Dancers Fly to Inventive Heights

With six more days to run, the best of fFIDA, the fringe Festival of Independent Dance Artists, it would be safe to bet, has already come and gone.

Denise Fujiwara's Conference Of The Birds, performed twice over the weekend in a cobblestoned laneway of the Distillery District, could easily rank as the best thing to premiere at the festival in many a year.

Originally commissioned for the 2004 Canada Dance Festival in Ottawa, but cut from that program after a budget shortfall, the piece is the product of months of work with nine of Toronto's most accomplished dancer/actors.

These include Nova Bhattacharya, Leanne Dixon, Michael Du Maresq, Katherine Duncanson, Sasha Ivanochko, Viv Moore, Philip Shepherd, Heidi Strauss and Rebecca Hope Terry.

Decked out in the bright plumage of Cheryl Lalonde's multicoloured and multi-layered costumes, they entered the lane one by one, each adopting a different gait, as if presenting the avian version of Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks.

They vogued and preened, each dancer like an illustration from Roger Tory Peterson's field guide, breaking out from the flock with an identifying solo.

Debbie Danbrook's soundscape featured occasional bird calls, a Japanese flute and an chorus of chanting that sounded like the wind at high altitudes, as the homo sapien and feathered species merged in a range of emotions expressed — envy and pride, desperation, fear, anger, confusion and defiance.

Whether struggling to be airborne, or running up against the windows, crying for attention or slowly moving in formation like a scene out of Winged Migration, the dancers presented the perfect analogy of the human condition.

Indoors at the Dancemakers Centre for Creation, at Studio Theatre Series C and D there is less to crow about.

In series C, Jane Townsend's Secrets Of The Arena, has been made for Townsend and two friends from the skating rink at Moss Park Arena: Aries Cheung and Scott O'Neill.

Filling in for an injured O'Neill, Townsend's partner from Dogs in Space, Mitch Kirsch, played cowboy to Townsend and Cheung's two cows. Secrets is a light-hearted, if enigmatic, piece featuring some mock-heroic flamenco dancing and a life-changing shift from black spots to red as the cows discover their individuality.

Toronto Dance Theatre company member Matthew Kwasnicki does a solo in Series C (tonight at 7 p.m.) he calls Interrogation.

If the question is "What Does a Dancer Do?" then Kwasnicki gives a generous answer, sculpting the air with balletic arm movements, moving in reverse circles, inventing and re-inventing himself in the empty space.

Series D (tomorrow at 7 p.m.) begins with a promise of some excitement in Valerie Buddle's It Can't Happen Here (Sexual Misadventures), but the Montreal choreographer concentrates on the morning-after agonies of a woman (Stephanie Fromentin) who awakes alone to regretfully re-live the evening in a series of moves we've seen before (waltzing with an invisible partner; embracing oneself to impersonate a couple seen from the back).

Andre Fairfield of Montreal presents a histrionic excerpt from Kristallnacht, which he performs with soprano Jo-Anne Donoghue, attempting to replicate the horror the Nazi destruction of Jewish communities on the night of Nov. 9, 1938. Andreah Hunt's Spiraling In, a reverie about the way we fantasize ourselves, is an occasion for some fine dancing from two young women who go unnamed in the program.

More's the pity, because when so much of the choreography at fFIDA fails to entertain or engage the imagination, the shows at least serve to introduce new talent.

With most of the short pieces aping the appearance of dance seen year in and year out on Toronto dance stages, it devolved to the SHUA Group of New York to hold up the fringe element of fFIDA.

During two sessions between 9 and midnight, the four-member company invited audience members to enter their outdoor space, festooned with hundreds of square metres of crocheted plastic (all found materials).

While a video-within-a video of a monologue ran on the back wall, the performers wandered through the space, randomly moving the crochet-covered furniture or engaging in momentary duets in an end-of-the-planet scenario that seemed to assure us that dance will prevail even in a total urban wasteland.

Source: Toronto Star