Choreographic Gems (2022)

Nov 21

In 2016, I was invited to submit a proposal to Soulpepper – one of Toronto’s most ambitious and successful venued theatre companies – for a new play to be commissioned by them and produced by my company. I pitched a production inspired by the avant-garde dance world of 1970s Toronto, and to my great astonishment and excitement, my submission was chosen as one of 30+ productions for a massive and generously endowed program under the banner Project ImagiNation.

Research for the project centered on 15 Dance Lab – an artist-run performance space operated by Lawrence and Miriam Adams in Toronto from 1974 to 1980 – and on the work of dance artists creating and presenting there and elsewhere in the city, including A Space and The Music Gallery. All these years later, I still have vivid memories of extraordinary, ground-breaking works by iconoclastic creator/performers presented in these spaces.

Work on the play began with an excavation of the archives of 15 Dance Lab – then mostly uncatalogued – undertaken by archivist Victoria Mohr-Blackeney. I sought out choreographers from the era to investigate the possibility of resurrecting key works as historical miniatures – abbreviated versions of longer dances that captured the creator’s signature.

Working with dancers Sarah Fregeau, Benjamin Kamino and David Norsworthy, distillations of pioneering works by Johanna Householder, Elizabeth Chitty and Lily Eng were developed in a first round of rehearsals. In later rehearsal blocks, Jennifer Mascall worked on recapturing the essence of an early trio with Sarah, David and Jarrett Siddall, while actor Shauna Thompson worked on an iconic solo with Louise Garfield.

Ultimately, the pandemic and a change in artistic leadership meant that Soulpepper let go of the project with me, but by then I was absolutely committed to the entire enterprise, and my company succeeded in realizing both a series of films, Choreographic Gems, and a commissioned play, Beautiful Renegades, written by Michael Ross Albert and directed by Eda Holmes.

Choreographic Gems is made up of nine short films by William Yong focused on early works by Elizabeth Chitty, Lily Eng, Louise Garfield, Johanna Householder, and Jennifer Mascall. Each film is a miniature that captures the choreographer’s signature within the distillation of a dance that is central to their body of work. The exceptional dance artists whose performances are captured in the films are Sarah Fregeau, Kevin Lau, Erika Provost, Jarrett Siddall, Shauna Thompson and Anne van Leeuwen.

Lessness (1974)

In this early work, Jennifer Mascall interrogates and disrupts systems for building meaning by breaking apart and then reordering movement phrases through the intersession of chance procedures, and then misaligning the resulting choreography with images elicited through text – originally by Samuel Beckett, but in this reimaging by Michael Ross Albert – spoken in unison by the dancers. This is a dance that positions itself as holding more – detail, elaboration, complexity, multiple simultaneous tasks – yet meaning less.

WKEY / boxes (1975)

Johanna Householder works with concise organizing principles, and in thinking back to this brief episode from WKEY, she shared descriptions of remembered action to call up the premise for the choreography. In the original version, two dancers rolled and tumbled back and forth, their progress interrupted as they hit up against large crates on either side of the performance space. The film version of the choreography takes place within a sunken space, like an open box, and the dancers never quite reach the sides.

WKEY / poles (1975)

This second excerpt from WKEY was reconstructed by accessing a series of photographs archiving the original performance. Johanna Householder describes this scene as “a sculptural proposition as much as a dance”. The bamboo poles – contributed by her performance partner, visual artist Jon Miller – are in no way decorative objects. Householder described herself as working within an “object-oriented ontology”; the poles present a sculpture that is activated by the dancers. And like the intentionally distorted sound elicited when a musician plays a prepared piano, the unexpected ways in which the poles interfere with the dancers’ movement objectives is primary to the realization of the choreography.

Hitting it Sideways (1975)

Internationally recognized for her iconoclastic work, Lily Eng built her reputation on dance performances of astonishing, even harrowing, physicality. Her dances are conceived with preconditions to be met extemporaneously, by harnessing her “confident mind” as a powerhouse improvisor manifesting “vitality through spontaneity“. Dancing alone, she nonetheless identified the surfaces in a performance space – the floor, the walls, the corners, a staircase, a door, a ledge, a crate, a table – as her performance partners.

Withheld (1975)

The dancing captured in this film was inspired by a 25-minute solo – a tour de force of endurance and kinetic imagination – devised and performed by Lily Eng. Withheld vividly demonstrates Eng’s foundational commitment to authenticity centered in her racial and cultural identity and in the specificity of her practice as a martial artist. She describes accomplishing this dance by “channeling energy from the earth” and managing that energy at a vibrational level until it was beyond her capacity to contain.

Mover (1975)

This distillation of Elizabeth Chitty’s large-scale Mover demonstrates some of her most deeply held creative commitments: circumventing theatrical structure, avoiding images that imply a need for interpretation, exposing effort, and dealing directly with weight and gravity. The performers alternate between actively moving another dancer’s passive but alert body and having their own passive but alert body moved. This formal conceptual premise proposes choreography that arises as an outcome of task-oriented interaction.

Lap / sleeve (1976)

In this searing duet by Elizabeth Chitty, violent physical contact between a woman and man is structured by the intervention of a primary object – a single sleeve that they share. Working rigorously against theatricality and mimicry, Chitty is uncompromising in her efforts to achieve what she describes as “corporeal honesty”. The dancers lean into her hard-core movement with force and weight.

Lap / whistles (1976)

In this second excerpt from the full-length work Lap, Elizabeth Chitty again introduces an object that has huge implications choreographically. In this case, a woman and a man each hold a whistle between their teeth while insinuating their weight into, onto, and against one another. The menacing sound of their breathing, amplified by the whistles, and the painfully slow pace of the action builds a scene laden with tension. As Chitty put it, “there’s trouble here”.

Balloon 2 (1977)

Throughout the mid 1970s Louise Garfield created a whole series of gorgeous, funny, and poetic works with balloons of all sizes – party balloons, massive transparent bubbles that one could climb inside, weather balloons… These balloons proved themselves to be entities capable of extraordinary acts of image-making. While Garfield always kept herself single mindedly committed to the specific set of tasks that made up her choreography, the floating, deflating, bouncing, vibrating, rolling, bursting balloons never failed to offer potent images that emerged seeming of their own volition. - PB

related links
Watch Miriam Adams, Margaret Dragu, and Peggy Baker discuss their experiences and impressions of 15 Dance Lab in their roles as co-founder, artist, and audience member, respectively.

credits

director:
William Yong / W Xento Productions

director of photography:
Jason George

director of choreography:
Peggy Baker

editing:
Alex Coleman and William Yong

Elizabeth Chitty
with post-production sound design by Phil Strong

Lap / sleeve dancers:
Sarah Fregeau, Jarrett Siddall

Lap / whistles dancers:
Sarah Fregeau, Kevin Lau

Mover dancers:
Sarah Fregeau, Kevin Lau,
Jarrett Siddall

Lily Eng

Hitting it Sideways dancer:
Kevin Lau

Withheld dancers:
Sarah Fregeau, Kevin Lau,
Erika Prevost, Jarrett Siddall,
Shauna Thompson,
Anne van Leeuwen

original music:
Debashis Sinha