Breaking new Glass Little known work of Philip Glass is fused with dance meditation on slippery nature of time By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 7:00 PM CST Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2023

Walking into a rehearsal for Looking Glass is like stepping back in time. Or, perhaps, forward.

Six dancers are made up as old-timey clowns in off-duty corsets and bloomers. Their red noses and white makeup remain, like they’ve been caught backstage just before — or maybe just after — a performance.

They are trying to get somewhere but can’t seem to, moving to an insistent piano, the seventh character onstage.

Looking Glass, which runs Feb. 9 through 12 at the Rachel Browne Theatre, is a new work by Israeli choreographer Idan Cohen commissioned by Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers set to a series of piano etudes by American minimalist composer Philip Glass to be performed live by Winnipeg pianist Lisa Rumpel.

Cohen, who is also an opera stage director and the artistic director of the Vancouver-based Ne. Sans Opera and Dance, began exploring a Glass-scored piece a few years ago after running into his friend Leslie Dala, a conductor, on the street.

“He said, ‘You know, I had this idea of playing a live concert of these 20 etudes by Philip Glass that so many people are just not aware of. It’s almost like a hidden gem in that sense.’ And I was, ‘Wow, yes, that’s so exciting,’” says Cohen, sitting curled up in a seat in the front row of the now-empty Rachel Browne Theatre.

“We did a version of that with my company in Vancouver, but I felt that the project could use more. And (working with WCD) was really an opportunity for me to look at the music through a different lens, working with a new group of dancers with their own creativity and agency.”

The pandemic also offered Cohen a different lens on the music.

“Pre-pandemic, we were so busy and constantly running, and then there was suddenly this pause,” Cohen says. “And we all remember that moment when suddenly we were forced to stop. And a lot of us were, ‘Oh, this is actually interesting, there’s things for us to learn from it.’”

Indeed, the pandemic played with our sense of time. Our once-busy calendars were empty, but the pages kept turning over. Time felt more elastic; it moved both fast and slow. Those early weeks, especially, were liminal spaces with fuzzy contours.

Cohen saw a lot of symmetry between how the pandemic made time feel and the repetitive, accumulative nature of Glass’s compositions.

“It creates a non-linear sense of time, it almost feels like we’re going in loops,” Cohen says. “So I started thinking about how we translate time through movement and dance.”

The dancers’ movements are slow and fast, stilted and fluid. Megan La Touche’s costumes, too, evoke a sense of timelessness.

“It’s almost like a troupe of dancers that are as old as time,” Cohen says. “Maybe they’ve been together for centuries. There’s something very vintagey and romantic, the clown also being a commedia dell’arte kind of thing that is as old as history. So looking at those types of imagery and trying to create a world that suggests an alternative to the chase that we’re all a part of.”

The dancers call to mind the travelling symphony at the heart of Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven, who were still performing Shakespeare in a futuristic world.

Dancer Andrés Felipe Jiménez Mejia, who will be joined onstage by Carol-Ann Bohrn, Justine Erickson, Shawn Maclaine, Sophie Milord and Warren McClelland, has loved dancing with a live pianist, as well as performing a piece that is demanding both physically and emotionally.

“Usually, when you have a very theatrical piece, you don’t use the body as much, or when you’re dancing a lot of things, you almost don’t have the time to focus on your expressions,” he says. “But in this piece, you have to do everything. And it’s amazing. Challenging, but very inspiring.”

Mejia, who is from Colombia, says that working with Cohen, who is from Israel, has highlighted the fact despite our varied backgrounds, cultures and experiences, the concepts of dance, music and time are universal.

“It’s actually kind of funny because it connects to the piece,” he says. “We’re all going through time. We’re all going through the music. But we all do it in a different way. We all have different backgrounds, and it’s really nice finding the point where we all meet.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

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Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist and author of the newsletter, NEXT, a weekly look towards a post-pandemic future.

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