Out Innerspace’s Me So You So Me is unlike anything you've ever seen

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      An Out Innerspace Dance Theatre presentation. At the Scotiabank Dance Centre on Wednesday, January 11. Continues January 12 and 13

      Out Innerspace’s warped new hot pot of Japanese pop culture and contemporary dance is as much fun as a Saturday-morning anime marathon. Setting things to the freak-out rhythms of Japanese percussion iconoclast Asa-Chang, the Vancouver duo somehow manages to fuse silliness on the scale of Domo and Pokemon with choreographic art.

      Suffice it to say you’ve never seen movement like this, or characters like this, on a dance stage before—and I don’t care if you’re from Shibuya or Shaughnessy. The company’s Tiffany Tregarthen and David Raymond throw themselves full-force into the wonky physical comedy of the piece.

      Dressed in gauchos, knee socks, and an absurdly cute teddy-bear hat with button eyes and little ears, Tregarthen looks and acts like Olive Oyl if she hung out in Harajuku reading manga comics. She uses her legginess to awesomely awkward effect here, bending and stretching her limbs like an animated mantis or skittering around like a wind-up Pikachu doll. Raymond, who like his partner wears mimelike whiteface and mugs like Charlie Chaplin, is her foil, in dark Beatle sunglasses and suspenders. Moving more angularly, he lunges and squats in multiple square spotlights, and often hoists her in beautifully off-kilter lifts.

      The show opens strikingly, with the stage in complete darkness. Suddenly, a light, centred in a sideways lampshade, clicks on and stares at us like a big LED eye. It’s not till it starts “looking” down that we see it is actually attached to Tregarthen’s head; and when it starts panning around, we see Raymond appear and disappear creepily in the blackness.

      As for other inventive visual surprises, they’re almost too numerous to mention: at one point, projections of the nonsensically surreal English text from Asa-Chang’s “Senaka” snake across Tregarthen’s limbs; at another, a projected heart pounds on her chest. At one moment, she pulls glow-in-the-dark strings from Raymond’s torso and tries to stuff them in her mouth, letting them hang out like too much neon spaghetti.

      But the show is about so much more than skits and gimmicks. To start with, Tregarthen and Raymond have managed to absorb all sorts of influences—like Asa-Chang himself—and distill them into something all its own. At the same time, they’ve found a choreographic language perfectly suited to the moods and quirks of Asa-Chang’s work, songs that can meld everything from spoken vocal collage to samples from Star Trek’s starship Enterprise to sax, barrel organ, and digitally tweaked tabla. But more importantly, amid all this madness, the pair has managed to craft a moving portrait of two people—albeit weird ones—trying to connect.

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