Goggles is a powerful combination of drama and dance. Performed and created by Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, she skillfully displays not only her dance training, but also her wider expressive physical vocabulary, her sense of comic timing, and her ability to weave these together with dialogue.
For me one of the great pleasures of spending time in Vancouver is the city’s contemporary dance scene. It’s a hidden gem in the Canadian cultural landscape.
Laura Hicks in He was swimming the other way, photo: Chris Randle
Provincial Essays seems an odd title for a work of contemporary dance: it evokes pastoral traditions, and vaguely suggests the image of a public figure-of-note in his or her sunset years retiring to the country to write memoirs – indeed, the original essays by Montaigne were a grab-bag of reflections on everything from diet to politics.
In Sara Coffin’s Dropped Signal, the set is made up of about eight weighted helium balloons on strings. Below them, two dancers (Jennifer Clarke and Sara Coffin) roll and move in low light.
He was swimming the other way by MachineNoisy part of Dance in Vancouver
With our bodies stuck in cars and cubicles and confining clothes all the time, it’s easy to forget what they can do. The electric duet between Alvin Erasga Tolentino (dancer), and Emmanuel de St. Aubin (musician), presented by Company Erasga, that opened Program Four of this year’s Dance in Vancouver offers some possibilities.
(in) habitat takes us on a dreamlike adventure with two wonderfully talented dancers; Tara Dyberg and Chengxin Wei. Their undulating bodies in the opening are a testimony to the incredible muscle control and strength these two dancers possess.
