Dairakudakan conjures astonishing Paradise DANCE

Straight choices

PARADISE

A Dairakudakan production. A Vancouver International Dance Festival presentation. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Friday, March 10. No remaining performances

A mind-blowing carnival of unearthly 2 delights, Paradise is a formidable contender for Vancouver’s dance event of the year. This was a rare chance to see one of the most outlandish shows to hit town… well, since Dairakudakan first came here in 2015.

The production—from Japanese butoh legend Akaji Maro—was exotically terrifying, with ghostlike forms, echoing screams, and possessed laughter. But just as the epic, stage-filling visions of life, death, ecstasy, and torment reached their zenith, the sparklysuited roller skaters arrived.

The maestro himself appeared at the beginning, rising dramatically from a convulsing, huddled mass of bald, white-caked, near-naked forms. Maro wore a long green gown and a green-streaked white fright wig, anchoring the other dancers by long chains clamped to their necks, heads, arms, and legs. They pull out and circle him like lost, trapped souls, spokes on a wheel of hell.

Maro is deeply, cynically interested in how we define paradise these days as the earth teeters on the brink of an apocalypse. The visions he conjured sometimes suggested different religious and historic notions of utopia. Recurring images of flower petals and projections of Henri Rousseau’s lush, leafy paintings were nods to ancient Persian ideas of paradise as a garden. There was also a scene where neon-red, -blue, and -yellow-maned Eves and their Adams are tempted by fruit— and by two nightmare-inducing serpent-dancers with flicking red tongues and undulating arms.

But Maro is also interested in the fictional paradises we try to construct: note the grinning, satin-clothed roller skaters with the John Travolta moves.

Still, you didn’t have to overanalyze everything to enjoy Paradise. This was a show that was entirely entertaining on a purely visual level. Scenario after scenario unfolded on a stage where tall boxes cleverly shape-shifted to create absurd new worlds. At one point, limbs jutted and bent out of the tops of those rectangles. At another moment, two eerily smiling heads poked out of small holes. A synthesized score that sounded like a John Carpenter ’80s horror movie added to the atmosphere.

Amid the spectacle, the skill and commitment of Maro’s 18 honed dancers made it all work, each mastering the crouched, primal, zombielike moves of butoh, but bringing individual demons to their personas. An early scene found the ghoulish figures throwing off their chains and lurching around Maro, each one twisting his or her face and body up into a different, detailed kind of pain.

The show built to a frenzy of colour, then circled in on itself. Paradise’s giddy, chaotic roller-skating party gave way, again, to the chains. The smiles were a ruse; we delude ourselves by chasing paradise.

This was dark stuff from a darkly funny genius. Maro and his dedicated group received a standing ovation; he met the applause and whooping with a bow, pleasing everyone with his deadpan killer death stare—the kind that can chill your blood.

> JANET SMITH

in answer to all that sound and fury, Abraham.in.motion made its Vancouver debut. And the choreographer was ready to show how you can create a different kind of magic with just a few bodies on-stage—in at least a couple of instances, with no music and no props.

The opening number, a duet from his yet-to-debut work Dearest Home, took place entirely in silence. And it was a little taste of what really sets Abraham’s swift, light-as-oxygen contemporary movement apart: soul, with a dash of swagger. You can sense that the man and woman here, danced gorgeously and charismatically by Tamisha Guy and Jeremy Jae Neal, have a history. And in this piece we see them come together, push apart, and play the game of love. You can feel a lot going on between these two, and it’s not easy to create that kind of chemistry.

The fittingly named Quiet Dance also started soundlessly, the magnetic Catherine Ellis Kirk moving in isolation from four others. This was beautiful dance, with arms arcing and slicing through air, but what made it special was that it seemed to emanate from deep within her—that sense of soul. It became a perfect embodiment of the subtle sounds of jazz pianist Bill Evans, riffing on Leonard Bernstein’s “Some Other Time”.

These hushed works were precursors of the more ambitious and energized The Gettin’, Abraham’s answer to the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of apartheid in South Africa. Dressed in ’50s outfits, the dancers show their stuff, finding the rhythms of Robert Glasper’s version of the seminal 1960 jazz piece We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, which captured the mood of the civil-rights movement.

The Gettin’ is an exhilarating ode to how far we’ve come, and a call to reflect on where we have to go. Dan Scully’s atmospheric video projections capture black-and-white protest violence from the era, and imagery of the struggles of South Africans during apartheid (including “Whites Only” signs).

The piece is rich and multilayered in its dance as well, with Abraham’s stopstart rhythms playing off the percussive score. There are slight touches of top rocks, jump-and-jive, and jazz in Abraham’s vocabulary, but they’re so seamlessly integrated into the modern flow that they feel organic. The complex emotions here shift between elation, defiance, and reflection.

Abraham has found a multiracial team of dancers who bring an extra something to every nuanced move, and they’re riveting to watch.

Rallying cry? Celebration? Yes, but so much more, too; Abraham, if anything, captures the human complexity of history—and its soul.

> JANET SMITH

PIANO PERFECTION Is there a more challenging body of work than Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano sonatas? We don’t think so: the 32 compositions encompass a huge array of emotional shadings, and require impeccable technique to master. One of the best recent recordings of the complete cycle was made by Paul Lewis, and he’ll give audiences a small taste of that achievement at his upcoming Vancouver Recital Society concert, with a performance of the

Piano Sonata No. 4 in E flat major.