DARKNESS & LIGHT
Acclaimed choreographer Gingras returns with multimedia spectacle
Animals of Distinction/ Frontera
When: Feb. 19-20, 7:30 p.m. Where: Babs Asper Theatre, National Arts Centre
Tickets and info:
From $48 at ticketmaster.ca
Dana Gingras doesn’t do anything by half.
The acclaimed choreographer first came to international prominence as half of the innovative dance company Holy Body Tattoo. That company was well known for its collaborations with live music by such acts as Tindersticks and the Tiger Lillies, writers like William Gibson and numerous visual artists. Gingras continues her exploration of multimedia performance with her satellite multimedia company Animals of Distinction, which presents its newest work Frontera at the National Arts Centre on Feb. 19-20
Founded in 2006, the company previously premiered a remounted version of Holy Body Tattoo’s monumental, featuring live music backing from Godspeed You! Black Emperor in Vancouver in 2016. The event was a visual and sonic tour de force.
Frontera unites Animals of Distinction with the avant-rock Constellation Records recording act Fly Pan Am and lighting and set design from the London-based collective UVA (United Visual Artists). A query into the ways that borders, barriers and surveillance culture affect us all and how to react to it, Frontera premiered in Quebec City last year.
“I think I probably left my body during the premiere, as getting to that moment with all the last-minute things around how very technical it is was challenging,” said Gingras. “What’s so interesting working with UVA is how they really work at the intersect of art and technology and have taken lights and turned them into a kind of moving scenography. Generally, you don’t get a level of emotion or feeling from lights, but they have been able to create these phantom/virtual wall structures with light on an otherwise empty stage that can be both oppressive and powerful.”
The light shafts sometimes form virtual prisons around dancers and sometimes allow some semblance of escape. She said the technology actually enables a kind of choreography to be developed between the projections and the person on stage, which is super exciting. UVA does a lot of its work via D3 animation, but Gingras said she still likes to do it old school.
“Being in the room with the live bodies, hands on, with all the sweat and seeing how the different elements respond to each other and what kind of juxtapositions and contrasts are created that we can work with is how I like it,” she said. “The beating hearts give you the real read on what is going on.”
Holy Body Tattoo’s third member was Voivod co-founder JeanYves Theriault and Animals of Distinction continued to connect with musicians as well. Gingras was excited when Fly Pan Am reformed last year.
“The band are all old friends and I’d done a lot of work with member Roger Tellier-Craig, including a 3D immersive dome film called Freefall,” she said. “When he told me that they were getting back together, it was ‘Oh yeah, now’s my chance!’ They were super excited and it’s been amazing working with them from the ground up in the rehearsal studio, with them improvising around rough ideas of the choreography and then fleshing things out for a final process.
“I’ve never really collaborated like that, in real time with 10 dancers and four musicians, making it up together as you go.”
Obviously, you can’t build a performance like that and then try to set it to track. So Fly Pan Am is the third factor onstage, playing live and blurring the lines between concert, dance and conceptual art. It’s a tricky but worthwhile process.
“The band is playing to a lot of cues to follow, the dancers are doing the same,” she said. “But live there is always going to be that sliding and adapting nature that keeps things on edge. There is no comparison to having live music, because it gives the piece even more of the intensity we wanted.”
She said that Frontera is a vivid and visceral work that reaches the audience and is one of the biggest pieces that Animals of Distinction has mounted. Gingras likes to move between small solo works, short films and smaller installation-based pieces between her big works.
That said, her next major work, titled Creation/Destruction, is bookending Frontera.