Beauty, Wonder and Hope: Belle Spirale Rocks the Vancouver Dance Fest

How to translate the abstract into the real is rarely a straightforward process, no matter the creative discipline.

This is particularly evident in contemporary dance. Without the explanatory scaffolding of words and images, how does dance communicate weighty issues like climate change? The lift of a leg, the curl of an arm or a group of performers running in circles doesn’t always immediately register as a commentary on disappearing Arctic ice sheets or the looming threat of species extinction.

It’s a question that Alexis Fletcher is actively interrogating in her work as the co-artistic director and choreographer for Belle Spirale Dance Projects, a multi-disciplinary Vancouver arts organization she leads with co-artistic director Sylvain Senez.

On a grey Friday afternoon, Fletcher and Senez are at the Dance Centre in downtown Vancouver, rehearsing their company, running different sections of two new dance works called UNIVERSUS as part of the Vancouver International Dance Festival this week.

Being in a dance studio catapults me backwards in time to a much earlier period, when I was working in an arts management.

Part of the job involved often sitting in on rehearsals, watching choreographers and performers build a work, brick by brick, sequence by sequence. Watching the process was a little akin to working in the sausage factory, meaning that you can never look at the sausages in quite the same way. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In the press material for UNIVERSUS, the intent of the show is stated thusly: “While each distinct work unveils our insecurities and trepidation about the future, at its core, UNIVERSUS showcases the transformative power of art, awakening the individual’s sense of purpose, agency and hope.”

So, what does this mean exactly? Unlike other art forms where the answer is carried in more definitive things like words or pictures, dance can take a less immediate route to finding and fashioning meaning. The effect is cumulative, doubly so in UNIVERSUS, which offers two distinct choreographic works.

As a double bill, the production features Senez and Fletcher’s Everything and Nothing, and STATERA (which means “balance” in Latin), choreographed by Spanish dancer and choreographer Fernando Hernando Magadan, who has performed with the world’s pre-eminent dance companies, as well as created work for major European companies and Ballet BC.

In his first large-scale commission for Belle Spirale, Magadan walks the razor edge between dread, safety and how we cope with a changing world. Making use of Magadan’s creative roots in gymnastics, STATERA brings a robust physicality to the work that is clearly evident, even in rehearsal.

In STATERA, Senez has fashioned a metaphor in the form of set design, a house and a huge boulder that brings to mind the sword of Damocles: a sense of imminent threat. Magadan has included a spoken-word piece from artist Marisa Gold, who also dances in the work. The poetry provides a direct path to the larger themes of planetary connection and the fleeting nature of existence itself. It also anchors the work by giving shape to the amorphous feelings of anxiety and uncertainty that seem to coat daily life.

In talking to Fletcher, the famous quote from Orson Welles’ film The Third Man pops into my head about periods of great upheaval producing astounding works of art: “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!”

If nothing else, the ongoing series of daily crises and the looming threat of larger catastrophes proffers the raw materials of great art. Although I’m not sure if this makes me feel better or worse.

Despite the dark matter at the heart of UNIVERSUS, Fletcher has faith in the future. She carries a deep belief in the ability of art to offer, as she describes it, “the opportunity to sit with our own humanness.” This kind of attention is itself a healing act that provides, in her words, “beauty and a sense of wonder to hold onto at the end of the day.”

Dance is still an art form that leaves a lot of folks deeply confused. “I don’t understand it!” is the usual refrain.

Even people who are working in arts and culture can sometimes have a hard time with dance. I once had a conversation with a cultural attaché, a person whose job it is to promote the arts, that ended with him pounding his fist on a table, declaring that he hated dance.

So, if you’re looking for a way in, a colleague offered a piece of advice that he’d received from a dancer friend about simply listening to how you feel in your own body when you watch a performance. It’s good advice.

Like any other art form, when you see something great, the effect is immediate and undeniable.

If it’s a truly extraordinary creation, art can even make you forget yourself. The experience of stumbling out a theatre in a state of disassociation is a startling thing: your own sense of self is pushed aside for a moment, and the piece of art you’ve just witnessed rushes into the void.

It is a rare occurrence, but when genuine catharsis happens, it’s almost frightening. You’re no longer fully in control, but that too can be great.

Back to the rehearsal studio for a moment.

One of the more curious aspects of a work of art is that it matters where and how you see it. A painting lying in a heap with a bunch of other work in an artist’s studio is an entirely different creature than a framed, burnished work hung in a gallery. So, too, is a film. Watching a movie on a laptop while lying on the couch can be an entirely different experience than seeing it in a packed theatre.

This change in perspective is especially important with an art form like dance. It’s one thing to see performers dressed in leggings and sweaty T-shirts rehearsing. It’s entirely another to see the same people, costumed on a stage, presenting the same work in its final configuration.

In an era of ongoing crisis, sometimes the only thing to do is make something hopeful and beautiful that allows for a moment of reprieve, transcendence and solidarity. One of the most fascinating and compelling things about dance is its ability to pull us worried, frazzled creatures out of our heads and back into our bodies. It is an invitation to remember what brings us together and makes us human.

Belle Spirale Dance Projects, in partnership with the Chutzpah! Festival, Vancouver International Dance and New Works Dance, presents ‘UNIVERSUS’ at the Vancouver Playhouse on Friday and Saturday.