Metamorphoses
Dancemakers
At Premiere Dance Theatre
In Toronto on Tuesday
Dancemakers is a company of powerful dancers who think deeply. The muscular men and women look like they could eat other companies for lunch, while their choreography displays a creative intelligence that shows their brains are as athletic as their bodies.
To celebrate the company's 30th anniversary and Toronto's Metamorphosis Festival, artistic director Serge Bennathan and three company dancers have created original works based on the poetry of Ovid. Metamorphoses, as the evening is called, is provocative contemporary dance on every level, tied together cleverly by Heather MacCrimmon's evocative costumes and Marc Parent's dramatic lighting.
The Metamorphosis Festival features works inspired by the writings of the Roman poet Ovid who detailed how Greek myths explained natural phenomena.
Bennathan's inspiration is the arrogant weaver Arachne, who was turned into a spider for refusing to acknowledge that her skill came from the gods. Susie Burpee draws on the thwarted lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, who independently committed suicide, and whose blood turned the mulberry fruit from white to red. Shannon Cooney chose Echo and Narcissus. The former wasted away from unrequited love, leaving only her voice, while her beloved and vain Narcissus produced a flower in death. He also wasted away while admiring his own reflection in a spring. Julia Aplin's myth de choix is Daedalus and his son Icarus. In order to escape exile, the inventor father fashioned wings attached by wax, but the foolish Icarus, despite his father's warnings, flew too close to the sun and his wax melted. He fell to Earth in what became the Sea of Icarus.
Needless to say, none of the dance works literally tells a story. What is intriguing is how each choreographer riffs on the theme.
Bennathan's Remains, an enigmatic, tour-de-force of punishing physicality, examines how we keep our own soul while undergoing a transformation. Using imagery that conveys both weaving (through gestures) and insect characteristics (through movement), he puts his six dancers (Burpee, Cooney, Alison Denham, Steeve Paquet, Linnea Swan and Dan Wild), through an ordeal of self-identity. Each member of the sextet discovers his or her own persona, and in an amusing finale, they each show off one self-defining explosion of movement.
Burpee's harrowing duet Mischance & Fair Fortune features herself and Wild in staccato, intense movement punctuated by tortuous pauses. They are united in death at the beginning, but throughout the dance, they are separated by hanging curtains, reliving the pain and desperation of being kept apart.
Christine Fellows and John K. Samson have provided the ghoulish music and black humour text, the latter, a litany of desire recited through a cellphone monologue.
Cooney has gone high-tech for Like Love to Gravity, and her own set design includes a hanging camera the size of a flashlight, a square of light, and a plasma television screen. In her trio, Denham, Swan and Cooney are restless and aimless beings, rolling and pounding on the floor, until they discover the camera. This little device produces bizarre, distorted pictures, and Cooney has provided the dancers with angled and twisted physicality to go with John Mark Sherlock's garbled electronic score.
It is up to Aplin to show that Dancemakers can make fun of dance. Ick, with a burping, bubbling score by John Gzowski, is a quintet for fools based on French theatre master Jacques Lecoq's pioneering bouffon technique designed to expose an actor's vulnerability through the art of physical clowning.
MacCrimmon has costumed the five dancers in bizarrely padded jester outfits while Veronica Verkley has fashioned the overhead wing sculpture. They caper and prance, hurling comments and insults at the audience, giving hints at the original myth while deprecating their ability to tell it. Aplin's sea change occurs when Wild dons the wings, and his explosive transformation, despite the dead duck that hits the stage, brings on a lyrical ending of power and poignancy.
Aplin's piece is a fitting end to the evening. Humankind has dared to fly. The artists have been transformed by the experience, as they hope their art has transformed us.
Dancemakers' Metamorphoses continues at Toronto's Premiere Dance Theatre until May 20.