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In Unclearing, a double invoice, the Chimera Undertaking Dance Theatre provides viewers two world premieres that revolve round overlapping themes. They happen at Harbourfront Centre on April 5 and 6.
Each take into account questions and themes that confront the person in society — how will we seek for authenticity? What fears maintain us again? However, choreographers Sophie Dow and Chimera founding Inventive Director Malgorzata Nowacka-Could convey distinctly totally different approaches to these concepts.
We spoke to Sophie and Malgorzata about their works, Agrimony and Smooth, respectively, and their collaboration on the present.
The Interview
Sophie Dow’s Agrimony was co-created with composer and musician Laura Reznek. Reznek performs her indie pop album Agrimony stay throughout the efficiency, incorporating 4 dancers in masks. The title relies on the flower of the identical title, a small yellow bloom that’s utilized in plant-based medicines. As a therapeutic plant, its behind the central concept of the piece as therapeutic by eradicating our masks. Reznek sings, and performs piano, violin and guitar, with Jonah Ocean on cello, guitar, and background vocals.
In Nowacka-Could’s Smooth eight dancers depict the monotony and futility constructed into fashionable existence, shrinking our consciousness from the bodily world to the small digital display. Reconnecting with our pure intuitions, the sort our our bodies already perceive, is essential.
“The Chimera Undertaking Dance theatre has been operating a dance mentorship program for a lot of, a few years,” explains Malgorzata Nowacka-Could, describing how she met Sophie Dow years in the past. “I used to be instantly compelled by the vitality and dedication that Sophie introduced to each rehearsal.” It was clear she was on her option to knowledgeable profession.
Sophie went on to change into a dancer, after which affiliate artist with Chimera Undertaking. “I requested her, what can be your dream venture on this context?”
Over time, the thought developed round concepts each have been invested in, however the place they’d utterly totally different entry factors. It resulted in a thematic overlap, however with thrilling variations in conception to juxtapose in a program.
“Additionally, I’m a dinosaur, and Sophie is far youthful,” she jokes.
For Sophie, the specifics of Agrimony started with assembly Laura in 2019. She recalled internet hosting her in Toronto whereas she labored. The 2 artists related, and Laura performed a demo of one in every of her songs from a cellphone.
“Only a lovely music,” Sophie recollects.
In the course of the pandemic, Laura bought the excellent news that she’d acquired a big grant to report an album. It allowed her to report at Monarch Studios with a string quartet and 40-person choir.
“Unbiased it’s a masterpiece of an album.”
When COVID hit, Sophie was in Toronto with some studio house she was utilizing to rehearse. “I used to be shedding dancers each day,” she recollects. “Finally it was simply Laura and I.” And so, the dance got here into being. “We each had this collective imaginative and prescient.”
As Laura performs the album from begin to end from the stage, as a personality within the piece moderately than an accompanist, Sophie’s dance is woven into the music. In Agrimony, the instant impact is to ask the viewers, what masks do you put on? “It illustrates issues fairly successfully.”
She developed the idea out of a way of curiosity, and discussions with a good friend who identified the delicate ways in which, in our society, we will put on a large number of masks. How does a masks develop, and when does it come off?
On a person stage, it asks, what are you afraid of, and the way do you embrace these fears?
Malgorzata’s work is usually influenced by her fascination with the horror style. “It is available in a good bit. Individuals discover resonance with the horror style as a result of it provides us a buffer for processing our fears, but in addition our wishes,” she says. “It’s a very attention-grabbing vessel of connecting us with one thing that’s oddly non secular.”
That doesn’t imply, nonetheless, that the dance resembles a horror film in any method. The dancers counsel the unknown, the thought of issues that may very well be true, however with a stage of doubt. “That entire space that we culturally don’t enterprise into very a lot.”
What ought to audiences take from the expertise? “The core message throughout the work […] it’s truly very troublesome to explain in phrases,” Malgorzata says.
By way of the physicality of the dancers, she’s aiming for the viewers to expertise “a type of cost when folks overcome one thing visceral, and change into for a cut up second a brilliant hero.” Transformation is the important thing in her work, discovering the extraordinary in humanity via its effort.
“They’re unimaginable dancers,” she says, “they’ve boundaries and experiences and evocations that create a transformative surroundings for them, that they, as a consequence, explode out of. You are feeling the trouble and lightness and impossibility of what’s taking place earlier than your eyes,” she provides.
“[It’s] a glimpse of how extraordinary our capability is.”
- Get tickets for the April 5 and 6 [HERE].
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Anya Wassenberg is a Toronto Metropolis Editor at Ludwig Van. She is an skilled freelance author, blogger and writing teacher.
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