Jan. 13, 2010 - Issue #743: Broken Embraces
WAVE: Smile and Wave
Sylvain Émard's choreography splits the body in two
"He was very different than anyone I've ever worked with," Barry says, explaining that Emard created choreography for the arms and torso completely separate from movements planned for the lower body. "He would give us very detailed upper body gestures and he would number them, like one to seven, and then he would give us a 64-count pattern of legs that we would all learn together. It was completely inorganic at first. The tasks were quite mentally challenging because you're calculating and remembering counts and trying to make it work for your body. Eventually it becomes organic, and it looks quite interesting because you don't normally see the body moving in this way."
The resulting piece from all the corporeal confusion is Wave, the conclusion to Émard's Climatology of Bodies cycle. Starting out seven years ago, the dances in the cycle examine themes of human connectivity and adaptability to change; Wave ends the series with a cast of five female dancers vigorously travelling through different relationships to each other in time and space. It's been described as an exploration of the human's individual desire to "melt"—and naturally, we had to ask Barry for a bit of clarification there.
"What I find is that constant change is the melt, " she says. "We go through life and we have to change and adapt to certain situations, we have to melt into it. We have to compromise, and other times people compromise for us. In the piece ... there's lots of different changes of people together. You're constantly seeing a different shift and dynamic in how people act with each other."
Knowing that it sounds a little vague, she admits that the theme is actually reflexive on the nature of her choreographer and his unique movement formula—the upper body has a specific carriage with gestures of a more communicative ilk, she says, while the lower half's vocabulary includes a lot of fast changes in direction and complex rhythmic patterns.
"(Émard) is very scientific and mathematic, and then there's this other part of him that's the emotional connection, so I think he creates both of them separately and then the dancers put it together. I don't know how he found it, but it works for him—it's become his thing," she says, adding that the most feedback she's had from audiences usually has to do with how technically difficult the movement seems.
"For me it's about getting through it because it's so hard, it's very kinetic," she laughs, recommending that the best thing an audience can do is enter the show with an open mind. "It's about complications and different sort of relationships and different energies and dynamics. It's not too complex, there's no story—it's more like thematic dance in that way. The best thing is to be open to whatever you're going to feel, because whatever you feel, that is the right thing." V
Fri, Jan 15, Sat, Jan 16 (8 pm)
WAVE
Choreographed by Sylvain Émard
Timms Centre for the Arts (87 Ave & 112 St), $18 – $28
New comments for this entry have been turned off and any existing ones are hidden. We apologize for any inconvenience.
