Thanks to New Music Edmonton, I had a chance to catch up with Mustafa Rafiq. Mustafa is an inspirational, boundary-breaking Edmonton-based performer whose solo work and collaborations have been crossing over from theatre to music, to spoken word, to dance, and back to theatre. Since our interview was conducted, Mustafa’s collaborative project, the Takleef Ensemble, has been added to the Winterruption schedule on April 2, 2022.
Our conversation has been posted as the first part of the Season Two launch of NME’s No Normal Podcast. Please also check out the second part, in which NME’s Ian Crutchley conducts a fantastic interview with Gerry Morita, whose always-evolving ideas about art and performance have made Mile Zero Dance a dynamic force on the arts scene in Edmonton.
Anne Rice, 1993. Confederation Lounge, Hotel Macdonald. Photo by Gorm Larson.
Anne Rice died last night. I was sucked into The Vampire Chronicles shortly after The Vampire Lestat came out in paperback. My friend Gilbert Bouchard, who was an aficionado of vampire fiction, raved about it and lent me his copy. I read it all in two or three days, which is fast for me. I was really taken by the vampire who was described as a David Bowie-like figure. At that point, I wasn’t used to reading fiction which make reference to niche corners of pop culture. Bowie wasn’t exactly underground, but neither was he usually referred to outside of music and fashion circles.
Besides that, the story of Lestat, Louis, and the doomed child Claudia had me hook, line, and sinker. I read went back and read Interview with a Vampire after that, and followed up with subsequent books in the series as they were released. They sprawled out of control for my tastes, and I wasn’t a fan Rice’s later war on fan fiction. But before that, I had an opportunity to interview her when she was in Edmonton to promote Lasher in 1993.
Rice was welcoming, thoughtful, and goth-fashionable. I think she really appreciated the surroundings. We were seated in Queen Anne (a coincidence) armchairs next to to the grand fireplace at the Châteauesque-style Hotel Macdonald. She said she liked my jacket, a black riding-jacket affair with back pleats; I felt this was the highest complement a fan of vampire literature could attain.
She spoke freely for the better part of an hour. Re-reading the interview, I was surprised by the number topics she discussed. Now I’m tempted to read or re-read all of Anne Rice’s vampire and Mayfair witch books.
October is almost over, so I’m sharing some photos I took at the Art Gallery of Alberta on October 16. I was there to see Ballet Edmonton perform, but I stayed to enjoy several exhibits. First good thing: the weather was glorious.
“Soak, Stripe, Splatter: Collecting Colour at the AGA” includes some of my favourite pieces in their collection by artists such as Arlene Stamp, Kenneth Noland, and Jack Bush. Here I am obscuring Claude Tousignant’s “Gong 80”.
Beautiful pieces by Alex Janvier, Mary Scott, Gloria Mok, and Geoffrey Hunter. (My friend Deb Bachman for scale.)
My friend Harley Morman’s show, “Let’s Do the Time Warp Again” is a ton of fun! It featured toys and artifacts that would make people of a certain age feel nostalgic for their childhood. There were a couple of mobiles with large mirrors, reinforcing a theme of reflection.
Harley used lenticular images to trace shifting perspectives that reflect changes in age, and, in Harley’s case, gender.
The “ROYGBIV” exhibit featured colour studies through art installations. “Hyperlings” by the artist Shoplifter (real name Hrafnildur Arardóttir) features colourful, fuzzy stalactites in a room meant to elicit comfort and joy. It succeeded!
September 17, 2021 was Day 1 of Salvage, a three-night collaboration between Mile Zero Dance and the Lowlands Project Space.
The Lowlands is a unique venue: the back yards of two adjacent bungalows in the Highlands neighbourhood of north Edmonton. Several pieces of installation art were set up in the adjoining back yards. They also set up three formal stages. One traditional one in one yard; one wrapped around a tree between the two yards; and a round stage in one of the front yards.
However, the performers on the first night defined other performance spaces: on lawn, on a cement walk, in a patch of dirt, around a fire pit.
Jason Romero performing at SALVAGE, a dance and installation art collaboration between Mile Zero Dance and the Lowlands Project Space. Photo by Suzette Chan.
The first work was a solo performance by Jason Romero, set to recorded contemporary music from around the globe. It was a sensuous, grounded performance. At one point, he was seen through colourful hanging window frames of an art installation. At another, he danced on a patch of fresh soil that my friends and I had avoided stepping on, lest it had been newly seeded. Instead of being a garden, it was actually a stage for Romero, who who danced on and in the patch, coating himself in dirt, flinging it about, either to shake off excess, or to share its richness. No matter where he performed, or the genre or language of music, Romero’s movement vocabulary seemed to communicate who he is in this place at this time.
Katherine Semchuk and Julian Anderson-Bowes performing at SALVAGE, a dance and installation art collaboration between Mile Zero Dance and the Lowlands Project Space. Photo by Suzette Chan.
The second work was by dancer Katherine Semchuk with musician Julian Anderson-Bowes. They combined dance improvisation and jazz improvisation in a performance which started on the front yard stage with a table and chair, to the middle of the yards around a fire pit, to the back of one of the yards on a formal stage with light sticks. They defined space and spatial relations throughout the set. Because there was no fixed seating, we were able to follow them from staging area to staging area, often being close enough to watch the pair watch each other as they improvised. They started low-key, but built up to a spectacular end, as they moved from no light to fire light to electric light, and as Anderson-Bowes’ music went from acoustic to electronically processed. Semchuk’s performance was bold throughout, but became epic–one could say incandescent–by the time she wielded lightsticks like ancient weapons.
This was the first live dance performance I’ve seen since February 29, 2020. It was a spectacular evening of art and dance, made all the more memorable by the mild autumn weather and the opportunity to see friends and artists I haven’t seen in person in 18 months.
Day 2 and Day 3 of Salvage are on tonight and tomorrow afternoon. If you can’t make it to the venue, you can live-stream them. That’s what I plan to do, and I can’t wait.
Recently, I discovered that two of my Sequential Tart friends, Olwyn Supeene and Wolfen Moondaughter, have become ARMY! We also discovered that we each liked a different remix of the BTS single, “Butter”.
Olwyn wondered if our different selections were related to our different musical tastes, so she asked us.
In which I dust off this blog with a fun summer song
It’s been almost a year since I posted here. What happened? Well, there was this pandemic…. COVID-19 stopped in-person live events cold, and this blog was set up to highlight live performances and gallery shows as a way to get me out of the house.
Local arts companies eventually found their way online, adapting pre-planned shows, including interactive ones, such as last May’s Tracks: Message Received. Soon, shows were entirely written, performed, and presented during the pandemic. Some productions went live to air; others were live to tape; some combined film, dance, and post-production decisions. I enjoyed many of these. Although they did not get me out of the house, or even my living room, they did give me the feeling of being in attendance. The entire field of the performing arts pivoted and took viewers and participants like me along with them as they explored expanded definitions of “liveness”.
I first came across the concept of “liveness” in the book K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance by UCLA theatre professor Suk-Young Kim. She wrote: “This book is mainly concerned with a more theoretical investigation of ‘liveness’ as a technological, ideological, and affective mode in which human subjects interact with other human and nonhuman subjects in the digital age.” The book was published in pandemic-free 2018, but I found it indispensable for understanding the new virtual environment in which performing art was presented during the pandemic of 2020 and 2021.
Joining ARMY
The reason I read the book was to understand the reason I never ran out of entertainment during the pandemic: BTS.
I had been aware of the group for a few years, but only started to to pay attention in early 2020 when images and songs from their just-released new album were being circulated by fans of the mega-popular Chinese series, The Untamed. I was already a few months late to that show, but made up for it over the Christmas/New Year season of 2019-20. Numerous fans wondered if The Untamed zombie character Wen Ning had inspired the look sported by BTS’s V in the music video for the single, “ON”. There was also a popular Untamed fanvid set to the album cut, “Moon”. With so many collisions in this fandom, something was clearly up.
I promised friends that I would check out BTS “when I had time.” Then the pandemic hit, and along with it, semi-lockdown orders. It seemed like a good time to look into BTS. What was the worse that could happen?
Cut to: today. I have an ARMY membership, several albums, streaming playlists, hours of Run BTS! logged, an ARMY bomb, a season’s greeting stationery set, and a cupsleeve from a local ARMY event to celebrate the December birthdays of Jin and V.
Coming late to a fandom can be daunting. In its eight years since debut, BTS has produced hundreds of songs (in three languages) and thousands of music videos, live performances, dance practices, and spontaneous live videos through which members spoke directly with fans.
So to become a BTS fan at this late stage of their eight-year career is to experience all their live events to catch up on BTS now is to experience all their work and events simultaneously. And because I’ve experienced this while being advised to stay-at-home, I did not go out to see their movie; I did not hang around to chat at the cupsleeve event; I did not organize a birthday party with a BTS soundtrack. Almost all of my interaction with their work is through my computer. They’re here, all live, all the time, of all times.
Which brings me to “Butter”
Video: BTS’s “Butter”, 2021
“Butter” is BTS’s second all-English single, following on their first U.S. radio hit, “Dynamite”. BTS has actually been very popular in the U.S. for years. In 2014, hundreds of fans lined up for their first U.S. showcase. In 2015, BTS landed an album on the main Billboard chart. In 2019, they charted three #1 album debuts, the first group to do so since the Beatles.
BTS should need no introduction now, but they do. The success of “Dynamite” and “Butter” seems to prove that they’ve been kept off mainstream radio in Canada and the U.S. because their songs are mostly in Korean. (They also have enough Japanese songs to issue this month’s BTS: The Best compilation of Japanese hits.)
RM has said that “Butter” has no heavy message, but the song and the video are still meaningful. It’s a more in-depth introduction to the band, a statement of their purpose, and their history. To me, “Dynamite” is the musical equivalent of the band’s iconic group greeting to audiences and interviewers, which translates to: “Two, three, we are BTS!” In this analogy, “Butter” is the part when each member states his name.
Before I get to my notes on “Butter”, I was influenced by interpretations posted by columnist Lainey Liu and the tweeter GM Cantave. Liu noted that the colour of butter is yellow, a word that’s been used to shame Asians, but the biggest band on the planet has now reclaimed it. Cantave wrote about the three storylines in “Butter”: BTS flirts with the listener, comments on the music industry, and sends a love letter to ARMY. I am simplifying, so please check out the links. Liu and Cantave’s well articulated ideas were in the back of my mind as I made note of my responses to “Butter”.
Notes on “Butter”
Jung Kook in “Butter”, 2021
“Butter” opens with beats that reminded me and many others of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust’, and is followed by the lines, “Smooth like butter/Like a criminal undercover”, which was reminiscent of “Criminal” by Michael Jackson. These reverential references to Queen and Michael Jackson invite listeners to compare BTS to those superstars. As a child of the 70s, I have no trouble placing BTS in the same bracket as Queen and Michael Jackson. My first memory of Michael Jackson was from Jackson 5ive cartoons on Saturday morning. I never imaged that he would become a solo star as iconic as Elvis Presley. When I first heard Queen on Top 40 radio, I thought they were a curiosity, but they proved to have massive mainstream appeal. I did not know about BTS when they started. I imagine there are a lot of people who are surprised that this group that was atypical of hip hop or idol groups have become the biggest band on the planet. But I do know that by the time BTS, Michael Jackson, and Queen held multiple-night concerts at Wembley Stadium (to choose just one milestone of success), they all had deep, bestselling catalogues and a global presence.
V in “Butter”, 2021
V’s entire section here is both a tease and a taunt. He’s flirting with the listener and flexing at an industry that underestimated BTS. By saying “I owe it all to my mother”, V brags about his natural gifts as a singer and visual, and pushes back against negative preconceptions about both idol singers and Asians. K-pop scene performers are often stereotyped as being inauthentic and “made” by plastic surgery, auto-tune, and a “factory” system. It’s a form of techno-orientalism, the association of Asian people with robots or synthetic life-forms, and Asian culture with unindividuated cogs in an efficient machine. These are stereotypes that this sexy, dishevelled, born-of-woman V defies.
V in “Butter”, 2021
Who’s sweating? The industry? ARMY? Probably both, but for different values of “like that”. Btw, I’ve made a YouTube playlist of V’s lollipop trilogy.
Jin in “Butter”, 2021
Jin then sings the pre-chorus: “Oh when I look in the mirror / I’ll melt your heart into 2 / I got that superstar glow so”. This amused me because it reminds me of Jin’s “Worldwide Handsome” persona, which is basically a comedic bit in which he acts like an unrepentant narcissist. He gave an amazing in-character anger to Indian interviewer Sakshma Srivastav when she asked recently if his looks overshadowed his talent.
Jung Kook in “Butter”, 2021
After their mugshots, the chorus begins, and the boys are on stage in full colour (I think of this as a subtle allusion to the pandemic: they’re fine on their own, but they live in full colour when they’re on stage). In this section, Jung Kook plants a kiss on the back of his hand, where he has a tattoo of a purple heart, a significant symbol for BTS and ARMY. When he sings “high like the moon”, I think about how it’s canon in the BTS universe, the band is the moon and ARMY is the Earth. You can see it in Jin’s performance of “Moon” at the Map of the Soul: ON:E concert and in the poster for their Muster Sowoozoo concerts on June 13 and 14. In the Sowoozoo poster, the boys hold what appear to be balloons in the likeness of the planets in our solar system. The only planet missing is the Earth, which is their foundation.
Jimin in “Butter”, 2021
When Jimin sings, “Let me show you ’cause talk is cheap”, it’s hard not to think of the high-octane, shows they’ve put on, even for three-minute appearances on U.S. award shows. But rather than a demonstrative gesture that indicates he’s showing something, he puts his finger to his lips in the international gesture for “be quiet”. He’s dancing and singing; it’s up to the audience to really look and listen.
V in “Butter”, 2021
V makes a reference to Usher’s hit, “U Got It Bad “, bringing the nostalgic vibes up to 2009. It’s a line that has entertained everyone, including Usher, who took on the BTS “Butter” challenge on Tik Tok. This scene is nostalgic for ARMY, too. The last time V was in an elevator, in the video for “Dope”, he was literally in short pants.
V in “Dope”, 2015
“Dope” was a 2015 single which was also an introductory anthem. It was a bigger hit globally than it was in Korea, and the band followed up its success with their first international tour. In “Dope”, V took the elevator down to join the others, who all seem to be gathering after their day jobs to commiserate/perform/excel together. Six years later, in “Butter”, V takes the elevator up to meet ARMY.
RM in “Butter”, 2021
During the dance break section, each member is shown alone in the elevator freestyling. It’s a great way for each member to show (because talk is cheap) an aspect of his personality through dance. Jimin’s moves are sleek and confident. RM powers through his section. V went for comedy. Jung Kook is dramatic. j-hope takes up the whole space and dances with every fibre of his body. SUGA sways with cool vibes. Jin’s larger-than-life World Wide Handsome personality has larger-than-life moves.
SUGA in “Butter”, 2021
SUGA raps, “No ice on my wrist”, and to prove it, shows his wrists, which are devoid of expensive watches, but festooned with friendship bracelets. He doesn’t need flashy accoutrements, not when he has “that right body and that right mind”. SUGA came from humble beginnings, and joined a company in its lean days. But sheer talent and determination drove their success.
BTS spells ARMY in “Butter”, 2021
Many bands have loyal fans, but who else can say they have an ARMY? Okay, KISS had one. It was the only fan club I remember being spoken about by name. However, it was not like ARMY (which stands for Adorable Representative MC for Youth). The relationship between BTS and ARMY is fascinating. I loved learning about it. First, I learned that it is common for Korean idol groups to name their fan clubs, and to have a high level of engagement with them through fan meetings and the like. However, because BTS came from a small company which was on the verge of bankruptcy in BTS’s early years, the band survived with the support of ARMY, who voted, streamed, and bought music and concert tickets to keep the band going. ARMYs could also relate to BTS, who regularly sang about the pressures felt by Korea’s “sampo generation”, which is mentioned in “Dope” (international millennial and Generation Z could also relate). ARMY is often mischaracterized as being screaming teens, and harshly judged for it, but BTS never fall for the “crazy fan” questions the Western media loves to ask them. ARMY feels that BTS understands them, and BTS feels that they would be alone it it weren’t for ARMY. So after BTS introduces themselves to the general public in “Butter”, they literally spell out the importance of ARMY as part of the band.
j-hope in “Butter”, 2021
To be honest, I had misgivings about the line, “We don’t stop.” I grew up with the stereotype of scary Asian invasions in comics, on TV, and in the news (specifically, the effects of geopolitical domino theory on Asia, which had a very real effect on BTS’s homeland, Korea). But j-hope sings this line with a welcoming smile, and leads a group of individuals we have now met through their dancing, rapping, singing, and style.
BTS does not stop. They have persevered through near-bankruptcy, industry disrespect, local media indifference, international media intransigence, racism, and a global pandemic. BTS is a remarkable group, and the members and ARMY seem to be remarkable people. I wish I had gotten to them sooner, but as SUGA once said, “Don’t feel regretful that you weren’t there since our debut, because every moment feels just like when we first debuted. The day when you first met us, is the day we debuted.”
BTS has expanded the concept of “liveness” in this respect, too.
He became a global superstar after designing David Bowie’s wardrobe for the Ziggy Stardust era. The clothes defied gender, ethnicity, and norms for stage wear and streetwear, and would be forward-looking today.
Yamamoto made a cameo appearance in a graphic novel about early 70s David Bowie, BOWIE: Stardust, Rayguns & Moonage Daydreams, written by Steve Horton and drawn by one of my all-time favourite artists, Mike Allred. A friend asked about it, so I’m sending her a link to the publisher and my review:
Reviewof BOWIE: Stardust, Rayguns & Moonage Daydreams (Originally published in Sequential Tart, December 16, 2019)
News that Michael Allred was working on a graphic novel about David Bowie had me, erm, dancing in the street! In the afterword to BOWIE: Stardust, Rayguns & Moonage Daydreams, Allred writes that he had planned to do a Ziggy Stardust comic in the 1990s, but was told by reps that David Bowie had plans of his own […] so I turned my Ziggy Stardust comic book into the graphic novel Red Rocket 7, in which I told the history of rock and roll through the eyes of a red-headed alien clone.”
Allred’s Ziggy Stardust comic finally became a reality when writer Steve Horton approached him with an idea for making it so. Using the last Ziggy Stardust concert as a framing device, BOWIE: Stardust, Rayguns & Moonage Daydreams traces how Bowie built and rebuilt identities and created innovations that affected music, art, fashion, videos, and even financial products. For example, it suggests that the visions experienced by Bowie’s half-brother while having psychotic episodes may have influenced Bowie’s interest in altered perceptions (although, curiously, there is no mention of the heavy drug use that characterized much of this phase of Bowie’s career, something that had been acknowledged in Red Rocket 7). Bowie’s unwillingness to deal with the business aspects of his career in the 1970s explains why he later took the reins of management, going so far as to issue “Bowie bonds“.
Horton and Allred bring significant milestones in Bowie’s career to life, and provide insight to some obscure or overlooked aspects of his life and work. The dialogue is perfunctorily casual at times — STEVE MARRIOTT: “I hear tell you’re old mates with Pete here.” DAVID BOWIE: “School mates.” PETER FRAMPTON: “My dad was even David’s teacher.” — but helps to create (or perhaps reflect) characterize the London music scene as being far larger in influence than its actual size, with all the camaraderie and rivalry endemic to tight-knit groups. It’s a delight to see so many future superstars, but Horton and Allred also credit those behind the scenes who helped shaped Bowie, from stylist Suzi Fussey, who created the Ziggy haircut, to Mott the Hoople leader Ian Hunter, who had several musical intersections with Bowie, and who gave him the heads up about the management side of things.
The documentary nature of such passages is matched by the close likenesses Allred has drawn of major figures in music, some based on the heroic rock and roll photography that has memorialized moments such as The Who and Iggy Pop in concert, Bob Dylan and Elton John album covers, and, of course dozens of memorable Bowie album covers, newspaper photos, concert snaps, fashion shoots, and music videos. Still, the drawings are recognizably Allreds’ (I’m including colourist Laura Allred in this assessment), with instantly intelligible pictures, clean, bold lines, and vivid colours– iconic artwork for an iconic subject.
As befits a book with such strong visuals about a man who led such a cinematic life, the artistic credits are given as if the comic were a movie: “Screenplay by Steve Horton and Michael Allred. Technicolour cinematography by Laura Allred. Directed by Michael Allred.” (The book was edited by Mark Irwin. Hans Allred provided colour assistance and Neil Gaiman contributed the foreword.) It also has bonuses of pencilled pages and Pin-Ups (see what I did there) by the Allreds.
Below: an interior page from BOWIE: Stardust, Rayguns & Moonage Daydreams.
Since mid-March the arts scene around town has mostly been a series of cancellation announcements. Our province is in lockdown mode. Businesses are starting to re-open, but the ban on large gatherings of people will last some time.
Art galleries have been closed for two months. Most performing arts seasons ended early. The Edmonton Fringe Theatre Festival has been cancelled. Teatro la Quindicina has postponed its entire 2020 summer season. The Citadel Theatre has added a note to their website letting people know that their 2020-21 season is subject to change in response to the COVID-19 public health emergency.
However, this does not mean that there has been no art. Galleries and museums hosted virtual tours, the Metro Cinema hosts movie nights where you stream new releases through their portal, and NeWest Books has hosted book launches online.
When it comes to scheduling arts events, I’m fond of saying “there is too much going on!” That has not changed. There is too much going on even in in this pandemic!
I’m not sure if it’s because we’re all supposed to have “nothing to do”, but I find it even more stressful than usual to choose between art events. The reality for me is that I’m working from home full time, so the number of hours available to me for events has not changed. But with artists and arts organizations figuring out how to do or present their work virtually, the arts calendar is overflowing again.
I didn’t get a chance to see that show this afternoon, but I saw a different project that began as a stage show and ended up being staged via video: the Fringe Theatre off-season show Tracks, which was supposed to be presented at the Backstage Theatre. The work would have been an environmental one: the stage is located inside a building that housed a turnabout for streetcar trains in Edmonton (the Edmonton Radial Railway Society operates a museum in the building), and just outside the theatre is the Strathcona terminus for a historical streetcar ride that goes downtown to the legislature.
Tracks is a which-way performance anthology directed by Beth Dart and tied together by the stories of Mac Brock, who told us about some personal epiphanies he had about himself while encountering trains. Raised in Saskatchewan, the first time he ever took a train was when he moved to Toronto and took the subway. I was charmed by his description of the trains (they looked like giant toaster ovens to his prairie eyes), and moved by his meditations of what it means to be a storyteller when you aren’t that confident in your stories, or, more fundamentally, in the significance of your own personal experience. But we need these stories. We need to know that our experiences are unique, yet shared, and that they’re real and matter.
Throughout the afternoon, Mac gave us two sets of performances to choose from, so it was not possible to see all the performances (unless you had two tickets and two computers — I wish I had thought of that before!). This was probably the plan for the live performance: to get the audience to participate by making a choice. We were further engaged by a feature that let us communicate with the performers via online messages. That was the other interesting aspect of this video presentation: it was all live. The performers were in the space of their choosing — or maybe just the space they happened to be in when the quarantine order came down. So while we were not all in the theatre, we were all, or almost all, in the same place: at home.
Two performances stood out for me. One was by Mustafa Rafiq, who I got to know while covering the noise music scene in Edmonton last year. His segment was wordless, but nevertheless, he communicated experiences that resonated strongly during this lockdown. He was under the covers of his bed the entire time. The room was dark, except for a bright, colour-changing spotlight. At first, we see his arm extending a violin bow to play a guitar that was slung in front of the curtains. Next, he went from the prone position to a kneeling one, all the while playing a saxophone and still under the covers. You could just feel the weight of the blanket pressing down the urge to create, but also the desire to shield the self from the spotlight, especially when you may be conspicuously alone.
The second performance that will stay with me was Hayley Moorhouse’s more logos-based segment. She asked us questions that we answered; hearing her read back the answers in real time made viewers feel seen (I’m not just guessing: someone typed that in). I’m not sure what the experience would have been like in a theatre, and I didn’t hear any of my comments read, but to see and hear someone read your comment back to you on video would be like being featured on a TV show. Like Mac, Hayley also reflected on the concept and the desire to communicate. She said it was like floating around “Sandra Bullock-style” in space, throwing out a distress signal and having someone receive it on the other end. It’s like that sense of relief that character felt, first of all of not being alone, and second, of the possibility of being saved or somehow having your circumstances or perspective change.
I really appreciated those sentiments and thank the creative team for bringing this to us through new ways of communicating. Message received.
The display is a result of a librarian’s curiosity about the collection and the role that some of its comics played in her own life.
Please read Sonya Leung’s story in the University of Alberta’s Quad newsletter. I hope you can catch the displays this month and someday check out (literally!) the books in the collection.
Autumn 2019 was a bit of a blur for me as I suffered two rounds of a viral cold while juggling a busy schedule. I did get out to some performances, but did not manage to write about them. I’ll say a few words now for prosperity, and also because I still think about these performances.
Work: Eve 2050 Artist: Van Grimde Corps Secrets Date: Friday, October 18, 2019 Venue: Triffo Theatre, MacEwan University
Promo photo of “Eve 2050” (c) Van Grimde Corps Secrets
Last summer, I saw Isabelle van Grimde’s dance film Eve 2050 at DYSCORPIA: Future Intersections of the Body and Technology, a massive visual art exhibit at the University of Alberta’s Enterprise Gallery. The exhibit was curated by Marilène Oliver, whose sculptures can be seen in the film, and who wanted to further explore the themes of the film.
As the title implies, the film version of Eve 2050 is about humanity in the future. It was also the first part of a triptych of performances by van Grimde’s company, Van Grimde Corps Secrets. The second work was a Montreal performance installation in which dancers and audience members co-mingled. The last part of the triptych was a stage performance which debuted in Montreal, and was subsequently presented in Edmonton in October as part of the Brian Webb Dance Company’s current season.
I attended the first of two performances of Eve 2050 at Triffo Theatre. Walking into the auditorium, it was apparent to even those who had not seen the film that the evening was going to be about the interaction between humans and machines. A dancer was already on stage. A vertical beam of light from the stage was scanning the audience.
What followed was not merely an adaptation of the film, which was about cyborgs and human-machine hybridization. The stage performance focused on artificial intelligence and other technological inventions that have allowed humans to extend their presence beyond their bodies. Van Grimde carried over some of the dance vocabulary seen in the film and added a layer of interactive technology. Using infrared technology that was invisible to the audience, dancers triggered and interacted dynamically with seemingly 3D images, including Marilène Oliver’s full-body MRI (which Edmontonians would have seen in the Dyscorpia exhibt) and an architectural rendering which was like a mind palace come to life.
The nine-member dance company was far from overwhelmed by the technology, whether digital or analogue. (One of my favourite “special effects” was a scrim in a door frame with a dancer on either side, suggesting a full-length mirror or a portal to another possible existences or selves.) Fittingly, as they were performing in the the birth city of Marshall “the medium is the message” McLuhan, Van Grimde Corps Secrets’s symbiotic relationship with technology was both the means and the meaning of the work.
Work: Chapter One Artist: Ballet Edmonton Date: Friday, October 25, 2019 Venue: Triffo Theatre, MacEwan University
Promo photo of Ballet Edmonton performing “The Rite” (c) Ballet Edmonton
Ballet Edmonton’s first show of the season was also the first time I’d seen the company since it changed its name from Citie Ballet and hired dancer and choreographer Wen Wei Wang as its new artistic director in 2018.
For the 2019-20 season, Wang has put together three shows, each numbered as a chapter, rather than named. Chapter One was performed on October 25 to 27 (I attended the October 25 performance) and featured two ensemble pieces with themes of seasonal change.
The evening began with Forêts by Serge Bennathan with sound design featuring sounds of the forest by Karissa Barry and Wade Staples. All the dancers wore black outfits, but each one was a little different, so we could tell the trees from the forest. Forêts was a work of pure motion and sound that prompted me to reminisce about the way being in the forest can feel like a reassuring hug, and also a privilege to witness the dynamics within its environment.
The second piece was The Rite, choreographed by Shay Kuebler. Inspired by The Rite of Spring, the 1913 ballet by Igor Stravinsky and Vaslav Nijinsky, The Rite did not cause the audience to riot, but it did portray cycles of nature with choreography that rejects formal stuffiness and embraces organic movements. At first, the ensemble appeared and moved as a huddled mass. Gradually, they flew apart, like fall leaves in the wind, until one dancer portrayed a full life cycle. In the end, the other dancers huddled around her, as if taking her back into the ground, ending the piece as it began, and setting up for the next renewal.
Kuebler will be bringing his company, Shay Kuebler Radical System Art, back to Triffo Theatre on February 14 and 15, 2020, as part of the Brian Webb Dance Company’s season.
I should mention that Ballet Edmonton and Brian Webb Dance Company are collaborating, sharing flip sides of the season souvenir booklet and other resources. It’s a fantastic development, as the two companies perform in the same theatre and offer complementary takes on dance, with Ballet Edmonton presenting modern ballet and Brian Webb Dance Company presenting avant garde dance.
Work: Sara Does a Solo Artist: Sara Porter Date: Friday, December 13, 2019 Venue: Mile Zero Dance
Promo photo of Sara Porter performing “Sara Does a Dance” (c) Sara Porter
Mile Zero Dance has been doing interesting things with its new storefront space in Little Italy (10816 – 95 Street). It hosts daytime yoga and dance classes, evening dance performances, and all-day exhibits of art in its front lobby.
The evening performances vary from its Dirt City Cabaret series of experimental work to full-length work by the company and by guests. In December, I attended the opening night performance of Sara Does a Solo by Toronto’s Sara Porter, who had also spent the week conducting workshops at Mile Zero.
Porter walked in and welcomed us after we were seated in the intimate space (it’s a dance studio with folding chairs set out on the same level as the performance area). The house lights remained up as her greetings slid into an introduction, and then into the first monologue of the piece. There was no formal boundary between the three pieces of communication, and this was intentional.
Normally, I would introduce an artist with their area of practice. I might have written, “Porter is a dancer and writer”, or, “Porter is a writer and dancer”, but Porter’s piece questions the idea of occupational labels and identity. Porter, who has taken breaks from dancing, made a statement, then amended it, reviving the tenses, challenging the urge to pinpoint an artist’s activities on a static timeline. She said, “I was a dancer. I could have been a dancer. I will have been a dancer.”
The piece reflected the fluidity in her life. From the audience’s point of view, the program was delightfully unpredictable. Porter would follow a story with a movement piece. She would pull a seemingly endless stream of dresses out of a suitcase and wear them all. She would perform a dance to a silent soundtrack. But nothing felt out of place. Everything was about who she was as an artist.
Sara Does a Solo was a combination of memoir, theatre, and dance. She managed to keep you in the story while she deconstructed the story. At no point did being reminded that I was watching the construction of a story kick me out of the story emotionally. She had a way of keeping the audience reeled in. For example, in telling the story of how she met singer Mary Margaret O’Hara (a personal favourite of mine, so I appreciated the story and the MMOH music included in the piece), Porter repeated the beginning of Sara Does a Solo.
At the Q&A after the show, Porter said that she created Sara Does a Solo five years ago. She hasn’t revised it, so as an actor, she’s playing herself from five years ago. “You have to find a way to make [the work] come alive for now.” Sara Porter found the way.
Arts City 