Remember your mother telling you to finish your dinner because children were starving in Africa? As its central motif, ‘Nigeria’ contrasts the spiritual wealth of Africa with the obsession with monetary wealth, spiritual bankruptcy and ennui of life in West Vancouver. In spite of its dazzling verbal gymnastics, the play often feels clichéd. And then, in a refreshing u-turn, the playwright questions the authenticity of his own premise.
Ihtsi-pai-tapi-yopa—Essence of Life— by Coyote Arts Percussive Performance Association (CAPPA), brings story and movement from the Blackfoot-Blood-Kanai culture to the contemporary dance stage. Using lights and background video (Craig Alfredson), a soundscape ranging from bear growls to night-club beats (Sandy Scofield), and the strong, often animal-inspired movements of the three male dancers, the piece tells of bird men who become lost and full of conflict in an urban landscape, but are guided to a renewed sense of balance by a bear spirit. The story they tell of urban stress and the presence of an intervening, powerful, ultimately benevolent nature spirit—of...
Part of the 22nd annual Dancing on the Edge Festival, Status Quo is a dynamic and visceral hour-long journey through two solo pieces and one quartet. Choreographed and performed (in part) by Shay Kuebler and Amber Funk Barton, the mandate of Status Quo is to “create movement that is dynamically bold and emotionally captivating due to its velocity, speed, musicality and articulation.” Drawing from a variety of dance techniques (to this untrained eye, there were glimpses of pop and lock, breakdancing, modern, and even ballet), the pieces seemed to physically articulate the relationships and fragmentation of our own society.
The Chutzpah! Festival coninues: on March 8th Sidra Bell Dance and Gallim Dance of New York presented a double-bill performance. Though vastly different in style, neither Sidra's Bell's “Anthology” nor Gallim Dance's “I Can See Myself in Your Pupil” overtly showed their conceptual underpinnings. Both companies focused on the purely physical rather than intellectual. Sidra Bell Dance explored polarities, representing the body as sultry and mechanical, while Gallim Dance shook things up with a wild, free-for-all performance.
There are the words and the melodies I write, and there are the fusions that I create between ethnic groups, between currents and between people, and in the encounter between them everything is open ~ Idan Raichel
On March 4th the Chutzpah! Festival kicked off its tenth anniversary with a performance by the Idan Raichel Project, which treated visitors to the Chan Shun Concert Hall to a taste of the jazz inflected world music that is its forte. The Idan Raichel Project is known for fusing Israeli pop with music from around the world, from Ethiopia to Morocco and...
Hiro Kanagawa's new play, The Patron Saint of Stanley Park currently on at the Arts Club, is about a harried mother, a troubled teenage daughter and a brainy ten year old son coming to terms with the death of the husband and the childrens' father on Christmas eve the previous year.
The two children are sent by bus to visit their uncle on Christmas Eve but they take a detour into Stanley Park to do their own private memorial to their father, who was a seaplane pilot that regularly flew past Prospect Point. They get caught in a major...
2010 is drawing to a close and we are still dealing with haywire news sources and mediums messaging messages of all sorts – not much conducive to a good night’s sleep or to enjoying seasonal holidays designed for celebrating peace on Earth.
Bevin Poole, Cai Glover, Vanessa Goodman, Robert Halley and Janine Kamonzeki. cred David Cooper
Jade in the Coal is about a Chinese immigrant coal mining community in Cumberland BC during 1900. It begins with vignettes of some common events in the miners lives such as working underground in the mine, sending letters and money back to families in China, gambling and eating. An underground explosion has killed many miners including the beloved father of Sally, the wife of Wu Kwun, the town's Chinese power broker. Sally and a young miner, Lew Chong, had hoped to marry before her father arranged her marriage to Wu Kwun. Wu Kwun has built a new hall and brought...
Collisions between dance and science or dance and technology seem de rigeur these days. In Vancouver, October 2010 saw the premiere of Co. ERASGA’s Shadow Machine, which professed to explore “the conflicting relationships humanity has held with machines and the industrial process since the first years of the industrial revolution.” VIDF 2010 gave us Kitt Johnson’s Rankefod, an “evolutionary solo performance in celebration of the origin of the species.” In the summer of 2010 the Plastic Orchid Factory offered the “contemporary dysfunction” of endDORPHIN, a work expressing an alienated, over-medicated 21st century neurosis through dance. Common to each of these...
