Where Theatre Meets Dance

The Edmonton Journal's preview of The Effects of Sunlight Falling on Raw Concrete included a biography of established choreographer and dancer Brian Webb. Sitting forever (as always) on a bus, I read that Webb didn't find dance until his degree in theatre at the University of Alberta forced him to take a dance class as part of his degree requirements. He never looked back (thank goodness!!).

I often forget that choreography constitutes a time-consuming and, often, tortured process for dramatists because they have to integrate body movements along with spoken, video, and prop elements without the movements coming across as pretentious or merely an afterthought. Whereas most movement can be appreciated as a stand-alone element in a dance performance, choreography for plays has to fit a specific context and be more directed to a specific understanding on the part of the audience. Tonight's performance of Beth Graham, Charlie Thomlinson, and Daniela Vlaskalic's The Drowning Girls at the Citadel reminded me that movement is just as important to drama and acting as it is to a dance performance. The play allows the victims of one George Joseph Smith to tell their stories of love, loss, and last thoughts before he mercilessly drowned them. Each woman was wed, insured, and subsequently drowned in the late 1800s by Smith so that he could collect their life insurance before he was caught by Scotland Yard and hanged for his crimes.



Stark blue light floods the floor, on which three immaculately white ceramic bathtubs contain three ghostly white women. The leftmost lady (Vlaskalic) sits up choking and coughing with little ceremony but the second, the rightmost lady (Beth Graham), swings both of her legs on either side of the tub, pulling herself up and out of the water in a splits-position, using her buttocks and core to hold herself up and rigid. The third (Natascha Girgis) does not emerge for quite a few minutes in. The way the ladies perpetually fall back into the tubs full of water re-enacts their deaths over and over, while hinting at the murderer's MO. Slipping into their wedding dresses and white stockings as they recount their whirlwind weddings, getting checked by a doctor for epilepsy, and applying for life insurance all required meticulous choreography and some fantastic unison sequences by all three women. In fact, the women are almost constantly moving, spraying the first row of people with drops of water coming from their skin, their drenched hair, their soaked wedding dresses. Somehow, the women managed to cry real, hot tears for the love they never saw realized in their lifetime and this too joined the water flung around the stage. All of these wet and wild gesticulations only accentuate those moments when the women walk to the front of the stage, light in soft white or translucent blue to make a bleak exposition or candid admission directly to the audience; the silence of their arms and limbs seemed to convey a humourless sincerity not perceived when they were moving. Stillness carries weight in pure dance performances as well, but the use of stillness seems more utilitarian and emphatic in theatre.

The choreography of The Drowning Girls was obviously well-thought out and, I think, really made the macabre humour of the play. Dance is everywhere, readers - you just have to stop to appreciate movement in all of its many forms!!