ARTS Laughlin finds new sides in solos
FJanet Smith
or years, Joe Laughlin has created eclectic dance works for himself or others—from his own solo Left, a pas de deux with a teacup, to TIMBER/TIMBRE, a baroque group ballet that played out on a chessboard.
But in his new Joe: A Solo Show, the veteran Vancouver artist behind Joe Ink has taken a sharp turn, inviting three choreographers to make pieces for him to perform.
At 57, the man who once thought he had left the stage behind is excited to be interpreting others’ voices again.
“I like the process of being an interpreter. It evoked a lot of memories of when I was a young dancer and did a lot of work for other people,” he tells the Straight over the phone between rehearsals. “I feel like I needed this injection from them—this injection of life and different ways of working.”
The project began when he reconnected with local choreographer Amber Funk Barton, whom he’s known since she was young.
“I met her when she was 15 and I was 36; she was in a training program and I met her at the Goh Ballet and gave her her first professional job,” he explains. “I feel like she’s my dance daughter.”
On a whim, he asked Barton to create a solo for him. The result, called Silas, is inspired by John Steinbeck’s iconic East of Eden—and its Arcade Fire–set ode to the land and agriculture ended up hitting a personal chord for Laughlin.
“She kept talking about the land and acquisition of land, and ‘You’re looking over this tract of land,’” he says. “My brother has a ranch in Alberta and I have looked out on this vista of the land. When my dad died, we scattered his ashes there.…it was two-and-a-half hours up and twoand-a-half-hours back on horseback. For that piece I feel like I channel my brother.”
On a roll, Laughlin asked two other beloved friends to create a solo for him—dynamic Canadian choreographer Gioconda Barbuto and South African sensation Vincent Mantsoe, who couldn’t have more different approaches and styles.
Barbuto, a Grands Ballets Canadiens alumna whom Laughlin has known for years, started by asking Laughlin to bring in old family photos for her to work from, mining his own stories for inspiration.
For the work called Long Story Short, Laughlin dug out one image of himself graduating from kindergarten in a little cape and scholar’s hat and another on a parade float with his antipollution club. “She would make a storyboard out of these photos and she kept changing them, and then she’d make movement stories,” he says of the work.
Soweto-born and Paris-based Mantsoe, whose Moving Into Dance Mophatong Laughlin worked with in the 1990s, made a trip here to create his solo.
“Vincent’s movement is so different—it’s very rooted in Zulu dances, and as I went through that process I became really strong in the other pieces,” Laughlin says, adding the physically pummelling work, called GIYA, is set to Astor Piazolla’s tango anthem “Oblivion”.
The question, as Laughlin worked in his studio to rehearse the three solos, was how to bind them together. And that’s when the ever-sociable artist decided to interview his choreographers about their process and use those voice-overs as bridges in the piece.
“It was their solo, so I wanted them to be at the show in some way. I wanted to reflect them more than just with their dance,” Laughlin explains. “They [the voice-overs] set up the pieces, they finish the pieces, and they sew the pieces together.”
Rehearsing alone in his studio, Laughlin has loved the feeling of keeping his friends in the room with him. And he’s excited about what bringing their voices to the stage will give to the audience.
“All of them brought something to me that I needed,” Laughlin says. “The voice-overs illuminate their real joy in the process. They’re very joyful people, and they reinspired me as a dancer.”
Sonically, Jen Shyu’s Nine Doors encompasses Taiwanese folk songs, European art song, Indonesian gamelan, North American jazz, and two distinct strains of Korean music: the bardic, long-form poetry of pansori, and shamanic ritual sounds from the country’s east coast. Theatrically, it includes dramatic monologues, a traditional Indonesian temple dance, gorgeous projected images, four languages, two goddesses, and a simple but effective stage set. And at its heart there’s a tragedy: the 2014 death, in a car accident, of Shyu’s friend and artistic collaborator Sri Joko Raharjo—an acclaimed young composer and dalang, or shadowpuppet master—along with his wife and their infant son. But for all the grief embedded in Nine Doors, the lost potential and unmade art, there’s also a warm and simple message here: stop and smell the roses.
The chrysanthemums, dahlias, and lilies, too—or whatever flowers were on Itaru Sasaki’s table the day Shyu met him as part of her research process. Sasaki, a resident of Japan’s Iwate Prefecture, is known for having installed an old-school telephone booth in his hillside garden following the death of his beloved cousin. The “Phone of the Wind” is intended to be a meditative space where the bereaved can talk to their dead, and has so far hosted over 10,000 mourners. Having heard of Sasaki and his work, Shyu decided to visit following a Japanese concert appearance—and what she found was not exactly what she’d expected.
Sasaki was initially formal, even distant, Shyu explains in a telephone interview from her Brooklyn home. But once the two discovered their mutual love of jazz, he opened up. “We spent three or four hours just talking, and I asked him if there was any wisdom that he had about life,” she says. “And he said, ‘You know, just take in the good things.’ And he pointed to the flowers, these beautiful flowers on the table, and said, ‘See this flower? This is a really good thing. So just spend time with the good things—good food, good flowers, good people.’ ”
After that, Shyu was left alone with the phone. “I just talked,” she says. “I talked to Joko, to my auntie who had passed away from cancer, to [her poet friend] Edward Chang, who also passed away from cancer. And it was so odd, because… You know, it was almost an anticlimax. Of course, being with the phone and experiencing that was powerful, but the important thing was the connection that I’d made with Mr. Sasaki and his wife.”
That story, she adds, “kind of ties the show together”. And so while Nine Doors is rich and complex and strange, it’s also about the basic human impulse to connect. What began as a kind of protective ritual for Raharjo’s young daughter Nala, who survived the crash, has turned into a more general kind of blessing, in which we’re all invited to mourn and celebrate our own dead.
“I’m going to ask everyone to think about someone they’ve lost, or someone who they miss,” Shyu says. “At one performance, in Connecticut, a woman came up to me afterwards and told me that her brother had died in a car accident just a year ago. And she said it [Nine Doors] was just such a powerful experience for her, because she could enjoy the music and the performance—like, it was a thing of beauty for her—but she could still mourn for her brother in a very direct way.
“It was very healing for her,” Shyu adds. “And all I could say was ‘Oh, my god. Thank you.’ ”