A SIMPLE WAY
Barbara Bourget looks back on a lifelong love affair with her art form
Barbara Bourget’s solo work reflects on her long love affair with performing.
The starting point that led to A Simple Way is as straightforward as the title suggests. Barbara Bourget was on her first trip to Japan in 2009 with her husband, Jay Hirabayashi. The city’s most accomplished and best- known butoh dancers were, not surprisingly, at a butoh festival in Yokohama.
“What I was really amazed by was the number of dance artists over the age of 70 who were performing,” Bourget said. “That struck a chord with me.”
At the time, she was 59. Bourget started dancing at age five and went on to a career that included learning ballet as a youngster with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School and then dancing with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. In contemporary dance, she was part of Vancouver’s legendary Experimental Dance and Movement collective.
Bourget and Hirabayashi set out on their own in 1986 and formed Kokoro Dance, a contemporary butoh company. Since then, both on her own and with Hirabayashi, Bourget has choreographed and danced in more than 100 butoh- inspired dance works.
In the world of dance, butoh is unique for its older and even elderly dance artists, which is the polar opposite of western forms of dance based on youthful athleticism. Rather than hiding the way age changes the body, butoh lays it bare for all to see.
“In North American culture, age isn’t so revered,” Bourget said. “‘ Now’s the time,’ I thought, ‘ for me to start working on something like this.’ ”
In Yokohama, Bourget was talking with butoh dancer Natsu Nakajima. When Nakajima told Bourget that “a dancer’s life is really a simple way,” Bourget knew she had the title to her work.
Bourget’s solo A Simple Way opens tonight at the Scotiabank Dance Centre for three performances. The 55- minute work features mostly new choreography by Bourget but also restaging of movement from previous works.
“The piece is really about my life in art, my exploration of this art form I love so much, that I have dedicated my life to,” she said in an interview.
“When you’re a performing artist, what you do only exists in the moment that you share the experience. Every time you have a great success, great failure, it doesn’t matter. Every time you go back to the beginning and start again. There is a deep sadness in that, but also great joy. I think it really is about looking back but moving forward.”
A Simple Way is also more than just about Bourget and her life in dance. She’s been working with her son, Joseph Hirabayashi, on the piece since last October through The Dance Centre’s artist- in- residence program. He’s created the music to go along with her dancing. Since he’s 25 and she’s 61, the difference in their ages also becomes part of the story of A Simple Way, if only because the two performing artists at are such different stages of their careers.
Trained in jazz piano, Hirabayashi said he originally had an idea to compose an hourlong modernist piano work. What defeated him was establishing a goal of writing down the score exactly and playing it. But what happened when he did that was some parts sounded too stale and not exciting enough for him to play. So the music has some parts composed and others that are improvised on a structure.
“It gives me flexibility to change and adapt the piece in the future and to respond to the movement in the moment,” he said.
During a recent rehearsal, I saw the beginning section of A Simple Way. In the first part, the music was full of contrasts between agile higher notes and sombre, solid lower notes as Bourget came to life as a dancer and started on her journey into movement.
The mood, movement and music changed dramatically in the second section as Bourget stood rooted on the stage, her arms waving like barely controlled windmills accompanied by rolling waves of musical thunder that filled the performance space.
Bourget acknowledges there have been a few creative clashes between her and her son in creating A Simple Way, but nothing serious enough to scuttle the process.
For the last month, Jay was called in as an extra set of eyes and experience to help refine the piece.
“We’ve had some difficult days,” she said. “There’s chaos in the creative process to acknowledge.”
Bourget said while A Simple Way isn’t a narrative work, it does have an arc and trajectory as a dance work.
“I think people will find a journey in it. There’s a real journey for me and a tremendous journey for both of us. I think people will experience that.”