(Photo: Brandy Leary)
Casually dangling over the roof of the Bata Shoe Museum on long aerial ropes, Anadam Dancetheatre’s latest interdisciplinary creation turns heads, on Bloor St. at least.
People often say it’s about time Toronto’s dance scene took some risks and went out on a limb, or over a roof for that matter. Brandy Leary’s Divergent Dances for Windows and Walls does just that. Mixing contemporary dance, contact improvisation, and aerial arts, this unique show uses the angular structure of the Bata Shoe Museum to reflect on the architecture of space, movement, and the human body.
Divergent Dances is the second part in a three-part, multi-year series titled The Precipice Project, exploring the creative potential of the museum through movement installation. After tickets are purchased and picked up in the lobby of the museum, the crowd moves outside to witness three aerial performers climb up long ropes hanging down the front façade of the museum and suspend themselves by their running shoes, arms dangling high over Bloor St. in a mind-boggling feat of physics.
Effortlessly shifting from one death-defying pose to the next, weightless against a backdrop of cyclists, tourists, taxis and cars, the performers seem unfazed by the uncompromising pavement waiting below as they twist and arc in a controlled tumble downward towards the street. Rolling on the pavement in semi-drizzle, they press their bodies at every angle and shape into the museum’s slanted glass display window, from both inside and out, playing with our sense of perspective and expectation.
As the show moves inside the lobby, the action explodes into a series of micro-performances. Dancers tumble in slow motion down the stairs in a slow-motion human Slinky, lie in horizontal piles on the back patio and perform graceful duets in the front foyer. Choreographed by Brandy Leary in collaboration with the performers and playing off the musem’s setting, the show is structured much like an art installation. Multiple performances happen at once while the audience is free to wander about and take it all in.
The dancers, clad in vibrantly coloured pants and tanks, climb the ropes again and again, this time strung from the ceiling down the middle of the large and open central stairwell, giving the audience multiple vantage points of their hanging, tumbling bodies. Ironically, the ones who seem out of place are not the dangling aerial performers; they appear to be completely in harmony with the angular architecture of the museum. It is the audience who stand out. Wandering awkwardly, unsure if they should stay still or roam about, the insecurities of the crowd quickly become a part of the entertainment.
In a sense, Divergent Dances for Windows and Walls is like life: everything is happening at once and nobody knows what the hell is going on. There is no one way to watch the show, every perspective and vantage point is valid and every experience unique. Once the crowd realizes this, they begin to relax and enjoy. This is of course strategic, and satisfies Leary’s goal of destabilizing the relationship between audience and performance.
“Excuse me guys,” says an aerialist, prompting them to shift out of his way. The dancers continually interact with the audience, asking them to hold their shirts, shifting between casual and ethereal personas. “It’s my brother,” performer Kevin O’Connor says to reassure the crowd, as he lowers himself, wrapped in the aerial rope, to land perched on the shoulders of an audience member.
This begins the show’s finale, an interactive exercise where the dancers invite the audience to become a part of a human sculpture built out of bodies and rope. The crowd must loop their bodies around the rope and then lean gently backwards as the dancers slide in and out of the twists and folds. The performers and Leary, like the angular architecture of the museum, show us another way to orient ourselves, a new perspective on space, movement, and performance, and what can be created if we’re willing to take a few risks.
Divergent Dances for Windows and Walls continues at the Bata Shoe Museum through July 28.
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