Eunoia's wordplay infuses dance, projections, score, and costumes at the Firehall Arts Centre
Canadian choreographer Denise Fujiwara spent years creating dance out of the constraints in Christian Bök’s celebrated, vowel-happy book
Eunoia. Photo by Jeremy Mimnagh
The Firehall Arts Centre presents Fujiwara Dance Inventions’ Eunoia from May 8 to 11
WATCHING DENISE FUJIWARA’S multimedia dancework Eunoia, you’ll grasp some of the layers of complex wordplay going on—but definitely not all.
The veteran Toronto choreographer based the work on Christian Bök’s Griffin Poetry Prize-winning book of the same name, in which each chapter features only words using the same vowel—and manages to create characters and narratives. This dance spinoff takes that idea to the next level. For the section based on the letter A, for example, performers move using body parts like hands, arms, and jaws. They wear pajamas. Late composer Phil Strong’s score draws on the sounds of harps, tablas, and maracas. And that’s only the beginning of the multilevel fun.
“When you watch the piece you’ll go, ‘Oh, we’re in chapter E and that's a jeté,’ and you’ll notice ‘E’ body parts and ‘E’ costumes and instruments,” Fujiwara tells Stir in a call from Toronto. “But you will never guess them all.”
By all accounts, you’ll have a lot of fun trying.
Eunoia. Photo by Jeremy Mimnagh
Looking back on the piece that has found wild success on tour since debuting in 2014, the Fujiwara Dance Inventions artistic director says it’s probably the most challenging piece she’s ever choreographed.
“In the whole creation period, we had no idea if it would work, because it was such a difficult task to make a dance that used such extreme constraints,” Fujiwara reflects. “We actually had no idea that it would be an interesting dance. I think the author felt the same way: it took him about seven years to write the book, and he told me when he got to Chapter U he worried he couldn't finish it.”
Fujiwara and her team spent about two years crafting Eunoia, working chapter by chapter through the book, and finding new, vowel-driven ways to approach the movement.
“The whole thing required us to start from a completely new place,” Fujiwara explains. “In a way the score of the piece is the text, in a similar way to how music can score a dance, so I had to change my way of working. There are pitfalls to avoid when you work with text: I don't believe that dance should ever illustrate the text, because that leads to banalities. But what kind of ideas should be expressed in the piece? Somehow in spite of the constraints we had to create compelling dance.
“Everything was unknown and everything was an experiment, so we were always delighted when we found something that worked,” she adds. “Sometimes we failed, and sometimes that led to breakthrough revelations. But all along there was a really good chance that none of this would work!”
From the first performance, everything came together: Fujiwara’s unusual movement; Justin Stephenson’s inventive letter-based animated video projections, which sometimes spread and swirl over the dancers’ bodies; the interwoven spoken text that draws from Bök’s book; and Strong’s score, with its impossibly complex play on piano keys and palindromes. (The award-winning composer, who had been a part of Eunoia from its earliest studio days of development, passed away in 2022.)
After the first performance, the audience jumped to its feet to applaud. And Fujiwara breathed a sigh of relief. NOW Magazine named Eunoia the Best Dance Performance of 2014, it was nominated for three Dora Awards, and in the ensuing years, critics have called it “thrilling”, “witty”, and “engrossing”.
Of course, you don’t need to know the full premise of Eunoia (which fittingly means “beautiful thinking”) to enjoy the show.
“Even if you do know the concept, you don't know how it's going to be delivered, or that in fact the concept is manifested in so many ways,” she gleefully adds. “It’s going to be coming at you from all directions.” 
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