On Oct. 15 I attended a contemporary dance performance entitled “Prism” in Sointula by Tentacle Tribe, a group hosted by the North Island’s own BC Movement Arts Society.
Tentacle Tribe is a Canadian-Swedish alliance from Montreal producing “conceptual hip-hop with a contemporary twist.” When it comes to the quality of the show, the audience response said it all. When the performance ended, the audience members didn’t just erupt into enthusiastic applause, they even cheered.
Located in the Sointula Finnish Hall, the set of Prism started out with a square mat flanked on two sides by four tall rectangular (possibly around 9 or 10 feet tall) mirrors. As soon as the dancers arrived on their stage, the mirrors produced an immediate impact. The number of dancers suddenly multiplied, and their movements resulted in a visually exciting kaleidoscope effect.
The guiding metaphor was the prism, suggested by the mirrors. The dancers, each dressed in a different bright solid colour, were like the different colours that result from the breaking up of white light.
The prism has plenty of symbolic potential. It can represent how a society is a composite of unique individuals. It can be a reference to quantum physics, that our existence might be merely a projection, like the colours from the prism, a movement of wave energy that sometimes manifests in something “solid.” Like Schrodinger’s cat, the dancers “were sometimes there and sometimes not there” as shown by them disappearing “into nothing” and then later reappearing from behind the mirrors. It can be an allusion to Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, perhaps suggesting that life is just a dream. I could go on for pages examining the symbolism in Prism. The potential for so many associations attest to the work’s depth and resonance.
The visual and conceptual aspects of this piece were one thing, but it is also abundantly creative from the movement angle. It is evident that the program’s creators have spent a lot of time observing movement as it happens in nature and the human world. Among the different types of movement that I recognized included mechanical dolls in a child’s toy store window display, lumbering dinosaurs, circus acrobats, an industrial sewing machine, the wild dancing noodle in a car lot…all represented within the framework of the Hip-Hop style. The dance was even exciting when movements happened in slow motion, or even, when dancers were not moving at all in a kind of freeze-frame scene.
One section had entertaining “special effects” where the dancers showed only half their bodies at the edge of the mirror, producing imagery like “a dancer with two heads” or a dancer seeming to float in mid air. They certainly “played” with the idea of movement in novel ways.
Previously I wondered why hip hop is being connected to contemporary dance so often these days. I realize now that is a good marriage: contemporary dance provides a conceptual framework, and hip hop provides lots of energy and spunk.
The mirrors were a feature that enhanced the conceptual, visual and movement aspect of the dance, while also adding some serious “awe factor.” At one point the gigantic mirrors were tilted back, creating a sense of extreme height and airiness in the theatre, as if the dancers and the audience was suddenly transported to the top of a high mountain. Later in the show, the mirrors were tilted 45 degrees down, creating a feeling of compactness and intense intimacy. These changes, I could tell, had people on the edges of their seats. In another section the mirrors were positioned to make the audience part of the dance. These “mirror movements” embodied the question, “What is the nature of reality?”
Above all, this dance gets my “double E” mark of success: it has energy and emotion. Energy and emotion can apply to any artform: painting, sculpture, writing, dance, theatre and so on. Skill and technique can only take artists so far; the work must also have spirit. In addition to being packed full of rich content, this show had spirit on steroids.
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.
