New works reveal how young artists view contemporary culture
This weekend Pumphouse Theatres hosts new works by Sylvie Moquin ( Vital Signs) and Meghann Michalsky (Residue), two rising young choreographers who bear scrutiny in a growing Calgary contemporary dance scene.
Project InTandem involves 15 young artists from various fields, including playwright /dramaturge Matthew Hall, combining their talents to create the new works.
Young artists like Michalsky and Moquin often come with impressive pedigrees that include long lists of teachers and performance experiences. They give us a chance to learn how an emerging generation of artists might view their contemporary culture.
Best of all, we get to see how they channel that creative energy into an art piece that suggests the future of dance.
There is a diversity of influence here, never a shortage of ideas, and nary a faulty moment in how to marshal them. These are youthful-period pieces to be sure, but of perfection and stark maturity.
The first piece, Residue, explored individuality and identity in the face of pressures to conform to the ubiquitous influence of mass media. The work could be more appropriately understood as a struggle to escape the residual fragmentation that dogs our online identities, which so often characterize isolation wrought by social media.
Here was a fine narrative, lucidly executed by Brenna Heer and Cassandra Bowerman, sprung from core strength, a strong grasp of movement, athleticism and with self-contained movement ideas deceptively appearing in pseudo-sketch form that eventually would take shape into longer, wellworked-out phrases.
A restricted, parsimonious movement language precisely described a clear story about struggle to escape the illusion of controlling one’s artistic destiny, ultimately allowing this fine work to live and breathe.
Co- director Hall provided a thoughtful voice-over, underscoring the outside pressures of conformity at the cost of individuality. He writes with a quiet edge, an intensity that both dancers internalized in their use of isolated, but always directly contrasting, movement.
Often this spoke most eloquently in contained bursts of freedom in all limbs, or windmilling while moving mostly on diagonal axes, conveying themes of social smothering and trying to break free.
Another sharp feature of the work consisted of the duo’s ability to convey a warped sense of residual temporal protraction, moving in and out of frame with our normative sense of time, as though swimming against it with furious arm sweeps one moment, and stabilizing to its gentle fluidity with deep pliés the next.
Our sense of time in this piece becomes a residue of lost identity and the performance forced us to confront the complexities of artistic survival.
Nathaniel’s Schmidt’s score with an electronica soundscape allowed us to take the pulse of the work.
In the end, Bowerman and Heer provided a hopeful conclusion, namely that the performance space and its memories reinforce each performer’s artistic struggle for authenticity.
The evening’s second work was the challenging Vital Signs, constructed for three very different bodies and movement signatures.
Taking the pulse, exhaling, a panic attack, visceral entities intuiting their way through the biological, an interior rhythm, slowly, in multiple uses of isolated gesture create a narrative about anxiety and deep reactivity we can all have to life.
Moquin’s work is created out of pure artistic honesty: if we are really willing to admit it, our vital signs often form the hallmark of who we are from moment to moment. Without a clear storyline, the highly abstract Vital Signs risks much and gains at least as much in return as an emergent personal statement about how art is felt through the body and the more visceral aspects of what the body can express.
Vital Signs doesn’t present as a functioning narrative but rather as a felt experience, groped for rather than grasped at, via a darkly intuitive mosaic of contemporary metaphors about the body.
For example, X-rayed ‘ bones’ drawn with white day-glow marker are illuminated via UV light, displaying what lies beneath us all in our very cells and sinews.
Careful movement by the trio of Nicole Charlton- Goodbrand, Valentina Dimitriou and Margarita Kozhevnikova made hidden visceral connections with gracious upper body movements.
Duos of one dancer shadowing behind another in close formation gave way toward the end of the performance to a striking trio: all three women moved as one, as though the performer sandwiched in the middle was a kind of visceral self of the manufactured outer skins provided by the other two dancers. It was telling and hypnotic, a definite high point that brought Vital Signs into sharper focus, and the evening of tandem performances into a fine pair of successes.