Dance review: Sculptural slo-mo and frenetic rush as Sloth Canon unpacks today’s punishing pace
With arresting dancers and haunting atmosphere, Company 605 and T.H.E Dance Company cocreation grapples with big, timely ideas
Sloth Canon. Photos by Dan Loan
The Dance Centre presented Sloth Canon at the Scotiabank Dance Centre from June 5 to 7
THERE WAS A STRIKING moment in Sloth Canon when five dancers, crouched low to the ground, pulled each other sculpturally across the floor in extreme slow motion. It was near the end of the physically exhausting piece, and you could feel the raw exertion of humans dragging and stretching just to move sideways—like a single, struggling organism.
It was an apt metaphor for the punishing pace of today—the way we get caught up in the rush, the drive to achieve more, make more, invent more. To what end, we’ve long forgotten.
The work, a collaboration between Company 605 and Singapore’s The Human Expression Dance Company, explored those ideas from multiple angles. While Sloth Canon didn’t completely jell, the piece had several standout sequences—thanks in large part to the arresting, committed dancers, Matthew Tomkinson’s haunting electro score, and Adrian Tan’s dramatic lighting. It chased big ideas and atmospheric design touches—fitting, given the themes.
On a level of pure movement, what choreographers Josh Martin (of 605) and Anthea Seah (of T.H.E) attempted was often fascinating. Dancers were given a multitude of tasks, pulled along at the fast pace of the group. In the most compelling moments, individuals would try to break free (most memorably, Brandon Lee Alley in a flailing solo of fragmented limbs). But they always seemed to get sucked into the mass movement again. At its most successful, you could feel a sense of groupthink—the dancers caught in the flow, hopping frenetically, arms pumping the air, even as they looked disoriented. Sometimes a performer would try to grind down the pace against the resistance of others.
Elsewhere, an interlude with a balloon that seemed to pull and bear weight as the dancers touched it felt more experimental and slightly tangential. Other moments when they were swallowed up by a giant, bubble-like inflatable set piece—a sort of physical embodiment of what they were imagining or “building”—felt truer to the theme.
We’re all hurtling toward an uncertain future, and you had to admire the way Sloth Canon felt like a for-our-times experiment in group momentum. 
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