Spotlight
Denise Fujiwara’s first challenge was to choreograph a play that has almost no movement
Denise Fujiwara’s adaptation of Jean- Paul Sartre’s No Exit hits the stage in conjunction with her solo piece, Lost and Found.
When you’ve spent 15 years as a soloist, sharing the stage can take a performer out of her comfort zone. But when Toronto dancer and choreographer Denise Fujiwara felt the compulsion to create an ensemble piece, she knew she had to go with it.
The result was No Exit, an adaptation of Jean- Paul Sartre’s play of the same name, which will be appearing on the Firehall Arts Centre stage, along with Fujiwara’s solo piece Lost and Found, for four nights this month.
On a break from rehearsals before heading off to the company’s first date in Regina, Fujiwara explains that she was interested in human relationships, but not in the traditional partnering involved in contemporary dance.
“Partnering has many conventions,” she says. “Unison movement, movement in cannon structures, lifting and that kind of thing. I wasn’t interested in anything like that. I was interested in the actual relationships between the people in the dance.”
Sartre’s No Exit is a play about relationships but it presented some unique challenges for a dance ensemble. Like a sitcom “bottle episode,” it has minimal setup, in this case just three characters trapped in a room, talking in circles, except this room is a waiting room in the afterlife that turns out to be a kind of hell of its own. The play itself has very little movement, but Fujiwara saw the emotional journey of the characters as a way in.
“They stay in hell because they can’t change or they don’t change,” Fujiwara explains. “They won’t take the steps to change themselves, to release themselves of this hell.”
But don’t expect a completely harsh and gritty performance. After all, No Exit is, at its heart, a satire.
“When I first read the play, when I was in university or even high school, I remember thinking, this is very dark,” she says. “But when I started this piece, I discovered it’s really funny, actually. For us, the dance has a lot of humour in it.”
Fujiwara’s solo piece, Lost and Found, draws more on her background in the Japanese modern dance form butoh.
Created over three years, Lost and Found was inspired by a piece of advice from one of Fujiwara’s early instructors in the form, “which was told to her by the master Hijikata, one of the founders of butoh: ‘ To dance butoh, one of the first things you must do is kill the self.’”
This cryptic instruction sent Fujiwara on a search for meaning. “In a way I used it as a koan, a statement that seems illogical,” she says. “It set me off on a journey of exploration into what the self is, which has all kinds of conundrums that come with it. If there’s no self, who dances the dance?”
Lost and Found became a kind of dramatization of that search for the self, a thing that, according to Zen, can never be captured from one moment to the next. Though this may seem confusing, Fujiwara found its ambiguity inspiring.
“As an improviser, it’s the ideal state of being,” she says. “It’s very transitory and difficult to stay in the present.”
She also sees No Exit, through the lens of Zen, as a group of selves in relation to one another, selves that have damned themselves through their refusal to change.
This is not Fujiwara’s first engagement with literature in dance. Her previous works have included an adaptation of a series of Noh plays about legendary Japanese poet Ono no Komachi as well as a piece inspired by the work of Sufi poet Farid Un- Din Attar.
Though she describes herself as a bookworm from early childhood who is often inspired by writing, Fujiwara points out the difficulties of integrating dance and literature.
“It’s full of pitfalls,” she says. “You never want the dance to say what the words say, because it’s much easier and more specific just to say the words. The dance you create has to say more than the words can say. They’re completely different creative processes and they reside in different parts of your brain. You have to learn how to work each of them.”
For No Exit, she had the help of an impressive cast. Sasha Ivanochko, Miko Sobreira and Rebecca Hope Terry are all accomplished contemporary dancers with enough professional credits to fill a novel. Since helping her develop the dance through improvisation, the three have consistently made themselves available for its performance.
Fujiwara credits the other dancers’ generosity with helping her circumvent Sartre’s grumpiest epigram, “Hell is other people.”
“What I found, in fact, was the opposite,” Fujiwara says. “Heaven is other people. Being a soloist is very lonely, so when I started to work on this piece, I worked with people who I really wanted to work with. They were wonderful to work with both creatively and personally. It was a really rich experience.”
NO EXIT AND LOST AND FOUND
Jan. 16- 19 | Firehall Arts Centre
Tickets: From $ 27 at firehallartscentre. ca or 604- 689- 0926