Art Attack

When poet Christian Bök wrote Eunoia, for each of the 5 chapters, he only used words that contain vowels of one type (for example, only 'e' or 'a'). In fact, eunoia is the shortest word that has all the vowels. Choreographer Denise Fujiwara decided to use similar constraints. On Saturday, I went to Enwave Theatre to see the result of this work which took several years to develop.

Her dance was also divided into 5 chapters (A, E, I, O, U). There were several ways that the dancers expressed themselves through these constraints. It was either style (salsa, tap, kathak), activities (wrestle, miming, handstand), variation of particular movements (rolls, drops), or a given body part (knee, heel, torso). They also played with props (hats, cups) and costumes (dresses, pink). Throughout, They rapped, recited, chanted, acted, or sung Bok's verses from Eunoia. Only chapter E had an overarching theme with its invocation of ancient Greece and Helen of Troy.

There were also lots of audio-visual components. The visuals obviously included many of the words and lines. But they had their own patterns such as a Greek temple (written out with just 'temple'), a sort of "lyric video" that revealed all the phrases formed up the letter i, and words falling as snow or bubbling up as water. The music and sound was harder to discern outside of some obvious ones such as whistling or the Doctor Who theme. According to the program notes, they also played with thirds, sixths, or tenths, and elevenths, etc.

It was a fun show and the audience was included in the game-play. The evening started with a game of hangman (with bananas for prizes), though there were some slowpokes. Several words in and people were still not realizing all the words had only 'a' as a vowel. They did better with the crossword. Surprisingly, though the dancers encouraged the audience to text or tweet during the show, only 1 person in the front made a few attempts.

I enjoyed it as performance art, since there wasn't really much dance. In fact,a variation of this piece would be great for kids. They'd have to remove the racier sections like the part about pornos and thr-bbing c-cks or doing push-ups while huffing about 'B-b- s-cks L-l- c-nt'.