9 minute read
DANCE
ARTS Core/Us aims for intimacy for everyone in the room
by Charlie Smith
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In the Vanessa Goodman-choreographed Core/Us, dancers Adrian de Leeuw, Eowynn Enquist, Anya Saugstad, and Ted Littlemore move through space together. Photo by David Cooper.
– choreographer Vanessa Goodman
Dancing on the Edge will present the Canadian premiere of Core/Us at the Firehall Arts Centre at 7 p.m. on July 7 and 9 p.m. on July 8.
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Vancouver choreographer Vanessa Goodman describes her company’s newest work, Core/Us, as “kind of a mix between a concert and a dance”. It’s also a group project—a relatively rarity during the pandemic, when solos and duets have been the norm.
“Something I was missing throughout the pandemic was this idea of intimacy with performance,” Goodman tells the Straight by phone between rehearsals. at’s what she’s seeking in Core/Us, which she describes as a highly collaborative project about how people move through time and space together. It features a live score with four dancers exploring “how we hear movement and see sound”, according to the promotional material. Core/Us will have its Canadian premiere at the opening night of Dancing on the Edge, which runs from July 7 to 16.
For Goodman, intimacy is not restricted to what’s occurring on-stage. She emphasizes that it’s also imperative to invite the Firehall Arts Centre audience to experience it. “How do I transform this black box that we’re in to something that feels more palpable and immersive?” she asks.
One way, Goodman says, is by sometimes generating sounds from localized spaces on the stage or from the dancers themselves. She points out that for audiences, this is a way of “kind of dropping people in their body and into the bodies of the performers and asking them to spend time with us”.
“We’re working with two helicons and then we’re working with a small ditto pedal, like a looping pedal, and another chaos pad to kind of augment and create di erent textures [of sounds],” Goodman says.
She reveals that sometimes a basslike drum beat drives the piece; on other occasions, the audience will hear the sounds of chords crunching.
Unusual sounds and looping devices are things that Goodman, artistic director of Action at a Distance Dance Society, has focused on in previous multidisciplinary productions like Graveyards and Gardens, In Fiction, and Tuning. Along the way, she has won several major awards, including the Chrystal Dance Prize and the Schultz Endowment from the Ban Centre for Arts and Creativity.
Core/Us brings together dancers Adrian de Leeuw, Eowynn Enquist, Ted Littlemore, Anya Saugstad—with contributions from Sarah Formosa and Shion Skye Carter— along with sonic mentorship from Brady Marks and lighting design from longtime Goodman collaborator James Proudfoot.
She credits Proudfoot for having an incredible gi for using lighting to draw audiences’ attention to certain places or things that she hadn’t previously considered to be so interesting.
“I always feel like I’m dancing with another partner working with his work,” she says. “I feel like he just brings so much to each project.” e ever-gracious Goodman has a lot to say in the interview about the contributions of all the other members of the team as well. She worked with Enquist and Saugstad when the two were students at Simon Fraser University, and then o and on since 2017. Littlemore was in Tuning, a duet with dancer Alexis Fletcher. Goodman didn’t meet the Alberta-based de Leeuw until 2019, when she was discussing choreography at an event in Montreal. ey were given broad latitude to contribute their ideas.
“It’s a team e ort,” she says.
When Goodman is asked how she comes up with her imaginative productions, she has a simple response: curiosity. Something comes to her, and as she starts doing research, she’s able to add context.
“It’s about sharing information and knowledge,” she says. “So for me, I just get excited to learn. So I think it’s partially that.”
She’s thrilled to be returning to Dancing on the Edge, describing it as “such a fabulous festival”.
“It showcases so many local artists, national artists, and sometimes even international artists,” Goodman says.
Dancing on the Edge is in its 34th year, and Goodman points out that festival producer Donna Spencer has done a magni cent job highlighting emerging and senior artists.
“Donna really makes a huge e ort to give people their rst show, which she did for me, and it made such a huge di erence,” Goodman says. “I can’t say enough good things about Donna, the Firehall, and Dancing on the Edge. It’s meant so much to me as an artist and so much to the community as well.” g
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Cultural Partner:
ARTS Ensemble summer fest tackles hot-button themes
by Charlie Smith
Try to imagine for a moment what it might be like if you could replace a loved one with a being created through arti cial intelligence. Would you choose someone younger, more attractive, or better behaved? ese are some of the questions that emerge from one of the plays being presented at Ensemble eatre’s Summer Repertory Festival at the Waterfront eatre on Granville Island. Marjorie Prime is a sci- drama set in the future and centred around octogenarian Marjorie, played by Gai Brown. Like many seniors, Marjorie’s memories are fading, but she has a new male companion, Walter Prime, who’s a younger version of her deceased husband. And he’s happy to help her recall parts of her life.
Ensemble eatre’s artistic director, Tariq Leslie, plays Marjorie’s son-in-law Jon and Bronwen Smith plays her daughter Tess in the play, which is directed by Shelby Bushell.
“It looks like our world—it just has a certain level of technology,” Leslie tells the Straight. “ e overall arc of that story really highlights how so o en when we try to ll a void—particularly an emotional void—with technology, we end up actually feeling more empty, not fuller.”
Jordan Harrison’s play was adapted into a critically acclaimed 2017 movie, Marjorie Prime, which was written and directed by Michael Almereyda and starred Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, Lois Smith, and, in the role of Jon, Tim Robbins. But Leslie, also a movie and TV actor, is steadfastly avoiding watching the lm version until Ensemble eatre’s festival ends on July 2.
“I have this thing when I’m doing a show, be it acting or directing,” Leslie explains. “If I know there’s another media version out there, I avoid it like the plague.”
Because he’s not acting in or directing Ensemble eatre’s other production in the Summer Repertory Festival, Pass Over, he had no qualms about seeing the 2018 cinema version directed by Spike Lee, which was lmed in the Steppenwolf eatre in Chicago. In fact, Leslie watched it before he read the play in 2019.
“From the rst ve minutes, I was in,” he recalls. “I was hooked and knew we had to do this play.”
Pass Over, written by Antoinette Nwandu, is set on the South Side of Chicago. Directed for Ensemble by Omari Newton, it revolves around two Black friends, played by Chris Francisque and Kwasi Thomas, dreaming of a better world but constantly under the threat of white supremacy in many forms as they’re stuck out in the streets.
In a June 14 interview on the Early Edition on CBC Radio One on June 14, Newton described Pass Over as an “absurdist, sometimes tragic, o en funny tale” and a “reimagining of Waiting for Godot and the biblical story of Exodus”.
“It really explores the existential and literal threats that Black people face in North America,” Newton told host Stephen Quinn.
Marjorie Prime and Pass Over re ect Leslie’s underlying goal of presenting plays that are about the human condition. He says that it doesn’t matter to him if they’re contemporary or if they were written 300 years ago.
“They have something to say about who we are and what our hopes and fears are,” Leslie explains. “And within that, there is what I would like to call a ‘portal for empathy’.”
By that, he means that Ensemble eatre plays must o er an opportunity to experience another world, where experiences remain with audiences. “ ey may not be ones that we are immediately familiar with, but the humanity of the characters depicted should be something you can relate to,” he says.
As an example, as a white person, Leslie could not possibly comprehend what it’s like to encounter discrimination on a daily basis.
“But I hope that there’s also a greater level of determination for those of us who are white to move beyond being allies and being proactive in big and small ways to make the change that we seem to have, for 50 years, always been to varying degrees on the cusp of but don’t ever get past the cusp,” he says.
Unlike most white people, Leslie has had a glimpse of being subjected to racial pro ling. It came about because his mother decided to give him an Arabic name a er taking a course on comparative religion at the University of Victoria. en when he tried to enter the United States a er 9/11, Leslie, who was born and raised in the Victoria area, experienced a level of scrutiny that he had never before endured.
“I would never make the claim that it’s anything like what anyone who is nonwhite goes through,” Leslie emphasizes.
In addition to the two plays, the Summer Repertory Festival is also o ering Sunday readings related to the plays and entitled ese ings Happen in All Our Harlems (the title is from a James Baldwin essay) and e Life and Times of Multivac (the title comes from an Isaac Asimov short story). e festival is also hosting lm screenings of Do the Right ing and her.
As the interview comes to an end, Leslie has a nal request: can the Straight give a shout-out to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which is the landlord for the Waterfront eatre? Consider it done! g
LILIAN BROCA Mary Magdalene
MosaicsExhibition
March 31 - August 15, 2022 Tuesday - Saturday 10AM-6PM
italianculturalcentre.ca Tel: 604.430.3337
In Ensemble Theatre’s Marjorie Prime, Marjorie (Gai Brown) and Walter Prime (Carlen Escarraga) reveal what can happen when someone tries to fill a void with technology. Photo by Emily Cooper.
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Ensemble Theatre presents Pass Over and Marjorie Prime, as well as Sunday readings and film screenings, as part of its Summer Repertory Festival from June 15 to July 2.
