SHE: is physical and holy
“Who is she?” ask the program notes for Robin Poitras’s performance of SHE at the Chapel Arts Centre, part of the Dancing on the Edge festival. “Is she a musician/is she a dancer/is she a singer?” But the performance itself – an arresting, vivid contribution by a deeply skilled performer – asks more radical questions about embodiment, momentum and resonance.
Its elements are simple but evocative. In the centre of the performance space something large and rectangular lies wrapped in canvas. As the dancer circles, then lines her body’s joints up with the canvas folds to hinge, reach, and unfold the fabric, the audience has time to wonder what’s inside. Given the banks of fluorescent lights framing the hidden object, the canvas could almost be holding a body (though in actuality it is too flat for that), or a doorway to another dimension. What turns out to be there, though, is a rusty bed frame. And this sets off another series of connotations: excavation, memory, ghost town, what happens in beds (intimacies, births, bed-time stories?) that is not happening in this bed any more.
Sometimes contemporary dance is about such narrative associations (witness Deborah Dunn’s masterful interpretation of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, another performance in this year’s Edge festival), but the focus of this performance lies elsewhere, in the question of how this body relates to this bed and in the question of sympathy as a physical experience, the resonance between two bodies, one of which may not even be human. The powerful simplicity of the movement and of the exploration made me aware of my own tendency to make narratives, but it also kept drawing me back to the physics of movement and sound and to the edge where material events (vibrations, oscillations) become imbued with meaning (a human mouth breathing, a voice singing, the sense that consciousness makes).
Back to what happens: the dancer unwraps the bed-frame, walks around it, sticks her hands through the wire webbing of the bed (will she be trapped? is she safe?), then thwangs it. It is as if she’s seeing the bed for the first time, with no knowledge of its name. Unwrapped and unmuted, the bed begins to act on the dancer’s body. Vibrations pass from her to it, from it to her. She blows air through her mouth, fluttering her lips like a well-ridden horse, almost crossing her eyes with the exhalation. She strums the bed. She lies on it like a lover, relaxing her curves into its sharpness. She finds a pipe in the bed mechanics to blow through with her chest raised, like an angel trumpeting the apocalypse (there’s my narrative tendency getting restless again), though the sound is a loose raspberry, comically anticlimactic. And then, oh my god, she finds a bow under the bed and, drawing it across her neck, she draws from her whole open body a high full tone that rings through all of us. A few moves later, she draws the bow across her lower leg, and now the tone is low, close to a groan. As oscillation becomes vibration, passing among body, chair, bed frame, and voice, moving in and out across the body’s boundaries, the voice dances and the body sings. The piece takes the metaphor of a finely tuned dancer’s body and makes it literal.
At the end she goes back to her chair and settles in. The audience waits, a half moon around one edge of the performance space, sitting in black leather barstools and metal framed chairs like the performer’s, a resonator struck but not yet sounding.
To the conversation going on in Canadian dance, this piece contributes a physical curiosity and expressiveness that I for one value a great deal. And there is also the contribution of Poitras as a performer: she brings a honed, balanced, open body together with unusual wisdom and history in her art. I just want to be in the room with this level of attention and presence.
This performance is all about being a body, being curious about other bodies, and being willing to be penetrated by sound, to vibrate, play, and be played. Laurie Anderson, speaking of her voice, echoing the seventeenth-century religious poet George Herbert, tells her audience, “Now I in you without a body move.” The spirit moving in "She" is utterly physical, and no less holy for that.
SHE by Paul-André Fortier & Robin Poitras, premiered at this year’s Dancing on the Edge Festival. It was performed July 13th and 14th at the Chapel Arts Centre.