Requiem and Stabat Mater meet Dance bridges the ancient and the new DANCE

> BY ALEXANDER VARTY WHAT THE DAY OWES TO THE NIGHT

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi wrote Stabat Mater in 1736, at the tender age of 26, shortly before his untimely death from tuberculosis. Maurice Duruflé, in contrast, penned his Requiem in 1947, a little more than halfway through his very long life.

What links these two works, other than that they will both be performed as part of Aeterna, this year’s edition of the Vancouver Chamber Choir’s annual Good Friday concert? The choir’s artistic and executive director, Jon Washburn, has an amusing answer—and a serious explanation, too.

“I think that they alliterate; one starts with P and the other starts with D,” the conductor contends, chuckling over the line from his Vancouver home. “But, musically, they seem to be cut out of a similar cloth. They really seem to complement each other.”

It’s this musical alliteration that intrigues him the most. “They’re both works that I just love,” he says. “For Duruflé, it’s his masterpiece, and for Pergolesi, it is full of potential. It is full of wonderful works yet to come, which we’ll never get to hear. So, in a way—and I hadn’t thought of this before—there’s kind of this juxtaposition of the young composer and the old composer, and the potential and the realized.

“The thing about Duruflé is that he wrote so few works,” Washburn continues. “In 80 years he only published 20 works, or something like that, and they’re all incredibly refined. It’s like he’s gone over and over them in order to just turn every little corner. Whereas with Pergolesi, you feel that it’s all youthful virtuosity—and that, no matter what he does, there’s a wonderful melody.”

Washburn stresses that even though both pieces draw their text from Catholic liturgy, the Vancouver Chamber Choir’s Good Friday offering needn’t be seen as speaking solely to the religiously inclined. While Stabat Mater tells the story of the Virgin Mary’s sorrow after the death of her son, it was not, he claims, intended to be performed in church.

“It’s too big,” he says. “I think it was intended for concerts.”

Duruflé’s Requiem, on the other hand, was intended to be performed as part of a Mass—at least in its simplest form, which was scored for choir and organ alone. The French composer published two other versions of the piece: one for choir, organ, and full orchestra, and another for choir, organ, and strings, which is the version the VCC will present. Edward Norman will be at the keyboard, while the Pacifica Singers and the Vancouver Chamber Orchestra will flesh out the cast.

Although he’s generally seen as an impressionistic composer, like his predecessors Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, Duruflé also took inspiration from the oldest surviving form of Christian music. “The way that he writes has a melodic character to it that he picked up from Gregorian chant,” Washburn explains. “And that’s what gives you that sense of ‘This melody is going to go on forever, and it’s very peaceful, and it seems to be leading someplace that I need to go.’”

A Compagnie Hervé Koubi production. A Dancehouse presentation. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Friday, April 7. No remaining performances

There’s a transcendent moment 2

in What the Day Owes to the Night when the sight of men whirling like Sufis gives way to that of others who spin upside down, on their heads, hip-hop–style. It’s the ancient giving way to the modern, the spiritual giving way to the street-smart. But each version of human top is as entrancing as the other, white skirt-pants fluttering out like sails around the dancers.

The presentation—which met with an extended standing O—felt like an experience larger than a dance show. That’s in part because choreographer Hervé Koubi took the time to share the story behind his creation. At the top of the evening, the Cannes-based artist explained how he had always believed he had French heritage until he was 25, when his father suddenly revealed his Algerian roots. What the Day Owes to the Night is the result of his ensuing journey to his parents’ homeland, where he recruited a troupe of performers who had never been to dance school, but did hip-hop and capoeira in the streets and on the country’s beaches.

You can feel the brotherhood he’s formed with these committed, insanely chiselled, bare-chested young men, and it’s moving.

What’s most striking about the work is its mix of raw muscularity and incredible grace. The men effortlessly pull off back flips, top spins, handstands, and cartwheels, but always as part of Koubi’s sculptural formations.

In the program notes, the choreographer speaks of being inspired by North African architecture, lace, and art, and you can see that poetic Arabic style in the movement, patterning, and tableaux. Sometimes the dappled light reminds you of rays darting in through high mosque windows; other times it evokes the half-light of a desert sunrise.

But the most powerful element of the piece is the dancers themselves. In an interview before the show came to town, Koubi’s artistic collaborator Guillaume Gabriel explained that because the performers are not schooltrained, they dance not for entertainment or show. They simply dance, because they have to. This brings the work an authenticity and passion that are hard to describe. The movement is raw and muscular, but sometimes balletic: witness some gorgeous lifts or the tangling of bodies linked by hands. Set to everything from the oud to baroque music, the dance circles and repeats, often reaching an almost hypnotic or prayerlike state despite its flashes of intense physicality. If you lose yourself in that meditative state, time and geographical space will cease to exist for the hourlong performance.

There are glimpses of stories here, seeming slices of Algeria’s past. The work draws its name from a book about a conflicted young Algerian during the former French colony’s war for independence. There is imagery of death, of a body being lifted and then tumbling down lifeless, shrouded in his flowing skirt-pants.

What’s unsaid, but resonates, is the work’s messages about cultures joining together in today’s divided world. That divided world came into relief at the beginning of the show, when it was announced that three of the company’s North African dancers could not get visas for this North American tour, so the show would be performed with a smaller ensemble. Though that absence hung over the work, it did not diminish the effect—an effect that came not out of theatrics, but out of the human soul.

> JANET SMITH