ESCALATION

DANCE

24 Aug

Recently landed: Escalation

Gracia’s written response to Escalator, especially for Fjord Review.

The inaugural season of Escalator, presented by Stephanie Lake Company in association with Abbotsford Convent, begins with the slow traction of Kady Mansour dressed head to toe in white as a tampon, replete with two strings around each ankle, and concludes with two dancers dressed as mirrored disco balls, declaring to the audience that they are “strong enough / to live without [us]” as they rewind and rotate on the dancefloor to Cher’s Strong Enough. “Prepare to be moved, surprised, delighted, and devastated,” chimes the opening night event program, and in the accelerated span of an hour or so, this “Escalator” proves true. Be extended. Be challenged. Be magnified. Be wigged. Be intensified.

Five short dance pieces assume various shapes in the Magdalen Laundry & Industrial School, of the Abbotsford Convent, choreographed by “five of Naarm’s (Melbourne) freshest choreographic talents,” who are, as Lake describes, “independent and at the beginning of their choreographic journey.” Mansour brings Menstruation the Musical, the opening “rollercoaster of PMS, mood swings, physical pain and fatigue” as Dolly Parton sings “Got those moods a swingin’, tears a slingin’”; followed by Melissa Pham and Jayden Wall with Sense Now; Luke Currie-Richardson, Gedovait; Kayla Douglas, Hysterics; and Harrison Ritchie-Jones, Big Wig Small Gig in recycled, ruched and ballooned, hooped and brocaded costumes supplied by the Malthouse Theatre.

From the bodily resistance of the floor as Mansour drags her ‘heavy’ costumed form, to Pham and Wall’s Sense Now, which also throws into relief their connection to the floor, I had not expected it to be the floor which caught my attention over the vaulted ceiling and clerestory windows of the historically loaded former laundry. Pham and Wall move in unison as if their lives depend upon it. As if, if one of them makes a mistake and collides with the other, they will break and things will fall apart. Their arms slice through the air, and Pham’s long plait too, propeller-style. Sound accompanies action and I hear the deep, mechanical swoosh of the blades with each rotation. In Hysterics, Kayla Douglas, too, anchors dancers Jareen Wee and Sarah McCrorie, only this time, the dancers are equipped with knee guards so that they may withstand the buffeting winds that have pushed them to the floor. Where Pham and Wall move like two precision-cut cogs in a machine that are designed to fit and work together, Wee and McCrorie take their feet off the pedals, to make themselves furiously spin; this “hysteria” is one that can withstand.