So Yu Think Yu Can Dance

Saturday night, I headed over to the Distillery District to see CanAsian Dance's Kickstart. This program of six shorts paired up new choreographers and established mentors. It also featured Asian performers and themes. Several pieces were quite funny, belying the stereotype of "serious" Asians (and also contemporary dance). It was an enjoyable evening with some interesting ideas.

NINEEIGHT took as its main theme the 1998 repatriation of Hong Kong to China. With projected headlines speaking of "returning home" and "motherland", the 3 dancers (Michelle Lui, Milton Lim, Alex Tam) explored the meaning of these loaded terms. Inspired by the absurdist comedy of 1990s HK films (mo lei tau), they often used kinetic motions in situations that were often Buster Keaton-esque: a love triangle; an over-the-top "bro" greeting; a Wuxia-like confrontation. I found Lui's solo turn, with her slender limbs, over-sized blouse, and jerky arm movements oddly creepy. It was like watching a puppet having a nervous breakdown.

Bageshree Vaze's Kathak piece In My (Dis)Place was the most traditional. The experimentation came in the musical choices and various effects layered over her live chants (tala is a set of syllables that describe Indian drum rhythms.) The title became clear when Vaze told the audience, as she put on her ankle bells, how the bells came to her possession: her grandfather had ordered them for her mother, when she was growing up in Africa, which Vaze inherited when she started her dance lessons in Newfoundland.

Despite the title, Japanese dancers Mami Hata and Yuichiro Inoue expressed more child-like play than pain in Itai. It started with them pretending to be giant monsters destroying a city made from a collection of tape rolls, proceeding to teach the audience some Japanese phrases, and rolling gleefully around the mess. But there was also darkness, when Inoue flipped and jerked or Hata became emotionally, even autistically, lost in a series of turns and spins.

Emily Law and Troy Feldman (Translating Translation) also engaged in play as a couple who watched kung-fu movies and provided their own sound effects or narration. In parallel, they danced in solo or pas de deux in reaction with improvised choreography drawn from urban dance including break-dance. The competitive nature of a b-boy battle was a natural fit with the clips.

d.b.k. was laugh-out-loud funny. Robert Abubo was so enamoured with Ben Kamino's solo in nudity, desire that he has decided to recreate it ... in karaoke form. So the audience laughed along with Abubo as he, only passingly familiar with all his electronic gear, tried to put together the tracks (drums, guitar, voice, etc.) for a version of You're So Vain.

The final short, a slow awkward, was also the most "traditionally" contemporary. Ziyian Kwan and James Gnam started in full worker coveralls and ended in their skivvies. Along the way, a pair of suitcases, some violent confrontation, and a whole lot of sensual dance illustrated the arc of their relationship. I've never seen contemporary dance done in high heels. But the pas the deux between Kwan in red heels and a bare-footed Gnam looked worryingly dangerous (which was probably intentional). One wrong foot or kick and there could have been a world of hurt.