Oct. 03, 2012 - Issue #885: Fall Style 2012
Caught in the inbetween
Inheritor Album explores the tension of a plateau
Inheritor Album
Presented by the
Brian Webb Dance Company
Timms Centre for the Arts, $20 – $35
It's the feeling of reaching an artistic plateau: not quite at the peak but far beyond the first steps, existing somewhere between the two. A transitional place that the 605 Collective, a particularly athletic dance corps on the rise, seems to find itself caught up in now.
"It's frustrating and exciting," explains Josh Martin, attaching a knowing sort of laugh to the statement. "There's the feeling that you're stuck behind, you're not quite far enough along to feel like you're really making huge impact, but at the same time you can see that there's this younger generation coming up and you want to make sure that you're setting the right pathway for them, or that you're doing things that will positively affect them. And so you don't really have your hands on the reins yet, but you know what you'd do if you had them."
With that in mind, the 605 Collective's Inheritor Album, explores tension of that plateau, of artistically being caught in the inbetween. The idea came from the collective's core—Martin, Lisa Gelley and Shay Kuebler—looking to find an agreed-upon term to ground their collaborative creation process.
"This word, 'inheritor' came out, and thinking about where we were, in terms of age and generations and finding ourselves starting to kind of bridge in that middle period now," explains Martin, who originally hails from Camrose. "Where we're starting to see what we're leaving behind and what we're now receiving from the people in front of us. And so it was just kind of a perfect place to start approaching that idea."
The idea proved itself a particularly rich vein to tap into, becoming a flow of short works instead of one encompassing piece (hence "album"), featuring six dancers and integrating some projected film/animations from Miwa Matreyek alongside an electronic score.
Even in as physically demanding a discipline as dance, the 605 Collective are known for pushing the levels of exertion a little beyond, Martin notes, what they're actually able to do. But reaching past their limits is one way the collective looks to forge a connection between artist and audience.
"I think that a lot of the times, you go see a ballet performance and it's all about perfection, seeing these people gracefully and so easily float across the stage and do these amazing things with their bodies," he says. "But you don't get a sense of how hard that is. And how much struggle and effort has gone into that. And I think by showing that, and by pushing ourselves just slightly beyond what we're capable of, you start to have a bit more in terms of your connection of it.
"It feels much more natural onstage to let the audience empathize with what they're seeing," he continues. "To see that it's not about being perfect, it's not about hiding anything. It's about showing everything." vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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