TAKE IT BACK RUNS AS PART OF THE TORONTO FRINGE DANCE INITIATIVE JULY
6-13. $10. GEORGE IGNATIEFF THEATRE, 15 DEVONSHIRE. SEE
FRINGETORONTO.COM OR EYEWEEKLY.COM FOR SHOWTIMES.
“There’s a huge dance component at the Montreal Fringe,” says Helen Simard of Solid State Breakdance. “I’d say it’s almost 30 per cent of the festival.” The estimation might surprise Toronto Fringers, who are used to an almost-steady diet of script-based theatre and improv. That is about to change with this year’s new dance initiative, developed by the festival in cooperation with Dance Umbrella of Ontario. Eight acts will strut their stuff, including Simard’s Montreal-based group, and local acts like AKA Dance (who are collaborating with choreographer Michael Caldwell), Brian Solomon and Collective HEAT.
Simard knows the Fringe circuit. Since 2002 she and Solid State have played Winnipeg and Ottawa in addition to their hometown. “It’s neat to perform in front of a more theatre-oriented crowd,” she says. “It’s so easy to get stuck in your own little dance world. We get fresh perspectives on the work. You make connections, because you cross paths with so many of the same people again and again.”
Solid State’s 2008 offering, Take It Back, is, appropriately, about collaboration and cross-pollination. It concerns the lack of couples dancing in contemporary society, an excellent point: sure, people may still take dance lessons as a hobby, but casual dancers in clubs are rarely seen moving with each other with any degree of grace or form. Simard and her partner JoDee Allen’s investigation of this phenomenon led them to swing dancing and in particular the lindy hop: one of the most kinetic forms of partner dancing in existence, which has several affinities with the b-girling that Solid State does.
“They’re both social dances that were going on in clubs, at a time of musical revolution,” says Simard. “They’re both dances that are really exciting and dynamic, and because of this got picked up by the media and put in television and the movies. They’re both dances that are very acrobatic, with complicated subtleties to them, and at the same time are improvised. You learn the basic steps and then have to freestyle in breaking, and it’s the same with swing.
“In breaking, in terms of its social development, when men stopped asking women to dance, women stopped dancing,” says Simard. “Where did they go? Is there a way back to traditional roles of leading and following without having it linked to gender? Is there a way for us to fuse our breakdancing vocabulary with that of partnering structures?”
Take It Back is, then, a salute to adaptation. Simard discusses the intricacies of following as opposed to leading, likening following to responding to questions the leader asks; a good leader, she points out, will listen to the answers to his or her questions and react accordingly. Putting on such a show in a Fringe festival — that is, in theatres — also shapes it significantly, for both b-boying and lindy hop are dances that are traditionally done within a round of spectators.
“You have to be careful not to lose what’s beautiful about it, to retain that ‘ecstatic shine’ as the [lindy hoppers] called it — that spontaneity and excitement. For us there is an abstraction that goes on. Everyone in the show breaks, but it’s not a b-girl or hip-hop show; it’s not a battle. We like to call it urban dance theatre. In a way, you create another dance in order to put it on the stage.”