Michael Montgomery of Alonzo King LINES Ballet
Vancouver International Dance Festival At the Roundhouse in Vancouver
Ballet and butoh define this year's Vancouver International Dance Festival. Diehards might be fanatically loyal to only one or the other, but adventurous souls have learned that it's not so much the form as what an artist does with it that matters.
My thoughts on the opening trio of shows are below. Best bet as the festival continues? In Between, by Montreal's introspective Lucie Grégoire and Japan's eccentric Yoshito Ohno: Their 2009 collaboration, Flower, was endearing and sometimes profound.
Resin and Scheherazade Alonzo King LINES Ballet
San Francisco's Alonzo King is a sensualist who delights in his 13 dancers' technical chops and individuality (several men even sport beards). In bits of chiffon or velvet that reveal muscular detail, the dancers' limbs unfurl like plant life while they power through spins and jumps. Both pieces feature similar movement – King puts the same jewels in different settings. The Sephardic music and showers of salt under which the dancers stand in 2011's Resin were magnificent. But 2009's Scheherazade left me swooning. Tabla master Zakir Hussain's music evoked history, quoting liberally from the Rimsky-Korsakov score used in the 1910 Ballets Russes Scheherazade. The peacock-feathers tutu and the colour-drenched backdrop were splendid. And, oh, the powerful shoulders and rippling arms of both men and women: There are no stick ballerinas in this Arabian Nights dream ballet. (A worthy headliner that opened the festival downtown at the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts.)
Rock my body… Kokoro Dance
The expressionist form of dance called butoh, developed in Japan, is generous to age: 65-year-old Jay Hirabayashi can still get onstage, stripped to the waist, bald and white-painted, and rock his body, just as the title of his solo says. This signature work by the festival co-producer and Kokoro Dance co-director captures the emotional richness that butoh at its best makes present within the performer's body. Keeping pretty much to one spot centre stage, Hirabayashi is powered by inner drama, sometimes peaceful and still, sometimes turning and tense. Fuelling Hirabayashi's alternately graceful and gnarled dance is the lush pop sound of a live quartet, Aunts and Uncles, featuring guitar, violin, drums and occasionally the bright sounds of a glockenspiel. One of the members is twentysomething Joseph Hirabayashi, adding a sweet father-son connection and a meditation on passing time. (This Roundhouse Community Stage show runs to March 8.)
Line Between inkBoat
It's hard to share even the most amazing dream with another person. Chances are, when you describe the astonishing images that filled your head so vividly to someone, they're bored, unable to enter into the deeper truths all the elements represent to you. That's what happened with Line Between by San Francisco's inkBoat: Shinichi Iova-Koga and Dohee Lee presented a series of surreal images and dream-like scenes that didn't add up to anything. Clad in white long johns, Iova-Koga and Lee tango, fight and hobble about like two elderly people. He prays to the Lord and throws dice into a paint can. She squeals and squeaks and bangs on a large drum. The butoh-based work takes place on a white stage with a crooked bed and a lamp planted in soil, and looked great. But it was their dream, and never became mine. (There are no remaining performances.)
The VIDF runs to March 11 (604-662-4966 or vidf.ca).
Special to The Globe and Mail