Falling into place Choreographer transforms obsessive pleasure of Tetris into interactive live dance performance By: Ben Waldman Posted: 4:24 PM CDT Thursday, Mar. 14, 2024

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This article was published 14/03/2024 (695 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 1984, a Soviet scientist named Alexey Pajitnov made digital blocks fall.

It was the beginning of Tetris, a tipping point for a generation of gamers, including choreographer Erik Kaiel, 51, who discovered the game while housesitting for neighbours in Portland, Ore. They had a computer — his family didn’t — and the 13-year-old stayed up all night trying to flip right angles left before the loser’s music chimed in.

“In the morning, I realized, ‘Oh goodness, I never slept,” recalls Kaiel, who was born in Austria and now lives in the Netherlands.

Tetris, it turned out, was quite addictive, and 40 years after Pajitnov’s breakthrough, the game remains an enormous part of Kaiel’s life.

In the early 2000s, Kaiel adapted the video game into a live dance show, teasing poetic motion and insights into human relationships out of simple geometric rotation. Kaiel’s staged translation of Tetris has been performed over 1,000 times, twisting and turning its way to audiences on six continents.

Its latest stop is at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People, where Arch8 Productions last brought the show in 2018. The Free Press called that run “weird, wonderful, funny and shockingly physical.”

“At its core, the show is almost always about working together, trying something out, being rejected and trying to rejoin the group,” he explains. “Also, it’s kind of imagining, playfully, that sort of slumber-party energy, where everyone’s had two litres of Coke, and they’re sitting there like, ‘Hey! You know what would be so cool? We should do this and this and this!’

“It’s a universal thing, and kids laugh at it when they recognize the laws of the playground in action, which works whether you’re in Africa, Australia, Brazil or Norway.”

Tetris is a decidedly international game, unblocked by language or culture; a square is always a square. In that truism, Kaiel recognized the potential to explore human metaphors through movement and theatrical interaction.

“In some ways, Tetris is an ironic name for this show because what we want kids to do is to put down the Playstation, go outside with other real kids, to collectively imagine and interact. At a base level, this performance is a proposal of a way of seeing the world as it is, but showing another one we imagined,” he says.

Kaiel’s world as a dancer started at a performing-arts high school in Portland, followed by a stint at Pearson College on Vancouver Island, an international school where he was surrounded by students from 77 countries.

After a decade dancing in New York, he moved to the Netherlands at 30, where the pieces came together for him to develop his own work.

In the early days of Tetris, Kaiel performed, but now, he serves as technician and director while Alberto Albanese, Joseph Simon and Clementine Vanlerberghe fill the space beneath the lights.

Audiences still love the show, but what about Kaiel? Is he sick of playing the game?

“It’s a great question. Everyone asks why Bruce Springsteen still sings Born in the USA or the Stones sing Satisfaction instead of new songs, and it’s about realizing what your audience wants. When you have a new show, you get these butterflies in your belly. Is it going to work? And I joke sometimes with Tetris, the butterflies have left the building a long time ago,” he says.

But with space for improvisation and audience interaction, the show’s shape constantly shifts, Kaiel says. Speaking of shapes, Kaiel has an opinion on which is the most useful.

“I’d probably say a circle, which is funny, because I’m here talking about right angles,” he says. “I like it both as a symbol of the possibility of perpetual motion, and the idea of going away and coming back.

“There’s a lovely e.e. cummings poem about travelling full circle, and I’ve learned something along the way that’s made all the difference. You’re back at the original point, but you aren’t the same because of the experience under your belt. And I think that’s true of time as well as space.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com