Dancers make mark in urban life portrayal
By Allison Ashmore
April 20, 2006 9:00 p.m.
The fast-paced mode of urban life takes to the stage in a
complex modern dance production of undulating bodies, gritty beats
and powerful imagery that pierces more than just the skin.
The Holy Body Tattoo dance company will present its U.S.
premiere of “monumental” in Royce Hall tonight and
Saturday, both at 8 p.m.
“monumental” is a large multimedia piece that
includes nine dancers, post-rock and soundscape/ambient music,
video, projected text and sculptural and light installments. In
this broad choreography of space, these elements combine to create
an edgy, artistic representation of urban culture.
The Holy Body Tattoo was formed in 1993 by longtime
collaborators Dana Gingras and Noam Gagnon, in an effort to promote
a reflection of contemporary society. Through performance language,
Gingras and Gagnon seek self-expression that addresses broader
questions of humanity, including matters of identity, alienation
and power.
As reflected in the name itself, The Holy Body Tattoo physically
expresses artistic ideals through the intricate markings of
personal experience. According to Gingras, life experiences are
stored within the body like an internal tattoo.
“As creators, we create from ideas that mark us,”
Gingras said. “The singularity and uniqueness of these marks
make it sacred.”
The ensemble choreography addresses the individual’s
struggle to conform to a group by playing with contrasts between
the individual and group dynamics. This exploration of group
identity manifests itself in the dancers’ large, jagged and
delicate gestures, and in their separate yet unified relationship
on stage.
“In a group, certain people appear and fall through the
cracks; we see the individual through (his or her)
vulnerabilities,” Gingras said. “We all put our beliefs
on pedestals, and our demise is hubris.”
These vulnerabilities are also evident in the contrast between
minutia and monumentality of the choreography.
“The minutia of human body language accumulates and
creates something monumental,” Gingras said.
“What’s monumental in our lives is the minutia, and not
the larger ideas that eventually fall through.”
The minute details of the dancers’ gestures and movements
were culled from the surrounding city environment. The dancers went
through a training period in which they took to the street,
observing the urban landscape at its most basic level: riding
public transport, going to bars after work hours, sitting in a city
park, or simply walking down the street. They studied and garnered
the obsessive tics of people, and this can be seen in their bizarre
yet evocative gestures, including the scratching of heads and the
rubbing of noses.
With the constant contrast between monumentality and minutia,
scale and scope become important factors in the work. The
choreography exists within the entire combination of elements on
stage, rather than being confined to the dance movements
themselves.
“We are choreographing the spaces between elements so they
become integrated,” Gingras said.
The atmosphere also integrates many elements of visual
stimulation, transforming the stage into a sort of warped
cityscape. Flashing images of modern landscape serve as a backdrop.
These images, recorded in Los Angeles, capture the craziness of
freeway interchanges and the power of wind towers. These symbols
evoke visual metaphors for power in the forms of machine energy and
electricity, which in turn complement the power of group dynamics
exhibited in the dance.
“These symbols of power are contemporary statues,
monuments that are beautiful and horrific at the same time,”
Gingras said. “They seem so big and overpowering in contrast
to the organic and fragile.”
In today’s world, an urban landscape is not complete
without language and signs; New York alternative artist Jenny
Holzer’s text periodically flashes against the backdrop. Her
quotations come from the art series “Living,” in which
everyday events are bent out of shape to provoke viewers to
actively question and analyze society: “You can watch people
align themselves when trouble is in the air. Some prefer to be
close to those at the top and others want to be near those at the
bottom.”
The Holy Body Tattoo’s frenetic elements in
“monumental” capture the physical anxiety present in
contemporary urban culture. But they cannot account for the
profound spiritual void that modernity has generated.
“Deep down in the layers of the piece, we come to realize
an underlying paradox surrounding what we have lost,” Gingras
said. “But it’s hard to know what we have lost, and we
don’t know how to account for it.”
