Dance review: CAMP performers show their swagger in WANTED
The livestream at the Vancouver International Dance Festival draws from the Wild West
CAMP in WANTED.
Reviewed at VIDF via livestream on May 29.
IN WANTED, THE five performers who make up the dance collective CAMP look at humanity’s extremes through a Wild West filter. The group’s new hour-long work, which was performed live online at the 2021 Vancouver International Dance Festival, is at its strongest when consisting of pure movement rather than campy vignettes.
Brenna Metzmeier, Eowynn Enquist, Isak Enquist, Ted Littlemore, and Sarah Formosa are all such strong dancers that we want more of them in this very element. Drawing from cowboy culture, they lure us in when firing finger guns, swirling invisible lassos overhead as they pivot, or lurching forward and back with their hand at their forehead as if tipping their hat.
A duet for Littlemore and Isak Enquist, by turns violent and sensuous, is a standout phrase, with all five artists sharing WANTED’s choreographic credits. Enacting a saloon-set brawl, the dancers’ gestures are so finessed and controlled that it’s hard to tell if they’re actually moving in slow motion or if director of photography Russell Lee is working some camera magic. Lee does so in a scene of the performers playing cards that’s shot from above; the cards become part of the choreography, to cool effect. Lee’s tight photography combined with Jonathan Kim’s intense lighting give the livestream the feel of a film.
Less effective is a cornball scene from “Horse News”, with four CAMP members pretending to be the guest mare on a TV talk show. Elsewhere, the audio recording of a man’s voice saying “now that I have learned what I’ve learned, I don’t think you people want to know what I know… You wouldn’t like it” is confounding if disturbing. And the collective’s expressive physicality outdoes their hyperbolic group cry.
When the individual and collective swagger are this slick, everything else feels like filler.
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