The Dangerous Naïveté of Kiss Bill

Ten years after Love Letter to Tarantino, Paula de Vasconcelos revisits her virtual interaction with the famous filmmaker in her new work, Kiss Bill. Gone are the vivid colours from her most recent work, the Earth Trilogy; instead, here we predominantly find blacks and browns, respectively in the costumes and the set design.

For this latest blend of dance and theatre from Pigeons International, de Vasconcelos is joined by actors Alexandre Goyette and Sylvie Moreau. Goyette plays a successful filmmaker who excels in stylistic representations of violence. But, as always, Moreau steals the show as a fast-talking, seemingly soulless producer. After seeing Kiss Bill, force is to admit that even standing among dancers she can manage the same feat. This may very well be because her performance in the comical scenes is the best part of the show. The producer mindlessly reveals that her director’s work comes from a concern with appearance rather than any meaningful content. In other words, their films are all about artifice.

One of the best scenes, highly reminiscent of a similar escalation of imaginary gestures in Les Ballets C. de la B.’s Import/Export, is when the two actors physically act out a series of possible deaths for 200 ninjas. They have to get more and more creative, reaching comic heights as the scene progresses and their actions fall into utter silliness, a child’s game played by capitalist grownups.

Kiss Bill constantly risks borrowing just a bit too much from the film it is parodying, Tarantino’s Kill Bill, including a repetitive use of tunes from its soundtrack. However, this is wittily recuperated when the producer says to the director that what he does is simply appropriating what other filmmakers before him have done. Ouch. De Vasconcelos, 1; Tarantino, 0.

But Kiss Bill has its own set of problems, the most obvious being its choreography. De Vasconcelos’s strength has always been to create works with popular appeal that still managed to retain a high level of quality. Her choreography often used a structure similar to pop songs, with a recurrence of chorus sections.

However, here we go from well-crafted pop songs to generic boy band material. The choreography is so simplistic that it often threatens to fall over into interpretive dance. Overall, it fails to become anything more than a series of memorized steps, despite Natalie Zoey Gauld’s intense performance. The ninja dance is the only section that evades this since it offers its dancer an original, more interesting corporality.

In the end, Kiss Bill offers a resolution that is too neat and naïve to be convincing. The pseudo-deep transformation that the “bad” characters undergo is so sudden that it rings false, becoming as artificial and shallow as the films that are being criticized. De Vasconcelos, 1; Tarantino, 1. We will have to wait until De Vasconcelos’s next tackling of Tarantino to see who will win the fight.

Kiss Bill continues until December 15 at Usine C. For more information, call 514-521-4493.

Natasha Bakht in Obiter Dictum, photo by Cylla Von Tiedemann

PREVIEW: From December 6 to 8, Natasha Bakht presents a series of solo performances at Centre Pierre-Péladeau. They include works by Shobana Jeyasingh, Montreal’s great choreographer Roger Sinha, and Bakht herself. Tickets are 20-39$ and can be purchased by calling 514-987-6919.