The BC Movement Arts Society brought Karen and Allen Kaeja to the Gatehouse Theatre on June 6 as part of the North Island Contemporary Dance Series featuring Canadian and international dance artists and multi-week artist residencies.
Karen and Allen Kaeja are life and dance partners, still dancing into their 60s, with a long list of awards and achievements in dance, choreography and film.
In Karen and Allen Kaeja’s piece Lasterday, choreographed by Hanna Kiel, the promotional material describes the dance as an exploration of how two individuals carry different memories and perceptions of the same events from their shared past. It is difficult to see this aspect of it without some indication of the memories and perceptions the poses and movements are referring to. Nevertheless, the dance came across to me as a tableau of moments in a long-lasting relationship, the ins and outs and ups and downs of it all, ending in a very tight spread-eagle hug representing the strong bond created by sexuality. I liked the use of voice and the story about “building the Ikea stool,” representing the importance of the mundane and suggesting a deeper hidden meaning. The poses were well chosen to represent the phases of a marriage, and I especially liked how Karen also lifted Allen… perhaps it was a metaphor for how they must lift each other.
I felt this dance needed to go a bit deeper, however. Just like every written story needs a central conflict, so does every dance, especially one involving a couple. They basically remained a single unit throughout the dance, leaving the audience very much “outside.” I felt they needed to be separated somehow by a breakup or a dilemma or a crisis for a while to bring the audience “inside” their relationship. Maybe what is needed is a movement soliloquy for each of them to help us get to know them as individuals, so we can worry about them, and then feel satisfied when they ultimately get back together or feel sad when they don’t.
Lasterday was then followed by a short film of a dance entitled Zummel that Karen and Allen were involved in the production of in 1999. The dancing in Zummel was very similar in many ways to Lasterday, but all it’s elements, subtle and overt, coalesced into a perfect gem.
Firstly, the “story” was very provocative in many ways. The dancers, looking like a family or a close-knit group, are dressed in mourning clothes in 1940s hairdos in a very dystopian monochromatic scene. They are dancing, (something not easy to do on stable ground), on an unsteady raft that seems to be on the open ocean…one of the many elements of this work that contribute to a feeling of suspense. Even the camera person was coping with instability, as if he/she were on another raft, capturing frames that were cut off in places, moving quasi-awkwardly, capturing odd angles to show how the world is an unstable place. The dancers likely represent Jewish refugees on the run from the Nazis, as there is a play with the same name on the same topic. This play can be extrapolated to the plight of all refugees by its embodiment of that prevailing feeling of “unsteadiness.”
Also unsteady is the relationship of the dancers on the raft. There seems to be “stuff” going on between them. Are there signs of a betrayal? Is someone cheating on someone? Is someone being manipulated? Are there smear campaigns going on? Has someone been killed? In the end, there is a happy resolution when the shore is seen (interestingly, by only one member of the group) and there is more colour on the screen. A dance like this can lend well to layers and layers of interpretation, of which I have only scratched the surface of here.
The dance, 25 to 1, choreographed by Ted Robinson, did not work for me. The action was too low to the ground and slow in places. The tent that they used as a prop tended to act like a roadblock to dramatic movement. When the movements were inside the tent, it buffered their impact. This dance too needed some strong element of conflict between the dancers to draw us in emotionally.
The last dance, In Case of Fire, that included Karen and Allen Kaeja with local dancers Alana Tortorelli-Collins and Mike Collins had a very simple format with all the dancers dressed in basic black. With this low-key look, I was skeptical about its potential effectiveness at first. In the end I was pleasantly surprised. I saw it as a kind of “Bridge Night”: two couples getting together on a Saturday night to entertain one another, but with dance.
What captured me was the different “dance personalities” of the dancers, and the dynamism between the males and the females and the two couples. If I could replay the dance over and over in my head I’m sure I’d find clues to interpersonal issues, just like some interpersonal issues can emerge on a night of playing Bridge. They were engaged in a kind of competition with one another, but, in the end, their competitiveness and “clash” of personalities ended up becoming a beautiful and complex whole.
