RUBBERBAND's Ever So Slightly launches the return of large-scale live dance in Vancouver
Montreal troupe’s energized exploration of control and change takes on new postpandemic meaning at DanceHouse
Photo by Marie-Noëlle Pilon
DanceHouse presents RUBBERBAND’s Ever So Slightly from October 21 to 23 at the Vancouver Playhouse.
RUBBERBAND’s Ever So Slightly was one of the first big shows cancelled due to the pandemic in March 2020, when the Montreal company was supposed to hit the Vancouver Playhouse stage. And now, after more than a year and a half of uncertainty, it’s finally back as the first major group dancework to be performed live on a stage here.
The idea of 10 dancers moving together on a real stage in front of an audience seems like something out of a now slightly foggy past. There’s sure to be a feeling of unreality along with the exhilaration that comes from witnessing choreographer Victor Quijada’s epic, street-energized work.
“We’ve been waiting for 18 months for this,” he tells Stir before flying out for this DanceHouse presentation. “I just can’t wait to be back on the road, sharing this work, having the musicians play that incredible music and see these 10 athletes not only be dynamite, explosive but then just be super vulnerable….But yeah, it’s very strange to say, ‘It’s happening!’”
Quijada’s sprawling yet sculpted work, which features a swelling, twisting, scattering mass of dancers in coveralls, has proven to be eerily prescient in its themes (see the trailer at bottom). Evoking a look that’s been likened to a prison, to refugees, or labourers, the flowing piece explores rebellion and constraint, aggression and calm, isolation and community—especially as they relate to our innate human resistance to change.
“I am sort of waiting to see what this piece is telling me this time around,” Quijada begins. “There’s new dancers, so there’s a new chemical reaction going on. I’m thinking about all those things that were present back when the piece was germinating. Change and resolving to accept it: I feel like all of us in our own way have had to deal with that over the pandemic. What are you ready to accept? Like with masks: sometimes I'm like, ‘Oh, I hate these masks,’ but then I do want them—I want what's past that.”
In many ways, Ever So Slightly is Quijada’s most ambitious creation—the culmination of decades of work that famously took him from the thriving hip-hop and B-boy scene of L.A. streets to hand-picked training at legend Twyla Tharp’s company to contemporary troupes like Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. Living in Montreal in 2002, he launched RUBBERBAND to fuse all those influences in a fresh new way.
Victor Quijada
In Ever So Slightly, Quijada pushes further with the moving sculptures of large-scale group work, breakout solos, and duets, igniting the honed classical and contemporary technique with the energy of hip-hop and capoeira. It’s all set off with live electroacoustic music by composer-DJ Jasper Gahunia and violinist William Lamoureux.
RUBBERBAND’s calendar was packed with touring productions around the world when COVID hit and everything came grinding to a halt. For his part, Quijada cops to some rough moments in those early months of lockdown and closed studios.
“There was a stage where I had to ask myself to imagine a future where there's going to be a lot of jobs that won’t exist after this—and ask myself if I’m going to make it through,” he says.
Adding to the difficulty was that his company includes dancers from as far away as the U.S. and U.K. who felt extra isolation. And so Quijada and his team kicked into action with “a big effort to keep the culture of the company alive” through Zoom sessions and townhalls, he says. Still, he observes: “Dancing is so hard—and the reward for sacrifices that the artists make is being onstage and sharing your art form.”
And yet it wasn’t all struggle. For Quijada, who with wife and company dancer Anne Plamondon had spent many months of the year criss-crossing the globe on tour, the forced hiatus brought a new perspective—especially, he says, as his seven-year-old learned to hike and swim over the pandemic.
“I’m looking with gratitude at whatever was there and not so much at what we missed,” he says, now fully back in studio with his masked dancers. “The interesting reality now is that you make preparations and plan for shows, but somewhere in your mind you have to be okay to let it go. You plan for the worst and hope for the best.”
It’s pretty clear that Vancouver dance audiences, hungry for more than the stripped-down solo or duet shows that have become the norm during the pandemic, can expect the best from RUBBERBAND—a troupe that will not be holding anything back in its first big live show since COVID.
Looking at the piece as it takes form now, Quijada says there’s another element that will give it a new energy as well. “Now we have a shared history,” he says—and he could as easily be referring to his troupe members as to the collective experience of dancers, audiences, and society at large. “We’ve lived through a pandemic.”
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