Happy International Dance Day!
Posted by Candice on April 29, 2009 at 11:35 am
Yes, that’s right. April 29th is International Dance Day. How are you celebrating? I think at least one crazy dance around your kitchen is in order! If you’re stuck for some steps check out this guy’s moves (remember this video?). Or just spend a good portion of the day watching dance videos on YouTube. You also might want to check out some important Canadian dance groups/people. Why not start at Dance Collection Danse or The Dance Current? Or, reread some of your favourite tomandcandice posts on dance. Anyway, at least think about dance today. Please.
To celebrate I’m posting a very short review/commentary I wrote a while back on TDT’s Chaismata (which also played in St. John’s last summer). The show is long over, but the writing shows how difficult it is to put movement into words.
Chiasmata Quivers: Talking to the Audience and the Universe Through Dance
On March 21, 2009 the lights went down on a full house at the home of the Toronto Dance Theatre - the Winchester Street Theatre. The small black box theatre shivered with anticipation as the audience prepared to watch twelve extraordinary modern dancers in their final performance of Christopher House’s Chiasmata.
Electronic music, twinkling like wind chimes, began the piece seconds before the lights went up on the entire cast spread across the stage dressed in long, earth-tone tunics. One at a time the dancers began to engage with the music, but not with each other. Gestural movements reminiscent of tapping, and searching defined the tone for the piece’s movement and gradually increased in physicality while maintaining the integrity of the scene. This pattern continued throughout the work as various combinations of the cast initiated their scenes by setting a particular movement vocabulary and then playing with echoes of the original physical sentiments to explore new interactions with time, space, and interpersonal relationships.
The scenes flowed logically beginning with sequences where the dancers barely acknowledge one another, moving to scenes that explore the various intersections of human relationships, and finishing with an intimate heterosexual pas de deux where intense human connection is finally established. Chiasmata questions the idea of free agency in relationships as the dancers move each other into turns, flips, and falls with a light touch or no touch at all, increasing the power of their subtle energy bodies, a difficult task for dancers who are so often firmly rooted in their physical bodies. Chiasmata is characterised by juxtaposing a fluid, carving, smooth arcing of limbs with sharp, short, repetitive movements that disrupt the natural energetic vibrations in the dancers’ proximal space.
Each section of the dance creates a distinct character with variations on the music and lighting and an obvious common intention amongst the dancers. The shared focus is easy to see as the dancers all use the same angles, efforts, phrasing techniques, and breathing spaces to speak to their audience on both physical and spiritual levels.
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