Radio transcripts

Transcripts Michael Crabb on CBC:

CBC RADIO HERE & NOW
THURSDAY 12 FEBRUARY 2009 @ 15:50 APPROX
ITEM: DANCEMAKERS – IT’S ABOUT TIME: SIXTY DANCES IN SIXTY MINUTES
GUEST: MICHAEL CRABB
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MATT: When you work on live radio like I do you’re very aware of time … and there never seems to be enough of it.

But what is this thing we call time? Does it actually exist or is it just something we’ve invented to bring order and sense to our lives?

That’s what Toronto’s Dancemakers is asking this week in a new work called It’s about time: sixty dances in sixty minutes.

Read full transcript after the jump



Michael Crabb, Here & Now’s dance critic was at Harbourfront Centre for last night’s premiere and joins me now to tell us about it.

Hi Michael.

MATT: As titles go, this latest offering from Dancemakers seems pretty clear about its intentions. But how exactly do you make a dance about time?

MICHAEL: In a way you could argue that all dances are about time – bodies moving in time and space.

But generally, time as a concept is not the primary subject of a dance. Time and space are simply the elements, however you want to name them, in which dance happens.

What Dancemakers is trying to do is make time the actual subject.

They want us, I think, to recognize how our experience of time is something different from what you might call absolute time – the kind that’s reading out by the second on that clock on the studio wall; the time that will run out if I don’t keep moving along.

MATT: So, to keep moving along, how does this new dance focus our awareness of time?

MICHAEL: As the title says, there are sixty dances – I didn’t actually count but I’ll take Dancemakers word for it – and they happen in roughly the passage of an hour.

But these are not dances in the way most people would describe a dance.

For one thing, there’s virtually no music, just an atmospheric sound-scape assembled from recordings of every day things – kitchen noise, traffic, train horns, voices chattering. It’s like time rolling aimlessly by.

It would be more helpful to describe It’s about time as physical theatre. The whole affair has more the feel of an “event” or “happening” than your routine dance concert.

There’s lots of walking, running, jumping, crawling, sitting, lifting and general careening about the open space of the Enwave Theatre stage … and in some cases the galleries surrounding it.

Occasionally the dancers disappear altogether, leaving us to endure the empty time until they return.

Counting is a big item.

In a repeated passage the three men in the company line up at the front of the stage, cover their ears, close their eyes and count to sixty out loud. And, of course, not in sync. Meanwhile, one of the two women holds the other in her arms.

We are aware of several things happening at once --- in both absolute time and relative time.

We know holding someone takes physical endurance and you can only do it for so long.

We also know that it’s very difficult for most folk to count accurately.

And as we watch all this, our own perception of the time it’s taking for the dancers to do these things is also different for each individual observer.

MATT: Michael, I gotta tell you this all sounds rather theoretical and egg-heady. Is it really dance … or theatre for that matter?

MICHAEL: Yes, in the broad sense it is. For one thing it is not just a random happening. It is choreographed and theatrically produced and it’s not somber.

In fact some of it is outright funny.

MATT: Such as?

MICHAEL: There’s a another repeated sequence in which one of the dancers will sit in a chair and try to count up to sixty but then two other dancers will start tickling him … or her. Suddenly this activity intensifies our interest, causes a kinesthetic response – most of us know what being tickled feels like – and somehow compresses the actual time that is passing.

Then there’s this other passage, also repeated, in which Steeve Paquet recites a one-minute recipe for shepherd’s pie; sometimes in short form, other times in over elaborate detail. It’s absurd and funny and while he’s deadpanning his recipe other dancers are hurling themselves around the stage.

There’s a lot to take in at once.

MATT: So you’d say it’s entertaining?

MICHAEL: I’d say it’s mostly engaging, often entertaining and consistently well performed. Dancemakers five members are what I call committed performers. Without their intensity and focus

I don’t this would work at all.

For example, carrying a fairly large, fish-tank full of water across a stage might sound a pretty inconsequential thing, but dancer Robert Abubo turns it into a mini-epic of human endurance.

And because it looks as if he might drop the tank at any moment, the time it takes before he finally gets it safely on the ground seems stretched to breaking point.

MATT: So It’s about time does actually make you more aware of time?

MICHAEL: It reminds us that time can be friend or enemy; help or hindrance and that we have, perhaps, just a little control over how far it governs our everyday lives because a lot time is just in our head.

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MATT: Thanks for telling about it Michael.

Michael Crabb is Here & Now's dance critic.

Dancemakers will continue to perform It’s about time until Saturday at the Enwave Theatre at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto.

[Runs 5:15 approx including intro and extro but excluding music.]