Two of Vancouver’s most innovative and exciting artistic companies have joined forces to create an experimental dance piece that goes deep into the senses.
In this cross-disciplinary collaboration, pioneering local dance company 605 Collective has sought out the artistic direction of Maiko Yamamoto of Theatre Replacement, and merged forms into The Sensationalists, one of the dance season’s must-see performances at The Cultch.
“It’s been surprisingly easy,” says 605 co-director Josh Martin of the crossover. “It’s been surprisingly nice to have these two conversations with somebody who isn’t just purely a choreographic mind, but also theatrical – thinking about narrative, thinking about text, thinking about the audience experience in a different way.”
With Yamamoto’s direction, Martin says that 605 has pushed beyond what is already an exciting and established aesthetic immersed in the creation of new work, into something informed by an outsider’s perspective.
“[We wanted to] use Theatre Replacement and to use Maiko to get us out of the way that we were making things as a collective,” says Martin.
But Martin is quick to point out that the two mediums of expression – experimental dance and experimental theatre – share many similarities when partnered properly.
“It became apparent, because they’re so deeply rooted in collaboration themselves, that [Theatre Replacement] just made sense. We knew they were going to be interested in doing this type of thing, and good at compromise, good at negotiating a process like this, and would want to explore something new. I couldn’t really imagine a better pick.”
Over the past two years, the two busy artistic arms have been coming together and workshopping the piece in stages – forging a relationship that will likely last long after the chairs are folded and the programs recycled.
And 605 is already feeling the effects. In addition to learning a new artistic language, the dancers say they have learned new ways of inserting the audience into the choreographic process.
“We’ve talked a lot about the audience experience in this piece and how they’re experiencing us,” says co-director Lisa Gelley, who dances in the piece alongside Martin and four others. “It makes us move differently and sort of… be in our bodies in a different way. To be less internal, to involve the audience and have the investment not just be in ourselves, but in them in relation to us.”
“To actually consider the audience experience as part of the choreographic craft – attaching each moment of what we’re doing to what it does to the viewer – that’s a different way of working,” agrees Martin. “I found with Maiko, we’ve really been working from the inside out as opposed to the outside in.”
It’s a perspective Martin says the company has already started working into their next piece.
“With 605 previously, we’d really build these phrases, these sections of work, and then we’d drill into them. Whereas with Maiko, we’re talking about what it is that we’re trying to build, and then building it piece by piece from that idea.”
But the performance is still very much rooted in dance.
The Sensationalists is built around an unofficial 605 mantra that says their vocabulary of movement is developed almost entirely around the sensations of the body.
“We’ve kind of had a narrative overriding throughout the creation process, which is, ‘We are the Sensationalists’ – this group of people or this society who meet together to feel things,” says Martin. “And it’s not something that you actually see inside of the work when you’re watching, but it’s something we’ve kept there, because we find it so akin to what it is to create dance – what movement feels like, as opposed to what it just looks like.”
“It’s about the sensation of the body,” says Gelley. “From the repetition and the discovery of that movement comes whatever the emotional content is.”
The show is also based around the message “Feel Better” – a play on words to encourage viewers to feel emotions and tactile experiences more richly, but also to walk away feeling lifted and engaged by the art. To achieve this, the audience will even be invited to take part.
The bold souls who take their spot in the “Participation Seating” won’t be asked to dance, but they will be invited to respond – to move and shift according to the needs of the dancers. Martin is prepared for stage crashers, however.
“We have to prepare for everything I think!” he says with a laugh. “There’s always going to be those people who are willing to test the full limits of it. And then there are the people who are going to be very timid and shy and want to stay out of any sort of sense of being viewed.
“But nobody has to dance,” he assures. “We don’t make anybody do anything they don’t want to do. It’s really ‘Choose your own Adventure’ in terms of how little or how involved you become.”
The duo began researching the concepts for The Sensationalists in May of 2013, and soon discovered there is a whole other community of sensory beings out there.
“Some of the research that we’ve been playing with is based around sensory phenomena, and there’s this one sensorial experience called ASMR – Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” says Martin. “It’s all about this warm, fuzzy, tingly feeling that people get when special attention is paid to them – at the doctor’s office or getting their face painted …,” he explains. “And there’s a whole community of people online who collect videos that cause ASMR and they all share them. These videos have become viral where people get ASMR from watching them!”
“It’s one of those phenomena that has yet to be proven,” says Gelley, “but it seems to be a little bit of a buzz around it right now.”
The Sensationalistsis rooted in that warm, fuzzy world as a place to jump out of and shock the senses again. And does it have to be real to be enjoyable? That is a question 605 hopes to answer.
“Is this something we actually feel, or something that we make ourselves think we feel?” asks Martin. “I think it’s all kind of in the same world as performance.
“These people have all come to see something they’ve never seen before and feel something they’ve never felt before. And so we are all Sensationalists, and all the people who have come to watch us are Sensationalists.”
• The Sensationalists (605 Collective) runs May 12-16 at The Cultch (1895 Venables). Tickets from $19 at TheCultch.com
