Jiri Pokorny and Eric Beauchesne perform in "A Picture of You Falling," one of four pieces in "The You Show."
The You Show
- Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM
- At the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in Vancouver on Tuesday
Over and over, people fall in the four pieces making up Crystal Pite's The You Show: either so fleetingly - on their feet again in an instant - that you hardly notice, or else suspended in a long backward arc for what seems an eternity before collapsing to the ground. Gravity will prevail, but Pite's crack team sure come close to defying such mundane natural forces.
The nine dancers from Canada, the United States and Europe who make up Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM - Pite's prestigious Vancouver- and Frankfurt-based company - have hyper-articulated bodies and strong presence. Each one seems born to embody the intense drama and epic comedy of Pite's entertaining show, which had its world premiere last November to sold-out houses in Frankfurt. The present production is the Canadian premiere.
A Picture of You Falling opened, a moody duet featuring Peter Chu and Anne Plamondon. It's a detective story, with a voice-over dropping clues about a previous encounter. Some clues are obscure and describe the dance itself ("This is you reaching back…"); others establish a concrete setting, describing a room with a bed, a window. This lovers' duet (the only remount, from 2008) is full of push and pull, and long, slow falls. When Chu lifts Plamondon, she flows around him like water.
The Other You is also a 20-minute, impeccably rehearsed duet. Sound, light, movement and dramatic characterization come together to create a spooky tale of mysterious connection. The stage is dark and bare, but the sound of a barking dog and ocean waves in the distance, as well as a high wind, suggests a setting: some deserted, lonely place, maybe a clifftop. Eric Beauchesne and Jiri Pokorny are about the same size and, costumed in similar dark suits, they look like twins. In a series of psychically intense encounters, the brilliant Beauchesne and Pokorny establish a strange physical power over each other. One moves a hand; the other man's leg lifts. One swings his arm out; the other reacts as if he's been struck.
The evening faltered after intermission with the brief Das Glashaus. Yannick Matthon and Cindy Salgado were as physically precise as the earlier duos, and there was a powerful soundscape of breaking glass by long-time collaborator Owen Belton (who provided sound for the whole evening), but the duet repeated the first half's forceful push through space, and the same restless movement that animates the entire body, without adding a new dramatic impulse.
Pite is becoming a master storyteller, a rare accomplishment in a contemporary choreographer, and it is this skill that made the finale, A Picture of You Flying, so engaging. Who else could pull off with such style an adventure comic about lovers and superheroes? It stars Jermaine Maurice Spivey as a thoughtful guy in glasses who transforms into a caped crusader and has relationship problems with Sandra Marin Garcia, who has her own double identity. The company take supporting roles as heroes and bad guys engaged in epic battles of mega-force and effort.
In her program note, Pite suggests we see our own heroic selves in the "fierce physical language" of The You Show. It shouldn't be hard to do: If we're not battling floods in Saskatchewan, we're facing cuts to the arts in B.C., or, everywhere, surviving romantic disaster. We are indeed the heroes of our ordinary, extraordinary lives, which The You Show celebrates.
The You Show runs in Vancouver until May 14. Remaining performances are sold out. It's at Festival TransAmériques in Montreal June 9-11.
Special to The Globe and Mail