Get Aua’

At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre
April 8, 9, and 10

JONES

kay, I admit it, I was figuring
O on tutus, toe shoes, and

anorexia nervosa on the hoof.
Instead, my very first ballet just
giggled at my outdated expectations
and whisked me away on a night
laced with irony, innuendo, and
feathers.

Distinctive for its ribald humour,
surprising choreography, and playful
use of costumes and lights, Mark
Godden’s Conversation Piece was the
first and stongest of the four works
scheduled from Ballet British
Columbia. The shifting standards of
sorrowful anger and righteous scorn
were good for many an eyebrow
twitch in this lively peek at the age-
old tale of The Attached Guy (Sylvain
Senez) and The Other Woman
(Andrea Hodge).

Choreographer Mark Godden has
put together traditional lifts, pointe
work, and pirouettes with sponta-
neous, natural gestures and cheeky
movements to extremely accessible
and entertaining effect. Hodge shows
this combination of styles most
strongly, from her gracefully ungain-
ly feet-out lifts to her fluid, full
body twists and curls. Seeing the
influence of modern dance on ballet
was an unexpected and jump-up-and-
down-for-joy surprise.

Opening with an onstage strip as
the prelude to illicit gymnastics for
the impassioned pair, fun galore was
had with Paul Daigle’s sleek cos-
tumes, which doubled as energetic
props for much of the performance.

Serge Bennethan’s The Fall, the
next item billed, unfortunately didn’t
live up to the previous Piece,
although it actually had a wee chunk

page 12 the Other Press

1 Dance

of set to it. Having not the best eye-
sight, I thought that Buddy with the
wings was actually a dancer, and sat
through the whole performance hop-
ing to see Lucifer stand up and do
something jiggy. Ahem. Silly twit.
Mannequins don’t dance. The other
wacked thing with this work was
Ame Eigenfeldt’s original
score. Possibly there was
something wrong with
the sound system, but
who knows, maybe
Eigenfeldt, being evidently a
composer of moody sound-
scapey bass grumbly
stuff, wanted the
periodic

spoken seg-
ments to come out
so distorted as to be
indecipherable. The
choreography was
interesting and well
danced by Gail
Skrela and Wen Wei
Wang, but the dis-
tractions of sound and
set made it hard to
focus on individual
movements.

Next up was the world premiere of
Dominique Dumais’ a/way inside, a
strong piece with a defined storyline
of need, escape and despair, also
known as the joys of co-dependancy.
Full of clear visuals and communica-
tive gestures, the battle between
Andrea Hodge and Miroslaw Zydowicz
was physically compelling, forcing
Hodge into repeatedly frustrated
attempts at flight, and Zydowicz into
progressively more desperate atti-
tudes of clinging restraint. The only
flaws for me were the sporadic forays

May 1999

   

  
  
   

into poetic fragments around Glenn
Gould's piano tinkling. The motions
onstage were fully eloquent, so
telling us that somebody's a-feelin’
blue seemed pretty redundant.

The title draw, Bet Ann’s Dance,
was the final work of the evening.
Choreographed by John Alleyne, the

round-robin entrances and exits
of the eight dancers kept
the composition shifting
from pairs to triads
and solos, making the
set-up onstage almost
disturbingly lively,
counterpointed by
the frequent linger-
ing exits close by
the wings. Yeah,
that doesn’t make
a lot of sense
descriptively, but
visually it
worked well to balance bursting ener-
gy upstage with hesitant stillness
downstage. The total soundcape
seemed too independent of the
dancers to fully augment the per-
formance, but taken seperately it was
quite interesting. In the combination
of live percussion from Salvadore
Ferreras, and recorded compositions
from Gary Kulesha and Jean Piche, I
found Piche’s work the most engross-
ing. A mix of computer sampling,
insertions of biblical prank calls, and
tympani trills, it may not have had
the funky rough polish of many sam-
ple vets profiled on CBC’s Brave New
Waves, but it still startled me into
glancing at the speakers a few times.

Yes indeed, for the most part, this
was a jim-cracker of a show. They
danced, they pranced, I was’
entranced, I’m glad I went, and my
brain is spent.