I was at the Toronto Dance Theatre in Cabbagetown on Saturday night for their first live recital since the pandemic. It was a full-house with people still trickling in between performances. For Performance Clash!, each TDT dancer was paired for 3 weeks with an artist in another discipline (visual arts, fashion, sculpture, etc.) Together, they would explore and share ideas and themes.
In execution though, I wasn't that engaged with the 11 5-minute shorts. Only a few actually involved some dancing: a promising combination of modern Japanese (Yuichiro Inoue) with Indigenous spoken word and song (Troy Emery Twigg); a music-video-esque dance (Jordan Alleyne) that included members of the band Tush; and a melding of contemporary (Andrew Taye) and bell-jangling movements (Rajni Perera) that may have been from Kathak dance. The other pieces were more like performance art: playing around with a giant beanbag, and a different one with giant stuffed mother figure, camcorder shots of preening narcissists, and a similar one about local access cable, and a rather strange short involving BDSM pig masks and kink gear.
The rest of the audience found the evening performance more enjoyable. This was probably because, from conversations I overheard between people who haven't seen each other in a while, many of them were in various artistic endeavours. So it was just a fun evening of watching other artists expressing themselves. But for someone who was an interested outsider, I wanted more dancing (or even some prancing). I think the dancers immersed themselves too much within the other discipline and failed to make dance be of equal importance.
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