Dancing the Body Electric - William Yong's vox:lumen

choreographer William Yong.

The lights burn bright in vox:lumen, a new work of electrifying dance whose world premiere took place Wednesday night as part of Harbourfront Centre’s World Stage series in Toronto. Powering them is kinetic energy of the human kind together with other renewable energy systems like the solar panels on the Harbourfront Centre Theatre where vox:lumen continues through Saturday (March 7). Solar power created during daylight hours is stored in massive 100-kilo cubes for use during the nightly 90-minute run. Additional energy comes from audience members participating in an Energy Fair set up in theatre lobby an hour in advance of the show’s 8 p.m. start. The dancers, five physically strong men, add their own muscle to the collective effort. At the centre of their dance is an enormous bike power generator which one of the dancers pedals slowly in the dark until there is suddenly, wonderfully, illumination. This is ecology in motion and, despite sometimes stumbling in the shadows of its own confusion, it succeeds brilliantly.

An initiative of Canada’s Zata Omm Dance Projects, this groundbreaking work of eco-dance was conceived, choreographed and created by William Yong, a dancer originally from Hong Kong who trained at England’s London Contemporary Dance School before moving to Toronto with his family in the late 1990s. A past member of Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance and Matthew Bourne’s Adventures in Motion Pictures, internationally celebrated British dance companies known for their risk-taking choreography, Yong embraces an experimental approach when creating works of his own. He has about 60 already to his credit. Vox:lumen, his latest, was four years in the making. It shows Yong going where no Canadian choreographer before him has gone before. This is without question.

Danger in the Drawing Room: James Kudelka's Love, Sex & Brahms

Bill Coleman, Evelyn Hart and Ryan Boorne and the cast of Love, Sex & Brahms. (Photo: Jeremy Mimnagh)

Actors who move. It's an image Canadian choreographer James Kudelka had in mind when creating Love, Sex & Brahms whose world premiere took place at Toronto's The Citadel Theatre on March 16. Set to the Intermezzi for Solo Piano which composer Johannes Brahms created late in his career, the work is more costume drama than dance, focusing on the emotional underpinnings of the characters more than on the spiralling spurts of their bodies hidden behind the Victorian-era dress created for them by Toronto fashion label Hoax Couture.

A Tissot painting come to life, the work is an expanded version of the two-time Dora Award-winning #lovesexbrahms which debuted in April, 2015. The new hour-long version now has 10 characters compared to the original 8 and more than twice as many scenes. Coleman Lemieux and Compagnie, the critically acclaimed and community-based dance organization where the award-winning Kudelka has been choreographer-in-residence since 2008, both produced and danced it. Among the performers for the run that ended on March 19 were company founders Bill Coleman and Laurence Lemieux and independent dance artists Danielle Baskerville, Tyler Gledhill, Luke Garwood, Victoria Mehaffey, Louis Laberge-Côté, Ryan Boorne, Andrew McCormack and Daniel McArthur.

The King's Domain: Laurence Lemieux's Looking for Elvis

Looking for Elvis (photo by John Lauener).

Elvis Presley was recently back in the building belonging to Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie, the dance company located in Toronto's Regent Park. The occasion was Looking for Elvis, the work created by the Quebec-born choreographer and dancer Laurence Lemieux in 2014 and recently remounted at the intimate The Citadel performing space on Parliament St. for four nights of performances during the first week of May. As he did the first time around, Elvis appeared in the piece as a casualty of his own fame. But with Lemieux having sharpened the focus on his isolation within the culture of celebrity, the poignancy of his end-of-life story was heightened, resulting in a more nuanced encounter of the King. Looking for Elvis shared the program with a 2010 work inspired by another great of 20th century American popular music, James Kudelka's The Man in Black set to a sextet of haunting end-of-life songs by Johnny Cash (and danced in cowboy boots by the National Ballet of Canada in 2013). Both works were united by their use of popular music to get inside the memories and emotions of their viewing public and by a shared masculine sensibility.