Two thumbs up for tough-broad hitchhiker

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Supplied photo Sasha Ivanochko bares her soul in wrenching solo performance.

Waiting for a pickup, she's vulnerable, exposed, ever-hopeful, and passively dependent on somebody who occupies the driver's seat.

She's between places, drifting, weary. Each car that whizzes by becomes one more slap of rejection.

Toronto dancer-choreographer Sasha Ivanochko creates a remarkable, emotionally naked portrait of a faded, tormented hitchhiker in her 2008 solo The future memory heartbreak junction.

The piece, which has a matinee and evening show today, is the season-ender by Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers, paired with a new work that Ivanochko has created for the company.

Wearing a garish red dress and clompy heels, the petite blond Ivanochko opens the piece leaning against the back wall, apparently drunk and trying to pull it together. A perfectly conceived, subtle soundscape gives us the backdrop of the evening, from voices and distant car horns to roaring motors. The soundtrack also incorporates bits of bluesy electric guitar.

The front end of a car is positioned so the character often faces directly into the glare of its headlights. The gal is an undignified, nearly funny mess who keeps falling down, her broken, ugly postures and attempts to recover speaking volumes about inner pain.

When she goes to a microphone and speaks of "looking into the darkness" that a torch singer sees while in the spotlight, another metaphor is layered on: that of the artist who puts herself out there every night, baring her soul and hoping for love and acceptance.

When the singer introduces an "old tune," she dances it rather than singing it. It's a wrenching body-song that tells of hard knocks, the forming of a tough-broad exterior, and a pattern of self-loathing anguish that becomes a silent scream of despair.

When she leans way back with thumb extended, the hitchhiker makes herself vulnerable, balancewise, to being flung down by the force of a vehicle roaring past. She makes us feel the humiliation of having to drag oneself up off the pavement.

On one level, she seems to tell a story of one needy woman whose heart has been broken by one abusive man. But what makes The future memory... one of the finest works WCD has presented in recent seasons is that we recognize ourselves in her dark night of the soul.

The second work, The Chorus Line, is a lighter treatment of a related theme -- having to put oneself "out there" to be consumed in a pornographic sense. It's an absurdly funny piece for five identically dressed dancers whose individuality is negated as they execute a soulless sort of sex-object drill-team performance.

Like blow-up sex dolls in shameless motion, they parade and lip-synch for us. (You may become one of their clients if you sit in the front row.)

All five are terrific, but the sultry solo by Brendan Wyatt creates more steam than prime Mick Jagger.

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

Dance Review

Sasha Ivanochko & Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers

Rachel Browne Theatre (Crocus Building)

Ends tonight

Four stars out of five

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 9, 2009 C8