Running Down a Dream

Thursday night, I went to the Bluma Appel Theatre to see triptyche from Les 7 doigts. This Montréal circus company has carved a niche as being a smaller, artier Cirque du Soleil. Their last show in Toronto, Cuisine and Confessions, played at the Mirvish-owned Princess of Wales Theatre. This time round, they double-downed on their arty pretensions by commissioning actual dance choreographers for their 3 works.

Marie Chouinard has videos on youtube where commenters often quipped about stumbling on the "weird side of youtube". This has to do with her incorporation of crutches and other mobility devices into her work. So in anne & samuel, a dancer and a hand balancer found themselves interacting with each other guided by their dependence on crutches. There was something weirdly animalistic about their movement, like human-giraffe hybrids. This obviously appealed more to the dancers in the crowd.

Victor Quijada stayed more on the circus performance side with variations 9.81. With the standard handstand, bane of beginner gymnasts and yogis, as the simplest form, the balancers explored alone and together all the advanced variations of inversion work. In their movement and transitions on the ground, there was a hint of the hip-hop asthetic that are usually present in Quijada's troupe RUBBERBANDance Group.

The last piece, nocturnes, occupied a happy medium for me. But from other reviews, it seemed both dance critics and aerialists found it to be overly long but for different reasons. Starting with a woman (or perhaps a young teen girl) settling into bed, the work spun off into a fantastic dreamscape of acrobats and fish-men flying through the air. At one point, the bed rose on ropes and flew around the stage like the world's most comfortable swing. There were a few flaws for me. First, the transition from dance to circus at various points was sometimes clunky. Second, each dance work has its own unique vocabulary. So like all languages, phrases and sayings should be repeated to become familiar, and larger themes should emerge: for examination, re-iteration, re-interpretation. The need to cram so much dance and performance arts into nocturnes left little room for this sort of introspection and recall. For example, insteadof  one long section of unicycling with ever more astounding tricks, use it more judiciously sprinkled throughout the piece.