Diasporama: don't dancers say merde?

Pierre-Paul Savoie and Marc Boivin in Mi-un ni d’eux.

In the 1997 film "Sick":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=1713997, performance artist Bob Flanagan nailed his penis to a board, cracked jokes and urinated on the lens of the camera that was filming him. I saw this excerpt of the film and it made me cringe. But here’s the thing, Bob Flanagan was a sado-masochist who had cystic fibrosis and spent much of his life making art about how he used pain to live with the pain of his disease. Does this make for good art? I’m still not entirely sure, but at least it was purposeful.

Also in 1997, "Gaetan Charlebois":http://www.canadiantheatre.com/dict.pl?term=Charlebois%2C%20Ga%EBtana Montréal theatre reviewer, stood up at the end of a performance of Koltès Quai Ouest at the well-respected Théatre Espace Go and called out “C’est de la merde! I remember, roughly, Charlebois’ defense of his actions; according to him, the performance was good looking, but utterly unchallenging thereby earning his very public wrath.

What, one might ask, are these two episodes doing in the same review? Well, I would answer that both came to mind as I watched the closing night performance of the two duets by PPS Danse that make up *Diasporama*, presented by the "Vancouver East Cultural Centre":http://www.thecultch.com/.

While one might find the somewhat Flanagan-esque sadism expressed in “…and the air felt like it would burst into flames” to be cathartic, one might also feel like calling out “It’s shit!”

What followed after Charlebois hurled that now famous (at least in Montréal) epithet into the darkness between the curtain falling and the curtain call was, in fact, a very interesting, if rather heated, discussion in the local papers about performance, the role of art in society, and the job of a critic. So, I won’t be the first to wander into the quagmire and if a discussion of any weight follows this review, then something of value will have emerged from what I thought was a pair of self-indulgent, underdeveloped and very amateurish duets.

The first piece was _Mi-un ni d’eux (1/2 One Nor Two)_ choreographed by Luc Dunberry and it began with some promise. On a screen in the background was an eerily realistic-looking eye blinking at the audience, looking around and then falling into an REM state, as though this disembodied eye were, on its own, capable of sleep, of dreams. As the lights came up, a heap on the floor turned into a pair of dancers who twisted and writhed their way through a series of contortions while engulfed in a bag that was somewhat reminiscent of those that Martha Graham used in her choreography. At times there was an odd beauty in what appeared to be the fusion of the two dancers’ bodies. They were, by turns, a two-headed creature, or a Quasimodo with too many arms and legs awkwardly embracing each other or themselves. This section was somewhat playful, but too dark, in a _Creature from the Black Lagoon_ sort of way, to have any real levity. Still, I was captivated; unfortunately, after about the first five minutes, I lost interest as the dancers emerged from their bag, wearing costumes that were formal on the top and zombie (bandaged legs and clunky bandaged feet) on the bottom, and spent the next 25 minutes wandering around the stage, breathing heavily, and failing to create any momentum – emotional or choreographic – to sustain my attention. What was so unsatisfactory about this piece was that it was neither well-choreographed nor particularly well-danced, thus making the odd costumes, spaced-out facial expressions and unusual soundscape (horses whinnying, cats meowing) – all of which could have been forgivable, and even creative – very aggravating. There simply was not a clear narrative or even a well-formed mood that I could decipher, and I resented the fact that amidst all of the aesthetic strangeness, I was not even treated to good dance.

The second piece “…and the air felt like it would burst into flames”, choreographed by André Gingras, was more engaging but no less infuriating. Was it a perversion of Theatre of Cruelty? Was it a theatrical/choreographic (the word seems like an overstatement since there was almost no dance) representation of the Marquis de Sade’s work? Or was it simply the kind of underdeveloped representation of something to do with rage, sex, and violence that any adolescent boy is capable of? Again, I was drawn in at the beginning when one of the two performers spoke directly to the audience about dreams, death and rage. However, what had some promise as a topic quickly came undone as the two dancers proceeded to take lead pipes to a pair of computers on the stage, disembowelling them gleefully, one dancer using the keyboard as a kind of guitar to play along with the rocked-out soundtrack, reminding me of Tom Cruise’s air guitar moment in _Risky Business_. And that’s about as good as it got. From here, the piece devolved into a badly choreographed series of sado-masochistic encounters between the two dancers, without actually making the context, motivation or meaning of these encounters clear. I’m all for sex and anger on stage, but it needs to be purposeful and well-executed, and I’m afraid that “…and the air felt like it would burst into flames” was neither of those things.

Together, these two works left me wondering about the nature of art. Was there something I missed? Or has our world of post modernism and pastiche caused us to set the bar so low that all a performer needs to do is to take a controversial or heavy subject matter, manifest it in some crude way, and place it before an audience for it to be called art? I’ve seen pretty art that bothers me because it lacks content and meaningful art that bothers me because it lacks artistic merit, but to lack good aesthetics and clear evocation of subject matter, and still get to present seems like taking things too far.

As “…and the air felt like it would burst into flames” came to its end, the soundtrack featured a voiceover that returned to dreams death and rage. The last words of the voice? “I am disappearing but not fast enough.” Yes, indeed.

_And the air felt like it would burst into flames Choreographed by André Gingras (Amsterdam), duet with Pierre-Paul Savoie and Vincent Morelle; Mi-un ni d’eux Choreographed by Luc Dunberry (Berlin), duet with Pierre-Paul Savoie and Marc Boivin A co-production of CanDanse, the Canada Dance Festival, National Arts Centre, The Vancouver East Cultural Centre, Brian Webb Dance Company, Agora de la Danse; they ran at the Scotiabank Dance Centre April 14-18, 2009. For more information go_ "here":http://www.thecultch.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=173&I...

By Jill Goldberg