Viva MOMIX

April 12 & 13, 2019, 8pm
Vancouver Playhouse (600 Hamilton Street)

Running Time: 105 minutes (plus intermission)

Speaking of Dance Pre-show Talk 7:15pm each night in the Vancouver Playhouse Upper Lobby. Moderators: Jay Nunns (Artistic & Community Development Director, Circus West) and Cameron Fraser (Production Manager, Circus West). Guest: Jason Williams (MOMIX dancer).
Post-show Social after the performance on Friday night in the Playhouse Salons.

VIEW PROGRAM NOTES.

In honour of MOMIX’s celebrated history, Viva MOMIX distills more than three decades of work into a compilation of audience and critical favourites – the result is a confetti-coloured explosion of old and new, a mash-up of illusion, beauty, and near-stratospheric levels of invention and creativity.

Choreographer Moses Pendleton’s unique blend of visual theatre combines ballet, acrobatics, and circus technique, with innovative lighting, costume and sound to create a fantastical universe peopled with human flowers, Gila monsters, and ambulatory cacti. Elements of the natural world – animal, plant and mineral – are transmuted through the skill and technical virtuosity of MOMIX dancers, who sculpt their bodies into theatrical creations that suspend the rational mind, and replace it with wonder and a glorious sense of play.

Production Sponsor

Top photo: MOMIX

Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights

March 15 & 16, 2019, 8pm
Vancouver Playhouse (600 Hamilton Street)

Running Time: 75 minutes.
Speaking of Dance Pre-show Talk 7:15pm each night in the Vancouver Playhouse Upper Lobby. Moderator: Kaija Pepper (Editor, Dance International). Guest: Annie Gagnon (Rehearsal Director, Compagnie Marie Chouinard)
Post-show Social after the performance on Friday night in the Playhouse Salons.

VIEW PROGRAM NOTES.

In honour of the 500th anniversary of the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, choreographer Marie Chouinard creates a living canvas, embodying the seething, heaving fecundity of Bosch’s most infamous masterpiece.

Working from the painting itself, Chouinard and her dancers collected a vocabulary of positions, culled from the hallucinatory, surrealist details – enormous engorged strawberries, happily naked bathers, bisected bodies, bird-headed monsters, Adam, Eve, and apparently God himself – all contained in three separate narrative panels. Is it a prelapsarian vision of voluptuous delights, or a dire warning of imminent fall from grace?

Backed by an original score by Louis Dufort, and brimming with Chouinard’s visual wit, the performance unfolds in quixotic tableaus of wonderment and horror that combine erotic entanglement, stunning choreography and painterly beauty to create an experience of near-Paradisiacal ravishment.

Note: This performance includes nudity.

Top photo: Compagnie Marie Chouinard. Photo: Sylvie-Ann Paré Interprètes/Dancers: Carol Prieur, Morgane Le Tiec, Valeria Galluccio, Leon Kupferschmid, Sacha Ouellette-Deguire, Paige Culley, Megan Walbaum, Lucy M. May, Scott McCabe.

The Objectifying Gaze in the Arts

Tuesday, March 5, 2019; 6PM
Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, SFU Woodward’s – Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (149 W. Hastings)

Moderator: Dorothy Woodend, Culture Editor – The Tyee. Guests Maureen Medved, Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program – UBC, Barbara Bourget, Artistic Director Kokoro Dance and Co-Producer, Vancouver International Dance Festival.

Co-presented by DanceHouse and SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs, Speaking of Dance Conversations is a series of free public dialogues and roundtable conversations about the world of dance, contextualizing it within culture and society. Presented by noted writers, choreographers and creative thinkers, Speaking of Dance is a platform for everyone to share and develop their observation and interpretation of dance.

Community Engagement Partner

Top photo: Speaking of Dance Conversations © Heather McDermid

Created by Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young

Revisor | World Premiere – SOLD OUT

February 20 – 23, 2019, 8pm
Vancouver Playhouse (600 Hamilton Street)

Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission.

Speaking of Dance Pre-show Talk at 7:15pm on Thursday, Friday and Saturday night in the Vancouver Playhouse Upper Lobby. Moderator: Janet Smith (Arts Editor, Georgia Straight). Guests: Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young.

Post-show Social after the performance on Friday night in the Playhouse Salons.

PROGRAM NOTES

From choreographer Crystal Pite and writer/director Jonathon Young, the creators of the internationally acclaimed Betroffenheit (winner of the Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production) comes Revisor, a new dance/theatre hybrid that mixes classic farce and the forces of radical change into a fizzing concoction that confounds expectations and inverts the official order.

Taking inspiration from the classical tropes of satire and subversion – apparatchik politicking, mistaken identity, trash the fourth-wall observances – eight dancers embody the recorded dialogue of some of Canada’s finest actors in a plot that reinvests theatrical devices with anarchic absurdity, and Pites’s wildly inventive choreography.

As story and dance cascade into a final conflagration of human failing and moral bankruptcy, Revisor uses the mutable language of conflict and comedy to examine the relationship between people and politics, with eviscerating wit and bold physicality.

Co-produced by Sadler’s Wells (London, UK), Theatre de la Ville – Paris/La Villette – Paris (Paris, France), Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Banff, Canada), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (North Carolina, US), The CanDance Network Creation Fund, Dance Victoria (Victoria, Canada), Canadian Stage (Toronto, Canada), National Arts Centre (Ottawa, Canada), DanceHouse with support from Anndraya Luui (Vancouver, Canada), Dance Victoria (Victoria, Canada), Danse Danse (Montreal, Canada) and Seattle Theatre Group (Seattle, US).

This is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter Program. With this $35M investment, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.

Developed with support from the National Arts Centre’s National Creation Fund.

Top photo: Kidd Pivot, Revisor © Michael Slobodian

Co-presented with SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs and Talking Stick Festival

Blood on the Dance Floor
By Jacob Boehme

February 6 – 9, 2019, 8pm
SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (149 W Hastings)

Running Time: 55 minutes.
Post-show chat on Thursday, February 7.

Warning: Adult concepts (sexual & drug references), coarse language, loud music.

A descendant of the Narangga and Kaurna nations of South Australia, choreographer/performer Jacob Boehme was diagnosed with HIV in 1998. In search of answers, he reached out to his ancestors. Through a powerful blend of theatre, image, text and choreography, Boehme pays homage to their ceremonies whilst dissecting the politics of gay, Blak and poz identities.

Created with ILBIJERRI, one of Australia’s leading theatre companies creating innovative works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, Blood on the Dance Floor weaves together generational history with personal memoir. From a “gay elder” grieving young men lost to disease and despair, to the current culture of hookups and casual sex, deeper moments sketched between Jacob and his father underscore the legacy of racism, homophobia, and shame that permeates both personal and cultural histories.

Grounded in Aboriginal dance and storytelling, Blood on the Dance Floor incorporates activism, autobiography, and performance into an incendiary work of raw and radical emotion.

                 

Production sponsor: Anndraya Luui.

Top photo: Ilbijerri Theatre, Blood on the Dance Floor © Dorine Blaise

Post-identity Utopia

Tuesday, February 5, 2019; 6PM
Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, SFU Woodward’s – Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (149 W. Hastings).

Moderator: Harlan Pruden, Cree scholar and community organizer. Guests: Jacob Boehme, Margo Kane.

Co-presented by DanceHouse and SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs, Speaking of Dance Conversations is a series of free public dialogues and roundtable conversations about the world of dance, contextualizing it within culture and society. Presented by noted writers, choreographers and creative thinkers, Speaking of Dance is a platform for everyone to share and develop their observation and interpretation of dance.

Community Engagement Partner

Arts Criticism in the Digital Age

Tuesday, November 27 2018; 6PM
Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, SFU Woodward’s – Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (149 W. Hastings).

Moderator: Crystal Pite, Artistic Director – Kidd Pivot. Guests: Pia Lo, Dance Journalist and blogger at Globe Dancer; Colin Thomas, Theatre Critic; Dorothy Woodend, Culture Editor for The Tyee.

Co-presented by DanceHouse and SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs, Speaking of Dance Conversations is a series of free public dialogues and roundtable conversations about the world of dance, contextualizing it within culture and society. Presented by noted writers, choreographers and creative thinkers, Speaking of Dance is a platform for everyone to share and develop their observation and interpretation of dance.

Community Engagement Partner

Top photo: Speaking of Dance © Heather McDermid.

Co-presented with SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs and Théâtre la Seizième

Chotto Desh

November 21 – 24, 2018, 8pm + November 24, 2018, 2pm
SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (149 W Hastings)

NOTE: The performance on Thursday, November 22 will be in French/La performance du jeudi 22 novembre sera présenté en français. The performance on Saturday, November 24, 2pm will include ASL interpretation.

Running Time: 50 minutes
Speaking of Dance Post-show Talks:
Thursday, November 22/jeudi 22 novembre – causerie post-spectacle en français avec Dennis Alamanos et Nicolas Ricchini.
Saturday, November 24 – following the 2PM matinée performance. Host: Pia Lo (Globe Dancer). Guests: Dennis Alamanos and Nicolas Ricchini.

VIEW PROGRAM NOTES

Akram Khan’s Chotto Desh (‘small homeland’ in Bangladeshi) takes a storybook view of Khan’s childhood, growing up under the stern eye of his authoritarian father. Freely mixing Kathak dance with storytelling and mime, Khan creates a series of worlds that run from the ordinary to the mythic. While themes of exclusion and identity are wound throughout, the work is light on its feet and filled with a luminous humanity that grounds the fantastical in the universal.

Composer Jocelyn Pook and children’s theatre director Sue Buckmaster add richly embroidered detail to Khan’s lyrical and often deeply funny vignettes. From a surly teenager practicing Michael Jackson’s crotch-grabs in his bedroom to a man fully in control of his artistry and his destiny – Chotto Desh captures the complex relationship between parent and child, and the pain and joy of growing up with astounding delicacy and beauty.

        

Top photo: Akram Khan Company, Chotto Desh; dancer Dennis Alamanos.

Borderline

October 26 & 27, 2018, 8pm
Vancouver Playhouse (600 Hamilton Street)

Running Time: 70 minutes

Speaking of Dance Pre-show Talk 7:15PM each night in the Vancouver Playhouse Upper Lobby. Moderator: Dorothy Woodend. Guests: Sébastien Ramirez and Honji Wang
Post-show Social after the performance on Friday night in the Playhouse Salons.

VIEW PROGRAM NOTES

Gravity turns elastic in Wang Ramirez’s sensational new work Borderline that weaves together diverse movement styles to trace a line between chaos and control.

Borderline pits five dancers and one rigger against the gravitational forces of weight and resistance. As bodies bend and flip, transgressing emotional and physical boundaries, the apparatus of the work is laid bare. The rigger acts in concert with and against the dancers — manipulator, liberator, and Deus ex machina, a capricious force that upends the story, drags lovers apart, and sends bodies tumbling into space.

Fueled by the performers’ stunning technical skill, and composer Jean-Philippe Barrios’ (Lacrymoboy) score, choreographic duo Sébastien Ramirez and Honji Wang fluidly blend contemporary dance with diasporic identity and blunt social commentary to carve out new territory in the interstitial space between air and ground.

While in Vancouver, the company will offer masterclasses on Thursday, October 25.

Top photo: Wang Ramirez, Borderline © Frank Szafinski