TENACIOUS D-O-T-E
You never know what you’re going to get at annual contemporary showcase
Outdoor performances, ‘crazy weirdos’ and MOVE’s 10th anniversary highlight the 27th Dancing On The Edge Festival.
Dancing on the Edge 27th Annual Festival of Contemporary Dance July 2-11 | Firehall Arts Centre and other locations
Tickets and info: $22-$28 and by donation at dancingontheedge.org
Donna Spencer co-founded the Dancing on the Edge Festival back in 1988, and 27 years later is still providing a platform for local and visiting artists to try stuff out.
This, more than anything, may be the enduring value of this tenacious festival, which once a year opens its metaphoric doors to artists and audiences for a coming together that is informal, uneven and, on occasion, extraordinary.
It’s a long-standing formula: mixed programs where you don’t know if you’re going to get candy-coated popcorn, peanuts or a prize (I am dating myself); outdoor work in public places, including dusk dances at Portside Park; and a few one-offs.
There are some compelling stand-alone events this year, leading off with Fortier DanseCréation’s Misfit Blues, in which Paul-André Fortier (Montreal) and Robin Poitras (Saskatoon) — both veteran dance artists with many storied miles under their respective belts — come together in an installation piece about “two crazy weirdos,” a work Fortier says “doesn’t belong to dance, even though it’s made by two dance artists.”
Then there’s MOVE: the company, 10th anniversary celebration at the Vancouver Playhouse. It’s an ambitious one-night-only program assembled by Josh Beamish, a young man on a fast career track. Kelowna-born and trained, Beamish has not lived in Vancouver since he departed in 2012, but remains committed to showing his work here.
Beamish has work visas in New York and London, were he has been steadily making dances for studio companies and artists associated with New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and the Royal Ballet.
In Vancouver, Beamish is showing four duets featuring artists from the companies he is involved with, as well as a solo by and for himself. One of the duets, The Other People in Your Party, was created for Heather Dotto and Cai John Davies Glover, two dancers Beamish says, “I grew up with. They were original members of my company. So their duet is a love letter to them, and to all the B.C. dancers who have worked with the company over the past 10 years.”
Spencer spoke with The Sun about some of the work she’s programmed on this year’s eponymous mixed bills. Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg has graced the stage at Dancing on the Edge many times over the years, developing both her acclaimed character-driven solos and more recently, ensemble pieces such as Highgate.
This year she strikes out in a new direction with “how to be,” which brings together some of the city’s feistiest dance and theatre artists to explore “the beautiful failure of it all.”
“Tara is really pushing herself,” says Spencer. “I am excited to see this next phase of her work, which will premiere at The Cultch. Supporting new work is the core, the raison d’être of the festival. How we do that has changed and needs to continue to change. But all artists need support for the development of new work, whether it is the first time in front of an audience, a work in progress or a commission.”
Family Dinner: The Lexicon is an example of the latter, a Dancing on the Edge commission which grew out of Justine Chamber’s Family Dinner, a set of immersive and subversive dining and dancing experiences that took place at last year’s festival.
Family Dinners: The Lexicon will feature five of Vancouver’s most inquiring performers playing back the everyday dining table gestures of participants in the crucible of the theatre.
What is Spencer most excited about in the 2015 edition of Dancing on the Edge?
She is hard-pressed to choose, but picks Montreal’s Tentacle Tribe, two Cirque du Soleil performers who met while doing the Beatles show in Las Vegas; Karen Jamieson’s Trickster (“She’s usually such a serious artist, so I’m looking forward to seeing her involved in humour”); and the edgiest of Edge programs, Edge Up, where the place is given over to hungry newcomers.
“It will be great to see that gang in front of an audience,” says Spencer.
Spencer is also keenly aware of the need to build audiences by involving a broader base. Watching an exercise class taking place behind us at the Roundhouse Community Centre, she wonders “how the festival can help to connect fitness to dance, sport to dance. How can we get people who love movement to engage with the virtuosity of dance? It’s a big, complex question.”