Dancers’ Studio West unveils trio of enticing choreographies in Metamorphosis production
Of the three major dance companies in the city of Calgary, perhaps the most intriguing is Dancers’ Studio West. With Dance Action Lab in its third year, DSW’s artistic director Davida Monk has her company firing on all cylinders with three new and enticing choreographies playing this weekend at the DJD Dance Centre.
The show’s title, Metamorphosis, consists of works by Shayne Johnson, Catherine Hayward and a sizable seven-part piece by Davida Monk herself. Steve Isom provided great lighting throughout and very often gave the dances an extra dimension that granted tremendous immediacy. And the music, by Jeremy Gignoux (for Catherine Hayward), Rob Clutton (for Shayne Johnson) and Allan Gordon Bell (for Davida Monk) was a continual exercise in sustaining many paradoxes of mood. Often, the pieces with which the choreographers worked could be at once engaging, suspenseful, shimmering, turbulent, meditative, violent, purgative, or even static. Music played an important role that carried multiplicitous meanings, aiding the choreographers in their creation of works of similar complexity.
For the Dance Action Lab, portraying many meanings at the same time in a dance artwork is a normal way of thinking. Catherine Hayward’s form, act, cease, ensue or Shayne Johnson’s Sight(st)ing are pieces that live in deep layers requiring the observer to look up and down, vertically in a manner of speaking, at the many ideas presented to us all at once and to consider how those idea interact. Their works are not horizontal pieces of linear narrative but instead live more resonantly within the passage of time and at different levels, becoming more clear as their dances evolve and change before our eyes.
Metamorphosis, an evening about personal and collective transformation, embodied just that kind of change and with a creative maturity that demonstrated consummate skill and artistic vision. Each choreographer brought their own approach to showing how change — metamorphosis — expresses itself in our lives, even when we do not realize it. Very often, Hayward, Johnson and Monk spoke with a distinctive voice that at times could reach for different theatrical traditions, especially Japanese butoh, a kind of metamorphic dance par excellence, al- ways on the verge of becoming but never really completing.
Davida Monk’s seven-part Ashes for Beauty provided the best example of how dance represents art that is often never really finished, something like the continual act of becoming that is the life of any artist. Ashes for Beauty is a conceit derived from the biblical quote taken from Isaiah “Give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.”
Monk’s six-dancer piece made for extravagant theatre, one which drew simultaneously on many traditions ranging from Ancient Greece to Japan to Indian mudras and seemingly much more. Angela Dale’s capes for the opening were designed to be culture specific, but when whipped around as the dancers snapped their bodies from side to side, making jagged arm movements through the air, they created a timeless sensation of an everevolving inner emotional theatre. Costumes and lighting made this piece feel like we were watching a work drawn along lines of an internal emotional dynamic set within eternal proportions.
In fact, Monk wants the Eternal, and all the time, demanding that her dancers move through their own inner transformations. As they peeled away layers of Dale’s colourful fabrics, as though sloughing off different skins they no longer need in their lives, their dances changed to adapt to new situations, new spiritual maturities. The solos were gripping and took you from panel to panel convincingly, especially Catherine Hayward’s glorious battle to embody stability, or Shayne Johnson’s slow, careful and tentative dance of realization. Or how about Su Lin Tseng’s hypnotic watery dance depicting a primordial birth, set to lovely music from Allan Bell? It’s all very beautiful and after a while, you abandon a sense of structure in favour of a better narrative, one that loses oneself in time but instead, records inner growth of the onstage characters, and even the growth one feels within. Ashes is a piece of consummate sensitivity that truly does replace mourning and heaviness with an intense theatrical experience of joy, praise and everlasting becoming.
Shayne Johnson’s Sight( st) ing was a wonderful piece worth watching for its purity of movement and slow kinaesthetic study of phrase and pose. Here was a mature piece that told of a dysfunctional group of four dancers, eyes focused upward and mysteriously held captive by another dancer, who was again, a positively magnetic Catherine Hayward. They are only released at the end when Hayward is stung to death by the very eyes that had been held captive by her, and now released, they made sinewy escape offstage to celebrate their newfound transformation.
But it was Hayward’s form, act ... that perhaps impacted with greatest immediacy. Leading off the evening, five dancers surrounded violinist/violist Jeremy Gignoux, who seems to birth the dancer’s movements with his playing, plucking and arpeggiating. They vibrated, vocalized and even imitated him resonating after the violin/viola as though brought into being like cosmic minions, undulated like waves on a string, and expired.
Such joyful studies in resonance through an instrument’s atomic suggestions, resulting in dancers who form, act, turn, ensue, and ultimately transform through space and time, was a brilliant piece.