A TECTONIC SHIFT IN BANFF
Backbones dancers rewarded with a standing ovation Thursday night
Right from the opening moments of Backbone, where a group of dancers huddle together onstage against a big, hard percussive soundscape that sounds like it could be tectonic plates shifting underneath the earth, there’s electricity in the air at the Margaret Greenham Theatre.
That’s the intimate venue at the Banff Centre where Red Sky Performance’s Backbone had its world premiere Thursday night, before a full house of dance fans eager to experience the show Red Sky artistic director Sandra Laronde, its creator, described as “the most important indigenous dance piece created this year.”
Laronde introduced the piece, which she says is inspired by the spine of mountains that span the continent, from the Canadian Rockies all the way to the Andes in Peru.
The indigenous belief is that the land is a living thing; that those mountains were created from the DNA of humanity, and that they are constantly expanding or contracting — over millions of years, which is the time frame over which Backbone unfolds.
“This is a place,” Laronde said, “where memory is long.”
Banff is also treaty land, but Backbone’s indigenous reach extends beyond Alberta, beyond North America and tries — and largely succeeds — in taking the whole global indigenous family in its arms.
After a kind of dance prelude that precedes Laronde’s appearance on stage that feels very Treaty 7, Backbone feels as if it rarely references what one might think of as Canadian indigenous dance.
Partly, that comes from the company, which is as international as it can get: two dancers in the company — Ageer and Doudou Chin — are from Mongolia, while Maori dancer Eddie Elliot hails from New Zealand.
The tempo of the piece is relentless — led by musician and composer Rick Sacks, who weaves a heavy percussive backbeat throughout the show against a soundscape that includes Inuit throat singing from Tanya Tagaq, Backbone sounds like those mountains have emerged from two million years of restlessness.
The choreography itself is raw, masculine and frequently ferocious. Ageer is a wiry little tornado onstage, who delivers frequent shout outs to street dance — he must have diverted through the Bronx on his way from Mongolia to Banff — giving Backbone an easily relatable reference to contemporary times.
There’s also a Maori element — mostly delivered through Elliot’s fearsome, masculine solos — to Backbone’s look and feel that connect that spine all the way to the South Pacific.
There are projected images, of fire on the mountain, and at times, of prairie. There’s wind, too, which, like Backbone, doesn’t blow — it howls.
It’s also short — around an hour — and the audience at the Greenham responded with a thundering standing ovation that might itself, have moved the mountain a little.