Nine Points to Navigate - Generic moves & text as crutch
The Brian Webb Dance Company is 29 years old - experienced, mature, steeped in training and knowledge. And dancing is still Webb's announced and lived passion - he describes himself as a person who "lives for dance" in the performance I'm about to describe. But the full-length piece he created for the 10 for 20 Dancing on the Edge commission was strong in staged story-telling - and strangely weak in choreography.
Nine Points to Navigate, a co-creation with soprano Sheri Somerville, was a presentation of searching, very personal narratives in which Webb and Somerville attempt to understand how their absent fathers were marked by war (in both storylines) and poverty (in Somerville's storylines). The live band on stage provided lively music, from Johnny Cash to Bach to the Rolling Stones, when required. The dance component, sprinkled between Somerville and Webb's texts, were repetitive. Unchallenging gestures were the norm, and both storytellers tried to use passionate facial expressions in places where passionate body movement would have communicated more strongly.
I became crotchety watching Nine Points to Navigate because the announced premise of the work rubbed irritatingly against itself from the beginning. Webb takes time to introduce (verbally) the premise that memory so often can't be put into words - that gestures can capture emotions and memories more effectively. Somerville agrees. But then: we get floods and floods of words, rather than dance. This set-up, or bait and switch (telling us to expect dance to communicate and then refusing to do so) became the shape of the performance. Webb would dance while Somerville spoke, and vice versa, but the dance moves were largely generic.
A pointed example of this: Webb is relating an anecdote in which he and some friends skipped a high school class to smoke up in his living room. He tells how his always-on-the-road father suddenly appeared and gave Webb a hell of a tongue-lashing. Somerville, sitting on a chair nearby, begins to make swoopy arm and head gestures, as if overly relaxed and stoned. Webb looks like he's about to dance communicatively, too.
But then the movement goes generic. Then the band kicks into Iggy Pop's "I'm a real wild child" and the dancers jump into air guitar and generally rock out - fun head-banging, general grooving to the beat. Evocative of the song, and of a teenager's mood? Sure. But do these dance moves give us anything specific to Webb's story, anything unique to the particular father-son narrative that he's giving us all evening with words? Not really.
If the audience is going to move from emotional point to emotional point at a fairly rapid pace all evening, there needs to be strong movement - or deliberately, clearly understated movement - to communicate conscious progression from feeling A to feeling B to feeling C. There simply was not enough specificity in the movements for me to distinguish the meaning of gestures accompanying a near-drowning narrative from the meaning of gestures accompanying a proud-provider-father narrative. The text can't be a crutch for the movement to rely on - both need to be worked up to full strength.
Webb is clearly an important force in Canadian dance, with influence in Edmonton and in his role as Artistic Director of the Canada Dance Festival (this year's edition ran June 7 - 15 in Ottawa). With this experience, plus decades of dancing under his belt, I was expecting to be moved by engaging choreography. Setting that expectation aside, the story-telling provided arcs of interest, some intriguing and tender images (Somerville worrying as her alcoholic father swims in front of the family dinghy in cold water, Webb slowly revealing his childhood pleasure in his grandma's daffodil cake). To expand on a point that Globe writer Paula Citron made in a July 7 article, Nine Points to Navigate would make better sense if the dance component was discarded altogether to allow for development of the text and music into a fully theatrical piece. That way the narratives - the emotional core of the work, and the reason we're watching it - could shine.
* * * * * * * * *
Nine Points to Navigate (Brian Webb Dance Company, Edmonton), is a Dancing on the Edge Festival presentation and a 10 for 20 Dancing on the Edge Festival Commission.
July 5 and 6 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre.
Choreographers: Sheri Somerville and Brian Webb
Performers: Sheri Somerville and Brian Webb
Music Collaborators: Haley Simons and Howard Fix
Rhythm Section: Thom Bennett and Marc Beaudin