Portraits and Scenes of Female Creatures: Adrift at Sea

So, a confession: I am not simply a sucker for a story, I'm positively OCD for story.I have two English degrees, combined with critical theory and creative writing. This means that, warrented or not, I will hunt for metanarrative in just about any fragment, and will analyse a mash-up of ideas within an inch of its essence. I'm a pro. It's what I do.

Therefore, choreographer beware: if you tell me your performance is about seafaring myths of femininity, I will take you at your word. I will turn the diamond of your work, looking for a reflection of this theme in every facet. I'll deconstruct your work and hand it back to you wrapped up with a bow.

The notes that accompany Portraits and Scenes of Female Creatures definitely offers a well-baited hook for someone with my story-obsessed proclivities: “Four mysterious female creatures create a world of loss and grief at sea. This physical journey descends to the bottom of a nautical world forcing its quartet of victims to come face to face with a reality they cannot change.” As any good analyst does, I come to the work informed by these suggestive hints, looking for a key to unlock the mystery on stage.

Amber Funk Barton definitley provides some lush and dynamic choreography informed by oceanic metaphors. Individual scenes offered plenty of energy, both of a pulsing hypnotic kind and also of an intense climactic kind. Yet something was lacking in the whole – it felt shapeless – as if the artist started to tell a story and then let it lapse into a moody blankness. In the same way that the liner notes trail off into non-specifics, “a reality they cannot change,” the physical piece seemed to lack purpose. Sometimes when this happens with a work of dance I wonder if the artist felt pressured to finish: how much of this work could have been cut to give it better shape, if the artist didn't need to get to 90 minutes for the sake of convention?

Here is what worked for me in Portraits and Scenes of Female Creatures: the opening two thirds of the work captured my attention. The dancers repeatedly entered from one side of the stage and exited from the other. Occasionally one or two would fail to exit, dancing to the same side of the stage from which they had entered. Their patterns of entering and exiting were like waves breaking on a shore – long and relentless incoming swells, and then the hint of the receding energy of the sea.

What didn't work for me would be the latter third of the piece – it felt repititious and formless. Although I enjoyed the individual dancers, I found my mind wandering as they variously clustered around each other or pulled each other ferociously apart, one more time. Yes I get it – fierce currents, uncontrollable forces, the dancers pushed by inner impulses to fight against a vast and uncompromising ocean as they decend/drown/fight the deepening current.....I could see the dancers trying to invoke this wild energy, but I wasn't feeling it. In the end, perhaps the water metaphor worked almost too well: if the stage is kind of containing box, the “last act” (to borrow structure from theatre) was an undifferentiated liquid element within. The work felt like it needed a few more islands, barrier reefs, pr some nautical maps for structure against this fluidity.

But perhaps, as I've said, I'm too obsessed with story? These metaphors are, after all, simply a jumping-off point from which a very physical, non-verbal work of art emerges? Should the metaphor govern the work so strongly? Should I be less literal in my expectations?

I think even if one lays aside the metaphoric guides, I still feel there wasn't enough tension or differentiation in the work. In practical terms differentiation would mean stronger transitions between “scenes,” between individual dancers and between their physical vocabularies. In the later part of the work dancers often moved in unison, repeating vocabulary from the earier part of the work: truncated motions with the arm, crawling over the stage backward, perhaps with one limb extended, limited ways of lifting their bodies. All of this contributed to a feeling of constraint, a difficulty of movement that suggested the vulnerability of the dancers to outside forces. But although the tempo of movements increased, and although the dancers eventually moved from working near the floor to standing upright, they seemed to repeat the basic patterns of the earlier part of the work. The physical language did not seem to change or grow more complex. The women mirror each other, or fight for traction on the stage, but their relationships remained generic.

Now, story and structure aside, what about the pure aesthetic pleasure of dance? After all, this art isn't just about transmitting meaning, it's about the experience for its own sake, right? I think that this pleasure in the art is still inherantly linked to the first two elements: the sheer lovliness of the work (or its fiercness or its horror or whatever effect your are going for) is enhanced if the foundation that it is based on is stable and meaningful. Otherwise what you get is really just a study on a theme – a lot of pretty movement to get lost in, a sweet confection to pass the time beween dinner time and sleep.

I think that Portraits and Scenes of Female Creatures failed in some ways to find deeper meaning in its core themes, it was still successful at a sensual, kinetic level. What I mean is that while I found the choreography somehwhat repetitive, the invidivial elements, as expressed through the moving bodies of the dancers, were full of energy and grace.

Amber Funk Barton is well-known in Vancouver, and I would say she's fairly prolific. My impression, of Portraits and Scenes of Female Creatures is informed by this view – it seems like one offering from a larger and growing body of work. The ideas worked out in Portraits and Scenes of Female Creatures will no doubt inform later work, either directly or perhaps in opposition. I think that Portraits and Scenes of Female Creatures, as performed in December 2012, is a signpost on a longer journey, and not the final destination.