Conceived and directed
by Allen Kaeja
A Kaeja Dance Presentation
at the Premiere Dance Theatre
March 25, 27-29, 2008

                Allen Kaeja takes his dancers like lambs to their slaughter. True, for most of his new 60-minute dance piece, the four male and three female dancers play cattle and sometimes humans, but the animal crux of the piece, the dramatic peak, as it were, concerns those poor little innocents being led or forced to their brutal deaths in a slaughter-house. In Jason Sherman’s remarkably unremarkable text—which could have been written by almost any other writer, let alone a Governor General-Award winner—the young narrator (a surrogate for Allen Kaeja who worked in his father’s Kitchener abattoir) records his dread of having to shoot the lambs with a stun gun, and there is a hokey climax to this point. There is even a pastoral sequence where the dancers gambol about, and lyrical moments of choral song and dance, but generally, the piece is grimly stark and propelled by a bizarre dichotomy. On the one hand, there are uncompromisingly detailed descriptions of the slaughter, skinning, and butchering process—sans stage blood, of course, but certainly not without loud sound effects by composer Edgardo Moreno. On the other hand, Kaeja insists by text and the geometry of movement that there is strange beauty and life-affirming virtue in the violent encounter between animal flesh and gleaming metal. Kaeja may take this as abstract art, but it looks and sounds suspiciously like pornography of a sort—the perverse delight in graphic representations of violence, sex, and gratification—that the creator attempts to aestheticize. I suppose you could find beauty in anything—even in a cockfight or human beheading—if you are determined or perverse enough.

   I found little of beauty in Abattoir, and even less of sustained visual interest. The show begins with deep, heavy groaning by Karen Kaeja that suggests an animal in agony. The dancers are in dark clothing (fishnet sleeveless tops for the men) and heavy black boots that clump and stamp like animal hooves at times. Some wear harnesses. They lift and toss one another around heavily, execute full turns and half turns. Allen Kaeja and Timothy Spronk even perform a slow waltz (awkwardly) and then wrestle, with one dominating the other and forcing him to the floor. There is even a sequence when the dancers face us and go into spasms. There are lighter moments, of course, where melody actually raises itself, and where Tanya Crowder, Robert Halley, Ryan Lee, and Susan Lee are given their fleeting lyrical flights. The real beauty is in Fides Krucker’s vocal soundtrack and, especially, in Roelof Peter (Ron) Snippe’s lighting with some splendid geometric patterns (including a rose window mandala image). The rest is rather wearying in several senses. None of the dancing is truly riveting or extraordinary. Aaron Willis as the narrator sounds faintly hysterical when he is not simply portentous. He ends with an appeal for more ethical slaughter—after all the preceding insistence on the beauty of animal butchery. Consequently, the piece as a whole never coheres to justify or make sense of its confused aesthetic.

photo: John Lauener

 L-R:  Aaron Willis, Ryan Lee, Susan Lee, Robert Halley,
         Karen Kaeja, Tim Spronk and Tanya Crowder


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