Throwing Gnomes - A New Breed of Humans Discover their Powers

This will be my last Montreal Fringe review for 2008, and though I hope to catch more in Toronto I’m not sure what will be able to top the dance show Throwing Gnomes - Lancer du Nain, which I saw in the sold out Tangent space on the very last day of it’s run.

I went based on Sylvain’s reccomendation, and because one of the dancers is an old friend I’ve known since he first began attempting to slide across the room on his head. I watched him go from eager teen to wildly skilled young man and from the beginning he used his love of breakdance to connect with kids. Now that he has the credentials to tour the world with his crew, he still works in schools using dance to help challenged kids integrate and become stars via sweet moves. A heart breaker for sure, so I was expecting a great dance show, but still, I wasn’t expecting this.

Throwing Gnomes

Lancer du Nain - Throwing Gnomes

I wasn’t expecting an utterly unselfconscious, clear-eyed, playful skirting over former borders between contemporary dance and breakdance, or that this would breeze across my memories, project scenes across my eyes of my own teenage love and life, the real discovery of LIFE life, in the exact quick flitting, moments stuck in amber kind of way it feels like it all happens when you look back at the quicksilver stuff of life. It’s all here, told in the glowing liminal space of the garden with a kind of youthful, leisurely, garden party sophistication that suggests it knows all about stuffy pains and failures of the non-magical world, but exists somehow in a parallel place where new bodies, untraumatized modern minds, defy gravity, defy death, defy narrative and dark places, leaving only moments of shared skill, joy, and support, and gentle gestures in the garden.

The fusion of breakdance and contemporary is used is a light, unpretentious way, so it feels like a discovery. It’s what prompted me to say and repeat that this show was like watching a new breed of humans discovering their powers. The power and wit of breakdance combined with the grace and emotion and intrigue of contemporary is used to make us laugh and expand our ideas of the types we see played out in life. The ladies in their garden party dresses, with their slo-mo exagerated 2-kiss hellos, roll suddenly up unto their pretty hats, heels awkwardly balanced in the air at a breaker’s funny sideways angle. The gender rolls displace themselves as fluidly, 2 men and 3 women interact with layers of trust and sparks between them but never slip into stereotypes, there is never a weaker sex, never a harsh mocking of masculinity, just genuine bits of character play, friendship, attraction, respect and physical challenge. Their bodies and their expressive faces flip so often into unexpected positions - circling, connected to, and catching eachother - and into shifting group patterns, that the power dynamic is constantly displaced and equalized.

Though the title and signature move comes from the seriously questionable practice of actually throwing little people, this joyful, tender piece brought tears to my eyes. Not in the hilarious Thunderdome-style moments when they chose their padding by rock-paper-scissors, or when they flew back and forth across the room as though magnetized, but somehow in the whole assemblage of it I felt an overwhelming hope. Dance can lift me to a place where I think about humans and find I quite like them, dispite our flaws. The choreography here is bits of fun ideas strung together, bits of touching business and really simple childlike play with a sheet that becomes a skipping rope that becomes a, that becomes a, that becomes a… It’s this childlike seriousness in exploration of basic objects, and the things that can be done with bodies, that’s so dear, so dear it had us cheering, and the older lady next to me gasping and clapping and yelping “Oh MY!”

Though they currently have no plans to tour or remount, their sold out success at the Fringe is making the Lancer du Nain crew think they should think about it. I would love to see this show get even tighter and cleaner, even more synchronized and developed, heck I’d love to watch these guys on TV every day. We spoke about having them perform at a Monthly Mess at some point in the future, so watch for that. And if you join their Facebook group or Myspace you can help us convince them to give us some more.