Everyday minutiae re-imagined via fluid vocabulary of movement

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/05/2024 (884 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One of the best things about modern dance is that you’re never quite sure what you’re going to see, its endless array of thematic concepts as fluid as a dancer’s arched backbend.

In this case, Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers took an estimated 40 members of Thursday night’s preview audience on a journey through the microcosms of daily life, with the world première of artistic director Jolene Bailie’s Signals to Segue. The three-performance production at the Rachel Browne Theatre caps the company’s 59th season.

It’s a worthy premise, and an impressive, all-local six-dancer ensemble — Carol-Ann Bohrn, Reymark Capacete, Justine Erickson, Julious Gambalan, Warren McClelland and Shayla Rudd — dance their hearts out during the often highly athletic, 55-minute work.

It’s every creator’s dream to have fellow artists demonstrating a fierce commitment to bringing her vision to life, and Bailie has a goldmine with her handpicked dancers.

Other strengths include the show’s dramatic lighting design by the choreographer’s longtime collaborator, the incomparable Hugh Conacher, and a driving electronic score by Emma Hendrix that pulses and provides underscoring throughout.

Brightly coloured pastel costumes of silky shorts and shirts are co-designed by another veteran of Winnipeg’s dance community, Wanda Farian; they pop like cotton candy against the white box set that serves as a canvas for the performers. It also creates an effective backdrop for Conacher’s shadows, shin lighting and geometrical shapes — including stage-wide circles and razor-sharp shafts of light projected onto the floor — that further define the space while adding visual dimension.

The production begins with the six dancers standing upstage in a line. They flail their arms, and slap their own bodies before exploding into Bailie’s visceral movement vocabulary, including high-flying leaps and lifts, daring upside-down flips, and warp-speed spins across the floor, evoking hyperkinetic tumbleweeds.

The larger group breaks into smaller, more intimate ensembles that highlight the “micro-decisions” of Bailie’s theme through more intricate choreographic detail, while wisely spotlighting individual dancers. An early duet of the well-matched Capacete and Gambalan, infused with forceful tumbles and leaps, bleeds into another dynamic trio featuring Bohrn, Erickson and McLelland, who reaches his arms into space and pulses on his toes.

However the abstract work often feels uneven, and overly cryptic. Midway, Bohrn now seated on a yellow chair, holds a microphone and intones, “I’m just going to read some texts but I want you to watch the dance.” Well, yes, it’s hard not to when you have several fine duets happening behind her by McLelland and Rudd, or Capacete with Erickson, with the dancers providing reactive counterpoint to the narration.

Bohrn then pushes further with a more confrontational dare to the audience: “Are you going to just sit there and not say anything?” Breaking theatre’s proverbial fourth wall is always startling — if not enough to make an audience squeamish.

The production gains greater focus and dramatic intensity with the addition of three chairs (plus a painted mime cube) used as props, as well as a suspended hand microphone magically lowered from the ceiling. Capacete’s dynamic solo (duet?) with the mic enthralls, as he swings it madly around the stage, chasing it around a pool of light before ultimately coiling it around his neck like a noose.

When he says, “Sometimes when I say something, no one responds” or the even more harrowing, “Sometimes I look in the mirror and no one’s there,” it reverberates with postmodern angst of social alienation in an age of technology.

This is echoed during one of the show’s final extended scenes, in which metres of microphone cable are strung across the stage like a giant cat’s cradle, as dancers take turns moving through the labyrinth, caught like spiders in a web of electronica. More of these images would have made this a stronger production.

The show comes full circle with the dancers returning to their opening line formation, now downstage, as they once more swing their arms and segue into staring out at the audience.

While re-establishing their “macro” connection as a society, their blank facial expressions and wide-open eyes signal their own “micro” discomfort and disconnection as individuals, in Bailie’s imagined, abstract world of meditative wonder.

holly.harris@shaw.ca