Shay Kuebler's Momentum of Isolation evolves into a multilayered look at loneliness—and even love
The Radical System Art dance artist unveils the full-scale results of a pandemic-long project at the Chutzpah Festival
Shay Kuebler in Momentum of Isolation. Photos by David Cooper
The Chutzpah Festival presents Momentum of Isolation at the Norman Rothstein Theatre on November 13 and 14 at 7 pm
VANCOUVER DANCE ARTIST Shay Kuebler has been exploring themes of loneliness and isolation right back to his breakout Karoshi, in 2012. Based on the Japanese word for “death by overwork”, its climax featured Kuebler in the confines of an anger booth, smashing plates—solitary and enraged.
Almost a decade later, the subject he’s been so interested in has become a global reality—spurring a large-scale new project called Momentum of Isolation that’s propelled the artist right through COVID times.
“Until the pandemic hit, I’d never realized how profound and relevant this topic was to everybody, and society,” the Radical System Art artistic director tells Stir. That hit home most powerfully as he delved further into research on the topic, coming across Albert Woodfox’s Solitary, an autobiographical book about spending 42 years in solitary confinement for a murder he didn’t commit.
“He expressed that isolation is the greatest torture or pain that you can experience, because he said it’s not pain of the body or the mind, it’s one of the spirit, it’s one of the soul,” Kuebler says. “The connection between mind and body gets ruptured.”
Last year brought constant touring to a halt for Kuebler, the creator of the tap- and technology-driven Telemetry and of the multimedia Epilogos. On the upside, that gave Kuebler time during lockdown to “reset”, and dig deeper into an idea he’d had in the back of his mind ever since he heard that the U.K. had named a Minister of Loneliness in 2018.
Working with dancers via Zoom, he debuted the first chapter of the dance piece, Momentum of Isolation, at Dancing on the Edge—a series of solos exploring loneliness. By summer 2021, he was back at the Edge with the second part, M.O.I. - the partitions. And now, after a multi-week residency at the Norman & Annette Rothstein Theatre as part of the Chutzpah Festival, he can bring his full vision to life—complete with video projections and bigger group numbers that explore the kind of loneliness that happens within social settings.
In short, Momentum of Isolation has evolved from a series of solo vignettes created amid social-distancing rules into something much more multilayered, multimedia, and complex. Episodic and integrating screens and projections that sometimes play across the dancers’ bodies, the work touches on the way our digital existence may divide us, and on the ways we long to connect.
Sarah Hutton and Aiden Cass in Momentum of Isolation, a work that’s grown since the start of the pandemic. Photo by David Cooper
“My wife told me after seeing it the other day that I unintentionally made a show about love,” Kuebler says. “So it became about social connections, about love and about technology and about values. It has so many layers that slowly exposed themselves, because we had this longer time to research and a bit of a more isolated, focused form of research.”
Love may seem like new territory for Kuebler—it feels a long way from anger booths, after all—but Momentum of Isolation still showcases his signature adrenalized mashup of dance and physical theatre, which draws on forms like contemporary, martial arts, and hip-hop. From day one, with Karoshi, Kuebler has made it clear that though his ideas may sometimes be dark or heavy, his performance language is relatable in ways that elude contemporary dance.
“These are social themes that are really relevant. And really accessible,” he stresses, adding with a laugh: “I’m from Edmonton and I always say I want to reach the hockey dads.”
Kuebler, in other words, is driven to connect. And the pandemic, though it cut the artist off from stages around the world and even closed dance studios for long months, ended up being kind of the opposite of an isolating experience.
“In a lot of ways I feel really grateful to this piece and to everybody who’s been a part of it,” he says, “because I feel like I’ve gone back to these things that I held valuable when I first started making my own work."
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