ARTS Chapple dances along line between tech and body

Janet Smith

For her new show, Suffix, dance artist Julianne Chapple is stripping the seating out of the Scotiabank Dance Centre’s theatre and turning it into a sort of open gallery.

“There will be chairs if people need to sit, or cushions if you wanted to lie on the floor. I thought of the ideal experience as an audience member,” she says with a laugh, sitting at a café a block away from the venue. “Viewers will have a lot of agency about where they want to go in the space. I do find it very claustrophobic sitting in a regular theatre.”

It’s fitting that the black-box space will resemble a gallery: Chapple and visual artist Ed Spence will be filling the space with installations and sculptures. Those include a big, rolling, shiny metal ball, triangular metal wedges, and a curvy cage that the dancers will interact with.

It’s all part of Chapple’s deep exploration of our fast-paced technological advances and the way they’re affecting the body, whether it’s through physical enhancements or the quest for immortality.

The seed for the work was a creative stint that Chapple and Spence spent at 33 Officina Creativa in tiny Toffia, Italy, in 2012. The isolation there, working in a medieval church without cellphones or Internet, made her think about the way technology affects our lives. She and Spence also spent time in Rome, looking at the work of Italian futurists—an art movement that would influence his smooth, geometric sculptures.

“Futurism happened during the Industrial Revolution, and it was all steel and machines and war and misogyny,” she says. “Ed and I talked a lot about how digital technology is really the big change that’s happening in our generation.”

Research back home, supported by the Dance Centre’s Iris Garland Emerging Choreographer Award, has led Chapple even further into advances in technology and so-called transhumanism. “A lot of Silicon Valley billionaires are investing a lot into life extension, and there are a lot of really weird things being done,” she says. “Life extension is where it’s all heading.”

Those ideas influenced a central installation in the show, in which each dancer’s “physical archive” is eerily displayed on a lightbox set atop a wooden plinth. The performers had a death mask created, a dental mould made, and a DNA sample of their choice—hair, toenails, blood, or other contributions—immortalized in clear acrylic balls. “They’re very committed performers,” Chapple says of dancers Maxine Chadburn, Francesca Frewer, and Antonio Somera, then adds with a smile: “They’re bringing me their pee and blood.”

The creation process required Spence to fabricate his sculptures early, so the dancers could begin experimenting with the pieces, which are tactile yet coldly futuristic-looking. “They had to be built to take weight and be durable,” Chapple explains, “so the performers can be rough with them and interact with them as they would with other bodies.”

Chapple is known for her surreal movement, and that definitely will play out in Suffix, as limbs intertangle and move with metal. “I’ve been getting them to treat the body as you would an object separate from the mind,” she explains. “I’ve asked them to be so focused on their own tasks that they’re kind of dissociating from the environment around them. It’s kind of scary!”

Adding to that sometimes chilling atmosphere are tall, rodlike LED lighting and the haunting soundscapes of the Wolves & the Blood. Chapple herself will take the stage to oversee the action for this ambitious piece—her first full-length and her first endeavour under the name of her new company, Future Leisure.

“I’m around,” she says. “I’m just going to be taking care of the space and taking care of time—and I’m making sure nobody gets run over by a big metal ball.”

What can viewers glean from entering this world of art, technology, and human forms? The messages are sometimes dark, sometimes ambiguous. “There are a lot of good things and bad things that could come from this,” Chapple says of our race to merge technology with our bodies, “but there’s a risk of losing something human.”

dI LOVE, LOVE, love The Wolves. Like the best sports matches, this play is packed with virtuosity and surprises.

American playwright Sarah Delappe’s debut script, a 2017 Pulitzer Prize nominee, follows the members of a girls’ indoor-soccer team. The play announces its terrific theatricality right off the top, as the team members sit in two circles, going through a series of warm-ups. One cluster is debating the justice of prosecuting an elderly war criminal—they argue over the pronunciation of Khmer Rouge and whether they have Skype in Cambodia; the other is talking about tampons. It’s impossible to follow all the overlapping dialogue, but it all feels real. “We don’t do genocides till senior year,” one girl says. “Her family is super Christian,” says another, explaining why their friend (who’s gone off to the porta-potty) still uses pads.

Delappe’s characters, known only by the numbers on their uniforms, are recognizable types: the mean girl (#07) and her faithful sidekick (#14), the smartass (#13), and the bright, authoritative stickler for detail (#11). But their struggles, sometimes suggested by no more than a single line or gesture, are achingly specific: sexist coaches, eating disorders, panic attacks, relationships, loss and grief. Each girl constantly negotiates her sense of self within the group (they are all eager to police each other’s language and opinions, and countless lines include the phrase “you guys”), including #46, the new girl trying to

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find a way in, whose inopportune blurts only alienate her further. And there is so much of the texture of real life packed into each scene— note how many more players have colds with each succeeding game, for example—that the characters all emerge as nuanced human beings.

Director Jamie King and her cast are in perfect sync, nailing both the complex rhythms of the dialogue and the considerable physicality of Delappe’s script. This show is a literal workout for the actors, who deliver many of their lines while doing running and passing drills on the tiny Astroturf-ed stage. Standouts in this very strong ensemble are Jalen Saip (#11), Danielle Klaudt (#7), and Montserrat Videla (#14), who are all convincingly skinless. And then there’s Georgia Beaty as the sweet, excitable, and not terribly bright #8, who gets to say things like “Can I just say I don’t get what the big deal is about self-knowledge?” Beaty voices #8’s thoughts with note-perfect timing and complete sincerity; she’s hilarious.

Nicole Weismiller’s lighting artfully enhances the emotion, especially in a few short, powerful scenes without dialogue.

There’s not a weak spot on the field in this production. Go, team!

Kathleen Oliver

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