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Uptown Magazine - Winnipeg's Online Source for Arts, Entertainment & News

November 27, 2008


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2008-11-27

The art of improvisation

TRIP dance artistic director/choreographer Karen Kuzak draws inspiration from parkour for her latest work, The Art of Displacement

Jared Story

TRIP dance company's The Art of Displacement premieres November 28 at the Gas Station Theatre. Artistic director/choreographer Karen Kuzak's new work was inspired by the physical activity known as parkour.

Parkour, or l'art du déplacement, was founded by David Belle in France. A parkour practitioner sees his or her environment as an obstacle course, in which the object is to move one's body from one place to another in the fastest, most efficient way possible.

"I just started wandering around through the world and making my tiny attempts, just beginning to play (parkour)," Kuzak says. "Through that process, I thought I was relating to my environment in a different way than I had seen and felt it before.
Just seeing the landscape differently, viewing the architecture of the world around me as a place of potential rather than a place of paths that I'd been conditioned to move through in a certain pattern."

Motivated by the concept of parkour, Kuzak took that potential for movement into the studio, where the idea was worked on with dancers Susie Burpee, Ali Robson, Giana Sherbo, Linnea Swan and Treasure Waddell.

"We started making a more sophisticated game, with the dancers themselves becoming the architecture, an ever-changing, moving architecture," Kuzak says. "The potential for relationships evolving from a moving structure rather than a solid structure was enormous."

By improvising through various game structures, Kuzak and company created The Art of Displacement.

"The act of playing the games, by creating and encountering obstacles, forced a series of physically driven metaphors," she says. "We strengthened those moments, finding a way to reveal those moments. You can't reveal exactly the same moment, that's entirely unrepeatable, but you can come to the same metaphor over and over again."

Back in April, TRIP presented the dance as a 'work in progress,' inviting feedback from the audience.

"We had a little post-show sharing session and looked for some of the common threads people were discussing," Kuzak says. "That gave myself and the performers a lot of information about where the strength was in the work and how to push it forward. One of the most important things we took forward was to leave the work open enough that people could find their own story inside of the dance. There were so many fabulous tales they found in the dance and I wanted to make sure that kind of accessibility to the work was maintained."

With life being the ultimate obstacle course, the piece promises to be easily absorbed by any audience.

"It's interesting because people relate to both sides of the situation," Kuzak says. "Often people will watch it from the view of the runner, the person who faces a dilemma. A dilemma is placed in front of them and they need to solve that problem, in the moment, on the stage.

"Others in the audience may identify with the obstacle and will put themselves as the person causing the dilemma. Everybody seems to find a journey inside the journey."

Kuzak also thinks the set-up of the stage makes The Art of Displacement easily relatable to anyone.

"It's not a dance that uses a typical stage front where things are coming towards people," she says. "We use the stage as a space with no front at all. You can imagine yourself sitting there, seeing the problem and working through it almost physically from your seat."

Another aspect that brings the audience closer to the dance is the music. Sound designer Ken Gregory took his primary sound source from a broken accordion. Kuzak says the squeeze box's sound is very similar to that of a person's breathing.

"It is sounds like that which allow you to watch the work from a very personal place," Kuzak says. "It's a sound we know. We feel and hear it in our bodies all the time. It's like a voice that's coming from you and creating this amazing sound."

In addition to the sound and stage, The Art of Displacement's most important feature, its movement, also enhances the piece's genuine nature.

"I believe it is something the audience can imagine themselves doing," Kuzak says. "It's not a standard traditional dance vocabulary. You won't find a développé. As beautiful as that is, one's natural body doesn't experience that as they travel though space, but they will experience a run or jump or a wrestling of arms. Those are all motions we go through in our everyday life."

THE ART OF DISPLACEMENT
TRIP dance company
Nov. 28 & 29, Gas Station Theatre

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