Dance review: Found-object sculptures add to All That Remains' eerie landscape
PuSh Festival opener explores a dance between humans and the industrial waste they leave behind
All That Remains. Photo by Christoffer Brekne
All That Remains continues at SFU Woodward’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts until January 24
ALL THAT REMAINS, the avant-garde dance work that opened the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival last night, originated in Denmark, but much of its imagery feels like industrial detritus washed up on a West Coast beach.
That’s in large part due to the contributions of visual artists Jaeden Walton and Taha Saraei: both recent graduates of SFU’s masters of fine arts program, they have created new iterations of the sculptures used in the show. Those set pieces are crafted from found objects, industrial waste, natural elements, and synthetic materials. Here, sadly, they’re things you see on any West Coast oceanfront, from aged Styrofoam blocks to what look like fishnets and buoys.
Choreographed by Mirko Guido, this highly experimental work starts with four dancers on the darkened stage, making eerie vocalizations and pawing at their faces—pulling their own mouths and eyes open. As their voices crescendo into a loud drone, the lights slowly rise through stage fog to reveal a sort of vast, surreal industrial wasteland.
Much of the rest of All That Remains features the dancers interacting with these distorted garbage monuments. It all makes for a haunting tableau, equal parts eco-apocalyptic and Sisyphean. One performer pulls a gigantic, crumpled blue tarp glacially across the back of the stage. Another drags a huge hunk of driftwood. And yet another pulls on a giant coiled yellow cord, stretching it across the floor.
Sometimes the figures wrestle with the garbage, or struggle under its weight. Similarly, the soundtrack builds to a percussive, electro-acoustic cacophony, strobe lights flashing. At one point in that pulsing glare, a dancer wrestles a coiled “snake” of thick plastic tubing. Later, the action turns into a sort of end-of-the-world rave, set to club beats.
Above the humans and objects, a square of light glows ominously: the threat of technology? An abstract symbol for the ever-warming sun?
Overall, the humans are complicit in the piles of garbage around them, but they also fight the junk heaps—and eventually, over the arc of the piece, assert control over them. It’s a weird, thought-provoking trip—albeit with a lot of repeated ideas and improvisational-feeling dance sequences. The work may be best appreciated as a sound and art installation, for the desolate, fog-choked space it creates and the way bodies and these found sculptures move within it. Ultimately, it’s an unsettling dance between humans and “all that remains” when they one day disappear from Earth. 
