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Sharing their culture – with song, dance and heart

Every performance of the Le La La dancers repeats a form that goes back thousands of years. But it takes this Victoria company and its director George Me’las Taylor to make the Kwakwaka’wakw (kwa kwa key wok) songs and dances new again.

Taylor’s willingness to share his culture is powered by a prodigious talent. He’s a showman. He’s a singer and drummer and knows how to wear a mask and animate it.

Last Saturday on the stage of the Victoria Aboriginal Cultural Festival, Taylor, born in Alert Bay, B.C., was in full voice, singing, drumming and introducing the dances.

“We perform these dances,” he said, not just for spectacle, “but because they belong to us.”

He meant “belong” in both a cultural and a family sense. In the Kwakwaka’wakw tradition, a dance and the mask that identifies it is the property of a particular family, passed on by inheritance or marriage. That means at any occasion that demands a potlatch, such as a birth, death or marriage, the family members can enact the dances they own. Some dances are considered sacred and are witnessed only in the context of a potlatch.

Since I first saw them perform in Toronto in 2006, Le La La (it means travelling from here to there) has only grown stronger at a kind of storytelling that’s at once specific to the spiritualism of the Kwakwaka’wakw and universally understood. Taylor’s nation has inhabited the northern tip of Vancouver Island, nearby islands and coastal inlets for millennia. Two of George and Melanie Taylor’s sons, Jason, 32, and Jarid, 29, have always danced with Le La La. Today the company also includes nephews and grand-nephews and grandson Lason Taylor, who is 5 years old. Melanie is the company manager.

The Kwakwaka’wakw are renowned artists whose reputation extends back to the time of Contact and includes important carvers such as the late Mungo Martin and his grandson Chief Tony Hunt. The full intent of the masks is only revealed when they are danced. Introducing Wild Woman of the Woods or Dzunukwa, Taylor tells the story of a haunting character represented with a mask featuring a hook nose and big red lips. She’s known as a bringer of wealth, but like many a mythical creature she has a dark side. Children were warned not to wander into the woods in case Dzunukwa might be abroad. She likes to snatch up young ones and take them home to eat. A Le La La dancer in a fur suit, wearing the magnificent mask, bears a cedar bark basket on his back – all the better for carrying home small children.

Bukwus, the wild man of the woods, possesses great strength and can make himself invisible. One interpretation has it that Bukwus might offer food that a wise person would refuse, because it is Bukwus’ habit to consume the souls of the living. Bukwus might also be an aboriginal interpretation of Big Foot.

Le La La’s Bukwus enters the stage in an outfit that looks like moss; he is truly scary. The transformation dance is an opportunity to see how dancers really do take on the identity of the animals and spirits they depict. On Saturday, 18-year-old Calvin Charlie-Dawson performed this dance with great agility, surrounded as he transformed himself by dancers Ethan Taylor and Jarid Taylor, wearing button blankets.

As a director at large of the Aboriginal Tourism Association of British Columbia, George Taylor has an official role as an ambassador for first nations culture. And ever since establishing Le La La in 1987 he has been taking the message of friendship and unity around the world, from Europe, to China and Mexico and all points of the North American compass.

“My father always told me to be proud to be first nations, and I am proud. But I am also a proud Canadian,” Taylor tells his audience. He means it and he lives it. In fact he says it again.

Family, pride, love, respect, harmony and peace. These are the values that Le La La stands for.

Photos, clockwise from top left: Haida chief Lance Baker, George Me’las Taylor, Jenna Lancaster; Calvin Charlie Dawson as the Raven with Jarid Taylor; Ethan Taylor dancing the Nun the bear; Lason Taylor; Andy Everson of K’ómoks First Nation and Ethan Taylor.

See George Taylor at the prow of a canoe at the opening of Victoria’s aboriginal cultural festival: http://www.cheknews.ca/aboriginal-festival-kicks-off-traditional-canoe-landing-189217/

For more about the company go to www.lelaladancers.com

 

Moraes’s dance runs on testosterone

Talk about a catchy title. Testosterone, the full-length dance that Newton Moraes has created with four male dancers premieres Thursday, April 28, at Dancemakers Centre for Creation. The show is his biggest, best, most complex and compelling work to date.

Under construction since January, the show — in rehearsal at least — delivers much that one would associate with the male hormone and much that is unexpected.

Moraes admits he didn’t know a lot about testosterone until he started doing a bit of research. Both men and women, to some degree, are driven by the hormone. “It’s important for us. Too much and you get aggression and fighting, but there is a positive aspect to it, in building muscles and giving us a sex drive. A lack of testosterone can lead to depression and illness.” And in middle age, men start to lose testosterone, the way women lose estrogen. These facts went into the mix along with personal observations about how we are a lot more than the sum of our endocrine systems.

A Brazilian who came to Toronto from Porto Alegre in 1991, Moraes has embraced the cultural and gender diversity of his adopted city and that had much to do with the shaping of Testosterone.

“I am a feminist. I believe in equal rights for women and men. I think there are lots of things being done for women nowadays that are wonderful and we as humans are advancing when we recognize LGBTQ rights. But when I was thinking of male friends of mine and how society has changed, reversing roles for men and women in the home for instance, I thought, how are these changes  affecting men?”

A grant from the Ontario Arts Council and support from Dance Ontario Weekend made it possible for Moraes to put much more work into this show than is usually the case for independent choreograhers. Still, he had to work a back-breaking day job to raise enough money to pay everyone adequately. His choice of dancers was fortuitous: Colombian-born Falciony Patino Cruz; Brazilian Marco Placencio; Italian Canadian Emilio Colalillo; and Shakeil Rollock, who is of Caribbean descent. Physically, temperamentally and culturally they make a fascinating mix.

Also, says Moraes, they each brought skills from different schools of dance. “So they bring different ways of expressing themselves, in the way they move, the way they dress, the way they connect with each other.”

Partnering between men is central to Testosterone, and since male dancers are not trained to lift other males, Moraes brought in choreographer Allen Kaeja to give a master class in elements of dance such as lifting, catching and overbalancing into the next move. There is a fair amount of body-slamming going on in Testosterone,  balanced with some very tender moments. Feedback from Toronto dancer/choreographers Ronald Taylor, Kevin Ormsby and BaKari I. Lindsay has helped sharpen the piece.

The dancers enter in business power-suits and among the many changes they undergo in the hour is a moment when Placencio performs in high heels, wearing a dress. Moraes invited trans artist Lola Ryan to coach the dancers on how to access their inner female.

“Testosterone is not just about expressing our macho masculinity,” says the choreographer. “It’s also about accepting the feminine side of ourselves.”

Photo of  Falciony Patino Cruz, Emilio Colalillo and Shakeil Rollock by Emmanuel Marcos

Testosterone

April 28 to 30 at 8 pm and May 1 at 3pm, at the Dancemakers Theatre, 313, 9 Trinity St, Distillery District Toronto as part of Danceworks/Co-works

Tickets: $25 General Admission $20 Seniors, CADA Members and Students

Call: 647-920-2883

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Indigenous dance from two sides

NGS 1 - Angie Cheng & Karina Iraola - Credit Marc J ChalifouxIndigenous Dance Double Bill

Luu hlotitxw: Spirit Transforming by Dancers Damelahamid

NGS (Native Girl Syndrome) by Lara Kramer

Native Earth Performing Arts and DanceWorks CoWorks

Aki Studio, Daniels Spectrum, Toronto

April 21 to 23, 2016

Native Earth Performing Arts presents two indigenous dances that are poles apart, both geographically and culturally.

Luu hlotitxw: Spirit Transforming is based on traditional Pacific northwest Gitxsan dancing, singing and storytelling about a young man’s self-realization as he meets life’s challenges. NGS (Native Girl Syndrome) is purely contemporary in form, based on the degrading urban experience of the choreographer’s grandmother; it is a journey into alienation and self-destruction. Both need to be seen.

In Luu hlotitxw, Rebecca Baker, choreographer Margaret Grenier and Jeanette Kotowich enter the stage in long fringed dresses, button blankets emblazoned with totems, beaded headbands, moccasins, leg wrappers and decorated dorsal fins sticking out of their backs. These are the spirits of the orca and they move in ways to suggest the playful rising and diving of the Pacific killer whales – seen life-size in a video projected on the back screen. They chant as they move with silent footfalls in circular patterns.

Nigel Grenier sings too, in melodic phrases repeated with slight alterations (“yay ha hay /yo ha ho”). On first entry he bears a large bear mask in front of his face. The women surround him as he returns, bare-chested, to kneel on stage. They place cedar fronds in front of him. These are understood to be healing or protective.

The young man paints a black X on his chest with a paste given him by one of the women. He wears a second mask on re-entry, like the face of a small hunted animal. It is marvellous to see how these masks are animated by the dancer’s movement, so we sense without being told what this story is all about.  Another figure, a warrior with a very elaborate mask, comes in. The warrior attaches little heads to his mask, making him more animal-like and fierce, while the young man removes pieces of his mask to reveal the human beneath. In a clever bit of staging, we see him as a silouette on the screen depicting a forest, taking his rightful place in the universe.

In Montreal choreographer Lara Kramer’s dance for Angie Cheng and Karina Iraola, NGS, the women of the street, drugged, drunk or beaten down, are made faceless, their hair or their headwear obscuring their identities. This is a powerful reminder of the missing or murdered aboriginal women of Canada: unknown and unsought. The ubiquitous duct tape is a symbol of how they piece together a precarious existence.

Dressed like hookers in assorted found and damaged items, they stagger about, Iraola pushing a stroller and Cheng leaning over an old pram with a native symbol painted on it. At the back of the stage, a huge plastic tarp hangs in the rough shape of a teepee. Iraola makes her way  to music that goes from a loud, scratchy din to rock songs, such as “These Eyes,” to heavy metal music and drumming to something with the ironic lyric “…walk easy, walk slow.” In a head-hanging stupor, Iraola dresses in fake fur and huddles under her makeshift tent. Cheng, bare-breasted for part of her perambulations, rolls out a Canadian flag with a native image over the maple leaf. From one of her bags, she pulls out plastic miniatures of people and animals and places them in neat rows on the flag, as if this would make a home.

NGS takes a stereotype, magnifies it and flings it in our faces. The long silence at the end, as the two performers lay hunched over in the dark, is particularly affecting.

 

Top: Angie Cheng & Karina Iraola  Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Below: Dancers Damelahamid  Photo by Derek Dix

Damelahamid 6 - Credit Derek Dix

The uplifting art of Alvin Ailey dance

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Sony Centre, Toronto

March 4 and 5, 2016

The standing ovations began after the first number on Friday’s opening show of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.  It was “Toccata,” an excerpt from Talley Beatty’s Come and Get the Beauty of It Hot, first performed in 1964 by Ailey’s then fledgling company.

The dance for 16 men and women affirmed at once the continuity of the Ailey tradition and the injection of new vigor and talent that came with the 2011 appointment of long-time Ailey choreographer Robert Battle as artistic director.

“Toccata” is an occasion to show off the classic lines and the high-energy amalgam of ballet, modern and jazz dance as the dancers, costumed in white sleeveless tops, swept the stage in rows or pairs or trios to the music of Dizzie Gillespie. That little insouciant kick that sets a pivot in motion or the wag of a hand in the midst of a long, fluid arm extension are elements of the sassiness that accompanies the Ailey form. These dancers, young and new as well veterans of the company, were like the melodic line to a drum solo in the midst of the piece.

Yannick Lebrun’s achingly expressive solo in Ailey’s Love Songs from 1972 similarly brought to the fore the highly versatile, athletic nature of the Ailey-trained dancer. Lebrun performed the songs, in descending order of sadness, from “A Song for You” to “He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother” to Nina Simone singing “Poppies,” as if they were written in his bones.

Without doubt the biggest impact of the evening came from Exodus, a 2015 hip-hop based piece for 16 dancers choreographed by Puremovement originator Rennie Harris. This extraordinary work set to sounds and music composed by Raphael Xavier, follows in a line of African American expression that began with Alvin Ailey’s 1960 dance Revelations (performed Saturday at 2 pm), which was set to spirituals and gospel music.

A giant of a Moses-like figure, Jeroboam Bozeman could be said to be the lead dancer, in a crowd of fleet-footed dancers that seemed to multiply before our eyes. Clearly aligned to the politics of Black Lives Matter, Exodus is a transformative celebration of spirit and solidarity. Dressed in street clothes and brightly coloured running shoes at the outset, the troupe somehow rearranged itself as a kind of chorus in white tunics and formed a united force near the end, when a gunshot rings out. But hope rather than defeat was the takeaway.

Even more than his distinguished predecessor Judith Jamison, Robert Battle has brought a range of dance creators under the Ailey umbrella. The closing dance, Open Door, was choreographed by Ronald K. Brown, artistic director of Evidence. This piece displays the breadth of abilities in the company and was performed by 10 dancers including veterans Linda Celeste Sims, Matthew Rushing and Glenn Allen Sims. The women wear long dresses, all the better to display their quick shifts from something African-based, leading with the elbows  and buttocks, to Graham-esque modern to partnering their men in salsa steps — in a seamless flow of the joy that is dance at its best.

Photo of Exodus by Paul Kolnik

Dancing the diaspora

Footsteps across Canada

Presented by Dance Immersion

Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Toronto

February 26 and 27, 2016

 

Geographically and stylistically, the six dances in the Dance Immersion concert embraced a wide African diaspora. Taken together they made a strong connection to Mother Africa and in several cases referred to a struggle for equality that goes on in the new world.

Montrealer Rhodnie Désir, accompanied live by percussionist Ronald Nazaire, performed BOW’T, a work that uses the imagery of a perilous journey across the ocean to express the longing for the homeland and the yearning for freedom. Désir’s strong West African-influenced choreography made her message clear.

A video projection of a seashore with rolling waves established a similar theme in Liliona Quarmyne’s Tide. The Nova Scotia performer danced to the music of Amadou and Mariam and manipulated a long white cloth to reveal a narrative of celebration and imprisonment, joy and concealment. A dancer whose face is covered is dehumanized and that seemed to be the point of what Quarmyne was saying about the historic African experience.

Two to see, four to reason is a quartet created by Rodney Diverlus, a Haitian-born dancer now based in Calgary.  Dressed down in big t-shirts and tight pants, Natasha Korney, Carina Olivera, Edgar Reyes and Diverlus had at each other, talking, shouting, pushing and gesticulating to music that included the blues of Bessie Smith and the big band sound of Benny Goodman. The dancers are all exuberant movers and the piece nicely bridged the divide between social and concert dance.

A solo by Toronto dancer Mafa Makhubalo, Songs of the Soil, was performed against a backdrop screening clips of South African students protesting high tuition and excerpts of an interview with South African martyr Steve Biko. There was something about a healing ceremony and Makhubalo’s submersion in the water contained in a galvanized steel tub certainly referred to cleansing. But his vigorous dancing could have meant anything, really.

Percy Anane-Dwumfour and Lauren Lyn, Daniel Gomez were dressed in white with appliqués of brightly coloured Ghanaian fabric. Anane-Dwumfour spoke a lot about the struggles of a man who finds after moving to Canada that he no longer feels at home in Africa or his new country. This piece, choreographed by Esie Mensah, could have been more effective without the speechifying.

Mikhail Morris, a Jamaican-born Toronto dancer, made a scary figure in long braids and a black mask over his face. With his features mostly obscured, he performed his solo Dichotomy, again underscoring the dilemma of the immigrant of African origin. What face are you proud to present to the world?

Photo: Liliona Quarmyne in Tide

A desperate plea for love

 

The Mystery of Mr. Leftovers: A Desperate Plea for Companionship and Love

By Sharon B. Moore

Jillian Peever Dance Creations & Cinetic Creations

Winchester Street Theatre, Toronto

February 25 to 27

 

If Jillian Peever set out to be named the hardest working woman in show business, she certainly succeeded with this production. For a full, head-snapping hour, Peever talks, acts, changes costumes, moves props and dances with a fury, as her protagonist Mr. Leftovers.

The high-energy show makes a dramatic, first full-length piece for Peever, who trained with the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and performed for a year with TDT. She has worked with just about every big name in contemporary dance, including Peggy Baker, who has mentored her, and Denise Fujiwara, who made Peever an understudy in Eunoia.

It was obvious from all the material Peever mastered that Mr. Leftovers has been thoroughly rehearsed and dramaturged. Sharon Moore’s text mentions the year 1887, which explains the Victorian outfit and top hat (festooned with long twigs) Peever first appears in. “I was born for greatness and for Empire,” says Mr. Leftovers, establishing his “freshly starched lineage.” It was all downhill from there, from a job as a butler to a rotten marriage to a stint in the war.

But really this character is an Everyman, whose fragmentary tale makes a physical reality out of dreaming, yearning, remembering and reinventing oneself – the ways in which a lonely heart will survive. It’s all done at pretty much top speed, as Peever runs or stretches, leaps or sprawls across the stage, gyrating between “control” and “no control” – enacting a mental state of being pulled from pillar to post.

Dressing up or dressing down, hauling in a trio of Christmas trees, Peever never misses a line. Some of them are quite profane (“Fuckers!” she shouts at unseen enemies) or funny. Many scenes are cleverly mounted. There’s a trick she does with red plungers stuck to the floor to make a barrier and a row of black boots in pairs, with one boot toppling after another, represents fallen soldiers. After an accident at sea, Mr. Leftovers is rowing an imaginary lifeboat, as Peever sits on a chair that makes a fulcrum for two long oars. She manipulates a pliant, thin board of plywood to make unusual sounds and to hide behind as if it were a wall or even a force of nature.

The lengthy monologue, the more poetic lines repeated to make a dance pattern, is backed by music from Bach, Vivaldi, Philip Glass, Mendelsshon, Purcell, Chopin and some jaunty ragtime and Latin music. Through it all Peever labours, performing episodes in a life that sounds like one long lament. “I’m a mere figment of what I used to be,” complains an old, forgetful Leftovers.

It is only in the brief moments when she’s not speaking her lines that we see how expressive a dancer Peever is, with her sharply defined moves and long, extending arms. It’s not easy to speak and dance at the same time and it is difficult for an audience to take in the language of the dance while piecing together the story that’s coming out of the dancer’s mouth.

By the end of the hallucinatory performance, full of literary and artistic allusions from the Hunchback of Notre Dame to Charlie Chaplin, the mystery of Mr. Leftovers is pretty much dispelled, leaving only the question, “How does she do it?”

A horror in action

Betroffenheit

By Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young

Kidd Pivott & Electric Company

Presented by Canadian Stage

Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

February 18 to 21, 2016

 

Something very menacing is certainly going on as the lights come up on Betroffenheit. In an industrial room with a pair of doors, an electric panel, and a wall-mounted telephone, there’s a tangle of dangerous-looking cables. One of the thick cables, and then another and another, comes alive and snakes across the floor and up the wall. This scene was enough to get a serpent-scared viewer into a state of high anxiety, even before the unseen figure huddled in a corner (Jonathon Young) rises to his feet in a panic. (Hence the title, a German word that means a state of shock and bewilderment in the wake of disaster.)

Betroffenheit could serve as a very good depiction of post-traumatic stress syndrome, its causes and cures. But artistically, Crystal Pite and Jonathan Young have achieved something unsurpassed with this show, developed at the Banff Centre and premiered at the Pan American games in Toronto in July.

A lot of dialogue, repeated and mouthed by Young and other performers, runs through the first part of Betroffenheit, along the lines of “system failure . . .hold on, hold on . . . stay put . . . repeat: do not move . . .collapse approaching . . .” Young appears as the chief victim, trapped in a room where doors don’t open and the phone doesn’t connect.

Simultaneously, a show is being mounted as performers carrying props and costumes parade through, exiting by another door on the bare set. The dialogue could equally apply to the process of putting on a variety show, which always involves potential disaster, perfect (or imperfect) timing and changes of approach.

It’s the profound contrast between an obvious accident and vaudevillian routines, done in jaunty style, that heightens the nervousness we experience in part one. This troupe of six performers is astonishing.  The first to appear in clown face-paint is Jermaine Spivey, a Kidd Pivott member since 2008. He plays doppelganger to Young’s figure. When, in spangled turquoise three-piece suits and patent-leather shoes they perform a soft-shoe number, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Interspersed with their antics, a white-faced Cindy Salgado in a sequined two-piece that might have been created by Liberace, spiders around the set like a trapeze artist who lost her way. A canvas bearing a painting of the room forms a moving, collapsing building as the dancers cross the stage under it. The many exits and entrances drive this first 45-60 minutes like so many horrible distractions. The state of confusion we feel is complete as the curtain comes down at the intermission.

A tall steel pillar in shadow dominates the bare stage in the second part of Betroffenheit. The shadowy column at first suggests a possible escape route, and then serves as a kind of memorial. Owen Belton’s soundscape of gritty, industrial, electronic emergency sounds alternates with a moving piano piece and other totally encompassing sounds as the dancers, now in drab blue and grey gym clothing, work through a series of intricately choreographed combinations that amount to a catharsis in motion.

Notable are the ways that Spivey and others make puppets of themselves, tugging at their knees to manipulate their own feet. The imagery of duality brings to mind the way a person in a disaster might be at once suffering and watching himself go through it.

The timing involved in the rapidly morphing ensemble makes Betroffenheit a wonder in performance terms alone. The group forms a tumbling, ever-changing entity, a metaphor for the feelings a participant in disaster must undergo. The last man on stage makes a quiet, slow exit to music suitable for a requiem, and brings a lump to the throat.

Another fabulous Baker girl

phasespace

Peggy Baker Dance Projects

Betty Oliphant Theatre, Toronto

January 22-24 and 27-31, 2016

The heroine of Friday night’s performance of phasespace was Sahara Morimoto, who not only beautifully performed in a trio and a solo, but stepped in on very short notice to take the place of an injured Sean Ling in a duet with Andrea Nann.

Much was made, in the before-show chat from Baker and Fides Krucker, of the vocal scores that Krucker composed from the dancers’ own pre-verbal and non-verbal sounds. The voice, Baker maintained, provides a direct link to the performer’s body and to the audience. But it was Morimoto’s silent solo that was the highlight of the night.

In the noisiest piece, the trio performed by Ric Brown, Sarah Fregeau and Morimoto, there was little sign of the narrative that Krucker had seen forming while working with the dancers. Three sets of standard straight-backed chairs, one human-sized the other a miniature, made an aimless allusion to Alice in Wonderland. The dancers came and went and moved themselves and the chairs through space. John Kameel Farah, perched above and behind the dancers played and improvised acoustically and electronically on the piano and computer keyboards, but did not seem a part of the piece as he did in last year’s Baker show locus plot. Marc Parent’s well designed lighting defined performance spaces. All of these elements should have added up to a unified piece, but it was hard work to find coherence in this piece.

Morimoto was a character shaking with the giggles, a high tittering sound. Brown was a howling dog. Fregeau careened about and each of them phased in and out of a whispered chatter that had no obvious connection to their movement. Such distractions took away from the well-rehearsed dance steps.

In Baker’s introduction to the show, she referred to a starting point: recognizing her own choreography in the body memories of her dancers. When it came to the Morimoto solo, first mounted in 2013, we could see Baker’s vocabulary, alive and present in a dynamic way. The Tokyo-born dancer, who has worked with Baker since 2008, displayed the long, wind-milling arms, the precise hand gestures and the fluid, almost flying movement that have long been Baker’s hallmarks. Inside a diamond shape etched in blue light, Morimoto created a world of her own. It was a simple, abstract solo, a purity of movement expressed through facial and body gestures as only dance can do.

Andrea Nann added a new element to the gallery of dances. Not only is she a fine interpreter of Baker’s dance; she is an established performer of her own choreography. In the duet that Baker made on her and Ling in 2014, Nann’s prolonged, sinuous movements made a kind of dance alchemy.

Kate Holden, who has been a fine interpreter of just about every contemporary choreographer of note, performs the new Baker solo, also vocally scored by Krucker. Her performance stretched the boundaries of the space and she broke out of her invisible box with long, slow strides and a final winding-out, a Ginsbergian howl that seemed to come from some place deep within her.

CREDIT: Sahara Morimoto in a solo, one of four dances in phasespace. Photo by Jeremy Mimnagh

 

 

Sashar Zarif soars in dance

Moving Memories

Sashar Zarif Dance Theatre

Small World Music Centre

180 Shaw St. Studio 101

May 8 & 9, 8 p.m.

 

As complex and in a way alien to western dance as Sashar Zarif’s work is, there is no excuse for going away baffled from his show Moving Memories. The title refers to Zarif’s journey of rediscovery:  the roots of his dance in his grandmother’s practice and in the songs and folk dances of his home country of Azerbaijan. Elchin Musaoglu’s film, screening behind the performance space, documents the dancer’s trips back to Baku since 2004. Zarif discovered the reason for his quest in family memories he unearthed, both emotionally moving and literally causing him to move, to dance, to tell his story. There’s a touching moment when he is lying on a carpet his grandmother took with her everywhere: “What made me look for a home? It was her need to belong.”

Zarif has a home now, and it is in Toronto, Canada. Moving Memories is a culmination of all that he has learned in his research of his heritage, his dance aesthetic and himself. Rather brilliantly produced on a small budget, Moving Memories is a journey in dance. From his opening monologue to a closing, improvised dervish-y spin with drum and singing, Zarif takes us on a life dance, showing us the relationship between his culture, the need to be in the song (the Azerbaijani mugham) and for the song to be in him. Louis Laberge-Côté, in long flared white skirt, brings a contemporary interpretation to the Sama – the whirling dance done by shamans and Sufis. Mezmerizingly, he spins and dips, carving out the space with his arms, inhabiting the music with grace and power. At the centre of the show is Zarif’s solo, set to the poetry of Rumi: “The wound is the place where the light entres you.” The choreographer seems possessed as he utters deep growling, animal noises indicative of the essential self he has reached in for. It is a transformative dance showing the way to enlightenment. The whole thing is akin to an act of love.

As collaborator and dramaturge Elizabeth Langley informs us, when Zarif performs, he is so in the moment that there is no difference between living it and dancing it. Introducing him for the finale, she says, “Sashar will now experience the last work.” So he does and so do we.

Peggy Baker Dance Projects

loc√∫≈p∟0T

Peggy Baker Dance Projects

Betty Oliphant Theatre

April 29-30, May 1-3

A few years ago Peggy Baker, cruising the web, happened upon a cache of beautiful symbols and drawings of mathematical equations that spoke to her as descriptions of movement akin to choreographic renderings such as the Benesh notation system. Both pictorial alphabets are used to describe motion and the relationship of figures to each other: the speed, volume, duration, mass of bodies falling, rising or circling, moving through time and space.  These abstract equations looked like drawings for the blocking of a play. Baker felt a dance coming on.

First she sought out John Mighton, playwright and mathematician, to give her a quick tutorial on the meaning of the equations.  As Mighton drew diagrams and worked out an equation, she could envision dancers re-enacting one on stage.

Building the dance layer upon layer, Baker invited vocalist Fides Krucker to come in and give the dancers sounds to emit. These vocals comprise everyday sounds, such as growls, cries and whispers, repeated in the manner of chants made in kundalini yoga. Finally, the choreographer asked composer and musician John Kameel Farah to orchestrate a live electronic and acoustic piano soundscape to complement the dancers’ combinations and recombinations. Marc Parent’s lighting design makes cones of illumination over the whole thing.

The element of chance that contributed to the fluidity of the project, said Baker, a self-described formalist, “really rattled my cage.” Indeed to the viewer of Baker’s works over a couple of decades, this production is a paradigm shift from work she’s created in the past, and yet indubitably a Peggy Baker dance piece. Dancers Ric Brown, Sarah Fregeau, Kate Holden, Sean Ling and Sahara Morimoto are all fine interpreters of the Baker dance vocabulary and it is joy to behold the sharp, almost hieroglyphic, gestures that are the hallmark of her choreography.

Under a fall of light, Farah opens the show, with a tiny tinkling on the upper end of the piano keyboard. His sounds usher in the dancers into the performance space, in everyday shirts and jeans, as if marshalled by some unseen dance captain.  Above them on a screen, a diagram appears, of a hand-drawn equation, as if worked out on a scrap of paper (a pity that the lines from Mighton’s pencil couldn’t have been captured in live action). It doesn’t take much to see how the dance figures correspond to the numeric figures above them, as they mark out lines and vectors with their footsteps, the five of them arranging and re-arranging themselves in geometric patterns.

In mathematics, locus is defined as, “1. a curve, etc. formed by all points satisfying a particular equation between coordinates . . . moving according to mathematically defined conditions. Or 2. the centre or source of something.” The definition for plot is “1. a ground plan, map or diagram,” and “2. a plan or outline of the main events in a play, novel or film.” Or dance. With each new equation posted in  locus≈plot, the dancers reconvene, speaking in cries, growls and whispers, communicating in an animal and human way – following a plot.

From very abstract, nearly random movement, the dances become more formal, culminating in a circular sequence in which the performers call out “centre. diameter. circumference. radius.” As Farah’s score builds to a crescendo of rolling thunder, their voices draw our attention to the breath. Without mindful breathing there would be no dance, no life, no creation, no connection with the Earth.

And so it is with a sense of exhilaration that we watch Kate Holden, wearing a short, white shift, dance a muscular, grounded solo. Crouched stage front, she that ends on a deep crouch, loudly expelling the yogic breath of fire, in affirmation of the dance of life, depicted in the shadowy forms who caper about behind her.

Above: Kate Holden in locus≈plot Photo by Makoto Hirata