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Harbourfront Centre & DanceWorks/Deciphers, co-choreographed and carried out by Naishi Wang and Jean Abreu, Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Feb. 8 to 10. (MAI, Montreal Arts Interculturels, Feb. 14 to 17, and Ottawa’s Nationwide Arts Centre, Feb. 22 to 23).
On the coronary heart of the dance piece Deciphers is the physique as a instrument of linguistic expression. It’s the premise of co-choreographers Naishi Wang and Jean Abreu that motion of the physique can talk as powerfully as each oral speech and the written phrase.
Apparently, Wang and Abreu met on-line by looking via up to date dance web sites. It was a gathering of like-minded dancesmiths, and knowledgeable friendship developed to the purpose the place they needed to work collectively. Deciphers is a results of that collaboration.
Wang, who was born in China, and Abreu who’s from Brazil, are each immigrants, Wang coming to Canada, and Abreu going to England. It’s the immigrant expertise that partly impressed Deciphers. The piece examines, as they are saying in this system notes, the complexities of communication, via each understanding and misunderstanding.
As immigrants, the lads needed to take care of a brand new language and a brand new tradition, and the difficulties are mirrored within the work by physicality that’s, for lack of a greater phrase, tortured. Taken as a complete, Deciphers is a bodily journey that expresses a variety of feelings from frustration to anger and again once more.
Wang spent 9 years as a member of Toronto Dance Theatre the place he was all the time a most beautiful dancer. Born with a fluid, agile physicality, Wang can twist his physique form at will via a sequence of dazzling contortions. Abreu has a extra chunky, meaty physique and so his bodily lingua franca is slam, and slash, and hurling himself via area.
Because the viewers enters, the 2 males are huddled over an extended strip of paper that incorporates footage, drawings, written notes and so forth, that symbolize their unique homelands. In a really efficient picture, Wang and Abreu every take one finish of the paper and start to crunch and fold it collectively. The paper has a crinkle sound as they collect it up, which represents a shattered world.
They lastly meet within the center with the paper crushed between them which they let fall to the ground. This uneven ball of paper stays on the stage as a damaged reminder of what was, and the difficulties of what’s.
The majority of Deciphers is made up of every man showcasing completely different motion patterns expressing hardship via numerous temper shifts. Often they arrive collectively in the identical bodily assertion. For instance, they each carry out what I name the inch worm which grows in depth till they’re each actually crashing and bashing themselves into the ground.
At different instances, they maintain themselves in stillness which can be an eloquent assertion of confusion, bewilderment or lack of course. At one other level, they every communicate Portuguese and Mandarin on the identical time, which a lot of the viewers doesn’t perceive, and which highlights the outlier nature of the immigrant expertise. Always, they’re conscious of the overall stage image, and the way their physicality is mixing collectively.
And herein lies the issue. As engaging and creative as every particular person motion is, and for every dancer, it’s bodily very completely different, that’s the sum complete of the work. There’s a sameness all through, going from one motion sample to the following after many repeats.
To extend the extent of choreographic sophistication, the work must take itself past the preliminary concept, and up the ante, so to talk. Choreographers typically do effectively with the primary concept, as Wang and Abreu do in Deciphers, however discovering that change up, that development, that deepening of what they need to say, is the second step that they’ve but to grasp.
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Paula Citron is a Toronto-based freelance arts journalist and broadcaster who hosts her personal web site, paulacitron.ca. For over 25 years, she was senior dance author for The Globe and Mail, affiliate editor of Opera Canada journal, arts reviewer for Classical 96.3 FM, and dance previews contributor to Toronto Life journal. She has been a visitor lecturer for numerous cultural teams and universities, notably on the position of the critic/reviewer, and has been a panellist on COC podcasts. Earlier than assuming a full-time journalism profession, Ms. Citron was a member of the drama division of the Claude Watson College for the Arts.
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