New energy spills out of confinement for Company 605's Josh Martin
At VIDF, Brimming explores the body as a rigid container for an invisible inner world
Josh Martin in Brimming. Still by David Cooper
VIDF livestreams Company 605’s Brimming on April 29 and 30 at 7 pm and May 1 at 4 pm.
COMPANY 605 dancer-choreographer Josh Martin had already been exploring ideas of containment, and how our bodies hold us in, when he was offered a unique opportunity: the chance to literally work inside a container.
And so, in mid-2019, he began rehearsing at Boombox, an informal dance studio and performance space set inside a shipping container in the back of a truck. Working there would help give birth to Brimming, the solo he brings to VIDF next week—one that’s intense, claustrophobic, and yet deeply human. The fact that it happens to be streaming now in a world where a pandemic has us all confined makes it resonate even more.
Boombox had a big influence on the creative process.
“It was a condensed space with walls only nine feet apart,” Martin recalls. “And it had this forced perspective: you’d be looking down this hallway to a compressed space in the back.”
The hidden, confined box became a perfect metaphor for the human condition: the way we all contain an inner life, waiting to spill out from within the body that we present publicly. “When you approach the truck, you don’t know what’s going on in there: it’s in the back of a parking lot where you’d never expect dance to be happening,” Martin says.
“It’s kind of a dark space, a dungeon-y space: that influenced a lot of the imagery in the work,” he adds.
As he rehearsed at Boombox, the setting started to affect Brimming’s strikingly different movement language, as well. Because the container still sits on wheels, with the truck’s suspension still in place, Martin quickly found out that if he rocked his body, the space would move too.
“So it was this idea of the container within the container within the container,” the artist says.
The result is choreography that’s punishingly rigid, and almost mechanical as Martin methodically isolates, bends, and angles different parts of his body—elbows, knees, ankles, neck—to “shape” his physical “container”. Sometimes he rocks manically from side to side—something he describes as “like shaking a can of Coke that is vibrating”. The artist expresses other moments as imagining himself to be “filling up” and “emptying out”, to be a bit like a glass of water—a hard container for something liquid and active.
Film still by David Cooper
The emotions are pressurized, and when they start to spill out, Brimming takes Martin to some raw and exposed realms.
“It’s really riding a fine line: How far can you go into those places before it becomes too performative?” he explains of dancing the piece. “I feel very connected to the work. These really are places I’ve been to and how I’ve felt. The dilemma for the performer is how much to show and how much to hold back. And that really speaks to the content of the work: what we keep inside and what we’re holding in; when it spills out, how gruesome it can be and how surprising it can be.”
Brimming debuted as a short film at last summer’s Dancing on the Edge festival; now he’s developed it into a longer piece that will livestream at VIDF. In this new version, he says he’s exploring more moments of stillness, of stopping and starting up again.
“It’s taking the vibe and the mood and tone of the research and then expanding it to this space where I’m finding all these kinds of states,” he says.
He’s worked with local lighting-design star James Proudfoot to create the sense of an enclosed, boxlike set through rows of lights. “It’s almost lke the room itself emits the light,” Martin says. “It’s very much taken on a character, and in a way it almost feels like a duet between me and the space.”
Finding new inspiration through shutdown
Brimming marks the end of a tough but, ultimately, artistically fertile year for Martin.
Last spring, Martin, who shares two small children with 605 co-artistic director Lisa Gelley, had an exciting year laid out before him after years of gaining momentum with the company.
Company 605 had burst onto Vancouver’s dance scene way back in 2006, famously born out of an East Van live-work studio (#605). Dedicated to experimentation and risk, the then-collective toured North America and the world, fusing the diverse styles of its members into something thrillingly athletic and new. Eventually it evolved into a company under the direction of Gelley and Martin. The last few years have seen them create a work for Ballet BC, bring in guest choreographers, and stage their own driving, physically explosive works, like 2019’s Loop, Lull.
In spring 2020, they were on their way to a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts to work on a new piece when the world shut down. Martin also had to cancel a tour of Korea with his earlier solo Leftovers, as well as a much-anticipated stint in Germany.
“There were so many things that were no longer going to happen,” Martin says. “But as things have moved on, we’ve found ways to work with what we have.”
That’s meant continuing to create work with dancers, even if by Zoom. As far as Brimming, Martin has discovered methods to express dance on film that he might never have otherwise.
“Throughout everything, it feels like I haven’t just been sitting on my hands; there’s been a lot of education about my craft,” he reflects. “It’s opened up a lot of doors I hadn’t considered.
“I think this disruption is generative in a lot of ways for the arts community,” the upbeat artist adds. “If we manage to stay resilient and stay whole, I think this is a strengthening time.”
And on that note, finally, it should be said that there's one relevant arts hub that could use some help staying whole at the moment. Boombox--the spot that so influenced Brimming--recently received a renoviction notice for April 30. It had been founded by Diego Romero, Katie Lowen, and Ileanna Cheladyn as an affordable answer to this city’s real-estate insanity. You can see the GoFundMe page here, aimed at finding a new trailer to host an arts scene that refuses to be contained.
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