OTHERWORLDLY DANCE
Show explores heaven and hell
When it comes to the arts, hell has always been hot.
Ancient texts like the Inferno section of Dante’s Divine Comedy, country music’s Charlie Daniels bringing the devil to Georgia for a fiddle fight and Al Pacino’s Beelzebub bursting into an Old Blue Eyes number are just a handful of an eternity’s worth of artistic expressions born out of the ultimate evil.
The idea of hell has been so hotly handled that you would be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t have a picture in his or her head of the singed subterranean site — it’s hot, loud and filled with endless moaning. Duh! The wicked get no rest.
Now, what about the opposite? What about paradise?
From white clothing to fluffy clouds, multiple heavens, dogs, virgins and hearts weighed by the feather of truth, it seems paradise has plenty of wiggle room and covers a lot of emotional ground.
It’s that idea that has inspired the fittingly otherworldly looking Japanese butoh dance company Dairakudakan’s show Paradise.
Headlining the Vancouver International Dance Festival until March 25, Dairakudakan takes to the Vancouver Playhouse stage March 10 and 11.
“Adam and Eve had to leave paradise. I decided to look into a question about the story’s structure and a definition of paradise,” Dairakudakan’s founder and artistic director Akaji Maro said in an email interview. “In my definition of paradise, I start from a concept that hell is energy to produce a fantasy called paradise. It is a multifaceted approach to so-called human beings or a species who wiggle between reality and fantasy.”
Maro, who also performs in the show, said as he looked closer at the idea of paradise he felt overwhelmed and inspired.
“Human beings imagined and created a big fiction. It made my head spin,” said Maro, whose Dairakudakan is the oldest butoh (a form of modern dance that has dancers covered in white paint) company in Japan.
But while the big picture discussion seemed — well — big, Maro felt the current state of the world could not be ignored and instead should be inspiring.
“Constant and devastating, extraordinary natural phenomena, war, poverty, terrorism in the world and its victims and dead people compelled me toward this new work,” Maro said.
The Vancouver performances mark the international debut for a show first mounted in Tokyo last June.
I hope everyone will enjoy our performance and dream about their own paradise,” Maro said.
Keeping with the idea of the search for something better is Vancouver-based Kinesis Dance somatheatro’s show In PENUMBRA.
A multimedia piece that is informed by the “grey area between light and darkness,” In PENUMBRA comes from the mind of the company’s creator, Paraskevas Terezakis.
“I have realized that utopia is something so ideal that I don’t know that you can ever achieve it. You achieve moments of it for sure,” said Terezakis, whose company is celebrating 30 years of dance.
“What is our quest in life? I don’t know.”
What he does know, though, is that art is not usually the playground for the contented.
“I don’t believe you can create unless you are f----d up somehow,” Terezakis said. “How would we enjoy the light if we did not have the opposite? We live in a system of oppositions.”
An immigrant from Greece who arrived in 1977, Terezakis is outspoken about U.S. President Donald Trump’s travel ban and the rise of international populist politicians and their anti-immigration platforms.
“We do need this search now,” Terezakis said of looking closer at utopic ideals. “We are going backwards and I am quite afraid. Even in this peaceful world I have in Canada, especially Vancouver, we are threatened. We are threatened ecologically. We are threatened by a lunatic in our neighbours, the Americans. We are threatened by the system of not respecting immigration based on the spill of people fleeing wars and we are the affluent countries that create these wars. I worry that we will destroy the little bit of utopia we have here.”
Despite his darkening view, Terezakis admitted that the light — be it utopia or paradise or just a bright sunny day — is made even more powerful through creativity.
“Art is something that connects us. Art is something that challenges us. Art is the thing that exposes us and through art we are trying to find truth,” he said.
What does Terezakis hope the In PENUMBRA audience walks away with?
“I hope they really question the sense of how we can connect. It is more about how we can survive better,” he said. “To say this can’t happen anymore, we can’t allow the world to be the way it is.
“Or maybe it is something in your own family or partner. The enlightenment for me is the person comes out with some different questions for himself. I cannot dictate them. It is their own search.”
The Vancouver International Dance Festival is now in its 17th year. World-renowned artists from 14 different companies (from Can- ada, the U.S., Denmark and Japan) will deliver shows at six venues in Vancouver.
“Our mission statement is to increase interest in culturally diverse forms of expression,” said Jay Hirabayashi, who along with Barbara Bourget has produced VIDF from the beginning.
“It’s vitally important for us; dance is an art form that expresses from one body to another,” Hirabayashi said. “It is an experience that is different from the appreciation of other art forms. It’s not just even visual or oral in terms of what you see and hear. It is really what you feel from the dancer’s body to your own body.
“It is something that can’t be translated on video or film. It is a totally different kind of experience when you see dance live. I think that is what makes the dance form unique and important. It is just a different way of expressing what humanity is.”
The VIDF is making sure that all people have a chance to experience dance. They have 15 free performances on the schedule this year.