The BC Movement Arts Society brought a contemporary dance performance, entitled “Graveyards and Gardens” to the out-of-the-way forestry and fishing village of Port Alice on Sept. 5.
The performers were Caroline Shaw, who is prize winning musician, and Vanessa Goodman, a dancer with a BFA from Simon Fraser University. There was a very good turnout of 27 people who showed up to watch the performance.
The performance occurred in the round. A single line of chairs for the audience formed a circle around the “stage.” The stage was encircled by lamps, spotlights, house plants as well as the numerous props and technical wires and gadgets required for the performance. The stage was a very complex and carefully crafted 3-D “poetic” space.
The lights and lamps turned on and off in many different modalities, from fading in and out to a kind of a strobe effect and so on, making for a “symphony” of light. The lights also cast interesting shadows of the dance and the audience onto the walls of the gym in the community centre. This produced a representation of a multi-dimensional world with a physical dimension, a light dimension, a shadow dimension and a sound dimension. These dimensions are all different, real in their own way, but all intimately connected with one another and influencing one another. Even the creases on the Vanessa Goodman’s clothes created changing abstractions of light and shadow as she moved.
The music incorporated spoken word, chanting-like sounds, breathing sounds, humming, all producing a kind of exotic “other-planetary” uplifting musical experience. The performers incorporated some clever ideas into the musical composition, such as the use of the switches on the lamps and an old cassette and cassette player as percussion instruments. The music flowed well together, had unity. It also incorporated necessary changes of pace, such as with the clattering sound of the cassette player to contrast with the more soothing sounds like humming.
When it came to the movement part of the show, I felt there was too much repetition. There were basically similar types of movements throughout. There was no intensification, no transformative climax that usually appears near the end of any “story.” For that, what is needed is conflict and suspense.
I have recently been doing some self-study on novel writing. I’ve discovered that no matter how poignant or eloquent a person’s writing skill is, their novel will not get read if there is no conflict, no problem to solve. A love of conflict is intrinsic to human nature, even though we may like to say otherwise. A painting might set us “off-balance,” might challenge us with a big splash of red, or with symbols that seem to have an ambiguous meaning, for example. When visual art does not destabilize us somehow, it is simply called “decoration.” Art must unsettle us, and then transform us in some way. It’s a kind of “head-on collision,” aesthetically speaking.
Being that there was only one main dancer in this production, creating conflict, drama and suspense is difficult indeed. It can possibly be done, with lighting effects or props, by creating “abstract threats.” The action in this dance, instead, seemed to be just one movement after another. I did not feel pulled into some sort of engaging problem, into that proverbial “plight of the hero.”
I think part of the issue is rooted in the performance description. It mentions many diverse and complex concepts, “a curious analogue driven performance,” “a visual and sonic album of reconstructed memories and distortions,” “nature and technology,” “antiquated innovations” and “digging deep into the beauty of how the body remembers.” This is a lot of stuff! I think a mere subclass of only one of these topics would be enough to put together a substantial story. I can’t see how all these topics are related, how they come together or what they even mean exactly. At the discussion at the end, the performers mentioned additional “themes,” such as “everything returns to the earth” which added to the confusion.
I think if the creators of this performance try to think about what they really want to say — in more concrete terms and with a single sentence statement — they would have a stronger and more impactful story that engages the audience. The guiding metaphor of the story was not clear because there were too many metaphors. Because the dancer must “tell” her story using mainly movement, if the main concept is not abundantly clear, the audience can easily get lost.
A contemporary dance is simply a story told with movement. The dance needs a beginning, a conflict or dilemma and a resolution, as all stories do. Even if the story is there but the audience can’t pick up what it is exactly, the dance will have a certain harmony and wholeness that will still be satisfying at an unconscious level.
Debra Lynn has a BFA in art and design from the University of Alberta and an MA in art education from Concordia University in Montreal. She lives in Port Alice.
