Margie Gillis: the Celine Dion of Canadian dance

If I can draw anything from Gillis' performance on Friday, however, I would have to guess that hers is an oddly populist art, and that her form of dance (at least as represented in this latest work) taps not the obscure recesses of human experience, but our most obvious existential fears – fear of isolation, and in that, fear of death. Called “Threads,” this latest work features Gillis and two dancers, Eleanor Duckworth and Marc Daigle. These two performed services somewhere between royal attendants and stage hands: they danced segues between Gillis' acts and they also moved two wheeled frames from one area of the stage to the next. The frames were hung with long elastic threads which absorbed the colours of the stage lights and radiated ambient red, blue, or yellow hues accordingly. Yet for all the wonder of this illumination, the blocky mechanical set reminded me of nothing so much as racks of raw spaghetti.

Gillis cuts a striking figure, with her pre-Raphelite hair and her statuesque figure. The performance opened with Gillis onstage, threads coming out of her chest like the strings of a parachute. She moved as if she was falling in slow motion or plunging into water, until Daigle entered and removed them from her harness. It annoyed me to see belt and clasps of this mechanism, which destroyed the illusion that Gillis was suspended. Somber music set a dark, threatening tone, but I found the effect melodramatic – if Gillis was a character suspended in a spiritual void, why was she there? The opening portion of the performance was devoted to atmospherics, and I craved some nuance that might explain or add complexity to this monochomatic emotional sphere.

The opening was followed by scenes where Gillis moved athletically, almost as if skate-skiing across the stage. As she moved she tangled herself in a cat's-cradle of elastic threads, so that her body was surrounded at each turn by restraining angles at her throat, waist, or legs. I found this aspect of the performance rather cold, as though Gillis was simply engaged in physical training, running a dancer's obstacle course. But the message, such as it was, seemed to be that she was struggling against intractable mental barriers.

The high point of the performance for me came two thirds of the way in, when Gillis emerged in a loose white smock with sleeves that trailed to the floor. Looking like a penitent saint or an incarcerated mental patient, Gillis whipped her body round the stage, animating the sleeves as if they were the ribbons of a rhythmic gymnast. Sometimes they hovered in the air, sometimes they swept the floor. She walked on the trailing edges with her back bowed, and against the thin mandolin music and white scrim, she looked like a snowy hallucination, something produced by the tortured mind at the edge of hypothermia. This frightening wintry image was emphasized by the placement of the screens, which were set side-by-side with a flat placed against them like a door. When Gillis beat her fists against this door, it became clear that the glowing rectangle was a cabin and she was locked outside.

Unfortunately the climax of this snow-fevered dream plunged the performance headlong into hysteria. Gillis screamed repeatedly and writhed out of her dress to stand naked on the stage. Now, it's not the nudity or the high-strung antics that trouble me. I'm sure that equal agony and exposure are available in your average butoh performance, for instance, and many performers tackle the question of nudity sooner or later. In and of itself this moment could be moving and interesting.  But what frustrated me was the lack of proper context for this potentially shocking exposure.  This crisis was framed by such obvious lyricism that left me strangely unmoved, and the drama seemed un-earned. We had shuttled from a somber neutrality to the picturesque to the frantic, and somehow it all felt overly constructed, emotionless for all the mimed emotion on the stage.

Why is it that I, who will follow most performers to the obscure places they wish to go – could find so few points of entry into Gillis' performance? In part the disconnect may be an aesthetic and generational divide. Gillis has been compared to Isadora Duncan, and I suspect that her choreography deliberately fosters the comparison – there was something of Duncan's famous “unrestricted, natural movement” in Gillis' deliberatly emotional performance, and certainly there was a reference in the fluid reams of fabric that Gillis trailed across the stage. Neo-classical references were ready at hand too, in Gillis' golden-mean inspired patterns (I could practically hear Madame Blavatsky whispering about sacred geometry from the wings). I am no dance historian, but I would venture that what felt to me like the use of out-dated tropes may appear to fans of Gillis' work to be a taking-up of Duncan's tradition, or of something with a kinship to it.  I tend to appreciate conceptual works of performance, and perhaps Gillis, with her emotionally charged approach to dance, speaks an idiom that cannot reach my post-post-modern, largely-deconstructed mind, let alone my heart? 

For me, Thread did not gel, and I think it was because the emotion was on the surface -- it was pointed to and pointed to again, and there was no room for texture or ambiguity. If Gillis' performance was a music album, I would say that it had been over-produced, that it no longer had rough edges and had become easy-listening. In the end this is the bone I want to pick with Thread: it was just too easy read. We are told that “Thread exposes the rope that trips us up, the twine that tethers us, the strings that attach us, the cords we cut, the ribbons that glorify us.” To me, these are images that have long-since wandered into cliché, and no amount of the Governor General's admiration will bring complexity to what is an all-but-dead metaphor for the “journey of life.” Even had I thrown my program away unread, what happened on stage did little to add complexity to this basic description. For all that Gillis exposed her body and heart to the audience, her performance felt exceedingly safe. There was little psychological challenge in this work, although it attempted to skate around a psychological abyss.

I wholly admire a person with the stamina and heart that Gillis appears to have, and I do not doubt that she deserves accolades for her long commitment to her art and for her innovations along the way. But as a stand-alone aesthetic experience, Thread left me feeling distinctly let down. From a “living legend,” I cannot help but expect so much more.