Duet For One Plus Digressions

What would you do if you had to dance a duet, but your partner didn’t show up? Not only did this actually happen to Andrew Turner when he was a student at Concordia University, but since then he’s used it as inspiration and decided to recreate the situation over and over again. Call it masochism, call it a desire to crowd the spotlight, but when Turner presented a version of his witty and surprisingly physical work at Piss in the Pool, it became one of the highlights of the event. This week, he’s presenting the latest version of his project, Duet For One Plus Digressions, at Tangente.

When I get to sit down with Turner at Cagibi, I ask him how the piece has changed since then. “I’d say what you saw is kind of one section of it. I was trying to learn about my interaction with the audience to explore what goes on while you perform, what happens when you look in the audience, both to them and to you as a performer. So it was kind of an exploration that I’m going to take further in this piece.”

Andrew Turner presents his latest creation, Duet For One Plus Digressions, at Tangente.

Even though dance, like other live performances, lends itself to constant revisions, there must be something more to keep him going back to this particular concept. “I found that [the previous work] lacked depth and research. [For the new version] I spent two or three months creating strong solo and duo material so that even if that text wasn’t there, the dance material was integral, could have integrity and be strong on its own. So then I worked with [dancer Milan Gervais] from the idea of duet work where often you’ll be manipulating the other dancer. I ended up creating a lot of material where I ended up manipulating myself. There’s a part where my hands are angry at my face.” Left to his own devices, he must get into fights with himself, only to then re-enact reconciliation.

But not everything is a matter of movement here. In order to fill the audience in on the goings-on of his invisible partner, Turner doesn’t shy away from using text. At Piss in the Pool, every time his dancing would gain some momentum, he would stop dead in his tracks with the stillness of words, keeping the audience on its toes. “The best thing is to take people a bunch of different places, to take them from somewhere really dark to something really funny, back to something more serious, and making it so they have to follow; there’s no choice. The transitions are as jarring as possible.”

The disjunction between the physicality of the dance and the immobility of the text creates humour that is hard to resist. He tells me that the contrast now is even worse, that the choreography is even more physical. “In fact, most of the time, when I’m talking, I’m completely out of breath. That’s the hardest part of it. I stop and I’m like, (breathing heavily) ‘So…’ I wanted to make sure that all the dance was extremely physical. It’s intense to watch.”

One of the biggest difficulties in the creation of such a work seems to be the attempt at anticipating the interaction with the audience. “There’s always that risk when you deal with humour and with directly acknowledging your audience. There’s that risk that they won’t be receptive, that you’ll hit a wall. If it does get more difficult, I will acknowledge that. I think that’s the strength of the piece, bringing it out in the open, that it’s not unspoken. Whatever the audience is doing becomes a part of what’s going on. If people are laughing, falling out of their seats, I want to acknowledge that also. I want to valorise the audience.”

Wanting to perform a duet on one’s own inevitably sounds like an experiment, yet it’s a word I hesitate to use given its sometimes pejorative connotation of the work as an attempt where success is uncertain. But is it an experiment? “That’s very interesting that you ask that question because I’m struggling with keeping that energy of the piece, which I found is what made it work, that relaxed energy about it. And now that I wrote a script, and memorized the script and the choreography, and now everything’s really tight, that kind of spontaneity is not coming through as well now. So now I’m in the process of recovering that.” Based on what I’ve seen from Turner in the past, experiment or not, it’s bound to be an enjoyable ride.

Duet For One Plus Digressions plays at Tangente as part of the Spoken Morphologies series (along with Filippo Armati’s My Life as an Art Piece and two of Gaétan Leboeuf’s sound dance pieces, Radio danse) from Thursday, April 17 to Saturday, April 19, at 7:30pm, and Sunday, April 20 at 4pm. For more information, call 514.525.1500.

PREVIEW Two other choreographers emerging from Concordia, Lara Kramer and Maria Simone, present their first independent pieces, Keeping your eyes gently closed and Close Quarters, at Studio 303 (372 Sainte-Catherine West) this week. Shows are at 8pm from April 18 to 20, plus matinées at 4:30pm on the 19th and 20th. Tickets are 12$ (10 for students).