It's all about the hips!

This past Sunday, I was invited to see my friend Shannon's second spring bellydance recital which is a joint production between the Edmonton Bellydance Academy and Aldiya Middle Eastern Dance schools.

The fun of watching bellydance, I think, includes how colourful and elaborate the costumes are and how confident each dancer seems as she is dancing. Shannon tells me bellydance was intended as a dance both for entertaining men and for communicating and celebrating women, though the latter definition is oft forgotten in North American society. Dances on the bill included everything from slow, sexy dances meant to entice a lover to quick traditional tribal dance to modern-theatre-bellydance fusion conveying suffering. Every single woman - and there were many beautiful women of all shapes and all sizes - seemed poised, graceful, and joyful in their movements. The recital was indeed a celebration of sisterhood and womanly wonder!

I am always amazed at the amount of control required to complete bellydance moves. While I like to think that modern has conditioned my body to be fit and strong, especially around the abdomen, I can't say that I could easily do undulations or belly rolls or hip slides or anything my friend Shannon can do seemingly effortlessly. Every woman seemed to know how to manipulate their lower abdomen versus their upper abdomen versus their obliques at any given moment and all of this was separate from the use of their gluteals and their legs, which is what I would have to use to move the same way!! It is all about practice, I have been assured, and a love of movement, so anybody can pick up bellydance if they just spent the time to learn and practice!

The other aspect of bellydance I found interesting was the facial expressions of the performers. If the movements were to be enticing, the face was quite alluring and mysterious, with a hint of a smile and sparkling eyes. In fact, some types of dances required a veil to cover everything but the eyes and charm still oozed through the veil, which I consider a skill. Sorrowful dances were conveyed through downturned eyes and pained expressions, while happy, fun traditional steps were matched with exuberant, smiling faces! What a difference, I think, from modern where facial expressions are often kept neutral so that nothing distracts from the movement of the body. I'm not sure that I even possess the coordination to keep my face from two extremes while dancing: a neutral, expressionless face (for modern) or a wide, cheek pain-inducing smile (a remnant of childhood dance competitions). Not every dancer had the same expression though moving in unison, which puts a really personalized touch on the moves of each performer. Certainly, bellydance represents a unique approach to expression and quite enjoyed watching all of the dances that night, especially the poor sword-wielding dancers whose performance was plagued by technical difficulties. (Way to persevere, ladies!)

The recital was a significant departure from the performances I had attended of late and change, as always, is good. I applaud the confident and expressive dancing of each one of the dancers that evening and the hard-working choreographers who laid the plans for an enjoyable evening. Who knows? Maybe one of these days, I'll dabble in bellydance myself.

Maybe after my abs recover from my last modern class, though.

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!!

"It would be sin"

"There's an advantage to coming alone to the ballet," said the young lady who sold me my ticket to the Saturday performance of Songs of a Wayfarer/Seven Deadly Sins. Indeed - my rush ticket put me on the main floor in the center section, quite close to the stage. I should fly solo more often!

Great seats to a great show! I had the good sense to attend the pre-show talk on the first balcony, where Brian Deedrick, Jean-Grand-Maitre, and Yukichi Hattori chatted about the creative process, the intricacies of instructing both dancers and singers, as well as the inspiration behind this year's collaboration. Deedrick was lively, entertaining, and pro-German (as always) while Grand-Maitre and Hattori smiled reservedly and replied quietly into the microphone. Ballet dancers speak with their bodies, primarily. Deedrick and Grand-Maitre stressed that Sins/Songs was their effort to bring dancing and singing ever closer to each other, blurring the lines between each profession and setting a new precedent for this unique collaboration. Yukichi Hattori apologized for over-spending on his elaborate costumes and set design.

Curious, I settled into my seat to read the program. Songs features the music of Gustav Mahler, sung by Allyson McHardy and danced by five couples. McHardy entered the stage in golden splendour, walking easily down a ramp lined with bare trees. The soft lighting contrasted sharply with the brightly-coloured dancers, who looked surprisingly casual, as though they were auditioning for the cast of Rent. A hawaiian blue Tara Williamson started the show with a contemporary solo, hitting her chest and covering her mouth between easy turns and smooth arabesques, establishing an internal conflict of sorts. But the music sweeps the other dancers into a dance of greeting, where partners are exchanged and both men and women leap happily in the air toward and away from one another. First blush love - a couple dancing in their own separate spaces and coming together on occasion to establish a connection. Partnership - a couple dancing as one entity, essentially, with lifts galore! Finally, loss - how strong and articulate each of their limbs are! Principal dancers Kelley McKinlay and Tara Williamson conveyed both the sensuality and tortured nature of love that was never meant to be. McKinlay exits, leaving Tara to repeat her opening contemporary solo. All the while, McHardy sang atop her tree-lined slope like a goddess watching over her people. Where is this interaction between dancers and singers Deedrick and Grand-Maitre promised? To me, it seems like the singers have their part and the dancers theirs.

I need only wait until the end of intermission, when the stunning audio-visual display for Yukichi Hattori's choreography for Kurt Weill's Seven Deadly Sins zapped the stage. Anna, one woman played by two people - a dancer (Williamson) and a singer (Patricia O'Callaghan) - wants to be famous. Her journey to stardom is full of temptation by the seven deadly sins, which she seeks to avoid but, ultimately, cannot. Hattori's lavish expenditure was well worth the spectacle, from the integrated captions built into the stage set all the way to the junk food costumes, getting pummelled by starved, gluttonous dancers. O'Callaghan gets a gold star for her mild dancing while maintaining a steady, strong voice to narrate her sister Anna's spiral into fame and [mis]fortune. Williamson, for her part, does speak German on occasion, though she is mostly occupied with getting her bright red clothing ripped off by her sister or raving fans, leaving her tiny dancer's body bare and vulnerable. My favourite part of the set, though perhaps not the most exciting, was the great white door in the center upstage. After Anna gives in to pride, she screams at her fans who leave her in a dilapidated heap on the floor, half lit by a spotlight on the white door and half shrouded in darkness. Her eyes are dull but her feathered and sequined body continues to sparkle, even when lying still. All for what? That door gated her entry to the stage when she was flying high, giving her a sense of belonging and ownership. The same door prevented her exit with her family at the beginning of the play and stayed shut when she realized that fame was not exactly what she wanted, physically excluding her from her ideals. Despite some minor technical difficulties in the middle of Anna's struggle with lust, the performance seemed to go off without a hitch and I was almost sad to see it end.

I wanted to see dancing and singing intertwine and I got it! A lovely bill on both sides, with beautiful singing and beautiful dancing, complementing one another perfectly on stage. What in the world is next for this collaboration? Perhaps Alberta Ballet will start training their young dancers to sing and vice versa ... whatever the next collaboration may entail, I hope to hear and see more from both the ballet and the opera together very very soon!