ProArteDanza

(Harbourfront Centre, 8 October 2011)

Complete, intense, not asexual, but not about sex, "Verwoben" (choreographed by Robert Glumbek) is about being human, which consists in provoking oneself to be surprised by one's errors as one strives for an ideal. One's true self is what one is at one's best, least manipulated by the environment, but not insulated; autonomy and interaction are balanced by choosing an appropriate social circle.

Glumbek's dancers live. He has summarised everything there is to say. Fortunately, the summary is beautiful.

Restricting dancers to the classical ballet vocabulary would be as absurd as making pupils use Roman numerals in multiplication competitions, or making modern playwrights comply with Shakespeare's standards of gore and flippancy. The outcomes would be neither effective nor pretty. In "Pearline" (choreographed by Kevin O'Day), unconstrained, Mami Hata and Louis Laberge-Cote achieve an effect akin to the Fred Astaire Revolution.

ProArteDanza project intelligence. The perceived intelligence is the ability to engage---a dancer with a dancer, unburdened by, but not neglectful of, music. Each dancer's each move has an origin, a destination, and a purpose, and is transmitted from one dancer to another, with comforting inevitability. (Defined as engagement, intelligence is absent from a scenic sunset, but inhabits an iPhone.)