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Fiery Egoyan keys into legacy of Simple Lines
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> BY ALEXANDER VARTY
he combination of an extra ordinary pianist, an acclaimed composer, and an acoustically interesting venue should be enough. But it's the story behind Eve Egoyan's upcoming performances of Ann Southam's Simple Lines of En quiry that should make this collabora tion between Music on Main and the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival a truly memorable event. The Victoria-born, Toronto-based Egoyan (sister to filmmaker Atom) had little idea what she was getting into when, in 1996, CBC Radio produ cer David Jaeger invited her to record a Southam composition for a com pilation CD. "It wasn't like there was an easy connection to the music to begin with," she recalls, interviewed by phone from her home. "But I really enjoyed meeting her, because she was in the studio. And I guess it seemed like a fruitful meeting, because the CBC commissioned a solo work and a concerto after that." Working with Southam on those pieces led to a friendship that lasted until the composer's death, from cancer, last year. And you could even say that the friendship continues, for Egoyan �as charged herself with main taining Southam's artistic legacy even if Simple Lines of Enquiry might seem an odd choice for a pianist known for fiery, emotional performances. "In a sense, these pieces lack drama, in the stereotypical performative sense of the word," Egoyan explains. "There are no contrasts, or no huge contrasts. It's all very subtle. It's maybe more akin to the Japanese art form of ike bana, where it's extremely elegant and the sensibility is very distilled." Think of Southam's score as a very sophisticated bouquet, then, one whose blooms are complex
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note-clusters struck with Zen preci sion, then left to decay. Simple Lines of Enquiry was inspired, in part, by mid20th-century modernism; its notes are derived from the intellectually rigorous contemplation of 12-tone theory. It draws on late-20th-century minimalism, too, in its simplicity and lack of explicit emotional content. Yet it's forward-thinking in how it leaves many performance decisions up to its interpreter, and timeless in its beauty. The piece mainly concerns itself with what happens to notes after they've been struck: how sounds blend and then fall into inaudibil ity as the piano's. strings slowly stop vibrating. Given that Southam fin ished the work toward the end of her life, it's easy to hear it as elegiac, yet Egoyan stresses that if the composer was contemplating mortality, it was on an abstract level. "You can never sustain a note on a piano; you're always working on something that's going away," the pianist offers. "And I think that, on a certain level, that's our shared ex perience as human beings. We're always in a state of decay." �
Feeling flamenco's puro heart i
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> BY TONY MONTAGUE
The cante (song) came in time to be accompanied by guitar and interpreted in dance. "It's the oldest and most primordial-even primitive-part of flamenco," says Bar rio. "When I perform I listen to the cante, the guitar .as well, of course, and the silence, also to what is inside me. We balance all the elements, but everything is inspired by the cante. Flamenco for me is about expressing what the song is, and your body has to be the throat of the singer." • For Noche Flamenca's Vancouver performance, Barrio will be joined by two singers, two guitarists, and three other dancers. Don't expect any showy ensemble choreog raphy-that's not flamenco puro. "I don't believe in group flamenco," Barrio explains. "Flamenco is a bit like jazz, a personal interpretation. Each dancer has his or her own jla menco, the same as each singer and guitarist, so when we get together you have to handle it very q,elicately. To have dancers doing precisely the same arm action is great, but it tllrns into something a bit different. It's as if you had four people simultaneously writing the same page in a book." When asked about the essence of flamenco for her per- • sonally, Barrio swiftly responds. "It's my very life, everything: my pain, my joy, what I get up for in the morning and what I lie down with-and it's work. Flamenco is a culture. It's impossible to encapsulate a culture in a few words-for many people it's a way of living every day."·-(>
oledad Barrio didn't grow up in a flamenco family-she turned 18 before beginning her stud ies in the dance form. And she's neither from Andalusia, flamenco's heartland and birthplace in southern Spain, nor is she a Roma. But Barrio is flamenco to her molten core, and one of its most celebrated dancers. "If you feel that it's truly your vocation, it do esn't mat ter where you're from or how old you are," says Barrio, reached in New York City, speaking rapidly in Spanish. "When I started to dance I said that it was like going back to being born-or to being a child, because when I was small I felt that inside, but it's as if I forgot it, and when I found it again it was indeed a birth." Barrio comes from a working-class background in Ma drid, and lives there still with her two daughters a_nd hus band Martin Santangelo, the artistic director of their com-· pany Noche Flamenca. It was watching television-more precisely, Carlos Saura's cinematic version of Blood Wed ding, by legendary Andalusian poet and playwright Fede rico Garcia Lorca-that rang the bells for Barrio. She and Santangelo, a New Yorker of Argentine descent, got together in 1993 to share their passion for hard-core fla menco, orflamenco puro. They take a back-to-basics attitude and approach to a tradition that originated in the fiercely Eve Egoyan performs at Heritage Hall dark laments of members of persecuted communities Noche Flamenca is at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on January 21. on January 23 and 24. Spanish Muslims, Sephardic Jews, Roma, and others.
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..I ..I ..I ..I ..I JANUARY 12 - 19 / 2012
THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 35