Heidi Strauss's How it is was one of the works in the Festival of New Dance.Jared Reid
- Newfoundland Festival of New Dance
- Choreographed by Andrea Tucker, Louise Moyes, Gwen Noah and Tristan Rehner
- At LSPU Hall
- In St. John's Sept. 23 to 24
To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Newfoundland's Festival of New Dance brought in the brightest and the best from across the county. No one can argue with a choreographic line-up that included Montreal's Daniel Léveillé and Martin Bélanger, Toronto's Heidi Strauss and Peggy Baker, and Vancouver's Lee Su-Feh, Jennifer Mascall and Mira Hunter.
However, I came specifically to catch the home team. Andrea Tucker and Louise Moyes live in St. John's. Both Gwen Noah and Tristan Rehner are Newfoundland born, but reside in Halifax and North Carolina respectively.
Moyes, Noah and Rehner are long-time veterans. Tucker presented her first choreography.
Louise Moyes' St. John's Women
Moyes' interdisciplinary fusion of film and live dance is deliciously droll - her witty brand of docu-dance defines the Newfoundlander's penchant for self-deprecating humour.
For this piece, she interviewed Ashley Kapoor, who is 24, Kay Haynes, who is 64, and herself, at 45. The three interviewees spoke about their memories of growing up in St. John's, and between the film segments and still photography montages, Moyes danced solo, sometimes with text that reflected on these reflections. Her costume included various skirts bought at local stores.
There was a melancholy edge, a subtext that lamented the loss of more innocent times. The very modern-day Kapoor clearly missed out on an old-fashioned coming of age.
As a mover, Moyes is clean, precise and lyrical, with a filigreed delicacy of gesture. The dance sections are clever. For example, the live solo that followed the women talking about religion includes attitudes of prayer which are mocking but never caustic or hurtful.
This richly layered piece is a delight from start to finish, and Lori Clarke's and Delf Hohmann's music captures the gentle irony of the work.
Andrea Tucker's kor'e-o'lis
kor'e-o'lis is the phonetic pronunciation of the Coriolis Effect, a theory that, among other things, explains the impact of the Earth's rotation on the movement of weather systems.
Translated into dance terms, Tucker's duet for Mark Bath and Tammy MacLeod, set to the new-age music of the Bell Orchestre, is the portrait of a shifting relationship. The couple communicates by miscommunication.
This is a "close but no cigar" piece. Tucker has some lovely physical moments, especially when the dancers actually get together, as when the woman attaches her body to the back of the man, and together they negotiate a series of close, tandem manoeuvres.
While Tucker shows promise, her piece is repetitive and the text is obscure, which perhaps can be redressed by developing the theme.
Gwen Noah's OK
Noah explores solo dance that mines the body for its "untold secrets."
It certainly spoke to others in the audience, judging from the warm applause. But I found it superficial at best.
Her roaming back and forth across the stage in swinging motion while layering in a changing series of hand gestures struck me as purposeless, random progressions.
Tristan Rehner's Kitchen
This work was first performed in 1998 and was a special remount to celebrate the festival's anniversary. Kitchen is a poignant fusion of scenes of domesticity and inner-soul dancing.
The subject is the intimate life of women where humour goes hand in hand with sadness. Karen Rehner's costumes are superb. The three dancers - Caroline Niklas-Gordon, Anne Troake and Tristan Rehner - are wearing old-fashioned, loose fitting, floral-patterned house dresses and old-lady, black, lace-up Oxford shoes. Props include preserves in Mason jars, a cabbage, a beetroot, onions, kitchen chairs, washing tubs and chopping knives.
The Celtic jig music interpolated throughout is by Kelly Russell and The Planks, but while the women dance to these toe-tappers, they never completely give in to the lively rhythms.
Unforgettable moments include Rehner's obsession with lining up jars and bottles in precise patterns, and Niklas-Gordon's dish washing sequence. Both speak of profound malaise.
Troake's vignette about onions and burns is both very funny and pointed. By the time she's through, to avoid the tears of the former and the pain of the latter, she is garbed in industrial goggles, a protective x-ray chest guard, and large work gloves. The kitchen, after all, is a dangerous place.