Bodies and seascapes unite in two COVID Commissions from both coasts, at the Dancing on the Edge festival
Vancouver’s Billy Marchenski channels isolation at Iona Beach, while recent Nova Scotia transplant Meredith Kalaman explores water and identity
Billy Marchenski in light- bearer. Photo by Israel Seoane
Megan Morrison and Akeisha de Baat in the sea of my tomorrows. Photo by Daniel Duque
Dancing on the Edge livestreams Billy Marchenski’s light-bearer from July 8 to 13 at noon. Meredith Kalaman’s the sea of my tomorrows screens live at the Firehall Arts Centre on July 13 and 14 at 7 pm, and streams as part of the Festival Film Package.
SEASCAPES PLAY a major role in two inspired new works at the Dancing on the Edge festival.
Both are the product of COVID Commissions, launched last year at the height of the pandemic as an investment in the future: $5,000 to $10,000 grants to seven artists to produce a piece for the 2021 fest.
In Billy Marchenski’s case, you’ll see the well-known Vancouver dancer perform amid the water and low-tide mud flats off Iona Beach, in the world premiere of light-bearer. Meanwhile, former Vancouverite and now Dartmouth, Nova Scotia-based Meredith Kalaman brings together two pairs of dancers—one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast—in a film called the sea of my tomorrows.
For Marchenski, his work started with the myth of Lucifer, a character he had once had a nightmare about, and one that has long fascinated him. He and dramaturg Lesley Ewen started exchanging ideas and imagery, Marchenski experimenting with his butoh-style movement in his living room at night, during the pandemic when studios were mostly shut down.
“Ali would wake up to get a glass of water, and I’m in the middle of the living room, and she’s like, ‘Oh god,’” he says with a laugh, referring to his life and frequent dance partner Alison Denham. “But sometimes that’s the only time you get to rehearse.”
Creating the work was less about portraying the character or story, and more about building choreography out of images that came up in researching the myth of Lucifer, Marchenski says.
“It’s always been an interest of mine how imagery affects your whole body, and the state of your body,” Marchenski says. “A lot of what Lesley was feeding me was beautifully evocative imagery.”
A big inspiration was a passage from Dante’s Inferno. ”He sees Lucifer suspended in ice; it’s this barren landscape that’s also very beautiful,” Marchenski says.
The result is a poetically dreamlike yet darkly humorous exploration of being totally alone—a theme that resonates during COVID.
“He’s the ultimate figure of isolation and being cut off,” Marchenski says of Lucifer, who’s fallen from paradise, adding, “Maybe isolation is self-inflicted.
“It’s become about a memory of connection or contact, and the loss of that—and maybe having a glimmer when you remember that,” he continues. “I empathize with that feeling. I struggle with it in my own life, wanting to have that connection and also wanting to shut it off or push away from it. As a solo artist, having that solitude is really fruitful. But I also have a family now, so it's been important for me to be in the world.”
The slow, eerie contortions of butoh became the perfect language for Marchenski to explore those ideas, alone with the air, mud, and sea.
“In butoh, you’re in a state of surrender, death being the ultimate state of surrender,” he observes, adding for him, it allows a release as an artist to let go of the stresses of day-to-day life. “You’re surrendering to the air around you, the feeling of gravity. Your body is being moved; it doesn't have to move.
“For me that really resonates with the time we’re in,” he continues, “surrendering to the idea there’s nothing we can do.”
Being outdoors, on the beach, adds to that feeling, requiring Marchenski to adapt to whatever conditions arise. Light-bearer, which will be streamed, requires him to watch tide charts carefully and go with the flow of nature.
“It can be challenging, cold, windy, wet, grimy, uncomfortable. It can be a bit exposing,” he explains. “You have to dance within the moment. How do you submit to those challenges and let them affect you and go with it? Because you can’t fight it.”
Megan Morrison and Akeisha de Baat in the sea of my tomorrows. Photo by Daniel Duque
FOR MEREDITH KALAMAN, who’s now well-acquainted with both Canadian coasts, the ocean was a much more direct inspiration for her COVID Commission, called the sea of my tomorrows.
Like so many others during this sea change in the world, she decided to take a leap in 2020 and move to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, to be near her sister and her family.
It wasn’t as though her career had stagnated here in Vancouver, where the Langley-born artist had made a strong name as an emerging artist, receiving the 2015 and 2017 Chrystal Dance Prize and staging her first full-length work, Femme Fatales. But the draw of family, the rising costs and stresses of the city, and the need for a shift in her career all coalesced into a desire to cross the country.
“There was a lot involved, but this very strange event in the world made me think about where I want to be and Nova Scotia called to me,” she says simply.
Making the move in August 2020, the artist was immediately struck by the difference in the landscape, alongside the comforting familiarity of being by the ocean. She’d never seen red beaches before. “Driving from Dartmouth to Halifax, there was just this expansive ocean blue,” she relates.
She began to think about how her identity and bodily rhythms had been affected by growing up by the Pacific, and whether that would vary if she’d lived on the Atlantic.
“I wanted to see what would happen if I brought two artists from the West Coast and Nova Scotia together,” she says. “I wanted to ask, ‘How do we hold the memory of water and how would they translate that if they were to meet?’ How does their internal world relate to external world?”
Pandemic restrictions have meant the live joining of those dancers won’t happen until a deferred performance to 2022. Instead a dance film, shot on both coasts, will allow the performers—Sara Coffin and Amelia McGrath from Halifax, and Megan Morrison and Akeisha de Baat here—to move directly on the shores that inspired the piece. In Vancouver, the segments have been filmed on Wreck Beach, while the Nova Scotians have taken to the Southwest Shore.
Working outdoors with her East Coast dancers has allowed Kalaman to improvise and experiment with uneven surfaces.
“I started with them connecting with how their body moves and flows internally—improvisations following the movement of water in their bodies,” Kalaman explains. “Then I started to look at them looking out at the sea and tracing the seascape in their bodies.”
From there Kalaman wove in the darker forces of the ocean of water, the violence of a stormy sea. And, like Marchenski did with his work, she started reflecting a lot about how the pandemic has affected us.
“Let’s say we’re 80 percent made up of water, so we are actually more predisposed to be a state of flow,” she says. “And the state of mind now creates a lack of flow in the body.”
Kalaman worked via Zoom with her Vancouver performers, building from the physical work she was able to do on the shores of Nova Scotia. The final work interweaves poetry by Gabby Bernard and music by Erokia.
Think of it as an act of cross-country artistic connection at a time when we’re still cut off from one another. And a look forward to a time when we can cross oceans again.
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