‘Agrimony’, The Chimera Project Dance Theatre, Photo by Vitantonio-Spinelli
As a double bill, The Chimera Project Dance Theatre’s Unclearing, presented by Harbourfront Centre, provides a satisfying, thematically unified contrast.
Agrimony, choreographed by Sophie Dow, is a both a stylish and entirely earnest interpretive reaction to the songs of Laura Reznek’s album of the same name. Melancholic and earthy, with lyrics that feel simultaneously banal and mythic, the music seems to both guide the dancers, comment on their interactions and foretell their individual and communal discoveries.
Dressed in comfortable greenish khakis, performers Amanda Testini, Tavia Christina, Mohammed Rashead and Dow have a layered, ever-changing relationship to a set of minimalist animal masks. They hide behind, embody, and sometimes regard these masks objectively as playthings or sacred talismans.
A length of rough-hewn rope figures prominently from the beginning—a token and a tether. At the beginning of the piece, two performers explore it, putting it up to their ears as if its speaking in some silent language. There is a sense here of connection to the earth and an ancestral through-line, made literal and explicit with a very interactive and embodied land acknowledgement incorporated into its early moments.
Resnek and her accompanist, Jonah Ocean, perform in tandem, and sometimes interact directly, with these animal-human hybrids. Agrimony is a sensual, intimately expansive concert; not hiding its promotional intentionality yet drawing us in with resonantly fanciful, abstracted elements.
Above all, a yearning quality pervades.
‘Soft’, The Chimera Project Dance Theatre, Photo by David Hou
Soft, choreographed by Malgorzata Nowacka-May, is an exhilarating bit of tonal and aesthetic whiplash. Starting with a harsh, bright wash on a bare space, Gabriel Cropley’s lighting design suggests, early on, the meta theatrical irony the performers inhabit in the opening moments.
Dressed in beige and white, the eight dancers (Tavia Christina, Christian Lavigne, Louis Laberge-Côte, Amy Hampton, Sebastian Hirtenstein, Ryan Kostyniuk, Dana Macdonald and Mio Sakamoto) carry out a series of awkward, performance art interpretations of daily rituals. There is a haphazard, stilted determination to their goofy little gestural quirks framed as art. One figure removes a pair of boots and then places their sunglasses in them in way that’s deliberately extra, a spotlight then imposes a hilariously heightened sense of purpose to these abandoned props. It’s all very self-aware, daring us to either be baffled or in on the joke.
But Soft has no intentions of staying in this mode. With snaps of electrical arcing and crackles of static, an eerie glitch in reality forms. There are forces at work here—not necessarily sinister, but undeniably preternatural. One by one, each performer falls under this corruptive influence—indicated by their outfits turning from white to black. Many of these costume changes are occur onstage and are rather clever.
One hold-out, timidly avoiding the encroaching dark, gathers the discarded pieces of white clothing as if safeguarding a familiar way of being. Eventually, though, she too succumbs to the menacing yet thoroughly intoxicating shared hysteria.
Composer Eric Cadesky’s score is a propulsive and hypnotic blend. With jarring shifts in rhythm and mood, it conveys the precarious reality these figures inhabit as they negotiate a sequence of evolving dynamics. A gesture that recurs continually—a hand pinching at a face and pulling out and away—suggests the ritualistic extraction of some invisible yet essential element.
While the vibe keeps changing with shifts in the quality of light, sound and movement; sometimes momentum and intrigue are lost as specific happenings get repeated and drawn out. Later on, as the performance loops back onto certain well-trod dynamics, I sometimes tuned-out, feeling we’d already been here.
Overall, Soft is absolutely my sort of anarchic, evocative madness. It’s a little meta, a little cosmic, and thoroughly thrilling in its charged and ominous interplay.
The Chimera Project Dance Theatre: Unclearing
running April 5 & 6, 2024
Harbourfront Centre Theatre (231 Queens Quay W.)
running time: 120 minutes (with intermission)
‘Agrimony’, The Chimera Project Dance Theatre, Photo by Vitantonio-Spinelli