Stir Q&A: Dancing on the Edge's Sarah Chase and Marc Boivin explore the architecture of memory
In The door opened west, the choreographer unlocks her friend’s perspective through patterning, light, and cinematic sound
Marc Boivin in The door opened west. Photos by Michael Slobodian
The door opened west is at the Scotiabank Dance Centre on July 11 and 12 at 7 pm, as part of Dancing on the Edge
VETERAN DANCE ARTISTS SARAH CHASE and Marc Boivin draw on years of friendship for an autobiographical and visually striking new solo.
Hornby Island-based choreographer Chase, who has created pieces for companies from Toronto Dance Theatre to Peggy Baker Dance Projects, re-envisions Boivin’s pivotal life experiences as a series of rooms. Architectural lighting by James Proudfoot and a soundscape by Antoine Bédard give those shifting spaces added shape and texture on a black stage.
Quebec’s Boivin, a freelance dancer, improviser, teacher, and choreographer, draws on a long career working with Canadian icons like Groupe de la Place Royale’s Peter Boneham and O Vertigo Dance’s Ginette Laurin.
Stir caught up with the cross-country collaborators before their intricately cued The door opened west debuts at Dancing on the Edge at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. Here’s a condensed version of their conversation:
How do you two know each other?
SC: I guess I've known Marc for—this will date us here—well over 30 years, partly just because we danced in the same milieu and met each other in Montreal, many, many years ago.
I was actually taking a class of his and thought he was just one of the most spectacular guys I'd ever seen….Marc has always been an extremely beautiful dancer. Actually, right from the very beginning, I was so struck by how he seemed to be so aware of space with the different facets of his body. I could see that even in the very first class he ever taught that I took.
How did this piece came about?
MB: Around 2015, I was at an age where where I was looking for something else. In a work I was doing some rather hard work at the time—you know, “hard” in the sense of connecting with the hardness of the world. And I needed to do something softer and on a smaller, smaller scale of the human relationship. And I found Sarah’s work….I found her work to have a view on the world that was not violent yet very intelligent in its perspective of not sugarcoating things. And I needed to live that as a performer. I got in touch with Sarah and she told me that she was also thinking about doing something for me.
SC: One of the things that I do is sometimes I make these patterns of movements that are very, very specific and very difficult for people to master.
I'll just try to explain that really briefly: imagine if you were doing seven movements with one arm and 10 movements with another arm, and you started those movements at the same time. It would take a cycle of 7-against-10 for those movements to complete and come back together, starting at the same point again.
And that's a way of of moving that, mostly in Western dance, we don't do: we don't do kind of that kind of cross-patterning, demanding, concentrated sort of work.
I had been in the forest in Hornby and suddenly Marc just came into my mind, and I started moving my arms in a very specific way to make a pattern that for me called in patterns of light changing in very specific planes. And I could just so vividly imagine Marc doing it that I actually, I contacted him and said “Let’s Skype and I'm going to teach you this pattern just for fun, because it'll take probably a while for you to master it.” And then when we spoke, he said, “Well, actually, this is amazing because I wanted to commission you to make me something.” And so that's how it started within this amazing beautiful sort of moment of us both thinking of each other deeply.
What's the piece become about?
MB: There is often an an autobiographical aspect to Sarah's work….It started with me going to Hornby Island and walking a lot and talking about my life story. It wasn't like an interview; it was just friends exchanging. And then she asked me to keep a journal and to send her whatever I wanted to.
But it's true that as a performer you learn what the piece is about only from performing it. I mean, there's a view you have when you're working on it. There's another view when you open it. And then when you keep at it, you start to get more and more. And there is something about the caring being with the aging process.
SC: When I work with people, I'm really interested in making very deep kind of portrait work. And so one of the tasks I set myself is that when I'm talking to people—even people that I think I know very, very deeply, like I've known Marc—is that there’s so much that you actually don't even know about a person that you think you know, and so I'm always really curious about what is very specific about this person's point of view and way of perceiving the world. So in the case of Marc I started to notice that whatever he was talking about like sort of pivotal events in his childhood or or early life….And I could visualize the exact architectural location and space, whether it was indoors or outdoors as well. And then at one point he told me that when he was a kid he he loved to just flip through architectural drawings in magazines and that this was something he just loved to do. And then I even found out that he had almost become an architect rather than a dancer and so the fact that I'd started with this patterning of of lights defining the space: I thought, “Wow, this is really amazing.” And I loved the idea of putting these intimate shifts in his life, doorways that closed, doorways that opened in terms of his fate and his and his life.
There are patterns of gesture, patterns of movement that repeat and keep on getting redefined by the narratives that are being spoken over them. So in the case of this piece, I was really looking at the patterns of light along with the the gestures and arm patterns that Marc is repeating. All these things keep on being redefined by the narratives.
What became the theme?
SC: Part of the overall theme of the piece is the moments we all have: those moments in life where you suddenly realize that something maybe has finished and something is now going to begin, where you realize that “Okay, that door has shut.” There are little vignettes throughout the piece that kind of reveal those moments in in Marc's life and also I would say we see aspects of of him being a caregiver for both his parents as well, and that slowly unfolds through the piece.
MB: Something that is in the theme of the piece is this balance in life between all that you desire, all that you think you could be and wish yourself to become, and the actual path that we each end up having. And there are moments when something will take you on the path that will open a whole bunch of experiences you didn't expect. And sometimes they’re not the ones you wish for. It’s very much the sting of, you know, serendipity and balance with desire.
Caring for the aging parents is is one aspect. But the young person wanting to dance is another aspect. [James Proudfoot’s] lighting is very, very Cartesian, very square, which to me feels like pathways that you go through and then balance. Within this, there's also a very nebulous aspect to the light that is really hard to catch. So they're kind of like the alpha and the beta of how we go through making decisions—or sometimes we think it's it's a decision but it's life taking you somewhere.
And how does the soundscape play into that?
SC: Antoine [Bédard] and I have worked together on several projects. And my approach to sound, when I'm working with him particularly, is very cinematic. So often in in many dance pieces there might just be one or two or three sound cues. But in a piece that I do with Antoine, I don't know how many sound cues are there—over 70.
MB: It's almost like it, you know, It's like a foley artist—like if you close the door, the door closes. So it's a whole bunch of ambiance.
SC: And and then there's very specific music as well. I always use music as a as a way of evoking a particular time and place and emotion in both the audience and the performer. So for instance, for Marc, there's certain music that, when he hears it, it's going to trigger him to remember the 1970s or the 1980s, or a particular moment in time. And so there's some of that use of music, of specific music that exists….And then at moments we'll have little bits of of Mark's mother's voice.
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