/Dance/Songs/ & FTA Recap

Watching /Dance/Songs/ at Théâtre La Chapelle was a rather strange experience for me. I kept wondering if I was having the longest déjà-vu in history or if I had a special gift and NBC should make a TV show inspired from my life. As Ockham probably would have guessed, the reason behind my seemingly extraordinary experience turned out to be deceptively simple: I’d actually seen excerpts from the show two years ago at Main Hall as part of Pixel Projects.

Ame Henderson’s /Dance/Songs/ is a show inspired by the rock concert format, not to mention the movements that it spurs. The audience sits on three sides of the square stage where can be found three microphones, which will be used by three young performers dressed like indie rock stars. An inconspicuous video camera follows them. They address the public, drink from water bottles between songs, explain the inspiration for their pieces, dedicate others, thank the audience, introduce the members of the “band”. The audience gets into it and, unlike at most contemporary dance shows, clap after each song.

The performers’ movement is jerky, repetitive. It gains momentum when taken up by multiple performers, much like when they perform right up against their digital alter egos in a larger-than-life live video projection. The choreography becomes more complex for performer Matija Ferlin in a piece called “Note Box”, but even before then he’d already stolen the show with his singular physique and similarly distinct way of moving.

I don’t have particularly strong feelings either way about /Dance/Songs/, but I have to admit that at 12 songs lasting under five minutes each, it goes by quite fast. So if you’re the kind of person who judges the value of a show by how quickly time seemed to have gone by, this might be the right one for you.

/Dance/Songs/ continues until Saturday, June 6. Tickets are 28$, 21$ for those under 26 years old. For more information, call 514.844.3822 or visit fta.qc.ca. Also note that Ame Henderson’s company Public Recordings will be back in town for the 2009-2010 dance season to present a new work at Tangente.

FTA RECAP Looking back on the last two weeks, I think this year’s FTA was stronger than last, at least on the dance side. However, my experience seemed to me like living in a parallel universe, away from the rest of the audience. I am personally almost ready to call Yasmeen Godder’s Singular Sensation, which got a rather timid reception, a masterpiece. On the other hand, I thought Jan Fabre’s L’orgie de la tolérance, which got the longest standing ovation, was the most terrible show I saw out of this year’s crop. Even then, I still thought it was an interesting show, which says a lot about the quality of the works at the FTA this year. Artistic director Marie-Hélène Falcon does have a flair for picking works that make no compromise, so it’s to be expected that audiences are going to fall on one end or the other of the spectrum. And that’s a good thing. The other shows fell somewhere between these two poles for me, but a few others were also standouts and should get mentioned one more time: Julie Andrée T.’s Not Waterproof and Rouge, Benoît Lachambre and Su-Feh Lee’s Body-Scan, and even though I didn’t actually see it in its FTA rendition, I’m confident that Frédérick Gravel’s GravelWorks is still right up there.