Noam Gagnon rides shifting identities in This Crazy Show

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      This Crazy Show is a wild exploration of shifting identities—a subject Noam Gagnon has faced a lot in his career. Known widely as the intense male force and angst-ridden urbanite in the body-smashing work of the Holy Body Tattoo, he had to reinvent himself after almost two decades, when he became a solo artist with his own company, Vision Impure. On his own, he ventured into vulnerable, autobiographical new terrain in pieces like 10 Things You’ll Hate About Me. But the work was still full of torment; one early Straight review described him as “a mad Minotaur stalking some painful psychic labyrinth”.

      More recently, though, stepping into the studio alone led to an identity crisis. It was a stressful situation that opened up a world of exploration for his latest piece—an off-kilter universe of changing personas amid swinging disco balls, haunting live accordion music, and perspective-skewing walls and floors.

      Noam Gagnon in This Crazy Show.
      Michel Dozois

      “When you are solo, you have a good opportunity to develop something personal. But after a while you say, ‘How can I say something new? How do I do it this time?’ ” the artist says candidly, sitting in an empty studio at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. “I usually go deeper and brutally crack it open. It’s so hard for me on-stage: there’s this beast that gets revealed; it’s what we are afraid to show. But this time I wanted those cracks to start from brightness and then expose the shadows—I started from the opposite place of what I usually do.

      “I tried to push out of my normal field and ask, ‘What could madness be at its fullest? How could I be raucous and malleable?’ ”

      Gagnon began looking back on the various transformations in his own life, beginning with the time when he was a child pretending to be a Bionic Woman–style superhero. And that brought him to explore, in his signature physically cathartic way, how all of us feel like we have to change to suit different situations, to gain acceptance, or to survive—how we go a bit crazy, as Gagnon puts it, “just to maintain a sense of equilibrium”. Working with theatre artist James Fagan Tait, he started to look at the challenge of holding on to the self through all of life’s changes.

      Gagnon takes all those ideas into a dreamlike fantasy world, donning everything from a suit to heels and a long, platinum-blond wig. He wants the highly designed set to reflect that state of flux with disco balls hung at different heights, and a chair stuck surreally near the top of the stage wall. (Gagnon looked to the works of M.C. Escher, Salvador Dali, and René Magritte for inspiration.) “There’s just a sense of something being disturbed,” he says. The music alternates between James Coomber’s cinematic score and the same artist’s live accordion-playing—the latter symbolizing a kind of breathing through life’s changes, Gagnon reveals.

      Staging This Crazy Show, and reaching into himself, has been a painful process with playful results. The difficulties in the studio paid off, it would seem, but this may be the last time we get to see Gagnon reveal the workings of his soul. “When I’m in it I really don’t enjoy it at all,” he reveals, adding that he longs to create work on other artists, as he’s done recently with a world-touring remount of the Holy Body Tattoo’s Monumental and a piece for Vancouver’s Joshua Beamish during the summer’s Dancing on the Edge festival. “What I love is creating work—with a group I can create faster,” he says, pointing out that solo work, until now, has been more financially feasible. “What I love is to create. I’m a choreographer. I’m lucky I am still able to dance, but I want support, I want funding, I want to be able to be supported to choreograph.

      “God, I find it hard,” he says with a laugh. “That’s why I need humour to get through.”

      This Crazy Show is at the Scotiabank Dance Centre from next Thursday to Saturday (October 20 to 22).

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