By Sarah Cruickshank
New Animal, at The Cultch from Feb 7-11
Even with their busy rehearsal schedules, we were able to catch up with Choreographer Dana Gingras and dancer Josh Martin to get the inside scoop on the dancers of The 605 Collective and the creation of New Animal.
Sara Cruickshank: Dana, can you talk a bit about the concepts and themes of New Animal?
Dana Gingras: As my work at studying human movement has deepened over the past few years, I’ve developed a fascination for what’s both common with and what separates us from our animal ancestors. Theses animals are still inside of us; in our needs for territory, in fear responses rooted in survival, in the fight or flight, in the need for food, in our often unresolved needs for the limbic bliss of the pack-mind. But in us, these drives are repressed by our daily actions, social codes, and restrictions inherent in living on a vastly over-crowded planet; these powerful, defining instincts become awkward, twisted and neurotic. Instead of focussing on how these animals inside of us are tamed, ritualized & socialized, the work looks into our bodies and our lives to see where the animal cracks through to express itself most directly and profoundly: the places where we mate, where we play, where we break, where we survive.
The theme of the piece is this: where the animal still speaks through us, in its least neurotic form. Where it has a voice, or rather, where it takes over ours.
SC: How did Animals of Distinction and The 605 Collective come to work together for New Animal?
Josh Martin: This project actually began more than 3 years ago, just as The 605 Collective was getting started. We were beginning to make more work together which, in its early phases, was really based on our desire for peer-to-peer professional development. Work aside, it was clear that the more experience and diversity of backgrounds we had with us in the studio, the more these creative sessions were becoming personal learning experiences, expanding our practice as both individual artists and as a collaborative team. With this mindset, we then imagined how fantastic it would be to bring an inspiring established choreographer into this same environment we had created for ourselves, so we could all have a common experience of their creative process, their methods and artistic choices. The idea was that we could all reference and grow from this encounter, and regardless of the outcome, apply whatever we had taken in to our future art-making. We really didn’t care what the piece was or even if it was performed. We just wanted face-to-face inspiration, and to learn through building something together, rather than being taught.
At first, we were too scared/shy to ask anybody. We knew we wanted it to be someone we’d be excited about, someone most likely out of our league, but we had barely stepped into the contemporary dance community and felt pretty timid. It was Shay Kuebler who actually had the balls to ask Dana Gingras, someone we watched videos of, with our jaws dropped, to create a work on us. Long story short, after our knees stopped shaking, Dana turned out to be the most generous and thoughtful person we could imagine. While still kicking our asses in the studio, she had gone above and beyond what we could have ever asked from her in terms of her support and investment, in this project, and in us as young artists. It was a total fluke that we contacted Dana, but now I can’t imagine a better fit.
SC: As this piece was created specifically for the dancers of The 605 Collective, Dana and Josh can you talk about the choreographic process and the relationship between choreographer and dancer in the creation of New Animal?
DG: In order to explore this theme, we began developing movement based on extreme states of human experience – the places in our lives where the animal voice can emerge. We started with research into these places, by reading survival manuals for things like bear or shark attacks. We did research on people’s physical responses to crises like earthquakes, floods, etc.
We looked at this research to find the way the body worked when the rational mind was overwhelmed by the animal world, or by forces of nature.
Through improvising a movement vocabulary with the collective based on this material, we started to enunciate the way our own animals moved, through and against us. During this part of the process, it became quickly evident that the phenomenal prowess and professionalism of the dancers quickly repressed the animals all over again! Their skill with the movement quickly dominated the language we were developing and made the movements beautiful, disciplined, full of rigour, but all-too-human.
We solved this problem by complicating the movement to the point where it nudged against the dancer’s limits. We layered complicated tasks overtop of the established movement; doubled vocabularies on top of each other. We did this to create challenges that would push the dancers into a place that was at the absolute limit of their skills, a place of near impossibility, with a vocabulary individual to each dancer. I wanted the actual demands of the movement to bring out the survival impulse, and to give the animal inside of these highly skilled, virtuosic movers a chance to break through.
The 605 Collective
This was further amplified by the work with the lemons in the piece. The lemons were a very powerful device to work with, in terms of bringing out unconscious reactions and visceral responses. Imagine biting into a lemon, for example. Simply thinking of this will cause your lips to tighten, and your saliva glands to react, completely uncontrollably and unconsciously. It’s a very visceral fruit and pretty overwhelming to tear into. As well, lemon juice is extremely acidic, more even than vinegar. It burns pretty relentlessly, and causes real physical damage to the mouth and the skin. In research with the lemons I wound up damaging my face so badly I developed skin problems that lasted for almost a full year! So having the dancers work with the lemons provided a really interesting way to compromise their bodies into evoking involuntary animal responses. In the videos we created, we slowed down the frame-rate, which powerfully draws the pain and intensity of the involuntary physical response to the acid.
Lemonade, anyone?
Here, the animal emerges, in its full glory!
Across the entire body of my work as a whole, I’ve always embraced imbalance and risk; in New Animal, The 605′s sheer athletic power, skill, and commitment have allowed this exploration to go very deep.
JM: We really stretched this process out, working a few weeks at a time, either in Vancouver or Montreal. What was initially intended to be a short 20 min piece turned out to be this full evening work with incredible sound, film and lighting collaborators. There has definitely been a transformation, and I think it has a bit to do with Dana getting to know us better over the years. I think she started to learn both our individual personalities, our relationships with one another in the studio and used this to frame us deeper within the themes of the work. From the start, almost all the movement was built by the dancers, chosen through Dana’s prompts, tasks and improvisation structures. She would then direct this movement out of our natural tendencies until eventually it felt foreign and bizarre. I’m just recently starting to feel like I’m making it mine again. Dana is very direct and clear with what she wants to see, but at the same time, it remains a very open working space with ongoing two-way discussion and constant input and ideas coming from the dancers. She really allows and encourages us to interpret the objectives, give feedback, and to make them feel right for our bodies and in our nature.
SC: In what ways does New Animal “exploit the supreme versatility” of the five dancers of The 605 Collective? How does the choreography both highlight and challenge each individual dancer?
JM: I think Dana is sometimes more interested in seeing what we can’t do than what we can. There is a strong difference there. The choreography often highlights each of us in the challenge/crisis of doing something beyond our actual capacity. I think it is this effort, and perhaps the failure, that makes it so interesting to watch. In essence, you’re watching us try to be/do something we truly aren’t/can’t. I think this becomes more powerful than simply watching us dance well, and serves to create more of an empathetic response from the viewer. I’m sure I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was probably this element that first drew 605 to Dana’s work, and why I was so taken with what I was watching. I’m really happy to say that this project is pushing us out of our comfort zone in many ways, which is really the point of bringing Dana in.
The 605 Collective
SC: Can you further explain what you mean when you say: “the performers reclaim their animal bodies as a means of becoming fully human”?
DG: Humans are filled with beautiful beasts, our world is constantly teaching us tricks that repress and tame their natures. There’s freedom, dignity, fierceness and courage in allowing these animals back, to allow them their full physical expression.
SC: Dana, this is Animals of Distinction’s second performance with The Cultch this season. How does it feel to have two of your works on The Cultch stage in the same year?
DG: So much of my career has happened here, at The Cultch. It’s an honour to have two pieces here, and at the same time feels like I’m performing in a kind of home, to a community that has nurtured my entire practice. Even more profound, possibly, is having this piece be performed with 605; an emerging company about the age I was when I had my earliest performances on this stage. That feels like a tremendous gift.
New Animal at The Cultch February 7 – 11, 2012. Tickets start at $16 and are available online at tickets.thecultch.com, by phone at 604.251.1363 and in person at 1895 Venables Street.
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