Full Impulse

I attended Impulse 2010, the School Of Toronto Dance Theatre Fall repertoire, which highlighted the students in all 3 years. The need to include so many students in the various pieces detracts from the dances for me. The busy-ness doesn't give the viewer time to reflect on the choreography and sometimes the dancers are just running around. But I don't want to dwell on this minor point. So here is what I found interesting in each piece.

Oracle Parade had the dancers imitating each other but with subtle variations. They seem to pass around objects/tokens/hand patterns that fascinate them. Often, as the "object" move from person to person, each assume a related posture until a tableau is formed. I thought this was the most striking idea of this piece. It was like looking at a multiply exposed photo of a person in motion or a slow-motion sequence from the Matrix.

In What is what isn't, dancers assume poses which slowly metamorphized: a shoulder sagged, a back stooped. Other times, they call out a dance step before doing it. Interactions never involve personal contact such as hand-to-hand: one dancer's head push another's shoulder, an inner elbow contact a leg. I thought this was the weakest of all the pieces and had the audience scratching their head.

In contrast, they were laughing good-naturedly at Undone Tragedies. It might have been a 50s Hollywood comedy as dancers act out a manic scene from some army base gone wacky. Soldiers run off with flapper girls over their shoulders, generals bellow out nonsense commands. Hidden within the slapstick was  some accomplished techniques from the senior dancers.

Caving back towards the light remind me of other pieces where the bright illumination define a non-physical, but still real, structure that the dancers interact with. In this case, the light carved out paths on stage for dancers to move across. They appear on stage left, move through a sequence singly or in groups along the white paths, disappear on stage right, only to reappear again on stage left and repeat their journey. The sequences are repeated by various dancers. A commentary on the human condition? That in the end, our actions and lives travel down well-trodden paths. This is the piece that could benefit from less dancers so that we can concentrate on the choreography.

The last piece, Endangered Species (excerpt here though I think the dancers from The School of Toronto did a much better job), was almost a parody of what a detractor of modern dance imagines it to be. Namely, nothing that resembles dancing; just people moving like weirdos. I sympathize with that viewpoint as I usually demand technical skills foremost in any dance recital. Yet this was my favourite piece of the night because the choreography, though not dance, was so strong and vivid. Also, the smaller ensemble of 9 dancers made it feel more professional. An anti-war piece from 1981, it starts with people running continuously across the stage with ghastly faces while a siren blares. A funny beginning, even if it wasn't meant that way. But the humour dies away. What are they running from? An air bombing? Soldiers with machine guns? It doesn't matter because it's all grim. They fight, they die, they fight some more. Victims to aggressors back to victims. The violence loops round and round. And all the while, the fire that consumes the whole world is kept well-stoked by a grinning, goose-stepping, flag-waving war-monger who is more than happy to get people to join him under his red banner. They then die, but there are always more recruits. Not a particularly pleasant piece, intellectually speaking, to end the evening but a powerful one.