Dance review: Joe Ink's DANCE:CRAFT builds an atmospheric world of movement, imagery, and sound
Inspired by an array of surreal art objects, the interdisciplinary show also integrates striking lighting, projections, and music
Heather Dotto moves around Debra Dumka’s hand-felted rug. Photo by Michael Slobodian
Joe Ink, in partnership with SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs, presents DANCE:CRAFT at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre until May 22
ONE ONE LEVEL, DANCE:CRAFT strikingly combines the two forms of the title. Dancers Heather Dotto and Joey Matt interact with strange, chubby-cheeked ceramic masks and disembodied heads, move around cocoon-like glowing-glass orbs, and manipulate scores of smooth wooden blocks.
But what the title doesn’t quite convey is what a total, immersive piece of interdisciplinary art this experience is. Choreographer Joe Laughlin invites audience members into a fully realized world of visuals and sound, from the moment they step into a Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre that’s been so fully reconfigured that it’s unrecognizable.
Visitors enter through two doors to a traverse stage, with stadium seating on either side of a galley where the performance takes place. During the show, those doors become eerie, backlit portals for the two dancers.
What follows is a flowing series of vignettes, each centred around craft pieces in five different media. But just as important as the movement and objects are Eric Chad’s projected video and James Proudfoot’s atmospheric lighting, which highlight the dancers and artworks. Sometimes Chad’s imagery, projected across the dancers and the floor, resembles firing synapses; other times it grows into a stylized tree or mimics the circling of a potter’s wheel or blowtube.
Equally integral is Jesse and Joshua Zubot’s indelible score. A mix of haunting strings, electro-scapes, and pulsing percussion, it helps raise the experience to a new, otherworldly level.
In other words, DANCE:CRAFT is a lesson in collaboration, the kind that could only happen in Vancouver’s scene—helped, of course, by Laughlin’s open-minded approach to other art forms, and the pedigree of this accomplished team on all fronts.
Heather Dotto and Joey Matt in DANCE:CRAFT. Photo by Michael Slobodian
The work’s strongest choreographic moments come when the performers’ movement flows out of and beyond the craft pieces. Patrick Christie’s smooth blocks, laid as a wonky platform for Matt, propel him into a muscular solo—first walking on all fours with the cubes in his hands, then moving brutishly on his fists. Deborah Dumka’s hand-felted, leaf-shaped rug inspires a more organic, fluid solo for Dotto, where she slides around the floor on her back, propelled by legs that move in and out of splits, and then rolls in and out of the fabric; that leads to a gorgeously unusual duet where she sits between Matt’s bent legs and they move like a single, multilegged caterpillar. The pair switch up their style completely when they don Debra E Sloan’s blank-staring, bulgy-cheeked ceramic masks, becoming curious, surreal characters.
There are clever, nonliteral references to craft throughout; at times, the duo wears aprons and glassblowing gloves; at others, Hope Forstenzer’s glass orbs glow the hot red of a glory hole.
As for the craft pieces, they add a visual appeal to the work all their own—particularly ceramicist Sloan’s crooked tree, dog figures, cherubic heads, and round-bellied torsos.
In an added level of interdisciplinary pleasure, you can “visit” each of the craft artists’ studios via VR headsets in the lobby before and after the show. Claire Sanford has made engaging 360-degree films interviewing each about their practice in their workspaces; in one segment you can look all around you at Sloan’s oddly charismatic figures while she works a huge slab of clay at a table.
Vancouver has long been celebrated for its innovative interdisciplinary shows. But considering artists have been working in isolation for more than two years now, it feels thrillingly fresh to take in an immersive production again. There are just two more nights to enter this strange and fascinating world.
Photo by Michael Slobodian
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