Retro musicals fire up Volcano

> BY JANET SMITH

With Volcano, dance artist Liz Kinoshita uses the language of a bygone time to express the here and now.

The Toronto-born, Belgium-based choreographer draws on the song and dance styles of old musicals. But listen to the lyrics closely, and lose yourself in the shifting tempos of the fancy footwork, and you’ll realize Volcano is a clever meditation on the rush of our modern world.

“The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—there are so many movies in that era that I could watch again and again,” she tells the Straight from a tour stop in Stuttgart, where her troupe is performing before heading back to Belgium and then over to Toronto and later Vancouver for Dancing on the Edge. “I, as a contemporary performer, can really appreciate them, to see how the timing and the weight shifts, and to watch these genius performers. They’ve really stood the test of time.”

Part of her fascination with old movie musicals stems from the fact that, at the height of the form in the 1940s, a war was raging, and yet was barely mentioned in the day’s upbeat flicks—a fact she attributes less to simple escapism than to a mutual understanding with the audience that the world was on fire.

In the studio, she started working with the vernacular in her own ways. Composing their own musicalstyle songs, her collaborating artists started expressing contemporary concerns in the classically rhyming lyrics. What emerges again and again in their words is the hectic pace