Suddenly Dance Theatre’s recent multi-disciplinary production, Nature Ecstasy, privileges the visual components of video, dance performance, and art installation more-or-less equally. This egalitarian interdisciplinary approach is a signature feature of the ensemble’s oeuvre to date, a collaborative venture that has been mounting successful performances for over a decade. (Their multi-media work, Opium, is soon to be mounted for Bravo.) Based in Victoria, the creative partnership is founded in the combined vision of Miles Lowry, David Ferguson, and Lori Hamar. Lowry and Ferguson have been presenting collaborative works since 1992. The artistic partnership has unfolded its fundamentally Neo-Romantic perspective through scores of venues, cast ensembles and performances, regularly bringing Modern Dance and ballet luminaries from across Canada and invariably drawing large, curious crowds. Purists among these audiences are sometimes disturbed by what might be perceived as a thoroughly Post-Modern approach to mixing media, perspectives and disciplines. Unconcerned with traditional conventions (except in the folkloric sense), Lowry and Ferguson freely mix what is ‘high’ art with what is low, digitised effects with the video equivalent of plein air painting, actual location shots with fantastic settings obtained through art and/or digital artifice.
There are four principal roles in the video component of Nature Ecstasy. These are performed by Ferguson, Korean-trained dancer Jung-Ah Chung, a small, antic cipher/mark digitally inserted into the dance action, and by the landscape itself. Ferguson created a loose choreography for the video sequences with Jung-Ah Chung. The pair then danced the piece in filmed episodes, sometimes on site in the natural location, and sometimes before a blue screen. The magic of collage and editing connected the series into a somewhat abstract, episodic sequence -- or what Lowry calls a “story without narrative.” The danced “non-story” veers among many moods, all of them married to the representation of landscape. The duo ritualistically describes the “ecstatic” dance of nature’s celebrants, earth spirits or elementals. From an initiatory baptism in calm, glassy water, through Eros, terror, consummation, and bliss, Ferguson and Chung paint an abstract narrative of tempestuous union, surrender, and relinquishing. The culmination of the piece occurs when each frees the other’s long, bound hair into the streaming wind in a reciprocal gesture of release. Lowry was operating the camera, filming sequences that were staged, alternately, in situ on the precipitous Irish cliffs of Inis Mor, or to be grafted into his own painted images in the editing process. These included a ruined tower, a verdant patchwork landscape glimpsed through an ivy wreathed rupture in the stone, and carved spirals in archaic ruins -- all reflected in the dancers’ twining limbs and hair.
The immediacy of the extemporaneous, live, musical performance by L.A.’s Eclipse Quartet dramatically influenced viewer perceptions of the piece -- both in terms of what was occurring in the representations of landscape and in the interactive dance sequences. The presentation of the video/art installation with a pre-recorded sound track renders a significantly different viewing experience to the audience. The Eclipse Quartet performed twice on the opening night of the installation’s 12-day run at Open Space; their emotionally intense soundscape veered between Romantic figures and the jagged edges of New Music interpretations. I found that the quartet’s colourations effected what I saw in terms of gestures, composed spaces, choreography, expressions, and signs. In one instance, I noticed Ferguson’s clenched hand in an episode that the mellow, sombre cello music of the recorded accompaniment had previously revealed to me as containing no tension or angst whatsoever. I realised the musicians had been responding to and participating with the visual imagery with preternatural speed. This suggested the group’s anticipation of movements, gestures and rhythms. As Ferguson responded to the landscape, and as Chung reacted to him and to their choreography, Eclipse Quartet reacted to their combined, filmed result as a unified movement, composition, or mood piece. Their sound was the essentialised movement of the dancers, both fluid and jagged, like the rocky precipices and prehistoric structures of the landscape. Their tense, tempestuous improvisations of the theme of elemental vertigo was a Romantic recognition of the ‘sublime,’ supported by staccato, rhythmic base notes. This bottom-heavy accompaniment seemed appropriate as Ferguson stuck closer to the grass and stone of earth than is usual for him, eschewing the aerial leaps and gravity-defying moves of past repertoires.
Nature Ecstasy’s comprehensive visual concept was ‘through-designed,’ with all aspects reflecting parts of an integrated vision. Ferguson’s urge to embody his interaction with the landscape through ‘sublime’ or ecstatic responses are perfectly expressed through the labyrinthine danced shapes. The visual art works that make up the concrete installation component of Nature Ecstasy also reflect the illusory weightiness of a natural world that science and magic more accurately recognise as a quality of movement. Ferguson’s paintings are rendered on cast cotton panels. They look like heavily textured, three-dimensional surfaces of thick impasto paint and built-up surfaces. Yet, for all their size and tactile, visual impact, the cast cotton grounds are light as air. The textured surface of Shelter/Weir serves as the ground for another DVD projection – a 5-minute loop of dancing shadows and the circular cipher. Lowry’s wall pieces serve as an even better example of the paradoxical, illusory weight of the spirit-imbued world of matter evoked in Nature Ecstasy. The View Down, The Black Kesh and Nature Tryptich are painted on rice paper, yet they too give the illusion of being built up, in impasto paint, on firm, supportive surfaces. They appear substantial as granite until you notice the tissue-thin edges of the filmy, delicate paper moving in the slightest breeze. The paintings undulate as if breathing, giving an uncanny impression of having come alive. This trick of the senses is of a piece with the lyrical, fey spirit informing the living world -- at least as it is conceived, ritualised and invoked by Suddenly Dance in Nature Ecstasy.