Trace, by Red Sky Performance.
- Trace
- Directed by: Sandra Laronde
- Choreographed by: Jera Wolfe
- Music by: Eliot Britton
- Produced by: Red Sky Performance
- Presented by: Canadian Stage
Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street Theatre is a small space for a seven-dancer ensemble, but there are particular pleasures in seeing Red Sky Performance up close. The strength of the company’s contemporary dancers might be its finest asset – and this strength becomes something literal and observable when we’re just a few metres away.
In several important ways, the Toronto-based Indigenous dance company is an impressive one. Their new work, the 55-minute Trace, which opened at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street on Thursday night, is a good calling card for what they do best. The dancers are talented and well-trained and the choreography they’re given is often intensely watchable. Add live, percussive-rich music (by Eliot Britton), inflected with throat-singing and other Indigenous motifs, and the ingredients for a rich work of art are there.
Like Backbone, which the company presented last year, Trace is full of physically demanding sequences that rely on the dancers’ swiftness and vigour. The dancers look athletic, dressed in minimalist white shorts, the men with open shirts exposed chests (by costume designer Kinoo Arcentales). Choreographer (and performer) Jera Wolfe likes to work with the tension between the individual and the collective. This can create striking effects in which a clump of bodies functions, momentarily, as a whole, and then dissolves to reveal its component parts. The beginning is a good example: dancer Julie Pham is held above the heads of the group. She moves her arms in an almost-balletic sweep, before she’s turned horizontal and rotated in a pike pose. Soon, she’s subsumed by the crowd, and a rippling back bend, triggered in each dancer, turns the group into a unified mass. A pile of bodies becomes its own collective character.
For the first part of Trace, Wolfe’s muscular floor-work and acrobatic partnering are compelling on their own—particularly as they’re consistently delivered with a lightness of touch. There’s standout work from Lonii Garnons-Williams, who’s featured repeatedly as a quasi-soloist. Dancers seem to bounce, ethereally, back into the group—and the work behind these complex machinations never shows. But when the dancing slows down, and we’re not being wowed by the spectacle, questions about the concept start to emerge. Pham performs a solo of sorts with a long white scarf in a seated position. Behind her, a video projection of a birch tree with falling leaves is played on a screen. How this scene ties into the rest of the piece is unclear.
I found myself looking to director Sandra Laronde’s program notes for insight into how to think about Trace; it’s an impulse I typically resist, being the sort of critic who thinks that a work of dance (or any art) should speak for itself and not be measured against the artist’s intentions. Laronde writes that Trace follows Anishinaabe sky and star stories, touching on the theme of human origin and our future evolution. While this helped explain the video imagery (designed by Daniel Faubert) of night skies, spheres and waning crescent moons, it wasn’t enlightening in terms of the choreography’s content or context. The dancing remained in a fixed abstract realm—without narrative, human relationship or character. The movement relayed a feeling of struggle, and the dancers emoted accordingly, but there was a vagueness to this feeling, with no sense of its development or arc. In fact, Trace is so driven by choreography that it’s hard to see what a director’s role would have been in constructing the piece at all.
As for the video projections, they felt largely disconnected from the dancing and often proved to be more of a distraction than a source of atmosphere or context. Moreover, they precluded any ambitious or poetic use of lighting, which could have done wonders to evoke an ancient and changing universe—a sense of time, history and space.
What we’re left with is the kind of action-packed choreography that’s initially exciting and contains lovely images, but, without stakes, has diminishing returns.
Trace continues at the Berkeley Street Theatre until Nov. 11
Special to The Globe and Mail