T2: technological beauty but no cohesion
Henry Daniel’s *T2*, performed as part of this year’s "Dancing on the Edge Festival", was a piece with some interesting and some aesthetically pleasing moments but overall it left no distinct impression emotionally, aesthetically or intellectually. It’s not that there wasn’t any worthwhile content – there was – but this was a piece composed of so many disparate elements that I simply had a hard time finding a throughline or central message or truth from this show.
T2 included video, dance, live tabla drums, short bouts of storytelling, and a telematic video* that took the audience (with one of the dancers) to the Interurban Gallery on East Hastings. The performance opened with some beautiful video footage being projected on a screen at the back of the stage; it was a street scene with time lapse and in front of this, on the stage, were four chairs as well as a series of 2 x 4s that the performers eventually arranged into a rectangular stage space that framed the performance.
However, in spite of the tidy frame, the various elements did not quite come together to create a cohesive whole. For the first part of the performance there were three young dancers wearing dancewear leotards that reminded me more of the classroom than a show, and there was one other dancer dressed in a silky, aqua dress that went with her style of dance – bharatanatyam, I think – but seemed strangely out of place in the context of the rest of the piece. In fact, the interaction of the three dancers with this other dancer was, altogether, a bit odd. She had a kind of den mother/dominatrix role, calling out the scenes of T2 as they started and stopped, saying things like “T2 scene X, Go!”; her punctuating calls seemed designed to frame each section of the show and guide the entire performance, but although she was the most polished performer in the first part, I could not quite reconcile her presence with the rest of T2.
In turn each of the dancers explains a bit about themselves, their identity, while dancing in sections that were basically well choreographed and performed. Later, each dancer tells a story about her experience in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, in an effort, I think, to tie the show to the location of the Interurban Gallery. I found this choice of subject matter to be, frankly, a bit condescending. The stories included one of the young dancers describing her experience being followed by a car as she walked down Hastings wearing 41/2 inch heels and a tight dress; she concluded her story by saying that she would “never wear a dress in East Vancouver again”, while another dancer’s voice cracks as she describes giving an apple to a homeless man. These sections, in which the residents of the Downtown Eastside are painted as being the pitiable Other were actually kind of offensive. To explain my own bias here, let me say that I’ve been doing volunteer work at a drop-in centre for working women for some time now. These women are not only by turns witty, funny and smart, they are frequently insightful and perfectly capable of telling their own stories. Hearing these young, beautiful women talk about them as if they are objects rather than agents really got on my nerves and made me question why the show included anything to do with the DTES at all, as this section of the show didn’t seem to be about breaking any kind of boundary between us and them, but rather reinforced that same line.
By the same token, I’m not sure I understood the purpose of having one of the dancers leave the theatre, with the audience following her by telematic video to East Hastings and to the gallery where she performs a solo. The idea was interesting, but the meaning of it didn’t click for me. There was some pretty interesting video work on the screen in the background, and some solid dance. Towards the end, the lone male dancer joins the show and raises the bar just a little higher and this was welcome. I have to say I was engaged by most of the show. Still, upon reflection, I keep trying to put all of the pieces together to create a meaningful whole, and I’m still not getting it. There is plenty in T2 that is worthy of further development, and perhaps with some more work it would have a coherent message that would draw all of its elements together and make it not merely engaging but worthy of the subject matter that it attempts to take on.
t2 ...a telematic dance performance, created by Henry Daniel, was part of this year’s Dancing on the Edge Festival; performances took place on July 11 & 12 at the Scotia Bank Dance Centre.
Telematics is the use of computers in concert with telecommunication systems. Telepresence technology allows a person to feel as if they are present in a location different to the one that they currently are in.