The Dali Universe is ambitious, accessible, and fun

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      A Vancouver City Dance Theatre production. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Thursday, September 16. Continues on September 17 and 18

      Vancouver City Dance Theatre opened in grand style Thursday night with a bizarre but entertaining blend of ballet, Dali-esque surrealism, and psychotherapy.

      In an economic time when dance has become an increasingly minimalistic affair, the brand-new company’s show is a bit like gorging on a chocolate cheesecake after weeks of fasting. The trip into Salvador Dali’s dream world finds a big, red, lip-shaped couch, a gigantic lobster, and projections of a sea of blinking eyes—all direct references to his artworks. An army of 18 dancers cavorts around in upside-down-shoe hats, black skirts wired so that their pointy corners stick straight up, and sometimes garish vests with sequin-glittery faces on them.

      It’s not every day that a new ballet company launches in this town, and VCDT had clearly gone to great lengths to announce itself with a spectacle. Alas, there were technical difficulties on opening night that eradicated all the multimedia projections from the first act—imagery of Dali’s famously symbolic elephants and ants, and more. (The problem was apparently a projector overheating, and it’s been fixed for future performances.)

      Complex shows raise the risk of such problems. But what really mattered to everyone was the dance. The good news is that, when it happens, it’s polished and frequently imaginative (even, evidently, when dancers are having to scramble without projection cues).

      The piece opens with a long theatrical bit about Dali (Carlo Violanti) visiting Sigmund Freud (David Bloom) in an attempt to tap his unconscious. This isn’t as unlikely as it sounds: Dali called the psychoanalyst “my father Freud”, and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams had a profound effect on his work. Small wonder Dali crafted that elaborate, hallucinatory dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s ode to Freudian psychotherapy, Spellbound. In The Dali Universe, Freud hypnotizes Dali into a dream state on his couch, and the elaborate dance-fantasy sequences begin.

      Artistic director Roberta Baseggio creates some big-impact ensemble work and sensual duets, all set to the cinematic orchestrations of Armand Amar and Francis Poulenc. The subject calls for some wonkiness, and there could have been more surreal flourishes—the vocabulary is more conservative than, say, Wayne McGregor’s or Mark Morris’s. But Baseggio injects some striking innovations: the men lifting women up, upside-down, with their legs splayed; a grand jeté where the dancer grabs his upper leg. The National Ballet of Canada dancers Sonia Rodriguez and Piotr Stanczyk are standouts. In one en-pointe duet, she spins effortlessly in his arms, wraps and unwraps her legs around him, then breaks down like a doll. And the movement of the characters is nicely differentiated, with Jung-Ah Chung, dressed in black as the Subconscious, moving like a cat, in low lunges.

      Where VCDT succeeds most is in melding classically based ballet with new media—when it works: one ode to the famous painting The Persistence of Memory finds clocks sliding and floating behind and under the dancers.

      Less successful are the script elements: actor David Bloom is refreshingly free of cliché as Freud, but he keeps reappearing throughout the work to lecture us on the importance of tapping our subconscious—ideas that don’t need to be explained when they’re being enacted with such wonder by the dancers.

      With such heavy Freudian messages and outsized set pieces, The Dali Universe might be over-the-top—if it didn’t have a sense of fun about it, that is. The fact is it’s theatrical, different, and high accessible. Universe is pulled off with such ambition and heart that you can’t help wishing that Baseggio and her husband, producer-psychotherapist Enrico Sorrentino, can make their own dreams for the company come true.

      Comments

      7 Comments

      Constance Barnes

      Sep 17, 2010 at 4:48pm

      An absolute feast for the mind, eyes, spirit and soul!! BRAVO!!

      D. King

      Sep 19, 2010 at 9:05pm

      Glad for you all. I look forward to the Victoria performance.

      Rico

      Sep 21, 2010 at 9:46am

      A bloated, tasteless, pedantic piece of fluff disguised as dance. Choreography that was limited in its scope and vision. A wonderful example of too much money and absolutely no taste or dance aesthetic. Equally offensive was the opening video which reeked of patrician arrogance by suggesting that poor little backwater Vancouver needed to be rescued from years of cultural drought and somehow this expensive but empty production was our salvation. Rubbish!

      June

      Sep 21, 2010 at 1:19pm

      I went to the Friday show and I loved it. Granted not every moment was my cup of tea, but it has been a long time since a dance performance in Vancouver has moved me like that. Judging by the standing ovation, it seems that almost everyone else in the audience felt the same. I liked the opening video. It was something different and very tasteful. I don't know why Rico is so angry, except maybe he wants to show that he recently bought a dictionary and learned a few big words?

      Susan Compton

      Sep 21, 2010 at 5:28pm

      Fantastic

      jansumi

      Sep 23, 2010 at 12:07pm

      i was so sorry i couldn't go. i really hope they do it again. glad to hear it was a success.

      omgjanetmustbeblindorretarded

      Oct 1, 2010 at 6:14pm

      wow Janet.