Quite aptly the dance piece opening this year’s Chutzpah! Festival is entitled ‘OPEN’, and boy did it kick things off with a punch. It is a wickedly eclectic juggernaut of a show. With multimedia projections on a series of movable screens (which are just as much a part of the dance as the dancers themselves), a plethora of props and a fabulous team of dancers, we are treated to a series of exhilarating, and at times wonderfully bizarre, vignettes.
As a whole, the piece is quite difficult to explain. There is no clear narrative or central theme, that I could see at any rate. It seemed to resemble the echoes of a dream or felt like flipping between channels on a television. Scenes flashed before us. Each as idiosyncratic and fiercely creative as the last. From a bustling 1950’s street scene to a matrimonial boxing ring, ethereal forests, and seascapes, to no pretence of a scene at all but just dancers on a stage in Vancouver on a winter evening.
The creative team seems to have followed their gut rather than the rulebook. They have free associated their way through this wilfully subordinate show. At turns, the performance is sensual, witty, aggressive, provocative, whimsical, clever, and base. There is one particularly clever scene where the dancers, donned in brightly coloured clothes, shape-shift into one another through a crafty combination of video art and live performance. Another scene that tickled my fancy sees the dancers covered in what must be dermatological face masks, battling each other to the rousing accompaniment of Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”.
It was intriguing to see the representation of aggression, through a medium as intimate and trust-dependant as dancing. This contrast of aggression and symbiotic vulnerability is all the more poignant with the use of the war paint and face masks. As the dancers tussle and become more and more entwined, face paints smudge and colours on both dancers mix to become one.
The creative team has set the performance to some of the world’s most well-known pieces of classical music, yet the choreography does not stick to this mould. We see contemporary, tap, lyrical, even some street dance moves, party grooves, clowning and buffoonery. The contrast of popular classical music with the diverse palette of movement and multimedia presentation is intriguing.
In the program, Ezralow describes the use of popular classical music as a fragment of the familiar to frame the potentially new and unconventional visuals. I rather liked thinking of Debussy as a well worn, comforting blanket to swaddle us as we explore the potentially new and strange dance environs.
The thing I liked most about ‘OPEN’ is that it appears to have been put together by people who love the beauty and joy that can be found in movement and dance, and want to do something that is just perverse enough to make you sit up and notice this too. At times the tactics recruited to achieve this verged on gimmicky or overindulgent. But these are perhaps occupational hazards when there is a genuine desire that the material in the show be fun, surprising, and inclusive. For this, and for the frankly beautifully bonkers show, I salute ‘OPEN’.
Please go and see this show and if you find yourself confused or asking “why did that just happen?”, just say to yourself, “why the hell not!”, and sit back and enjoy the ride.
You can catch a show tonight (February 17th) at 8pm. Tickets here!
– MG