Human evolution goes on an enigmatic journey
Kitt Johnson X-act: Rankefod
(out of 4) Choreography by Kitt Johnson. Until Apr. 8, at Harbourfront Centre Theatre, 235 Queens Quay W. Harbourfrontcentre.com/boxoffice or 416-973-4000. Danish dance artist Kitt Johnson is not the first to attempt to evoke our primordial past through movement. Such efforts can too easily appear corny or, worse still, cute. Instead, Johnson’s Rankefod is epic and aweinspiring.
In her 50-minute solo that opened at Harbourfront Centre on Tuesday, Johnson takes us on a journey at once strange and haunting — from the infinite vastness of a universe devoid of life to an evolutionary moment when our primitive ancestors took to dry land and hind legs.
An improvised electronic soundscape by Johnson’s longtime artistic collaborator Sture Ericson roars deafeningly in the darkness; the birth of the universe, perhaps. It then diminishes to a whispering, unworldly ambience.
A dim circle of light gradually intensifies to reveal an unidentifiable creature, a mound of animal matter with a prominent spine suggestive of an exoskeleton. It begins to breathe and pulsate, shooting out stunted bodily appendages in staccato bursts of movement. The creature unfurls, becomes increasingly mobile and scampers about as if exploring unknown terrain.
By now, of course, we know it’s Johnson’s human form generating these images of primitive existence. Yet, naked though she is except for a rough-textured loincloth — a blank, glassy-eyed expression on her palepainted face — we never for a moment see her as anything but prehuman.
Now in her late 50s, Johnson remains a formidable presence and performer, her body lithe and expressive.
The solo’s title is the Danish word for a subclass of crustaceans known as cirripedia. Barnacles qualify as such, along with various other arthropods. It’s not necessary to know this to appreciate Rankefod, although it does help explain some of Johnson’s oddly contorted modes of locomotion, redolent of leggy insects or sideways-moving crabs.
Rankefod’s overall poetic resonance is enigmatic, more easily felt than explained. The image conveyed by designer Charlotte Ostergaard’s deeply textured backdrop varies according to how it is lit by Mogens Kjempff. It can be a rocky cliff or transform into a barren, gullied landscape. It is toward this that Johnson turns her glance before finally staring out beyond us in the direction of an unseen and, we ponder, threatening future.
This is a return visit to Toronto for Rankefod. Johnson first performed it here nine years ago as part of Harbourfront Centre’s World Stage, a series presenting both international and Canadian artists from a range of contemporary performance disciplines and their evolving hybrid forms. Now, Johnson is the opening event of World Stage Redux, a compact 18-day festival comprising eight programs, three of them featuring Canadian artists.
Launched in 1986, World Stage was once a high-profile festival that introduced Toronto to a host of major international theatre artists. However, when munificent corporate sponsorships began to dry up, World Stage became a more modest — although still artistically adventurous — series of performances.
This year, as Harbourfront Centre re-evaluates its place in the local cultural landscape, it has opted for an interim to dip into its past with a festival of encore appearances.
A combination of timing, logistics and available funding doubtless determined the choices. Five of the eight shows feature solo performers, which of course makes them no less interesting.
This week, World Stage Redux also features a fresh iteration of actor Clare Coulter and director Philip McKee’s exploration of Shakespeare in Lear: A Retrospective, as well as dancer/choreographer William Yong’s Steer, an unnerving portrayal of how technology may denude us of our humanity; as if it hasn’t already.
Among next week’s highlights, if that can properly describe a “theatrical memorial” to the Holocaust, is Rotterdam-based Hotel Modern’s chilling Kamp, in which three performers animate the occupants of a roughly 1:20 scale model of Auschwitz. World Stage Redux will end with Mies Julie, South African Yael Farber’s contemporary reimagining of August Strindberg’s torrid drama.