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CORPUS, moving, moves us

Singing in five-part harmony, making the music of the spheres, the five singing goddesses proceeding along Toronto’s Esplanade were a welcome sight for bystanders on May 25. This was the premiere of Divine Interventions, the latest production from CORPUS.

“There comes a time in every story when it feels like hope is lost,” states the introduction on the company website. “Everything is going wrong, all options have been exhausted, and the only thing left to do is pray for divine interventions.” That’s a sentiment most of us who’ve lived through the COVID-19 pandemic can relate to.

“We’ve been working on this piece for two years,” says artistic director and CORPUS co-founder David Danzon. That means in lockdown and rehearsing in masks. Danzon commissioned composer Anika Johnson to create new songs that form the score sung by Barbara Fulton, TrudyLee Gayle, Barbara Johnston, Tracy Michailidis and Michelle Yu. Choreographer Bonnie Kim and company member Matthew O’Connor collaborated with Danzon to achieve a trademark CORPUS spectacle — surrealism, delivered with wit and whimsy.

“They are five really talented, amazing singers, who also happen to be great movers,” says Danzon. They sang a capella, on and off their tricycle, winding up in the courtyard at Berkeley Castle at the end of the Esplanade. The four nights of the Toronto processional show found audiences eager for joyful and meaningful human interaction.

This spring and summer CORPUS is back on the road after a two-year hiatus, with engagements in San Diego, Norway, Sweden, Germany and France before returning to Canada for an August gig in Quebec. Among the shows they’re touring is the enduring Les Moutons, first seen in a Toronto park in 2003. You can get a taste of it in this video: Les moutons – Corpus Dance Projects

One might say Danzon, who was born in France, has come full circle since co-founding CORPUS with Dusk Dances artistic director Sylvie Bouchard in 1997. They arrived on the scene in 1996, creating A Flock of Flyers, for Dusk Dances. The premise was playful: “Due to severe budget cutbacks, the 217^th Canadian Flying Squadron has been left without any planes . . .” Danzon, in the part of squadron leader, led the performers, costumed in leather helmets like World War I flying aces, in a show of a kind never seen before in Toronto. You can watch it here: http://corpus.ca/creations/flock-of-flyers

Danzon moved to Toronto with his parents and brother when he was 15. After the family returned to France, he remained and after high school enrolled in York University’s theatre program. But he was not destined for the indoor stage. “It’s a curious thing, he says of his career path. “I grew up on street theatre, because I had an aunt who was part of a well known Paris theatre company in the 70s and 80s. They were doing a lot of street performances in France. In the 60s there was a big thing about taking theatre outside the traditional four walls; a lot of festivals developed and it became a kind of form unto itself.”

Danzon has been leading CORPUS tours abroad since the early 2000s. This year company will go back to Japan, a country among the 34 they’ve performed in where they are particularly popular. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of street festivals in Europe in the summer, says Danzon. Plenty to keep inspiring this street artist extraordinaire.

Photos, courtesy CORPUS, from left: A Flock of Flyers, Divine Interventions, La Bulle

Serge Bennathan: Paintings for the Soul

A broad, enticing smile is Serge Bennathan’s default expression. I beam back when we meet at a Broadway intersection in Vancouver. Bennathan, best known as a choreographer, has more than dance on his mind these days.

For the last several years, this jack of all arts has been turning out beautiful, intriguing and alluring watercolour paintings and showing them on his website.

It all began, says Bennathan, at the time when he was artistic director of Dancemakers. He got into the habit of writing, in a poetic way, and sketching when creating new dance works. He took his talent public for the first time in 1999, with a little book featuring an amusing cartoon character, The Other Moon of Mr. Figlio.

Becoming a full-time visual artist, Bennathan says in his delicious French accent, was an organic process. Nothing in a long career in the performing arts – he is still active in his choreographic work for the world’s major opera companies – was pre-planned.

Born in the village of L’Aigle in Normandy in 1957, Bennathan first saw an occupation for himself when his parents took him to see an operetta. Encouraged to learn dancing, he took his first ballet lesson in 1966, the only boy in his class. Bennathan’s father was in the military and the family moved frequently, but talented teachers were available in locations as disparate as Perpignan and Paris. Young Serge was curious enough to seize an opportunity whenever he saw one.

One day in 1975 in Paris, after being publicly admonished by his ballet teacher for arriving late prior to the end-of-year recital, Bennathan happened to notice a sign saying Roland Petit was auditioning new dancers for the Ballet National de Marseille. Only three dancers would be chosen from a field of 200 applicants. Serge was confident he’d make the cut. He didn’t. Shocked, he waited behind after all the other dancers had left the rehearsal hall. “Roland looked at me and said, ‘come, I’ll take you.’ ” To this day, Bennathan doesn’t know why. “I had a bad technique but I could jump really high. Roland would come close to me and say ‘Saute, saute’ and I would jump, with my hair flying.”

Bennathan’s first visit to Canada was on a tour with Ballet Marseille. Karen Kain was one of the guest artists they employed in the cities they visited. Petit encouraged Bennathan to be a choreographer, but when a dance he created did not get budgeted to include his preferred, Bennathan decided to leave. Invited by Rosella Hightower to take up a creative residence in Cannes, he settled there and later started his own company. After money troubles closed the company, Bennathan chose to immigrate to Canada. He arrived in Montreal in 1985 with a suitcase and a thousand dollars.

Luck and sharpened instincts took him like the wind from Montreal to Ottawa, where he had a very fruitful time with La Groupe de la Place Royale, to Vancouver and to Toronto to head up Dancemakers, where he served as artistic director from 1990 to 2006. When it was time to leave, he returned to Vancouver, creating dances as an independent choreographer under the name Les Productions Figlio.

Serge’s Vancouver bedroom serves as his painting studio. He has a drawing board near the window and his pictures are stacked on shelves in the corner. He can paint anywhere, which is important for a peripatetic man like him. “When I was 13 years old I wanted to be a monk, to have this space of silence. Now I’m there,” he says.

Bennathan explains the origins of the pictures he is pulling out. “I am attracted to this right now,” he says of a painting with mountains and a night sky. The constellations and the stars are only visible to people who live outside cities, as he does when he returns to a little house he owns in Normandy.

Then there’s the Courageous Villages series of paintings, beautiful renditions of fortified towns that have lasted for centuries. He shows an unsold one of St. Paul de Vence, the place in the south of France that has always attracted artists, most famously Picasso, Chagall and Alexander Calder. These pictures, rich in a thickly laid watercolour paint, are dazzling in their colours, particularly red. (Full disclosure: I bought one of Bennathan’s paintings, Dance is My Freedom.)

A pandemic series called Giants feature huge figures on bare landscapes. A newish picture, “Zone Libre,” has an element of the giants, in the form of a huge seated figure draped in the Ukrainian flag.

Bennathan calls his art Paintings for the Soul, because he thinks maybe the pictures might help viewers in a gently healing way. He finds he needs to be of service somehow. “Painting is what I can give to people.” It’s obvious, in any case, that the inspiration for these watercolour pictures comes from some place deep within him.

http://www.sergebennathan.com

Instagram: serge.bennathan

Facebook: Serge Bennathan

From top left, clockwise: Zone Libre, Quand Calder et Chagall Illuminaent St. Paul de Vence, Serge Bennathan, Creating the Music of Our Lives

Dancing the Black diaspora

Politically, economically and socially, 2020 was a disaster year. A global pandemic was backdrop to an eruption of violence and oppression suffered by people of colour and indigenous nations. But those hardships have given rise to an artistic expression of pride and determination.

Among the many artists who’ve been hard at work while theatres are dark is Esie Mensah, a Toronto dancer, choreographer, director and educator who comes with an impressive resumé that includes work with Rihanna, Drake, Arcade Fire and the Toronto Raptors, and a Dora nomination for her work Shades.

She has made TESSEL, the title taken from the word tessellate, which means to form a pattern of shapes that fit together lyrically and visually. The dance film, co-commissioned by Fall for Dance North and Harbourfront Centre, is both a showcase and a podium for 14 Black Canadian performers whose voices we hear over scenes of them dancing – in just about every dance genre you’d normally see on a stage. It is released online today, June 1, the first anniversary of Blackout Tuesday, a day in 2020 when arts organizations stopped their regular programming as a protest against racism.

“Art is a protection ritual,” says a man speaking over footage of Halifax performer Liliona Quarmyne dancing a willowy solo at dusk on a beach, the waves lapping behind her. “Dance is a protection ritual. So every time you dance you are creating a protection ritual for yourself.”

The narrative of this 15-minute film was stitched together from snippets of seven hours of conversations orchestrated by Mensah.

Viewers will easily identify with many of the voices heard here. “I’m learning what love really means,” a female voice explains. “I’m really trying to think about change and what that looks like,” says another. A man states, “When you hire me to do something, you hire all of me, not just what you see visibly.”

A range of genres, ages and Canadian regions are represented here among dancers who are not widely known in the theatre, except for elder statesman Ronald A. Taylor, moving stylishly in front of the pillars of Princes’ Gates at Toronto’s Exhibition Place.

Many revelations occur in this short piece, derived from the opening of hearts and minds among the 14 performers. “When you have what is called a ‘service heart’, you are constantly giving to and serving other people,” says a woman’s voice over the face and movements of Toronto performer Natasha Powell.

TESSEL boasts high production values. Voices overlay voices; Lisa La Touche’s tap-dancing feet overlay dances by Livona Ellis and Powell. Some dances are punctuated with a simple gesture, such as the fist that turns into a hand over the heart, an image created by Eugene “GeNie” Baffoe of Winnipeg.

One statement refers to the ancestors, making a moment when the black diaspora and the indigenous peoples of Canada express common cause through dance. It is, after all, the oldest storytelling form. Two Vancouver dancers, Kevin Fraser and Livona Ellis, indeed live on the unceded territories of the Musqueam Squamish Sleil-Waututh nations.

This is a work that often moves. “Nothing we give is without value,” we hear from a man’s voice, over video of Alexandra “Spicey” Landé dancing in her Montreal loft. Amen to that.

TESSEL premieres on Tuesday June 1, 2021 and is streaming free at: www.tessel.film. Links to the film can be found on the websites of the many co-presenters, including Citadel + Compagnie and dance immersion.

Photo of Esie Mensah by Mikka Gia

Red Sky on fire

If you want to see some terrific contemporary dancing, set to an amazing score by Eliot Britton and Rick Sacks and performed live on stage, get down to the Berkeley Street Theatre to see the latest Red Sky production, AF.

Billed as “seven movements of contemporary dance and compelling physical storytelling,” AF is a show that grew out of Red Sky’s residency in the Berkeley Street Company. The initials are taken from Animal Farm, George Orwell’s allegorical novella of 1945 that depicted a rebellion among farm animals seeking freedom from their farmer overlord. It does not end well.

According to Red Sky artistic director Sandra Laronde, rather than recapitulating the dark path of Animal Farm, this show, choreographed by Thomas Fonua, took its lead from the more triumphant Anishinaabe mythology, specifically the eight fire prophecies.

The Anishinaabe fires correspond with epochs in the history of Turtle Island (i.e., the world), each fire a prophecy. The fourth fire, for instance, foretold the coming of a light-skinned people. The seventh fire, as explained on the website crystalwind.ca, was delivered by a young, clear-eyed prophet. The seventh fire was to lead to the rebirth of the Anishinaabe nation. The eighth and final fire will be an eternal flame signifying, “peace, love, brotherhood and sisterhood.”

None of this information is available to the audience, so the dancers have a daunting task – to explain in mime and movement what’s going on. What’s more, the wonderful voiceover from Anishinaabe speaker Albert Owl, is nowhere translated. It would have been a simple matter, given Chris Malkowski’s clever lighting design, to project surtitles on the brick wall that forms the back of the stage.

Story-wise, AF takes a while to find its feet. In a cone of light, a tall figure of powerful mien, with long hair and a cloth draped over his jeans, opens the show. In front of him in darkness is a long table and all we can make out are four heads. When the lights come on over the table, we see it a supine male, leaned over by two women dressed in flowing blue dresses, their hands clawing at the supine figure’s legs, their heads shaking rapidly back and forth, somehow in synch with the rhythm of the music and drumming to the right of them on stage.

Even those ignorant of the mythology will catch the meaning of the fourth or fifth movement, when a mottled circle of light slowly encloses the dancers in a tight formation. The paleskins take over the land and put the Anishinaabe on reserves.

The tall, warrior-like character might be interpreted as delivering the eighth prophecy, as flames (a trick of lighting) lick around the dancers: Eddie Elliot, Michael Rourke, Miyeko Ferguson, Marrin Jessome and Connor Mitten.

Fonua’s contemporary moves are pretty standard, but as barrel rolls flow into floor crawls or leaps and push-pull partnering, it’s hard to see any aspect of Animal Farm – or any necessity for it.

Yes, the dancers do a lot of sideways, forward and backward moves on all fours and sometimes there are farm animal sounds, but what you notice are the birds’ cries, blending with a soundtrack of recordings from Gabe Gaudet, Marie Gaudet, Nelson Tagoona, Tanya Tagaq and a Tribe Called Red. Jenifer Brousseau’s live singing and keening, invoking the spirits, takes precedence. The problematic dance language is in repeated poses with heads down and faces unseen, always suggesting submission. Problematic, because this is a hopeful, upbeat show and we need to know that before the final upright, towering formation.

Direction and concept by Sandra Laronde

Choreography by Thomas Fonua

Music by Eliot Britton and Rick Sacks

Lighting design by Chris Malkowski

A Red Sky Performance production presented by Canadian Stage at Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto, until March 1

Photo from AF by Dahlia Katz

‘Let’s queer up the world together’

“Toxic masculinity” is such an oft-used term, one almost forgets there is any other kind. So Sébastien Provencher’s Children of Chemistry, set on five gay male dancers, comes as a welcome corrective. The show, first worked on in 2015 as a site-specific piece in Montreal, contains in its theatrical version all the drama –and comedy — of a well made one-act play.

Dancers Miguel Anguiano, Jean-Benoît Labrecque, Louis-Elyan Martin, Alexandre Morin and Simon Renaud first appear on the black box stage of the Citadel as a quiet ensemble, dressed variously in white shirts or t-shirts over jeans, a skirt or underwear. Slowly, in precise in unison, they move their arms and hands, raising elbows, pointing, stretching, opening palms like a flower and repeating a hand gesture to the forehead that suggests a rooster’s comb. This first movement is like a work of synchronized sign language, floating over Hani Debbache’s electronic score, a gentle hum that builds to something like techno-funk.

Before you know it, one dancer has broken out – there’s one in every crowd, you think. And soon they’re all going freestyle, colliding with one another. One, Jean-Benoît Labrecque, has a little breakdown on stage.

Either they are highly skilled quick-change artists or there are some very good dressers back stage, because in the blink of an eye, the five have returned in colourful blazers, mincingly doing a fashion runway walk sporting camouflage army dress, swimwear (featuring a one-piece with a thong back to reveal rounded cheeks) and sports gear, culminating with a guy in a colourful windjacket doing a wobbly turn on roller-blades. Soon they are down to skin, a rubbery horse’s head and white socks being the only attire of one model.

Vamping becomes voguing in the hilarious football sequence that has them all in red leotards with matching red helmets. Soon they are in full-blown North American red-blooded form, a coach shouting orders, all marching, military style – sometimes on tiptoe.

Children of Chemistry comes back to quiet as the lights go down, one bare shoulder illuminated in the fading light as all five lie face-down, bums up like five children sleeping in the same bed.

In his notes, choreographer and costume designer invites us to watch this show and “queer up the world together.” He’s got a point: it’s for our own good, whoever we are.

Children of Chemistry

Choreography by Sébastien Provencher

Music by Hani Debbache

Lighting design by Nancy Bussières

Presented by Citadel Compagnie at The Citadel, Toronto, until February 22

Photo of Jean-Benoît Labrecque, Miguel Anguiano, Alexandre Morin, Louis-Elyan Martin and Jossua Collin by Justine Latour

A dream of a mixed ballet program

Three cheers for the National Ballet of Canada for bringing Frederick Ashton’s The Dream back into action after 17 years. Sir Frederick Ashton (1905-1988) was an English choreographer whose ballets brought a new quickness, brightness and delight to the form. The National Ballet lists eight of his works in its repertoire, including the audience favourite La Fille Mal Gardée. Even more than most ballet creators, Ashton let the music dictate the shape of his work.

The Dream, set to music by Felix Mendelssohn arranged by John Lanchbery, is a fine example of Ashton’s craft. The violin section that heralds the appearance of dancing fairies leads us into the one-act dance as if we too are enchanted.

Ashton boiled down William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to its essentials: three sets of lovers out of sync with one another. He re-imagined the play, set in ancient Greece, as a royal court in Victorian times, the place being an English wood where fairies rule.

Jillian Vanstone is a regal Titania, queen of the fairies, well matched with a noble Harrison James as Oberon, her king. Their struggle concerns ownership of an Indian changeling boy, whom Oberon would have as his servant. Aramis Gonzalez in a heavy courtier’s costume melts hearts with his every appearance as the Changeling.

Ashton placed the fairy Puck at the centre of The Dream, as he should be. Puck, sprinkling the flower dust that makes his victims fall in love with the first creature they see upon awakening is the change agent who drives the plot and initiates the fun. Skylar Campbell is dazzling in a role that calls for a deft touch, speed and a bit of craziness. He fairly flies across the stage. Second soloist Joe Chapman has a particular challenge as Bottom, the worker whom Puck transforms into a donkey. He must dance in point shoes; Chapman manages, going from delicacy to slapstick with wit and precision and bringing a bit of dignity to the role.

Tanya Howard stands out as Helena, the most sympathetic of the wronged women. She is ultimately to wed Lysander; played by Ben Rudisin, who enters stage right as a comic fop. Chelsy Meiss is a fetching Hermia. She is finally married to her Demetrius, a nimble Giorgio Galli, from the company’s corps de ballet.

Paired with The Dream on this mixed program is Guillaume Côté’s Being and Nothingness, a stark contrast to Ashton, but not without its own sense of play. Appointed a principal dancer in 2004, Côté is also the company’s choreographic associate and has added significant works to its repertoire. Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical manifesto of 1943, Côté explores ideas of selfhood, free will, the individual versus the crowd and the meaning of sexual congress in some razor-sharp contemporary ballet combinations.

Pianist Edward Connell gets equal billing with the dancers for playing the brilliant score made up of Philip Glass pieces, including Metamorphosis No. 4. The music comes up from the orchestra pit, so the dancers appear to be performing in silence or acting out what’s running through their consciousness.

Côté also dramatizes an opposition of subject and object. Being and Nothingness is structured in seven parts: The Light, The Bedroom, The Door, The Sink, The Living Room, The Street, The Call. The spaces are designated with a door, a bed, a bathroom sink, and a telephone on the wall, perhaps indicating a higher, determinist power. The Street is represented by 11 dancers in men’s suits and hats, as if they’d been borrowed from Joe, Jean-Pierre Perrault’s monumental 1983 ensemble piece.

Greta Hodgkinson, centred, controlled yet emotive, anchors the piece. Rolling through on the repetitive Glass piano arpeggios, are a series of duets, solos and ensembles, illustrating aspects of Sartrian existentialism. Most notable is Siphesihle November, the South African dancer who joined the National Ballet last year. He is shaving at the sink and whirls into a muscular solo. Côté’s work is very physical, but what strikes one most about Being and Nothingness is the grace and fluidity of the movement and how it all flows into a satisfying experience.

The Dream

By Sir Frederick Ashton

Being and Nothingness

By Guillaume Côté

A National Ballet of Canada production at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto, until November 25

Photos of Greta Hodgkinson, Jillian Vanstone and Harrison James by Aleksandar Antonijevic

The Monkey Queen springs to life in a new drama

The story of the Monkey King is probably the best known legend to come out of China. Like many such stories, it is about transformation. For The Monkey Queen, playwright Diana Tso switches the gender of the shape-shifting mythic monkey and simultaneously tells the story of how a Canadian-born girl finds her Chinese roots.

Hong Kong-born Canadian dancer/choreographer William Yong directs a show that is equal parts dance, storytelling, acting and singing. He is also listed as dramaturge, choreographer and scenic designer.

Young actor and recent theatre school graduate Nicholas Eddie plays opposite Tso, more or less mastering ballet moves he was never trained for.

The 65-minute show, staged in the small space at the Theatre Centre, is surprisingly easy to follow, given all the roles that Tso and Eddie must shift in and out of.

The Monkey King, the warrior Sun Wukong, grew out of legend and is the hero of a 16^th-century epic novel, The Journey to the West. According to the novel, he was born from a stone, possesses supernatural powers and is a trickster. The warrior monkey demonstrates Taoist practices, fights off demons and is imprisoned by the Buddha.

Tso loved the Monkey King stories and always wanted to play him but would never be cast in a male part. So she made her own adaptation. Monkey Queen, like her gender opposite, is a warrior of immense strength and is equipped for speed; she skips continents in a single somersault. Born in Canada, she travels east to China to discover her origins.

Yong remembers the Monkey King stories as cartoons on Hong Kong TV when he was a small boy. In partnering with Tso, he drove her to expand the performance possibilities of her play.

First you need a set that can adapt to worlds only imagined, as the characters move through time and space, legend and reality. This is done with a zig-zagging catwalk above the stage floor, so that the players are either flying or sinking below earth level.

The warrior queen’s travels take her to a shaman woman. Eddie dons a wig to impersonate this spirit guide. He also plays a demon and the Buddha. Exceedingly tall this young actor is also pliable, so he can lift Tso and move like a dancer.

Tso, alternating between the queen and the girl growing up in Canada, prances with lightness and grace, all the while telling her story.

The frequent transformations mean conveying the image of a carp in the bottom of a lake, a blue heron and a polar bear. The allegory here refers to a threatened natural world. Lighting designer Rebecca Picherack and sound composers Nick Storring and Brandon Valdivia greatly assist in the more than usual willing suspension of disbelief required to enjoy The Monkey Queen.

The Monkey Queen

By Diana Tso

Directed by William Yong

At the Theatre Centre, Toronto, until Dec. 2

Photo of Diana Tso and Nicholas Eddie by David Hou

Now you see it, now you don’t

“Poetry in the flesh,” said my seatmate at the end of Humans, an artful act from Australia’s Circa Contemporary Circus, performed for one night, November 9, at Toronto’s Sony Centre.

Under the artistic direction of Yaron Lifschitz, Circa is a Brisbane-based company established in 2004. That its 10 performers are Olympic-level gymnasts and skilled acrobats, tumblers, trapeze artists and contortionists is a given.

But Humans is no mere circus act. It’s a 70-minute highly choreographed show with no props, other than a swing and ropes, no scenery, no costumes: just briefs and tee-shirts or bras.

These sturdy men and women are not what we’ve come to expect from champions of the mat or dancers at the barre. Built like discus throwers, they are nevertheless lithe, agile and move like quicksilver.

Never mind the contemplative description of the show: “what it means to be human and how our bodies, our connections and our aspirations all form part of who we are.” Humans is sheer joy from beginning to end.

As we take our seats in the theatre, we see the acrobats getting out of street clothes and into skimpy dance gear; one woman hunched under her coat and trousers like a land tortoise, extricates herself in a funny bit of contortionism.

Soon they are coming and going, each on her own path, entering the stage and exiting and entering again, in a musical and yes, poetic, flow set to tunes as disparate as Blixa Bargeld’s “I Wish I was a Mole in the Ground,” Astor Piazzolla’s “Ave Maria,” Andy Williams’s “The Impossible Dream” and a nostalgic accordion tune, “Waltz for Jb.”

Moving, leaping, tumbling, erecting themselves as human totem poles, spreading across the stage in weird poses that would stymie any yoga expert, Circa calls for maximum attention spans. Stunning highlights stick in memory: one man shouldering five men and women joined in a chain. Bridges made of standing acrobats are walked over, as if heads were river stones. Bodies are wrapped around torsos like so much dead, pliable weight. It may be called “extreme acrobatics,” but Humans, to this watcher, was everything a dance can be, to lift the spirits and take us beyond the flesh.

Moving in every sense of the word

When someone suggested to Laurence Lemieux that she make a dance honoring the Canadians lost in World War I, her first thought was for the community where her Citadel + Compagnie is based: Toronto’s Regent Park.

It didn’t take much delving in the mass of war documents maintained in Canadian archives to locate eight men from the Dundas and Parliament neighbourhood killed in the battle for Vimy Ridge in April 1917. Two of them shared the same last name: a father and son who lived on Gerrard Street. One soldier Lemieux discovered was William James Hawkey. “He lived just around the corner from the Citadel in a house that remains today.”

Starting from the specific and the personal has paid off in Jusqu’a Vimy, a title best translated as All the way to Vimy. The through-line in this complex multi-media production is the journey taken by these young men, untrained recruits entering a war of a kind never before experienced.

Making drama has often been Lemieux’s choreographic modus operandi. She knew what she was doing when she picked from the archives the actual soldiers, then assembled her dancers — Luke Garwood, Andrew McCormack, Philip McDermott, Tyler Gledhill, Connor Mitton, Brodie Stevenson, Daniel Gomez, Zhenya Cerneacov and Kaitlin Standeven – assigning the identity of a soldier to each of the men.

“They got to read all the information about that soldier and then we all [including composer John Gzowski and production designer Jeremy Mimnagh] went to France to visit the memorial site and look at their graves,” says Lemieux, who was fine-tuning lighting cues on the eve of opening.

Jusqu’a Vimy is a totally immersive experience, lending access to the emotions and torments of people who lived through a horror 100 years ago. The show is the dance equivalent of Timothy Findley’s novel The Wars, which relived the experience of WWI soldiers from just a few kilometres north of Regent Park in Rosedale.

The men are introduced one by one as each dancer advances into the performance space. Blown up on Cheryl Lalonde’s cloth surround, are handwritten documents indicating an individual “killed in action” or “missing in action” or his pay rate. Before the dance has even begun we get stark reminders of the fragility of life.

Jusqu’a Vimy is structured in sections in which the dancer/soldiers, in period uniforms, puttees and boots, move in formation as if on a march, partner each other or make a scrum to carry off a fallen mate. Making friends, they enter battle, bombarded time and again with artillery. Or they shiver in trenches huddled against each other. You get the message, as orange explosions burst on all sides of the screen, cued to Gzowski’s powerful soundscape. One minute that soldier beside you is your pal; the next he’s a corpse.

Kaitlin Standeven enters the scene at intervals, once carrying a paper notice, another time a folded greatcoat, wandering among the soldiers as if they were ghosts of fallen husbands, fathers, brothers and sons.

Mimnagh makes the landscape of the silent Vimy woods the central image, manipulating his projections to show the change of seasons and to create a lasting visual memorial. This is a show that will endure, lest we forget.

Jusqu’a Vimy

Choreography by Laurence Lemieux

Musical composition by John Gzowski

Production design by Jeremy Mimnagh

Lighting by Simon Rossiter

Costume and sets by Cheryl Lalonde

At The Citadel: Ross Centre for Dance, Toronto, from November 16 to 18 and November 22 to 25

Photography by Jeremy Mimnagh

Mesmerizing moves

From its opening scene in a living room under constant rearrangement, Factory took me back to big ensemble arrangements of a kind you might see at the National Ballet. Michael Caldwell is a choreographer with classical tendencies.

Give him five outstanding dancers and you get a perfect mix of ensembles, solos, duets, trios all in a seamless flowing movement, and exchange of energies.

Factory posits “the riotous disruption of a hyper-connected society.” To this viewer it looked like a place where people were constantly coming and going, colliding, combining, working together or apart and finally arriving home.

In the room that is being arranged even as we wait for the dance to begin are: a standing fan, a red square carpet, a small table, an old-fashioned radio console, a desk chair. Lori Duncan, Louis Laberge-Côté, Benjamin Landsberg, Kaitlin Standeven and Heidi Strauss are all dressed in clothes you’d expect to see in the workplace or on the street. Laberge-Côté wears a raincoat over dress shirt. Landsberg is dressed like a biker and wears dark glasses. The women all wear outfits office workers might don.

Phil Stong’s outstanding soundscape brings sounds like the ocean, traffic, a factory assembly line, the hum of electricity, the rolling sound at a skateboard park or tranquil music.

The carpet rollout announces the action. Caldwell’s production designer Joe Pagnan has made brilliant use of this prop, which is finally crumpled up against the wall like a sculpture. The shoes they all removed are contained there.

These dancers co-ordinate in a way that bespeaks rigorous rehearsal. An opening solo by Standeven is supported and watched by the other four participants, just as it might be in a ballet. At times, they all move as one unit, striding across the space like creatures on a ship rolling at sea. Sometimes they fall as if victims of a shipwreck.

At moments, a figure will appear like an observer, a chronicler of urban life, then the configuration dissolves and another episode begins. This quintet operates together like the parts of a perpetual motion machine.

There’s peace and struggle, a fight scene and lots of contract-release coupling. A principle at play here is that a soloist will start slowly, then pirouette, then spin out of control. Then it’s someone else’s turn.

Factory has a pleasing symmetry that makes one hope it will return to the stage before too long.

Factory

By Michael Caldwell

Sound by Phil Strong

Light by Noah Feaver

Production design by Joe Pagnan

Presented by Citadel + Compagnie

At The Citadel, Toronto, until Sept. 23

Zhenya Cerneacov photo

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