New ideas and voices come together at 12 Minutes Max

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      A Dance Centre presentation. At the Scotiabank Dance Centre on Friday, June 12. No remaining performances

      There were grapefruits, underwear, and even people sucking face in the second-to-last row. But most importantly, there were new ideas and new voices at 12 Minutes Max—a sign the rejigged program at the Dance Centre is making an impact.

      Started in 1994, the project has been relaunched, with an amped-up focus on the creative process in sessions throughout the year that offer studio time and critical feedback. The season-ending lineup was a curated taste of the radically different work that’s been cooking.

      Most of the 12-minutes-maximum shorts felt like ministudies or experiments.

      Among the more fully realized was Con8’s giddily inventive Vanilla to the Touch. Every minute, a spotlit hand would reach from off-stage to drop a Dada-esque new prop onto the dance floor—the aforementioned citrus fruit, a ladder, a balloon, a retro cassette-tape recorder, and so on. Hilariously, in the tradition of the absurd, none of the props ever really found their way into the action. Instead, dancers Charlotte Newman and Georgina Alpen tangled themselves into a playful riff on growing up in suburbia—aided by a soundtrack of their own voices giggling like teens throughout. They’d fold their legs and arms in on each other to move around the stage like a centipede. The props, while random, evoked images from childhood, popping in like disconnected flashes of memory. The vibe here was infectious—unpretentious, playful, a bit surreal, and visually rich.

      Equally playful was Natalie Tin Yin Gan and Francesca Frewer’s Our Gestures Are No Longer Ours. Dancers Frewer and Erika Mitsuhashi wore full brown skirts that they used to strange effect: one would pull it up and stretch it to cover her arms and head, so she became a pair of disembodied legs poking out of black underwear. Another would lie on her back, bending her legs behind her ears and covering her front so she looked like a kind of violin-shaped torso in the same black gonch. The dancers were toying with ideas of nonverbal communication and word games, and it was charming, if still a little raw.

      Frewer and Mitsuhashi broached the audience during one of their games, an idea that was taken farther by the trio in MAYCE’s Veiled: Robert Azevedo, Antonio Somera, and Marisa Gold. Exploring the idea of the gaze and being watched, the two men at one point edged their way right into the tight rows of audience members, moving down the aisle to plunk themselves on someone’s lap and apparently see how close they could get to them or how far they could go. This played out as a swift kiss on the cheek at one point to impromptu tonsil hockey between the dancer and a viewer at another. These out-there, literally in-your-face moments alternated with scenes of purer dance—with vocabulary, such as bending over and covering the eyes and face, exploring the theme in more abstract ways. The dancers were dynamic, but the far-flung parts felt disconnected.

      It says something about the evening that the most “different” work in the mix would be the most conventionally dance-y. Most radically, Caitlin Griffin’s here or there had actual music, by Johann Sebastian Bach. Performed by expressive former Ballet B.C. dancer Delphine Leroux, it used wooden chairs as its props, the soloist balancing on them, pushing them around, thrusting herself off them, and, finally, stacking them in a precarious pile. The work draws from research the artist has been doing into women in wartime, but this study seemed to be more about one person struggling to adapt or survive and finally finding her power to conquer the objects.

      At least a few of these eclectic little pieces are bound to make their way into larger, more fully realized form, grapefruits, chairs, and all.

      Follow Janet Smith on Twitter @janetsmitharts.

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