Toronto Dance Theatre Goes for the Spectacle

Twelve individuals stand in the same position, immobile. A golden light shines on them from behind, transforming them into silhouettes that slowly break into movement. The sound of insects and frogs fill the space, aurally transporting us to the edge of a swamp. This is the dawn of the living.

From the very beginning, Christopher House’s choreography for Toronto Dance Theatre - presented last week at Centre Pierre-Péladeau - is mesmerizing. With Timecode Break, he makes full use of all twelve dancers who can often be found on the stage all at once. He has a great sense of the spectacle, finding strength in numbers, speed and excess.

This feeling is further heightened by the giant televisual screen that hangs behind the dancers. Though the typically simplistic use of video in dance is a pet peeve of mine, here we find one of the better uses of video I have witnessed in this medium. My assessment that video is almost always used as moving tapestry crept up again when out-of-focus images of water were first projected, but they quickly gave way to defined digital replicas of the dancers onstage.

Standing in front of the screen, they watch themselves becoming fractured by the framing of the camera, never able to become whole in the eye of the lens. Eventually, their video alter egos duplicate the same movement they are performing live. When all twelve dancers can be found onstage, this means that we now have a total of twenty-four dancers, enhancing the spectacle before our eyes.

Since the camera cannot possibly reproduce the hundreds of individualized positions inhabited by the audience, it also means that we suddenly have two simultaneous points of view of the same action. This juxtaposition reveals that the body can never be the same twice, that there is always a slight variation in the repetition of movement, which goes a long way in showing us the heightened value of the live experience.

However, Timecode Break does not succeed in avoiding the common pitfalls of the spectacle. For all its high energy, it often lacks the substance that would elevate it from entertainment to true work of art. It sometimes even looks and feels like pop dancing, the dance equivalent of paint by numbers, and consequently comes across as slightly vapid. Still, Phil Strong’s versatile music is of such quality - moving in reminiscence from M83 to Explosions in the Sky - that it almost succeeds in covering up the empty spaces left by the lack of conceptual aspirations.

Sadly, Timecode Break - which was closing Danse Danse’s season - is now over. If you want to know more about Toronto Dance Theatre, visit their website at http://www.tdt.org/. Danse Danse’s programme for next year is already out, again with plenty of enticing offerings, including the return of Marie Chouinard’s bODY_rEMIX/les_vARIATIONS_gOLDBERG along with the presentation of her newest work, not to mention the presence of one of my favourite choreographers, Crystal Pite, with Kidd Pivot’s Lost Action. For more information, visit Danse Danse’s website.

YOU MUST CHECK OUT the year-end show choreographed by the graduating students of UQAM. I have had the chance to see it and it is outstanding. The first work, Pascal Desparois’s Dissemblance en série, is so entertainingly humorous, antagonistic and violent that I would often not even notice that music would not play for extended periods of time. The second work, Virginie Brunelle’s Les cuisses à l’écart DU COEUR, is like the illegitimate child of Daniel Léveillé’s La Pudeur des icebergs and Dave St-Pierre’s La Pornographie des âmes. Brunelle’s look at contemporary sexual relationships is cold, but engaged; hilarious, but troubling; brutal, but lucid. Two choreographers of tomorrow that you can catch at Agora de la danse until Saturday, April 21 for a mere 8$. For more information, call 514-525-1500.