Quirky and unsettling love duet giddily inventive
Me So You So Me Choreography by David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen, Out Innerspace Dance Theatre. Until Saturday at Harbourfront Centre Theatre, 231 Queens Quay W. harbourfrontcentre.com or 416-973-4000 A dizzying West meets East cultural mash-up has arrived in Toronto, courtesy of Vancouver’s Out Innerspace Dance Theatre and Harbourfront Centre’s World Stage, and it’s not Canadian West meets East.
David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen, Out Innerspace co-founders/directors and makers of the giddily inventive Me So You So Me, have fashioned a quirky, often unsettling love duet that serves as the narrative framework for much more. The 55minute work delves into contemporary Western youth’s obsession with Asian culture, particularly Japanese manga and its anime expressions.
Raymond and Tregarthen, both born and raised in British Columbia, started out in forms such as tap and jazz; their curiosity about other cultural forms and the evolving nature of contemporary dance has led them to a place where pop culture can assume almost existential significance.
The result in this instance is an arresting approach to dance theatre that mixes athleticism, clowning, slapstick and mime with references to everything from video games to martial arts and even Kabuki.
Each has a distinct character. We first meet Tregarthen disembodied in the darkness around a bright lamp, which turns out to be settled on her head. Its beam lowers and we see her hands. It swings around and the light reveals Raymond in a T-shirt and fatigue pants held up by thin suspenders. But what really registers is his painted whiteface and dark-lensed John Lennon-style shades.
Raymond is part action hero, part modern Charlie Chaplin. His compact, musical body articulates into angular, sometimes disjointed movements that make him look both robotic and vulnerably human.
Tregarthen, also in whiteface, is more the pursuer than the pursued in an episodic courtship as much driven by the strange impulses of Japanese experimental percussionist Asa Chang’s score as by any tangible narrative.
The theatrical impact is enlivened by James Proudfoot’s integral lighting and Raymond, Tregarthen and Craig Alfredson’s magical, projected video effects. Words scroll over the dancers’ bodies or seem to hover in space. An inverted shadow, light where it should be dark, tracks Raymond’s moves.
Unpredictability, and a generalized air of mystery, lend a gothic spookiness to the proceedings. Raymond is elusive, disappearing on one side to re-emerge soon after on the other. In one scene, saturated in red light, Tregarthen repeatedly mimes vicious stabs to Raymond’s heart. In another she massages his back with swift hand chops and then begins pulling a noodle-like strand from his waist. This she greedily crams into her mouth, as if devouring his entrails.
Overt tenderness is in short supply. They handle each other’s bodies with mechanical more than emotional interest. When love does seem about to blossom it is usually awkward, suggesting that each has fashioned a comic-book identity that renders the more complex negotiations of real human interaction deeply puzzling.
Me So You So Me is funny and sad, chaotic yet purposeful. In the end, these odd beings, pitched into a weird world that’s fired by their own imaginative flights, appear to land on firm ground. But like everything else in this madcap work, it could all be an illusion.