Risk: the youth of today
Having moved to Vancouver from Montréal only one year ago, I consider myself to be a relative newcomer to the Vancouver dance scene. Before I arrived here, I’d heard of and seen companies and dancers including "The Holy Body Tattoo":http://www.holybodytattoo.org/, "Wen Wei Wang":http://www.wenweidance.ca/, "Kokoro":http://www.kokoro.ca/, "EDAM":http://www.edamdance.org/ and "Crystal Pite":http://www.kiddpivot.org/ perform.
But, I hadn’t heard the buzz surrounding "Amber Funk Barton":http://responsedance.blogspot.com/ before landing on the West Coast, so I was excited and curious to see *Risk*, which debuted at The Firehall Arts Centre on December 3. I’d seen Funk Barton perform once before at B.C. Buds at the same venue, so I anticipated a very athletic and fast-paced show. And on these counts the show delivered. However, while the show was high on energy and provided an excellent forum for the exuberance of the five twenty-something interpreters, I felt that its reliance on imitation or mimicry of daily life actually detracted from the show’s gravity and restricted the performers’ range of emotional expression as they worked to convey the themes being handled by *Risk*.
Sitting in my chair, waiting for the show to begin, I had a feeling that what I was about to see would be a crystal ball, showing me the future of dance. The audience was young and the cell phones were out along with the iphones and the ipods. Audience members were engaged in a choreography of their own, fingers in a dancing frenzy, cramming in the last text message before the curtain went up. As I am a thirty-something who has been teaching English Literature since I was, myself, a twenty-something barely older than my students, I have long been aware that the number of years it takes to make a generation gap has been getting smaller and smaller. It is clear to me that the people I teach live in a faster-paced, more frenzied and possibly more confusing culture than the one I knew at their age. In the areas of communication and information, instant gratification is always possible, and Risk was an example of this, feeding its audience easily digested scenes from “real life” without asking the audience to invest too much of their intellect or imagination.
Risk is a show with plenty of strengths. Foremost amongst them is the athleticism and endurance of all the dancers. Their commitment to the show was absolute, and the demands of Risk are relentless. The pace is fast, and the movement is precise and requires a full range of strength and flexibility from each performer. Each dancer, and the company as a whole, used the space of the stage in a way that was commanding and confident. All this was very impressive.
Still, Risk didn’t move me as much as it clearly did many of the audience members. I tend to like dance that relies on abstract distillation of thematic concerns, that uses the body to express an inner journey, and the stage as a vessel to show the refined product of that journey. In other words, I don’t love spectacle for spectacle’s sake. This is why, even though I spent years and years doing ballet before moving onto modern and other forms of dance, I don’t really enjoy watching ballet; it lacks interiority and tends to feel, ironically, static. Strange that I should compare Risk to that; and I should say that the comparison is not aesthetic, but has more to do with the impulse to tell rather than to show.
Risk had an aesthetic that was, I thought, imitative to a fault. Rather than showing me how it feels to be twenty-something nowadays, I found that the show only managed to tell me what it looks like to be twenty-something in 2008. There was a lot of activity centered on a couch that sat upstage and was equipped with lights that came on during certain scenes; the dancers crashed out on the couch, they snuggled up to each other on it, fought each other off and one dancer was, at times during the piece, wrapped up in his struggle to move the couch. There were male dancers fighting each other, and sometimes fighting the air, women sorting out their relationships with the men, and at one point in the performance a crowd of well over a dozen “extras” came on stage to enact a party scene with the the dancers. The choreography of this section had these extras waving their cell phones to the audience before leaving the stage, some of them talking into their cell phones about being “so wasted” and other similarly familiar post-party laments. These are the kinds of things that just didn’t move me because I’ve literally seen all of this in daily life. I know a lot about cell phones, parties, sexual/non-sexual relations, feeling wasted after the party’s over and all the other moments that were represented in this piece. What I would like to know more of is how it feels to be these dancers, what are the deepest passions, fears and hopes of Funk Barton and her company? And I don’t necessarily even want concrete answers to those questions but I’d love to know how all of those things feel and would love to see those feelings put in motion.
Am I stuck in my own decade, ten years too late to relate to the inclusion of the cell phone in art? I don’t think that’s it, exactly. I think my real issue is as ideological as it is aesthetic. I want to see art that transcends daily life, even if its subject is daily life in all of its mundane glory. I want something finer than mimicry, more distilled than imitation. I want art to be able to bring me to a place where I am aware of the human imagination and the human capacity to creatively interpret deeply felt emotions, even if these emotions are so ubiquitous as to be ordinary. As an audience member, I have the capacity to recognize meaning, even, and perhaps especially if it is an abstraction of lived experience. I turn to art to be challenged, to have my perceptions interrogated or at least played with; to witness the artist’s ability to take a subject and push it to a place that transcends the material. Risk did challenge me in that it caused me to ask myself if I feel that imitation is art but I don’t think this question was, itself, posed by Risk; the show came across as being very self-referential and, unless I missed it, I don’t think there was any kind of ironic or critical distance in the treatment of the self as subject.
It’s obvious that Funk Barton and her dancers are a talented bunch. They dance well and work together beautifully. As a company and individuals each has a great deal to offer. And, towards the end of the show, there was a final duet that almost, just almost, reached that place of transcendence. There was an emotional commitment in this last duet that absorbed me more than all the rest of the piece and this section was over all too soon. I’d love to see this group stripped of props and street clothes, and anything else that is representational, and given the chance to create from a place of imagination, from the interior journey rather than a place of making a spectacle of what already is. I want to know what could be, what could be from the inside out because I’m sure these dancers have a lot to say.
_RISK Created by Amber Funk Barton; produced by The Response Dance Society; presented by The Firehall Arts Centre 3-6 December. Dancers: Amber Funk Barton, Josh Beamish, Heather Laura Gray, Josh Martin and David Raymond._