Jessica Lang Dance creates moving visual art on-stage

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      A DanceHouse production. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Friday, October 28. No remaining performances

      Beautiful was a word you heard a lot among audience members at Jessica Lang Dance's first show in Vancouver this week. Indeed, pretty, polished images swirled across the stage in an astonishing variety of short pieces. Dancers—dressed in black, then red, then yellow, then blue—played on the colour blocking of Piet Mondrian. A soloist in a long, flowing white gown sank into a giant skirt like it was quicksand, then twisted it around her legs as she turned. And in the show's bubbly i.n.k., dancers chased and mimicked the projected Rorschach-like waves of black ink that spilled across the screen behind them.

      The crowd ate it up. This was work poetic yet accessible, often like moving abstract art. What it lacked in enigma it made up for in joyous, balletic lifts and leaps that defied gravity. 

      There's an earnestness to Lang's work, a lack of irony or conceptualism—and that offers something different for audiences here. The nine dancers are top-flight, honed—especially the magnetic Kana Kimura. She turns The Calling, with the long white gown, into a soulful portrait of yearning, and the central duet in i.n.k. into something so fluid she seems to be as liquid as the slo-mo video imagery splashing around her.

      The balletic movement and abstract ideas are not something you see much of in these parts, amid the fierce, Euro-driven work at Ballet BC. (Witness the lightning-fast, body-pushing pas de deux of resident choreographer Cayetano Soto.) They’re also a world away from the high-concept, more earthbound dance-theatre of Crystal Pite.

      Lang's work, though  enjoyable, lacks that edge we're so used to in the contemporary-dance hotbed of Vancouver. It feels safe as a result.

      Jessica Lang's Lines Cubed.
      Takao Komaru

       

      This was especially apparent in the piece Thousand Yard Stare, a poetic look at the trauma and camaraderie of soldiers and the endless cycle of war. Bathed in eerie green light, it was full of striking images, of marching soldiers who freeze mid-step, or sling limp bodies over their backs, or form tunnels for others to crawl through. It was moving, aching stuff set to Ludwig van Beethoven's haunting strings. But given it was depicting the hell of war, it sometimes felt too aesthetically pleasing, as pairs swirled and lifted toward the heavens.

      What Lang does best is play with illusion, and collaborate with other creative types to concoct striking, stage-filling visual worlds. Vancouver design company molo takes a starring role in Lines Cubed, its accordionlike paper structures extending and collapsing to create different modular shapes out of the stage's space. The interpretations of the colours' moods—cheery yellow, melancholy blue—is sometimes trite, but the shifting formations are gorgeous. At the end of the show, the way the dancers' forms echo the rippling shapes of the ink in Shinichi Maruyama's video is equally lovely to the eyes.

      Yes, it was beautiful, and a chance to see top-flight work from another place, and props go to a presenter like DanceHouse that brings us such an array from around the world—some of it incredibly avant garde. But sometimes that work reminds us there's no place like home.

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