Dance of revising in real time WCD’s Retuning explores the joy and perils of the changing nature of art and life By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 4:56 PM CDT Wednesday, Apr. 12, 2023

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This article was published 12/04/2023 (929 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What does it mean to retune something?

The dictionary has some insight. You can tune something again or differently, return or redo. You can readjust a key, a pitch, a frequency.

But what about our bodies and minds? If those are the instruments we use to express ourselves in the world, then they, too, can be retuned.

Those ideas are at the heart of Retuning, a new work by choreographer Jolene Bailie, the artistic director of Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers, that will cap off the company’s 2022/23 season.

“I think retuning is something that we all probably do a lot in our lives for various reasons,” Bailie says during an afternoon rehearsal at the Rachel Browne Theatre. “I think it’s an important part of personal growth as well.

“I think that the willingness to address the need to retune, and also the subtleness in the body and the mind — and making space and having that level of participation and investment in yourself or the people you’re with — is something we often don’t talk about. I think the work we do when we have to retune is really challenging. It’s much easier not to do it.”

Indeed, making changes — especially the granular, interior ones necessary to create bigger changes — can be difficult, sometimes insurmountably so, which is probably why there’s a billion-dollar industry devoted to self-help. But retuning, to Bailie’s mind, is more about refinement than reinvention.

“At the end it’s still the same instrument. It’s still you, but you might be playing the same song in a different key,” Bailie says. “So it’s like, how do we become our best selves while still being ourselves?”

As a dancer, Carol-Ann Bohrn — who is joined in Retuning by Reymark Capacete, Julious Gambalan, Andrés Felipe Jiménez Mejia, Shawn Maclaine, Warren McClelland and Shayla Rudd — feels this idea of body-as-instrument acutely.

“I think about how life kills you,” she says with a laugh. “Like how living will cause your death.”

She’s noticed how her body is changing as she ages, how some parts are getting weaker and some parts are getting stronger.

“And then I have to do a retuning; I need to go to the chiropractor or something,” she says. “Even on a mental level, whatever ideas you were clinging to to bring you somewhere, you have to let them go. It feels really relevant and nice to reflect on.”

Rudd points out that dancers are constantly retuning as they perform.

“I think as a group as a whole, we’re very in tune with each other and we’re able to retune as a collective within the piece,” she says. “It’s not just like, ‘Oh, I’m here, doing my stuff.’ I can be watching Reymark across the stage and I can see, oh, in this run, he did this little subtlety and that changed his experience and that changes Carol-Ann’s experience.”

In a bit of a departure for the WCD, this work will be performed in the round. A giant white vinyl circle has been placed on the studio’s floor, blank space to be filled in by the dancers.

“Dancing in the round, it does make you feel exposed from all sides,” Rudd says. “And having this idea of retuning within yourself, within the piece, it does kind of put you in this vulnerable place.”

Even the small movements, then, are not so small.

Tiny individual movements, such as taking a breath, are what lay the foundation for bigger moves, such as taking a flying leap, Rudd points out, noting the symmetry between the choreography and how we approach retuning our lives.

“As much as we want to make leaps and bounds and changes, it’s just not possible,” Rudd says. “We need to start with the small things.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com