DanceHouse celebrates a return to live in-theatre events with Montreal's RUBBERBAND

The company’s first major work to feature its entire 10-member company hits Vancouver Playhouse stage October 21, 22 and 23

SPONSORED POST BY DANCEHOUSE

RUBBERBAND’s Ever So Slightly. Photo by Mat Doyon

What do you get when you combine electrifying energy, explosive athleticism, and a live electronic soundscape? RUBBERBAND, direct from Montreal, and a never-seen-in-Vancouver work, Ever So Slightly, that’s what.

Choreographed by Victor Quijada, RUBBERBAND’s artistic director, Ever So Slightly explores humanity’s response to life’s daily aggressions, coupled with our urgent desire to resist our daily constraints.

The show, hitting the Vancouver Playhouse stage on October 21, 22 and 23, marks the Montreal company’s first major work to feature its entire 10-member company of artists, Ever So Slightly’s dynamic choreography will be accompanied by a live electronic soundscape from composer / DJ Jasper Gahunia and award-winning violinist William Lamoureux. 

RUBBERBAND was the first event DanceHouse was forced to cancel at the beginning of the pandemic, and it’s fitting that these performances mark the return to the theatre and live audiences. “It could not be more fitting then, to mark our return to the stage with the anticipated presentation of this extraordinary Canadian company,” says Jim Smith, artistic and executive director of DanceHouse. “It will remind us what is so entirely special, so utterly inimitable about live performance - sweeping us up and connecting us together on an exhilarating journey.” 

Ever So Slightly features an original soundtrack composed and performed live on-stage by Gahunia, RUBBERBAND’s longtime collaborative partner, an established TV and film composer, and resident DJ for hip-hop artist K-OS.

Joining Gahunia on stage is virtuoso violinist William Lamoureux. The duo imbues the work with a pulsing soundscape: an eclectic mix of esoteric electronica, breakbeats, and vintage sampling.

Hailed by Le Devoir as “brilliantly rendered,” the work was a finalist at the Grand Prix du Conseil des arts de Montréal in 2019. It begins with the company’s dancers lying face down on an unadorned black set. As tension mounts, movement slowly ripples through the pack as the dancers bubble up, one at a time, in a reflexive chain reaction. As the work builds, the dancers strip away their constraining boiler-suit uniforms on the path towards emotional freedom and transformative enlightenment. 

Quijada grew up performing in hip-hop clubs of his native Los Angeles and later embarked on a professional dance career with Twyla Tharp Dance, Ballet Tech, and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal. In 2002, he founded RUBBERBAND as a vehicle to fuse the form and rigour of contemporary and classical ballet with the ideology and movement vocabulary of hip-hop culture. 

Tickets are priced from $35. Visit dancehouse.ca for more information.

This post was sponsored by DanceHouse.