Dance review: Coregulation and calm, as Action at a Distance’s WAIL sculpts vocal sound and movement
In this PuSh Fest, Music on Main, and Dance Centre premiere, humming songs, whispered words, and hypnotic movement bring a sense of serenity and connection to a chaotic world
WAIL. Photo by David Cooper
Music on Main, The Dance Centre, and PuSh International Performing Arts Festival presented WAIL at the Scotiabank Dance Centre on January 26 and 27
“COREGULATION” IS A process where one person helps another manage their emotions by offering a calm, supportive presence. And the key to experiencing Action at a Distance’s new WAIL seems to lie in that word, which choreographer Vanessa Goodman has used to describe what she does with her unique mix of dance and looped vocal sound.
The work, presented to a jam-packed house by Music on Main, PuSh Festival, and The Dance Centre, doesn’t so much entertain audiences, or wow them with physical feats, as soothe them with gathering voices, repeated words and sounds, and slow-motion dance. And given what’s going on these days in the world around us, WAIL’s humming songs, murmurations, and hypnotic movement may be exactly what we all need.
Continuing the work with microphones and live-generated soundscapes that Goodman has explored in everything from Graveyards and Gardens to Tuning, the piece opens with the six dancers’ voices ever-so-gradually joining in an echoing hum, the long, neon mic cords becoming a recurring set piece. Later in WAIL, the performers even provide percussion by dropping a mic to the floor in a steady beat.
With the audience seated on two sides of the stage, a giant, soft-glowing image of bursting red dahlias dominates a screen behind the moving figures (the lush imagery created by Ben Didier). Goodman plays the botanical elements off the technology of the cords and the sonic manipulations, with one dancer nearly obscured by the bouquets she carries around her head and shoulders in the early part of the piece.
There’s a restlessness and randomness to the choreography, which often moves at a glacial pace, slowing down time in keeping with the healing sense of suspension that Goodman builds in the space. WAIL was created collaboratively, with performers helping to generate their own, disparate movement languages, becoming separate figures caught in what feels like a dreamlike limbo, often turning off-axis and catching themselves before falling into the quiet chaos of our world.
The voice becomes not just an instrument but a physical force that moves with the body and reaches out in space. Often, the dronelike emanations conjure meditation. But it’s not all feel-good: in one of the darkest and most striking sequences, a riveting Shion Skye Carter crouches and spins violently around the stage with a mic, her breath rising to a sinister, hurricane-force wind. In another segment, whispered, looping words float in the air as James Proudfoot’s lighting sculpts arms reaching out and a torso turning in the dark. The vocal work and physicality often meld: two singers create a stunning effect with long tones, turning their heads from side to side at their microphones, sound and bodies wavering mesmerizingly in the air.
WAIL. Photo by David Cooper
The magnetic dancers—Carter, Anya Saugstad, Ry Jackson, Marisa Gold, Hayley Gawthrop, and Allison Lang—commit fully to this project that stretches them physically and vocally, and they each reveal beautiful, haunting voices.
With less of a narrative arc than Graveyards and Gardens, the amorphous piece seems to at first yearn for and then actually build to human connection. In one late, extended sequence, two dancers alternate single words of a song, moving slowly toward each other until they are performing the back-and-forth lyrics while in a tender embrace. By the end, marking this as by far the closest thing to music and song performance that Goodman has created, the group gathers in unison, almost as if around an invisible campire.
The choreographer has said she’s inviting the audience to “tune themselves” in to what’s happening in the room—a unique offering that is best approached with an openness to dialling in and letting yourself go to a multisensory experience. 
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