Classic Noetic inspires Banff audience
Artistic director successfully overturns last year’s more experimental stances
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity chalked up another summer success last week with several performances from its dance program, The Creative Gesture, impressing their sizable and devoted audiences.
Following The Creative Gesture into its second summer has been a complete pleasure as the program transforms into a well-organized, tightly ordered group of 22 emerging and mid-career dancers.
And, judging by the fruitful results that emerged last week from Banff’s Eric Harvie Theatre where the dance program solidly presented Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Noetic, a poly-complex work of mathematically inspired balletic devices embedded with an uncompromising neo-classical esthetic, it was apparent that the program’s artistic director Emily Molnar has everything running well, overturning last summer’s more experimental approaches.
New programs require several years to work themselves out into the identity that best suits them, and critics of all arts initiatives need to allow program directors the time to prove themselves.
But judging by what we all saw from the stage at the Harvie, the Creative Gesture has started to show us that it has emerged as the crucial voice we need in this country, residing at the heart of a very important discussion that asks the most pertinent questions of the dance world. Why do we dance? How do we collectively create dance? How do we talk about such things? And, most of all, what are the crucial elements that underlie dance psychology and the intensity of its creative processes?
This brings us to the multi-disciplinary, intense Noetic, brought in by program head Stephan Laks to begin addressing these questions by challenging the program’s participants to collectively make a complex art work live again.
Premiered by GoteborgsOperans Danskompani in 2014, Larbi’s piece had to be re-conceived when it was relocated to Banff for its remount and taught gesture by gesture to each dancer. There was no video to present, as though saying “Here’s what we’re doing this summer.”
In effect, the dance was reconstructed and scaffolded to even greater complexity than the original 2014 production, and all within four weeks from beginning to end — a superb accomplishment.
The title Noetic refers to the Greek word “noesis” implying “knowing through intuition.” Recited text by dancers, all in motion, which re- quired extra efforts at breath maintenance to pull off at quick speed, was transcribed and edited from the Rodin Coil speech, a touchstone for those who follow the developments of “Noetic science.” While interesting and controversial in many ways, the text provided clues as to what the work was about and how Noetic ties in with the many mathematical patterns perceived to underlie seemingly every layer of existence.
Antony Gormley’s scenography, using a standard white, open-cut cube, devised space from artificial boundaries demarcated by long carbon-fibre slats that could be placed on the ground by the dancers, creating areas for small-group work of four-to-seven in close quarters with intricate body combinations. Later in the hour-long piece, these slats were collectively combined into a basket weave that resembled helical assemblies suggestive of complex coils and biochemistries, or more simply, an atom. In this way, Larbi’s sense of line required flexibility of imagination from both his audience and his dancers, a creative dynamic that brought the audience into the space effectively, as though we were asked to co-create our own individual meaning within the collective performative enterprise.
Such a performance byproduct stems directly from the dance program’s focused intention to pass along a co-creative experience to its viewers and speaks directly to The Creative Gesture’s success at translating process to practice, or even dance theory to audience reception. The instant standing ovation each night spoke volumes.
Dressed elegantly (costumes by Les Hommes; dark formal slacks and vests for the men, and flared dresses for the women), the corps moved robustly but linearly through multiple movement spaces, stopping at designated co-ordinates to assume many stance orientations and translations. They appeared comfortable throughout in a work that seemed to intersect favourably the hyper-intense gestural simultaneities of a John Neumeier choreography with a study in complex line and esthetic abstraction such as Wayne MacGregor’s Limen.
Only, in Larbi’s Noetic, the patterning seemed even more deliberate with a concealed objective of creating new forms, many of which are collectively created and disassembled with rapidity, lending something of a conceit or clever riff on the world of particle physics.
Dancers often spun, twisted, or gestured, especially in great solos by Lukas Malkowski, Mason Manning and Alessia Ruffolo, or even vibrated like protons and electrons, charmed and strange quarks such as in the moving final duo by Ariane Voineau and Jonathan Royse Windham, as though showing the underlying mathematical secrets of all nature, a kind of ritualized extension of contemporary Laban movement choir.
But the last image of Rosslyn Wythes (dance and text) who finished inside the atomic sphere at the end, set to elegiac tonal music by Szymon Brzóska, struck the broadest chord — a noetic poetry of our inter-connectedness on all levels that seemingly knew no boundaries.