proartedanza

L-R:  Ryan Lee, Tyler Gledhill and Benjamin Landsberg

all photos by Geneviève Caron

 in Robert Glumbeck's Shifting Silence

The opening program for the proartedanza fall season is a beautiful action packed variety of music and choreography that exemplifies the company's mandate for passion in performance. 

Robert Glumbeck's Shifting Silence opened the evening with sharply focused sequences, divided by a dominant square of light and blocks of dense costume colour. The ensemble, led by Tyler Gledhill's shirtless singularity, moved in solos and duets through contrasting musical interludes. J.S. Bach's classical strains and Senking's powerful electronic music, marked by gorgeous highs and lows, supported the transitions with wonderful nuance and impeccable sound editing. Initially the pairings seemed to have been arranged according to prowess and degrees of corporeal presence. Two red costumes quickly became very distracting as they appeared to denote a connection between the two dancers that never quite materialized. Tyler Gledhill's couplings with Mami Hata were the most connected and dynamic, but Hata's costume suggested otherwise. This would not necessarily pose a problem if the colour and design of the whole ensemble's outfits had not been so reminiscent of a kind of strange Star Trek sci-fi motif. Showcasing the muscularity of Gledhill's bare torso seemed to be a physically defining moment, but a somewhat incongruous choice when the whole company might have been served better by more form fitting, less crisp, interplanetary lines. Same sex pairings between Gledhill and other dancers such as Ryan Lee were able to transcend the designs and showcase the dynamic beauty of Glumbeck's choreography. 

Shifting Silence provided a powerful and evocative series of contrasts, all focused around the opening presence of Gledhill's dominant role, creating an exciting and satisfying overall impression of Eda LeShan's  epigraph contained in the program note -

"When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death."

Moving into, away from, and in tandem with Gledhill's pivotal red trousered turn, Shifting SIlence was indeed a gorgeous and powerful journey from the beginning of life to an unspecified end, with a single powerful companion to embrace, diverge from, and ultimately consume and be consumed by.

Tyler Gledhill and Mami Hata 
in Robert Glumbeck's Shifting Silence

The second offering, a collaboration between artistic director Roberto Campanella and artistic associate Robert Glumbeck began to suggest a perhaps unconscious movement into the more balanced progression of costume definition and exhilarating physical tones for the overall evening. Entitled simply, Beethoven's 9th-3rd Movement, the high and lows of movement and music worked well in relation to each other as the slow meditation of musical tones gradually built to Beethoven's signature crescendo - ending the piece on an almost anthem like note that led well into the final section of the program. Costume Coordination by dancer Anisa Teipar began to reveal a subtler sense of form and colour that allowed bodies to flow in a less distracting manner than the evening's opening sequence. The bodies are the primary vessel in dance, after all, and there are times when costume can overwhelm movement to a bewildering degree. The Beethoven sequence succeeded beautifully and could have added another level of dynamism had the men's costume's been more sharply defined. The women's torsos were lightly draped in elegant semi sheer greyness with shortened casual lower body apparel and simple black socks. The men wore monotone clad gymwear that allowed them to embody a kind of casual, generalized presence. Chairs played a significant part in the sequence and became beautiful integrated props in a piece that possessed shades of Chekhov's over-furnished dramas where a somewhat familial ensemble scrambles through the domiciled and emotional interiors of complex physical maneuvers. The first appearance of a single chair evoked a sense of "oh no, not the thing with the chair again!" But quickly these simple timeless utilitarian objects provided a fully integrated and mesmerizing part of a truly committed and theatrical element of praartedanza's signature promotional cut-line stating that they do in fact embody great passion in performance. 

The final selection of the evening took this sense of passion to the height of perfection through brilliant, powerful choreopgraphy, engrossing music, and sublime costuming by Deanna Sciortino. Venetians Snares, the main performing alias of Canadian musician Aaron Funk, provided a recorded electronic soundscape that possessed a crescendo laden, patterned rhythm that moved the dancers through breakneck pacing, allowing for exciting solos and dynamic pairings. The entire ensemble took virtuosic turns in this engrossing finale, punctuated with simple black trousers and bare torsos for the men, and similar black two piece outfits for the women - covering the chest area with a slim horizontal swath yet defining the body with a strong accentuated power and grace. Entitled Fractals, Guillaume Côté’s choreography matched the envigorating power of the music and ended the program with a fabulous interpretation of the “development of snowflakes, flowers, or clouds” whereby “strict order and unpredictable influence are integral to the formation of fractals.” This idea of “order and chaos, along with shape and pattern” was a beautifully realized tribute to the complexity, serenity, and pandemonium of nature’s varied emotional and material offerings.

Anisa Tejpar and Tyler Gledhill                                                                                                                            


Anisa Tejpar, Erin Poole and Tyler Gledhill

                                                          
                         proartedanza - at the Fleck Dance Theatre, Harbourfront, until October 5th

MAN'S BEST FRIEND, 

HIS DOG OR HIS MOTHER?

In Daniel MacIvor's latest two hander there is an uneasy tension between the love of a deceased mother and the love of a loyal canine companion. Inspired by his relationship with his own dog, an Italian Greyhound named Buddy, The Best Brothers, currently running at Tarragon Theatre, is a fast paced, hilarious depiction of the familial induced emotional gaps felt by a gay real estate agent and his very straight architect sibling. Set in Toronto's Church Street village the play offers up a smorgasbord of topical delight ranging from the names of local flowers shops to unfortunate gay pride accidents at the corner of Parliament and Wellesley. How a Pride float got that far off the parade route one might wonder, but perhaps I got the intersection wrong. Nevertheless, the intersections between poignancy, comedy, gay, straight, maternal and canine love are  brilliant, touching and beautifully performed - yet tend to stray from the central narrative course at times. 

Coming in at eighty minutes the play wobbles a little in the third quarter as it succumbs to some brief comic flights of fancy that take the nostalgia of boyhood stories to a slightly awkward and bewildering extreme. But there is a very funny childhood Lego story that acts as a powerful metaphor to post-modern predictability and packaged commodification. 

The extreme comedy of a eulogy, shared by the brothers, possesses some fine comic moments yet lapses into a kind of physical comedic interaction that doesn't quite gel all the way through. But ultimately the laughs and the poignant punctuating moments will warm the heart of anyone familiar with the shops and thoroughfares comprising one of North America's largest queer communities. And there are very convincing moments of overlapping repartee between the brothers that reveal the playwright's uncanny knack for tapping into quirky conversational moments that expose the human condition as a universal commingling of laughter and heartache. 

DANIEL MACIVOR                             JOHN BEALE

Like so man of MacIvor's plays, The Best Brothers masterfully creates dialogue and longer solo speeches that beg to be staged with clever moments of blocking and vocal nuance. Both actors are given the opportunity to represent their mother, Bunny, and MacIvor and his co-star John Beale rise to the occasion and infuse the absent matriarch with a fine blend of comic grace and compassion. Dean Gabourie's direction and Julie Fox's set and costume design create an impeccable almost sculptural feel through solid colour and focused playing spaces that allow the narrative to unfold with the same crisp, direct quality of the script. Very creative and concise staging of the movement in and out of the mother monologues sets up theatrical convention in a simple and powerful manner, giving the fast paced quality of the overall piece room to breathe for a few moments before moving back into another eloquent display of a classic struggle between two very different men competing for the love of their very colorful mother.

                                                                          

The canine narrative has prompted Tarragon to set up dog walking for pooch lovers on two nights during the run (Sept 27th evening, Sept 29th matinee). This is a very dog friendly production graced by a powerful, layered script that reveals the intricate ways in which straight, reserved masculinity, and a particular form of flamboyant, mannered 'gayness' can intersect through the presence of a very willful independent woman. Mother Bunny sees the strength of out queerness and the fragility of certain forms of strict heterocentric reserve, and in her absence her sons reveal intersections between the two with great insight and immense entertainment value.

BEST BROTHERS RUNS AT TARRAGON THEATRE UNTIL OCTOBER 27TH 

DANCEWORKS 

firstthingsfirst productions

with a trace

Kate Holden

Three challenging and rigorous pieces of choreography opened the Danceworks 2013-14 season with  firstthingsfirst productions'  gorgeous mixed bag of elegance, staccato psychological volatility, and a narrative duet that created an exquisite example of explosive, lively dance theatre.

Opening with  a form of ponderous beautiful physical memory, set to the romantic strains of Johannes Brahms' opus 39, and original music by Joshua Van Tassel, Kate Holden re-shaped and re-interpreted Peggy Bakers this body of memory/Brahms Waltzes, giving spectators a re-imagining of a classic 1990's creation. Via Baker's original concept, The Choreographer's Trust, Holden was given the unique opportunity to follow her instincts through a kind of emotional and physical recall that re-traced the original choreography, yet diverged from Baker's steps, evolving "through the lens of memory" and ultimately revealing "the traces it embedded in her muscle memory more than a decade ago" when she first learned the piece from Baker. The end result is a lovely, ponderous exploration of corporeal nuance celebrating a kind of introspective romance between memory, the body, and past physical encounters with the dancing self.

Kate Franklin

Gotta Go Church is an enigmatic and psychologically exhilarating interrogation of "spiritual energy" that took unexpected narrative leaps, placing the dancer in the audience at one point and then taking her back onstage to convulse both tragically and comically through a series of movements that pulled Kate Franklin's body into particular "physical states ... as a path towards being present onstage." Similar to the re-imaging of the opening piece, this collaboration with Frankiln and Valerie Calam/Company Vice Versa possessed fine moments of intense physical imagery and provocative contortions, yet wandered at times through what the collaborators have called "a space where [the dancer] is free to make decisions in the moment, while maintaining a pre-determined structure and arc." This daring and risky choreographic choice infused the piece with an improvisational quality that ran into a few cliched moments here and there, yet culminated with a powerful finale that brought the sequence back to the more successful nuances of the initial explosiveness and fully engaged physicality. Sound design by Paul Shepherd added an emphatic narrative site that felt distracting at times yet echoed that intense physical intuitiveness the overall piece strove to embrace.

Kate Holden and Marc Boivin

The most diverse and invigorating moments of the evening occurred between Marc Boivin and Kate Holden in Melanie Demer's (in collaboration with Holden and Boivin) Would. Boivin initiated the spoken elements with sound and language that moved from playful and quirky to direct and subtle at a moments notice. Similarly, the movements between the two dancers leapt in and out of intense, near viloent episodes and playful fun loving entanglements. The gender balance was equalized in the more violent chorepgraphy as Holden took the upper hand after a series of very aggressive movements by Boivin. The overall piece is a wonderful mixture of frolicking voice and physicality-cum-engrossing aggression that is deascribed as a dance sequence that "is almost like taming a wild animal." In a program note Demers eloquently and concisely describes the strength of the piece and the performers when she says  that the wild animal/beast metaphor that creates the central impulse for Would is "embodied by two great perfromers who are equally sophisticated, yet not domesticated."

The overall evening possessed a fine example of truly sophisitcated dance that drew from shared trust, re-interpretations of classic choreography, and improvisational moments that allowed the artists to trace and re-trace primal physical and emotional impulses as they displayed immensly measured skill and liberating intuitive prowess.

with a trace ran at the ENWAVE THEATRE from 
Sepetmber 19th-21st, 2013
(Harbourfront Centre)  

Kate Holden and Marc Boivin

Jazz Goes To The Movies 

with The Hollywood North Starlight Orchestra

Sept. 12

7pm-Midnight at Palais Royale

Swing dancing in the main ballroom and jazz outside on the patio starting at 8 sharp.

I emcee and I’m inviting some TIFF movie stars!

Featuring Barbra Lica, Chris Norton (From NYC), Don Francks, Colin Hunter, The Sparkettes and more!

Proceeds go to www.unisonfund.ca

Info at: www.palaisroyale.com and www.bullhorn.ca

Tickets at: http://www.ticketweb.ca/t3/sale/SaleEventDetail?dispatch=loadSelectionData&eventId=3665924

_________________________________________________________________

JAZZ.FM91

THE JAZZ.FM91 WORLD MUSIC SERIES at Hugh’s Room (August 6-10)

Info at: https://www.jazz.fm/index.php/news-a-events-mainmenu/world-music-festival/8370-jazzfm91-world-music-festival

Tickets available at: www.hughsroom.com

further info at: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/l6r55vo3e36266z/HqGiQQiAby

__________________________

Godiva Dates & One Night Stands

Regie Cabico is having a ménage et trois with himself.  A triumvirate of comic device that builds swiftly from an initial storyline and then explodes into a two step movement from titillation to full fledged consummation inhabits every story this master performer/comic/poet tells in his current one man tour de force Godiva Dates and One Night Stands.

Cabico invites his audience to join him on a rollercoaster ride of hilarious and touching voyeurism as he barrels through almost a dozen diverse tales of love lust and outrageous laughter with the emotional layering of a fine narrative craftsman. A New Orleans bar, Banff National Park, and the streets of Montreal become thoroughfares for a brilliant mixture of race, gender, and sexuality as one man attempts to navigate the idiosyncrasies of a selection of hot men who he hopes will morph from sexy stranger across a crowded room into enchanted friend and lover who will fulfill his relentless romantic quest.

 Ultimately the stories become tales of a willful, streetwise, wide-eyed raconteur who may have to get off the rollercoaster in order to enjoy the ride - or stay on and continue to tell his eager audience all the bawdy and breathtaking details. But, alas, the price of a good story could very well be the quenched thirst for romance this complex collection of vignettes frequently embodies. But there are moments of great hope and potential promise for a welcoming light a the end of the proverbial bath house bar room chat room tunnel.

Priceless moments include Cabico channeling Tina Turner in a brief blast of virtuosic vocalization, leading the way toward a finale that allows him to take the iconic presence of a Nina Simone recording and meld it into a seamless tribute poem to a truly divine diva. Three quarter profiles of Regie Cabico’s face during the Simone  segment reveal a profound connection between the performers words as they connect with perfect synchronicity to the pauses she was able to inhabit, and take complete control over, in the incredible arrangement of her historic songbook. This is a brilliant example of spoken word poetry and a classic musical form becoming inseparable and gorgeous, both aurally and physically. Director Matt Ripa has skillfully allowed Cabico the room to move from story to story with simple effective transitions that give spectators a fleeting chance to breathe between stories and prepare themselves for the next madcap sexcapade.

Throughout this sixty-minute show Cabico dances, reflects, sings, and above all else, tells a hand full of love stories that he has found himself immersed in during an ongoing ride through highly a sexualized search for a titillating soul mate. If he does find one audiences may lose the breakneck, action packed, sex filled collection of truly memorable characters populating Godiva Dates and One Night Stands. But Cabico appears to have plenty of brilliant narrative equations, as a writer and performer, up his sleeve, and will surely come through with equally entertaining and beautiful renditions of one man's search for someone to love in future incarnations of his impeccable solo performance career.

until Sunday at Capital Fringe 

Washington D.C.

Stratford Music Festival

https://www.visitstratford.ca/micro.php?ID=2125&referer=badge+clickthrough

http://www.westben.ca/

available at amazon.com
and on Kobo http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/The-Adventures-Don-Valiente-The/book-OXiCI0u9Ekyi6WWOm4UKRw/page1.html

New Mexico, 1922.

The orphaned eighteen-year-old stablehand Rosalind Grundy is seduced by a married woman, and faces a lynching after the pair is surprised in 'flagrante delicto.' But she manages to escape with the aid of a strange and aristocratic old man who calls himself Don Valiente.

Don Valiente, having read too many dime westerns, has come to believe that he is a famous gunfighter. He thinks Roz is a young man named "Ross," and he takes her under his wing - intending to teach her and to revive "The Code of the Caballeros."

Don Valiente and Roz embark on a series of comic adventures. But when they come upon a grisly murder and the trial of three escaped-convict killers, Roz realizes that her only chance to survive the imminent showdown and to reunite her with her true love lies in her ability to separate Don Valiente's madness from the eternal truths in his teaching.

(back cover - The Adventures of Don Valiente and the Apache Canyon Kid)

*

The evolution of late nineteenth century dimestore novels and mid twentieth century pocket westerns has been a pulpy and predictable narrative journey, with flashy titles ranging from The Knight of the Canyon (1880's) and Arizona Cyclone (1880's) to Outlaw Trail (1938) and The Night Horseman (1920). More recent incarnations include Badlands Bride (2012) and Cowboys and Aliens (2011). Close to my heart and at the bottom of my reading list these juicy Harlequin like tales have become a classic, enduring form. My father's penchant for reading an endless array of dimestore westerns, alongside his beloved copies of The Happy Hooker, Xavier, and Lady Chatterley's Lover, all kept in the tiny accessible drawer of his bedside table, primed me for a classic case of literary snobbery and closeted titillation. A recent revisionist interrogation of this formerly masculinized soap opera-ish form has caught my attention and drawn me back into the netherworld of my earliest literary influences.  

With the publication of The Adventures of Don Valiente and the Apache Canyon Kid, John A. Aragon and Mary W. Walters have teamed up to create a wild and wooly post-modern pastiche of some of our favorite cultural icons. By combining hot lesbian sexuality with cleverly concocted versions of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and Calamity Jane, these literary collaborators have created a vastly entertaining twenty first century take on a timeworn genre, the dimestore pocket western. 

Opening with a titillating scene of carnal exposure the tale moves through the exploits of   Roz and Don Valiente. A case of mistaken gender identity propels the journey through a variety of bloody and imaginative scenarios that include one very decorative hat that stands in for a hybrid combination of high fashion and sacred ceremonial head gear. There are moments of Tom Robbins 'esque flight of fancy as the sheer vivacity and cleverness employed by the authors allows them to navigate symbolic cross-cultural mixed gender horizons that pull at the comic, cosmic, and emotional heartstrings of their readers.  

During a recent Toronto reading Mary W. Walters said that the collaboration was a minute, painstaking, back and forth cyber-creation-cum-detailed edit that had the two writers in total sync as they coordinated the lives of iconic villains and brave, mind bending madmen who appear to mistake Hollywood location sets for actual daily occurrences. And yet the characters and the occurrences, from a Mary Pickford-like heroine to rough and ready desert showdowns, are all woven together with such intricate plot devices that, in the final analysis, reality and fiction become integral to the creation of a satisfying and seamless conclusion.

Aragon lives in Santa Fe New Mexico while Walters resides in Toronto. Miles apart they have managed to bring together diverse narrative strains that make their collaboration a single unified piece of entertaining mastery. Max Von Sydow, Angelina Jolie and a diverse cast of colorful characters could surely bring a tale of such cinematic magnitude to life beyond the enchanting pages of this new, absorbing, novel.