A Toronto Dance Theatre Presentation
at the Premiere Dance Theatre
December 4-8, 2007

   The two new works by talented TDT choreographers have something compelling within them. Both have traces of the poetic, and both have beautiful moments that are exciting. Valerie Calam puts a joking spirit to pop music in her 30-minute piece, Parliament, which is a satire on gender relationships, at least as these relate to the sex or wooing games that people play. Under an ornate chandelier in a gleaming room with long, heavy drapes, the figures dance to the music of the Marvelettes and Duran Duran, while portraying tensions, disagreements, rivalries, and virtually narcissistic flamboyance. Marvellous Kristy Kennedy, she of the exquisite long legs and incredibly supple back, leads the female side (complemented by Alana Elmer and Kaitlin Standeven), all decked out in fancy hats and eccentric finery, as the male side is represented by Luke Garwood and Matthew Waldie. There is humour in some of the posturing—especially in the case of Garwood—but the idioms sometimes seem fractured or spastic, and the imprecision of frenetic gesturing (with acute twitching) makes the dance seem gratuitously self-indulgent and fuzzy.

   I much preferred Sasha Ivanochko’s Sunshine, a densely textured 30-minute piece that seems to be informed by Eastern rhythms and concerns with the body’s distribution and concentration of energy, all bound up with Ivanochko’s powerful dynamism. With Sean Ling seated on the floor stage left observing the others, the dance begins virtually as a meditation on movement. There are flurries of miniature movement—rotations of the buttocks, slow movement of the head, small jumps or pirouettes—and even when the choreography is bold and larger—with aggressive pulling, dragging, swift barrel rolls, back archings, backward leaps—and the dancers are sometimes possess animalistic force, there is an inescapable sense that they are subject to mutual scrutiny. The dancers watch one another, sometimes coldly, and there is an inescapable sense of the importance of the gaze as Ivanochko plays with ideas of natural movement and fabrication. Her choreography does not seek to reproduce the surface manner of life or human behaviour. She focuses as much on the movement of feet as on ways of sitting and watching, while investing her focus with a sense of stylized formality. Her dance marks juxtapositions of natural and contrived movements. The six dancers (each marked by distinctive personality) describe certain leitmotifs, modulating the level of articulation with differing bodily responses, but there is always a withdrawn figure—a voyeur or brooding isolate (Sean Ling at first; Brendan Jensen later) who crystallizes the notion of movement analyzed or the dance impulse scrutinized. Yet, Ivanochko does not produce merely a physical grammar. Her meticulousness does not preclude a dynamic conversation of expressive bodies. Her dancers (Heather Berry, Yuchiro Inoue, Kamen Wang, Linnea Wong, Brendan Jensen, and Sean Ling) are too intense, too vivid for mere abstraction. They—and the costumes of Tanya White, the music of Catherine Thompson, and the lighting of Roelof Peter (Ron) Snippe—make the dance utterly compelling.

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