Review: The Age I’m In

Recently, I was telling someone about Reema Singh, the delightful owner of Cocoa Locale, a bakery in Mile-End. As I was going on and on about her, my interlocutor stopped me and told me that it sounded just like Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character’s story in the movie Stranger Than Fiction. So maybe I got my stories mixed up and Singh is not actually a McGill dropout. Maybe I was actually thinking of Rufus Wainwright. Can you blame me? With so many stories floating around, it’s hard to keep track. Sometimes, I can’t even remember if something actually happened to me or if it’s just something I saw on an episode of Dawson’s Creek once.

It’s the same feeling I got more than once last night while watching Kate Champion’s The Age I’m In, the first of three Australian shows to be presented at the Cinquième Salle of Place des Arts this year. It’s that a large portion of the soundtrack for this dance-theatre show is composed of excerpts from interviews conducted with 80 ordinary Australians aged from 5 to 80. And, as these excerpts are being played, 10 actors and dancers ranging from 15 to 80 years old are lip-synching to these voices, independently of whether their age or gender seems to match that of the speaker. I was getting the feeling that maybe the performers also no longer can tell which stories are their own and which they’ve only assimilated into their lives. And, at the same time, does it really matter? At the risk of sounding cliché, so many of the stories in The Age I’m In have such a universal quality to them that maybe they are our own, even if we are not the ones to speak the words.

But let’s focus for a moment on what is usually my area of interest: the dance. Champion’s choreography is simple, but charming, and maybe never more playful than in that section where a young girl seems to be drawing in the air with her fingers. Though the movement itself might not be complex, it remains impressive due to its constant fluidity. Everything is happening so fast that cling your eyes and you will miss something.

This mixture of movement and storytelling will no doubt remind Canadian dancegoers of Sarah Chase’s dance stories. The main difference is that, here, Champion seems to be more interested in telling the story of a people rather than that of specific individuals. She loses the personal and intimate aspects of Chase’s work, but what she loses she gains in universality.

Finally, it would be misguided to review The Age I’m In without mentioning its creative use of technology, most visible in the performers’ handling of portable screens on which images often flash at lightning speeds. The performers must be swift to keep up with the technology, further enhancing the fluidity of the choreography. But maybe is its use never more touching than in the final images, when an old woman is sitting on a chair and the screens reveal two women lying against her. In the end, all that remains are memories, most specifically those of human relationships.

The Age I’m In continues until Sunday, October 25, at the Cinquième Salle of Place des arts. Tickets are 31$, and those under 31 years of age get 30% off. For more information, visit cinquiemesalle.com or call 514.842.2112.

The Age I’m in – Force Majeure from Place des Arts on Vimeo.