Vancouver-Singapore collaboration Sloth Canon captures drive to build more, faster
Company 605 and T.H.E Dance Company push cross-Pacific team of dancers to embody a society rushing toward the next thing, at the Scotiabank Dance Centre
Rehearsal for Sloth Canon. Photo by Crispian Chan
The Dance Centre presents Company 605 and T.H.E Dance Company’s Sloth Canon at the Scotiabank Dance Centre from June 5 to 7
FITTINGLY, IT TAKES a minute to process what’s happening among the five dancers rippling and rushing around the Scotiabank Dance Centre’s studio floor.
In this rehearsal for Sloth Canon, a new collaboration between Vancouver’s Company 605 and Singapore’s The Human Expression (T.H.E) Dance Company, bodies reach, tumble, jump, and crouch in offset echoes of each other—in a kind of fluid counterpoint to Matthew Tomkinson’s driving electronic score. But there’s also a sense of incompletion: before they settle fully into an action, they’re already moving into the next.
“It’s in between states,” 605 choreographer Josh Martin explains to the heavy-breathing corps when the rehearsal takes a pause. “That search is at the base of it: having the sense of discovery as the motor of the piece. What does this become and to what end?”
That endless rush and constant push toward progress creates a strong metaphor in Sloth Canon—whether it’s for global economics or the more personally hectic pace of life these days.
Martin calls it his company’s first “tragic comedy”. The choreographer, who is working with T.H.E resident choreographer Anthea Seah on the piece, says it’s like he’s building a “micro-civilization” onstage.
“We’re interested in how the dancers are negotiating each other, negotiating multiple tasks, all at once—the impossible kinds of things that they’re trying to hold, all at once,” he explains to Stir. “We got interested in this idea of when you’re at a certain speed, how do you stop? How do you resist being pulled into other people’s speeds or the momentum that other people hold?
“We’ve never really made anything like this before, where we’re trying to basically choreograph how imagination can transform physicality,” he reflects. “It’s like we are moving at this pace, but no one’s really decided why we’re moving this fast or why we’re having to progress or build at this exponential speed. And you can’t help but run…”
“...until it pops!” adds Seah.
The ambitious cross-Pacific project, presented here by the Dance Centre, had its origins before the pandemic, when Martin met the Singaporean troupe at that country’s M1 Contact Contemporary Dance Festival in 2019 (where 605 was performing Leftovers).
“T.H.E is a company that takes time to make work. They take collaboration very seriously. It’s not like a machine,” Martin says. “So I think in that way, it’s similar to 605, where they really want to dig at things and ask some bigger questions.”
Flash-forward to today and the collaboration is finally coming to fruition as Martin works with Seah, who is based in New York City after many years working in T.H.E, and training in its distinctive “Hollow Body” approach to movement. That explosive physicality is brought to life in Sloth Canon by T.H.E dancers Haruka Leilani Chan, Chang En, and Billy Keohavong, alongside two standout local dancers: former Ballet BC artist and Dance//Novella cofounder Brandon Lee Alley and former Sidra Bell Dance New York artist and freelance choreographer Rebecca Margolick.
Sloth Canon drew its title from a musical form—specifically, the compositional technique where melodies split, with one part running twice as slow as the other.
The work was also inspired by the colossal growth of Seah’s Southeast Asian city-state home country, and the glass mega-towers that have risen on the tropical island.
Says Seah: “We say ‘kampung’, the villages, and we are still the kampung people in Singapore—you still feel like kampung people right now in a city, but trying to move for the next speed.”
“The scale of that growth—it’s not a huge place. But I think imagination is present there. Like, these buildings where there’s a giant ship built across the top of the skyscrapers,” Martin says, referring to Singapore’s famous Marina Bay Sands, with what appears to be a cruise ship balanced on three soaring towers. “So it’s another place where you go there and ask, ‘What is this all for? What are we building? How big will be the biggest building that we need to make? Look how capable we are. Look what we can do. But when will it be enough?’”
Martin and Seah say Sloth Canon has become the kind of dance work they might never have come up with separately—a unique, and daring, piece that is the byproduct of putting themselves together in a sort of “blind encounter” and posing questions. And make no mistake: what they’re doing is challenging, not just by asking the dancers to watch each other and stagger their movements in complex canon, but by purposely overloading them with tasks to execute in real time, quickly.
“We’re just doing this at a rate of speed that feels like, ‘How many things can you actually move through?’” Martin says.
The overall effect becomes a metaphor for a super-wired society and for rapacious development—both in Singapore and in Vancouver, where the drive to erect endless green-glass towers seems to have done nothing but exacerbate a housing crisis.
But that insatiable quest to create seems similar to the state of the artist.
Martin, whose Company 605, which he runs with co-artistic director Lisa Gelley, has grown to tour the far corners of the world, agrees. (Sloth Canon itself travels to the cont·act Contemporary Dance Festival in Singapore in June.)
“There’s this kind of momentum where we don’t quite know how to stop, or we don’t quite know what will be enough,” he reflects. “And I guess that’s sort of the darker part of this comedy: that these people are so capable and they’re so able to produce and to constantly progress, but they don’t quite know where they’re going, or they don’t know what it’s going to be for at the end of it. And I feel there’s similarities in this act of creating—never really knowing a destination for a piece, but just knowing that it has to be done.
“There’s always a bit of a struggle once it completes, because there’s so much build for it, and then it sort of disappears,” he adds, “and then you have to kind of build that momentum back up again for your next work, or the next thing that you’re infatuated with or investigating.”
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves in a work that’s about the impulse to get ahead of ourselves. The dancers will move with incredible intensity and urgency, but for audiences at least, Sloth Canon is a rare chance to slow down and think about all that. 
Sloth Canon. Photo by Crispian Chan
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