"Without any prior knowledge of Rainer’s piece, two dancers learn it live on stage with the help of a video recording that they mimic over and over again, slowly putting together their interpretation of the original choreography."

Stage Review

PuSh Festival 2012

Show: After Trio A + Beginning

Choreographer: Andrea Božić

Performers: Anne Cooper, Claire French, Julia Willms, Andrea Božić

Venue: The Dance Centre

Run: Feb 2-4 2012

Reviewed by: Tessa Perkins

Yvonne Rainer’s 1966 work Trio A is a seminal modern dance piece that is renowned for its simplicity and rejection of any sort of frills or focus on anything except bare movement. The piece is accompanied by Rainer’s “No Manifesto,” a poem that rejects things like virtuosity and spectacle. The first half of this show, After Trio A, pays homage to Rainer’s work while entering into a dialogue with it and responding to its ideas of minimalism.

Without any prior knowledge of Rainer’s piece, two dancers learn it live on stage with the help of a video recording that they mimic over and over again, slowly putting together their interpretation of the original choreography. There were two video screens hanging over the stage, one playing a dancer performing Trio A, and one that displayed lines from Rainer’s “No Manifesto.”

As the dancers learned this piece, various parts of the manifesto were questioned, such as “No to involvement of performer or spectator” as it became clear that both the performers and the spectators were very involved in the process of the dancers learning the piece. Julia Willms, stepped on stage to do some juggling during the dance as well, as if rejecting the line “No to spectacle.” The dancers left the stage and returned wearing tap shoes and a sparkly vest at one point which seemed to respond to the lines “No to eccentricity” and “No to style.” 

At the right side of the stage was a large speaker hanging from a rope that was dropped repeatedly and crashed to the stage throughout the performance. Perhaps this was also meant to be an eccentric addition to the piece. Along with the program was a copy of Rainer’s manifesto as she wrote it in 1965, as well as her revised “A Manifesto Reconsidered” written in 2008 and Božić’s own version “After No Manifesto.” The dialogue that emerges between these three manifestos is also present in the performance as the dancers reply to this manifesto and reject its wishes.

The second half of the show, Beginning, started and ended with the question: “In the beginning there was…?” It was a very neat collaboration between Božić, who danced in front of a projector, and Willms who sketched her silhouette as she moved. The backdrop of the stage showed a bird’s eye view of the paper that Willms was sketching on, and as Božić moved, the sketches began to look very life like and full of movement as well. Willms moved the sketch paper along as needed, and Božić seemed to control the whole thing as she moved her foot and the paper moved as if she had pushed it along.

Božić’s movement started out very slow and controlled, but gradually she began to move faster and incorporate more complex forms that were harder to sketch, then she began to jump up and down moving her arms around increasingly fast as Willms drew frantic black circles representing this movement. The piece ended with Božić shouting and splats of black paint being thrown onto the paper. Willms stood on her chair and slapped the paint brush back and forth across the page as Božić reapeatedly galloped around and yelled. It was quite a cathartic experience. Once this was done, Willms slowly moved the paper under the camera from beginning to end, and it was quite impressive how these sketches had turned out to be a beautiful sequence of movement and emotion.

Based in Amsterdam, Božić is a Croatian dancer and choreographer who is known for her interdisciplinary pieces and frequent work with video artist Julia Willms. I loved their collaboration, and I’m glad the PuSh Festival was able to share this great talent with Vancouver.    

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