Dancing between reality and illusion
Spooky, psychedelic The Fine Line plays with perceptions
In the poster image for The Fine Line – twisted angels, one dancer is suspended upside down in mid- air, while two others are glued to the ceiling. Reality or illusion? That’s the question that choreographer Judith Garay asks us to consider in her latest work, on view at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts through Saturday.
Garay has said that the genesis of The Fine Line was a long- ago dream that she remembers through a prism of blue, grey and green. She’s recreated that dreamscape for a trio of dancers: Cai Glover, Vanessa Goodman and Bevin Poole. They’re dressed in fungal shades that suggest the underside of things, and they dance in front of, over and around psychedelic projections, colour whorls and pulsating shapes that grow and shrink, appear and re- appear at difference places in the stripped- down stage space.
The dance plays with perceptions from the outset. It opens with Glover making swan arms in front of a projected image that gets bigger and smaller, so that his size relative to it keeps shifting. Is this guy man or beast? Huge or tiny? The device both introduces the subject of the piece and sets its tone. When Glover gets going he is all tics and agitation, pushing back against a menace that seems to hang in the air.
The mood is picked up by Goodman and Poole, who perform little compulsive, unhappy gestures — unzipping, pointing, tracing shapes in the air we can’t quite make out. They’re sad, and mad, too: a teddy bear gets his head ripped off early on in the proceedings.
Thematic linking sequences are interspersed with unison and canonic dance phrases, in which the performers move as a frightened, exhausted gang of three. They take turns containing and restraining each other, with the action building to a quiet climax where grainy light projections flicker on the three cloaked, hooded figures. Something is about to be extinguished; someone is about to wake up. The dancers are enervated, and so are we.
Garay has assembled an able team of collaborators for The Fine Line. Patrick Pennefather’s score surrounds the performers with freaky noises worthy of a horror movie soundtrack: vibrations, echoes, distant thunder. Flick Harrison contributes enigmatic video designs, John Macfarlane is responsible for the elegant lighting, and Margaret Jenkins’s costumes evoke the colour palette of Garay’s remembered dream.
The three dancers have all worked with Garay before, and their commitment to her vision is evident. Among Vancouver dance makers, Garay is not a super nova. Rather, she has continued to make work steadily, on the edges of the firmament. A faculty member of SFU’S School for the Contemporary Arts, her company is one of the most widely toured in the province, bringing contemporary dance to dozens of smaller communities for the past 13 years.
While Garay has remained true to the original repertory intentions of dancers dancing, her own choreography forms the core of the company’s work. The Fine Line is a spooky and mindbending addition to an oeuvre of more than 40 dances.
Oh, and about that poster: try turning it upside down. It all depends on how you look at it.