Cinematic lighting brings out the best in dance performance

Edouard Lock’s New Work for La La La Human Steps uses the dramatic play of light and shadows to highlight the dancers’ bodies

As I watched the dancers in La La La Human Steps on Saturday evening, I was slightly irritated that I couldn’t see their faces.

A couple of women were dancing in front of me less than 10 rows away but instead of noses and eyes all I could see was shadow. But then it hit me: the lighting from above was meant to outline their bodies.

By drawing their limbs and torsos in light, it forced me look at the contours of their heads, arms and legs. The dramatic play of light and shadow revealed rather than hid their bodies.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen lighting used so effectively in a dance performance before as in Edouard Lock’s New Work at the Centre in Vancouver for the Performing Arts. The lighting was extremely cinematic. At several points during the 90- minute work, the overhead lighting shifted from one side of the stage to the other. When that happened, it looked like a jump cut from film. It both sped up and slowed down time.

The jump cut lighting wasn’t just a gimmick — nothing is in a work by Lock.

Like Amjad, the last work performed by La La La in Vancouver in 2007, New Work deals with cultural memories.

It is inspired by two baroque operas: Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, which tells the story of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and the Trojan hero Aeneas and her despair at his abandonment of her; and Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice based on the Greek myth of Orpheus rescuing his wife Eurydice from the Underworld.

While two works are tragic love stories that deal with the end of relationships, it’s not really necessary to know much about either to be thrilled by New Work. Lock uses ballet technique — all his women danced en pointe — but he’s divorced it from its traditional partner in narrative story telling. That frees Lock to deal with other ideas and themes such as time and the physicality of the body.

New Work has all the signature dancing of Lock’s choreography: the jabbing and precise rapid hand and arm movements and the quick reverse turn pirouettes by the women en pointe. In contrast, there were moments of quiet and repose as heads came to rest on legs or dancers sat nonchalantly on the stage floor with a hand on a knee surveying the performance around them.

I found myself constantly fascinated at seeing such complex movements performed at warp speed. Who knew that dancers could move so fast? It didn’t look human. The subdued lighting made their limbs blur or move like sequential stop-time photographs.

The production included three films directed by Lock. They showed women dancers from the company in two massive vertical screens: on the left as they looked today and on the right, as if they’d been aged

I found myself constantly fascinated at seeing such complex movements performed at warp speed. Who knew that dancers could move so fast? It didn’t look human. The subdued lighting made their limbs blur or move like sequential stoptime photographs.

several decades and grown elderly.

The films provided a calming break in the fast- paced dancing. Although there was a black emptiness between the screens, the relationship between the figures on screen animated the void between them.

Rather than recorded sound, New Work included live music performed by a quartet on stage.

Usually lit with an even, softer light at the back of the stage, their movements became part of the performance.

They performed an original haunting score by Gavin Bryars and Blake Hargreaves.

New Work was presented by Dancehouse on Saturday and Sunday at The Centre in Vancouver for the Performing Arts.