Laurie Young comes home to dance in NAC program
Ottawa native presents performance that explores the shifting nature of time
Twenty years ago, Laurie Young was a promising young dancer in Ottawa when the influential German choreographer Sasha Waltz invited her to Berlin.
It was a huge opportunity for Young, a Canterbury grad who at the time was dancing with Ottawa’s Le Groupe Dance Lab. Led by artistic director Peter Boneham and housed in Arts Court, the nowdefunct dance lab was created as a workshop centre for contemporary dance research and development, with an ensemble of dancers to help visiting choreographers bring new pieces to life.
After Waltz visited Le Groupe in 1995 and worked with the dancers, she recruited two of them — Young and Luc Dunberry — to follow her back to Berlin, one of the world’s most important dance cities. Young was hesitant at first.
“It was daunting,” she recalls. “I was 22. It was a big move. I had done a backpacking tour a couple of years prior, just after the Wall came down, and it was very intense. I had held that as my memory of Berlin. But of course, I couldn’t say no.”
Young spent eight years with Sasha Waltz and Guests, and has been in Berlin ever since, still working as a dancer, but also establishing herself as a choreographer with a unique voice.
“She’s extremely inquisitive and a really commanding performer,” says Cathy Levy, artistic director of the NAC’s dance department. “And she’s quirky, which is something I like, with a strong voice and a strong identity.”
Levy is bringing Young back to hometown Ottawa this week as part of the Canadians at Large portion of the NAC’s Face2Face series, which returns after a hiatus last year. The fifth edition (in six years) of the series, the goal is to shine a light on Canadian dance artists who are making a splash outside Canada.
“It really impressed us when we did our homework to see how many Canadians have made careers for themselves in Germany, in Belgium, in the States,” Levy said. “It does make us proud that alongside achievements in some of the other art forms, like music and literature, our Canadian dance artists are having an impact, and we want to bring them back and show them off.”
Young is one of five Canadian dance artists in town this week as part of the series. She performs at her old stomping ground, Arts Court’s ODD Box, while the others — a triple bill featuring Joshua Beamish, Belinda McGuire and CIE Mossoux-Bonté, and a performance by Indigenous performer/ choreographer Daina Ashbee — take place at La Nouvelle Scene.
Young will perform her 2014 piece, How is Now, a collaboration with her friend, the towering drummer and sound designer Johannes Malfatti, that explores the shifting nature of time.
“To be honest, I’m considered an older dancer now, and there’s something about an aging dancer’s body,” says Young, 44. “There’s a finite sense of time that comes from working with your body so long, and I kind of want to delve into that and understand what kind of physicalities are still available to me within that context. One thing about making your own work as you age is you choreograph stuff you can still do.
“The piece starts being really centred on time and speed and what is considered the normative rhythms of gesture. It’s a piece that plays very much with time, with repetition, with looping, playing with fast-forwarding or rewinding to see what might be held between the frames of different images.”
Young and the drummer, Malfatti, had worked together in the past, first bonding over their shared love of what Young describes as “questionable heavy metal.” Growing up in Ottawa, she loved heavy music, including Faith No More, Pantera and Fishbone, and still calls Fishbone’s wild, gravity-defying appearance at Carleton University’s Porter Hall in 1994 one of the best shows she’s ever seen.
She knew Malfatti understood that energy. “I knew I wanted to work with a really tight score, and Johannes is quite a perfectionist, very interested in detail,” Young says, “and I found that works well with what can be quite wild. I needed something that can be rooted in minutiae and detail, and also something that can be quite rock ’n’ roll and big.”