Ballet BC and Turning Point Ensemble earn five stars for their imaginative and courageous decision to bring two new music compositions and four new ballets to the stage to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Ballet BC. The new works filled the large stage at the Queen Elizabeth with authority and a sureness of skill that was commendable.
In a province intent on siphoning funding away from artists, should artists respond by creating audience-friendly works that are sure to be crowd pleasers, or is the role of an artist to challenge, educate and edify by pushing boundaries, making audience members even a little uncomfortable by requiring them to engage in material that presents a perspective that is new, or uses language in a way that is unfamiliar?
Two dance shows that recently hit Vancouver prompted me to consider these questions, and I'm still thinking about them, but if it's dollars that matter, then apparently...
Last night’s VIDF show at the Roundhouse was a master class in solo performances. The full length dance solo is a difficult task – a single performer keeping an audience involved for 45 minutes. Last night offered us two perfect examples from opposite ends of the spectrum. The first piece seemed to be an example of how not to do a solo, and the second piece showed us how to fix almost every problem that the earlier piece experienced.
Margie Gillis is an icon in Canadian dance. Her illustrious career is studded with awards: she received the Order of Canada in 1988, received Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts from the Canada Council for the Arts in 2009, and it has recently been announced that in 2011 she will receive the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, “the ultimate recognition in Canada’s performing arts.” (Gillis receives the prestigious award alongside the equally illustrious William Shatner, but that's another story).
A large portion of Vancouver’s most celebrated dancers received at least part of their training at Arts Umbrella. Ranging in age from 15-18, their youth company (made up of 36 dancers) trains five days a week in ballet and modern, with two days a week devoted to creation of performance pieces. Eight of the programs (I can’t bring myself to call it a company since they don’t get paid) brightest students performed on the free stage at VIDF last night in two quartets.
Expectations always get in my way. For example, if everyone tells me I will love a movie, my expectations build up so high that no matter how good the movie may be I always feel disappointed when I see it. Seeing Hungry Like The Wolf made me consider my expectations for a dance performance. SiNS (Sometimes in Nova Scotia) have been assembling a repertoire of pieces based on each of the seven deadly sins. Upon hearing this work was a study on greed that would use hundreds of uniform boxes as the objects of desire I instantly...
Deborah Dunn's Four Quartets is a weird and wonderful interpretation of the cycle of the same name by T.S. Eliot. I think it's fair to say that that poetic interpretations in any genre are risky, especially those that try to reframe great works by long-dead, canonical figures. At worst the performance hangs off the coat-tails of and earlier master-work and offers nothing new in the way of interpretation. And sometimes even strong performances fail to use their source material as anything more than a garnish, adding a veneer of historical depth to their own work but failing to engage with the original in a meaningful way. In both cases...
Italian-born and Munich-based, Yvonne Pouget has developed a reputation as one of Europe's leading choreographers. Her skills were very much in evidence on March 5, when she performed Il viaggio – la smorfia della vita (which translates as 'The Journey—The Lottery of Life'), a work built around “la smorfia,” a mysterious divination tool that originates in Naples.
Yvonne Pouget with Katharina Neuweg and Damien Liger
On March 4th I attended the Turning Point Ensemble’s presentation of Firebird 2011, their take on the 1910 ballet of the same name. The first act was a new arrangement of Stravinsky’s Firebird by Michael Bushnell and the second was an interpretation of the original story, choreographed by Simone Orlando. Orlando's piece, called Luft, featured local choreographer Josh Beamish of MOVE: the company, as well as Alison Denham, Heather Dotto, Cai Glover, and Matjash Mrozewski. Luft (which means air, not red – in case...
