STILL DANCING ON THE EDGE
Festival’s professional participants are undeterred by the need to put work online
This year’s Dancing on the Edge (DOE) festival, like every other festival, has had to move to a mostly online format.
While that’s obviously not the best-case scenario, the good news is dance pros are generally quite comfortable with filming their work and, in this case, were excited to step up for the revised July 2-11 Vancouver fest.
“Dance artists tend to document all of their work because it is not text-based. They’re videoing all the time,” DOE artistic director Donna Spencer said. “They are happy we have gone forward with this.”
While the long-running — 32 years — DOE will be made up mostly of about 25 online (some livestream) performances, there will be a handful of live events in front of very small audiences at social distances at the Firehall Arts Centre’s courtyard and in its theatre.
The festival also will include online discussions and classes for anyone who just wants to dance.
Another upside to an online presence is potentially more people will see dance artists in action — a benefit Spencer says the DOE festival is embracing and hoping to build on in future.
“Anyone, anywhere can view it. It’s exciting,” said Spencer.
“We are already looking at next year’s festival and that it will have a similar component, and I think that is where we’re headed. We want to move forward, if we are allowed to have a live festival next year, but to also move forward so we can have material that can be streamed beyond Vancouver.”
The festival has also created the COVID Commissions program. Commissions ranging from $5,000 to $10,000 will be awarded to five artists to go toward the creation of new works for next year’s festival.
“This year is unconventional as we all know. We are having to make things in different scenarios,” said dancer/choreographer Vanessa Goodman, who has developed Solvent, a 20-minute solo piece that includes a sound score from Loscil (Scott Morgan).
The new work, according to Goodman, is focusing on ideas of shifting surfaces — both anatomically and geographically. It will be streamed July 3 and 6.
“We are trying to figure out how to make things together in these times, which feels really nice,” said Goodman, who formed her Action at a Distance dance company five years ago.
Vancouver’s Shay Kuebler, and the Radical System Art dance company, will be delivering their show, Momentum of Isolation (MOI), live inside the Firehall Arts Centre to an audience of 40 physically distanced people July 10, and then it will be streamed again live the next day.
“It’s kind of a chain of solos and chain letter between all the performers that ties it together,” Kuebler said about the performance that will have seven dancers doing six-minute solos each. “It is very unique to each artist and they were all created in isolation.”
The word “isolation” is key here, as it’s the driving inspirational mechanism for Kuebler’s show. He was inspired by it long before we all ended up in our houses in stretchy pants and slippers.
A few years ago he had heard the U.K. was creating a minister of loneliness job.
“It was reported that a lot of people said they felt isolated, lonely and this was leading to greater health problems,” Kuebler said.
“So for me I have always tried to do works that are relevant to what is happening in the world. So this felt like something that was very prominent and was becoming more prominent as our communication is becoming more online and digital.”
Then the pandemic hit and Kuebler has a prescient production and an expanded digital language that now offers him more ways to share his and his company’s work, but like all the other dancers and dance companies in this festival, COVID -19 has been a big disrupter for Kuebler.
His company has tours planned for next year, but no one knows what next year is going to look like. However, in the meantime, artists have to create — and that, Kuebler says, is what they’re doing.
“We’re trying to find ways to keep moving forward,” said Kuebler. “Trying to find ways to put the art out there.”
Tickets for live events must be bought in advance.
Online shows are free and instead people are being asked, if they can, to make a donation to the festival.