasping and letting go becomes the leitmotif of the work, the dancers falling in and out of each others' tempestuous embraces for the entire twelve minutes: now she lets him fall, now she saves him, now he caresses her face, now he cradles her over his shoulder, now they spoon on the floor, and then twisting into sitting positions, graced with the most marvelous bed-head seen on young dancers (at least by the public) yet this summer. The piece is saved from re-enacting the Leo DeCaprio/Clair Danes fiasco by the fierce technical and emotional precision of Justine Chambers, who invests herself in every movement as if it were her last.

Choreographed by Justine Chambers.

What if Dance
Silly, silly, silly – and so much fun:

What if Dance Were a Highly Contagious Disease?  Bearing in mind that this piece uses video footage, picture hipster youth moonwalking through crosswalks, salsa dancing in the doctor's office, and jiving around kitchens, cafes, and convenience stores. Much hilarity ensues.

What if Ballet Was Taught By Robot Strippers? Do I need to paint a picture of this one? Awkward booty-slapping is involved. 

What if it Was So You Think You Can't Dance?  A cute dancer girl in long pigtails tries desperately to resist the strains of Flashdance.

What if People Danced the Way They Really Wanted? The best part of this sequence is the dancers' instinctive grasp of teenage/twentysomething' body language, making their send-up of club-culture that much more of a conflagration.

What if Running Man was an Olympic Sport? The performers are reaching for the gags here, but riding high on their own comic energy.

Was the What if Dance really necessary?  Not at all.  Was it fun? It was all that and a bag of chips – self indulgent empty calories flavoured with the salt you know you crave.

Choreographed by Katherine Single-Dain.

And that is really the lowdown on the 12 Minutes Max Sampler: it was a smorgasbord of delights, some sweet, some sour; all piquant.  Short as the pieces were, they still managed to offer Nibblits of soul-food here and there, mixed amongst the sweet chunks of marshmallow-candy-for-your-brain

12 Minutes Max Sampler was part of this year's Dancing on the Edge Festival. It took place on July 13th.