enteRtAInMent
OUT INNERSPACE DANCE TROUPE BRINGS BYGONES HOME TO LOCAL AUDIENCES
Vancouver’s Out Innerspace Dance Theatre company is back on their home stage for a series of four shows at the Scotiabank Dance Centre Dec. 11-14 after sharing their new show Bygones with audiences in Bulgaria, Germany and Quebec.
It’s obviously a good thing to get to sleep in one’s own bed at night but Tiffany Tregarthen, a dancer and the contemporary dance troupe’s co-director, says familiar faces in the audience make the performance both comfortable and nerve-racking.
“What’s great about it is it’s home,” said Tregarthen over the phone during a break in the Quebec run of Bygones. “There’s a lot of trust, love and familiarity — but at the same time, these are the people that we imagine have some of the highest expectations and that have known us the longest and they know the best what we want to get out of what we are doing. We have taught our students our material and we’ve talked to a lot of friends about our ideals for our work and our company so the insight they have to our work means that we feel that awareness.
“I will always be the most nervous to dance in front of my friends and my family, my students and my colleagues. That is so much more nerve-racking then performing for big presenters or for strangers or television or something,” added Tregarthen, who founded Out Innerspace in 2007 with co-director David Raymond.
“It will always be the people whose opinions I care about the most and who will have to keep living with me after I do that one show.”
The show this time is Bygones. Tregarthen describes the full-length 70-minute presentation as a show that explores the idea of transition and, ultimately, hope. Tregarthen performs the piece along with her collaborators Raymond, Elya Grant, David Harvey and Renee Sigouin.
“We’ve been thinking a lot about the reflex to want to make things better. The attempts to want to pick up the pieces and try again to resolve things. To just keep going,” said Tregarthen. “We were feeling this reflex to make things better is so vital to surviving change and provoking change. That is a lot of what started the ideas. That’s what we were noticing.”
This need to change is not a new concept by any means. Since humankind could reason, the idea of changing things has been part of our daily existence.
“I imagine if you talk to any generation there was probably a lot to want to change. Historically there has probably been a lot,” Tregarthen said. “I think also, at certain phases in people’s life that change inevitably happens as people you love grow older or as children start coming into your life or maybe it’s career changes, the more personal things. But, also, it is a time where the political situations and the environment, there’s just a lot of changes there.”
While the idea of change can be a heady topic, this is ultimately a dance performance that wants to engage and entertain — you know, that sneaky thing artists do.
A long-standing contemporary dance company, Out Innerspace has a strong reputation for work that is inventive without being too “inside baseball.”
“I really hope that they want to see more dance. That’s the main thing,” said Tregarthen. “There is something so important about people gathering together in person. Being in the same place together gathering around live performance and being around art, and that to me is the thing that feels the most important, first and foremost. That sort of special gathering around something and how that connects people is the main thing.”
And maybe once people connect, they can talk about change.