Two very ripped young men in tightie-whities and balaclavas were gyrating, twisting and bouncing to a raucous pop song. The dancefloor was crowded with bodies. As the band got louder and messier, even the wallflowers were nodding and grinning. Sounds fun-but pretty standard, right?
Not exactly. The nearly-naked men were Toronto Dance Theatre professionals, while the band was local favourites the Hidden Cameras wailing about getting high on church grounds. The wallflowers were the few audience members too shy (or too confused) to join the performers on the TDT stage for the encore.
You Are the Same, last week’s four-night collaboration between TDT and the Hidden Cameras, was disorienting, chaotic, and gleeful even before the audience joined in. Over the course of the 14-song performance, musicians moved and mimed on stage while dancers grooved along on trumpet, cymbals and xylophone.
With both dancers and musicians in street-casual costumes, and the audience outreach-in addition to the stage-storming encore, the cast had appropriated the first row’s chairs and taught a bizarrely Macarena-like miming dance-it seemed as though TDT and the Hidden Cameras were intent on ecstatically demolishing all of modern dance’s conventional divisions. Musicians and dancers, performer and audience, pop vs. highbrow-we really are the same! All of us! Right now! Hallelujah!
Well, again, not everything is always as it seems. Before seeing the show, I spoke to Jessica Runge, a longtime TDT company member, choreographer (she will be presenting her work as part of TDT’s Four at the Winch, April 7-10) and part-time U of T student. She assured me that while audiences were jumping up and down with enthusiasm, “it remains pretty clear that we’re performing for them. No one’s dragged on stage if they don’t want to!” she laughed. By inviting audiences to dance along during some songs, the show “accepts that everyone has a sense of movement.” She adds, “Everyone has a sense of music, too, and I think if they had extra instruments…”
An implication perhaps best left unrealized, if only for the sake of the older gentleman who peered suspiciously at Saturday’s performance with gnarled fingers jammed into his ears. Runge confirmed that the audiences were diverse: “Some people are familiar with TDT, some are familiar with the Hidden Cameras. It’s great to see [the show] bridge the generation gap… and the other gaps” that separate loyal modern-dance patrons from fans of the Hidden Cameras’ ‘gay church folk music’.
During the creation of the piece, too, disciplinary distinctiveness had to be balanced with integration. While TDT founder Christopher House and Hidden Cameras frontman Joel Gibb retained final say over choreography and musical content respectively, the process of creation necessarily involved collaborative efforts both within and between the two groups.
The Hidden Cameras presented songs from their albums Ecce Homo and The Smell of Our Own, sampling the band’s growth from a one-person operation to a chaotic, ‘full-fledged pop army’. The TDT dancers acquired new musical responsibilities, as they were absorbed by or even switched places with the Hidden Cameras over the course of the evening. TDT dancers were also involved in helping the Cameras learn to dance. “All the dancers in the company helped,” Runge said. “It was really fun to watch them let[ting] loose and enjoying what their bodies can do.”
Hidden Camera John Caffery took centre stage with real flair in a narrative piece choreographed to “Gay Goth Scene”, performing an impressively angsty and energetic dramatization of family conflict. TDT dancers’ interdisciplinary efforts also often worked quite well. Few efforts to integrate sound-producing movement in modern dance are as clever and fun as their go-go dancing on and drumming with chairs. And the play between lyrics, movement and shiny accessories in “Golden Streams” was beautiful and flat-out joyous.
But interdisciplinary breadth occasionally compromised choreographic depth. The effort to integrate non-dancers necessarily required adapting choreography to bodies that haven’t been professionally stretched, moulded and controlled. Conversely, modern dance lifts and poses occasionally looked ridiculously baroque against the sharp, brief energy of a three-minute pop song. And an odd piece choreographed to “The Animals of Prey” was an impressive mimetic display-TDT dancers make great swans-with little substance. TDT has significant experience in integrating ideas from other disciplines, including art installations, video, and spoken text, and these efforts can yield more profound insights than were available on this program.
Partly this was due to an under-theorization of “how music relates to the dancers,” which “becomes an issue with live music”, Runge pointed out. “With recorded music, you have to accept it as part of the mystery of the stage that the music happens at just the right time, like the lights coming on, or the curtain rising; it’s just part of the suspension.”
The Hidden Cameras’ emotionally-charged, high-tension flirtation with impending chaos did add to the excitement, however. It also reminded that pop music is the soundtrack to a thousand private movies. In one piece, a lone performer writhed and slumped on stage, looking sad and lost, as the band sang “You are the same” and TDT dancers in false moustaches banged on a plastic drum. It perfectly captured the sorry, crazy, surreal feeling of dancing around in your room after a break-up, and echoed the way in which music moves people behind closed doors. Sure, some of us do it better than others. But in some ways, we are all the same: shaking with joy, dancing around in our underwear, imagining we’re on centre stage.
