Goodman submerges performers, audience in water-themed work
Advance images for Vanessa Goodman’s new work show several of the dancers under water. However, don’t expect to see them performing in a big tank of H20 onstage at the Firehall for Never Still.
“I wish,” said the Vancouver choreographer.
“We basically filmed the dance artists under water and we’re going to project that onto the set. I wanted to create a kind of underwater or otherworldly environment that encapsulated the idea of being surrounded by fluid, but also the idea that we’re approximately 50 to 70 per cent water,” Goodman said. “I wanted to explore our body of water with other bodies of water.’ ”
In the new piece, which makes its premiere at the Firehall, Goodman says she wanted to specifically look at three different systems of circulation: global water cycles, communication technology, and fluids within the body.
To choreograph the show, she collaborated with dancers Shion Skye Carter, Stephanie Cyr, Bynh Ho, Alexa Mardon and Lexi Vajda. The choreography for the show was already well underway when Goodman filmed the dancers, so their submerged movements will have little influence on the final choreography. Instead, the dance’s vocabulary comes from, among other things, a word game.
“We wanted to focus on the internal and external relationship to circulatory systems,” she said. “So, on the first day of creation, we made brain bubbles or word charts based on the words ‘body’ and ‘water.’”
The dancers then selected words from their own and each other’s charts to form the vocabulary of the work’s movements.
“I wanted it to be something they correlated with two ideas, that it wasn’t just my relationship to these two ideas.”
Goodman is once again working with longtime collaborators Scott Morgan (who records and performs under the name Loscil) and lighting and set designer James Proudfoot.
The choreographer worked with both on last year’s Wells Hill, a similarly ambitious blend of dance, music, and visual projections. That piece was partly based on the works of Glenn Gould and Marshall McLuhan.
For Never Still, Morgan is creating loops of the dancers under water, and slowing down and reversing the footage.
“They ’re these odd and beautiful moving stills that are a bit surreal,” Goodman said. “I find them a bit spooky.”
Mixed with his own footage, these loops will be projected onto the set as well as the dancers. The set is constructed from Tyvek, the synthetic material used to protect buildings during construction. Lloyd Clothing is providing the costumes.
“I wanted them to have a similar feeling to the Tyvek, a stiffness,” Goodman said. Lloyd’s linen garments blend with the Tyvek, “so that the dance artists almost look like they ’re part of the set at times. And they (the dancers) are moving screens at certain points because of the way the image is projected onto the costume.”
She had the seed of the idea for Never Still in 2013.
“At that time, I started making two separate works, and both dealt with water cycles or circulatory cycles in different ways,” she said.
Down Goes Fraser was inspired by water cycles, and the long indoors by the circulatory cycle of the human body. “The more I thought about them, the more I thought they were of the same world.”
Goodman also drew on another collaboration with Morgan called Floating Upstream (2017). “That was based around precipitation cycles, how water cycles move in and out of the earth, the extreme amounts of it but also the extreme lack of it in the summer.”
Never Still is the culmination of these ideas. Like all her projects, she sees it as an ever-evolving work.
“There are always things to work on,” she said.
“I’m very excited about sharing the work in its final stages, but I always see it growing. I’m always searching for something raw and fresh.”