You can't appreciate the beauty of life without confronting the inevitability of death — and Kokoro Dance's latest work is fueled by both sides of the coin.
Jay Hirabayashi and Barbara Bourget — the married powerhouse behind the critically acclaimed butoh-driven dance company — have routinely confronted the circle of life over the last five years.
They mourned the deaths of Bourget's mother and sister, and Hirabayashi's parents; they welcomed five grandchildren into their family; they felt the impact of time's passing on their busy bodies.
"All those kinds of experiences affect you and make you appreciate living more, or the time that you have left," says Hirabayashi. "The older you get, the more you realize that the clock is ticking."
Thus, Kokoro Dance's latest work is the simply titled (but far from simple) Life, for which Bourget and Hirabayashi collaborated with Vancouver composer Lee Pui Ming and Toronto-based fibre artist Kai Chan.
Lee composed a string quartet for Life ("She thought that a string quartet would be the best vehicle for her to express her emotions about life, and she sent us a score that is amazing and so moving"), while Chan contributed three, eight-foot by 10-foot walls of recycled threads. "He takes material, unravels it, ends up with long threads, and weaves it together," says Hirabayashi.
The symbolism of weaving something tangible into something new isn't lost on Hirabayashi. "Life is also this weaving of all kinds of different strands of experience," he says.
Together with costumes by Tsuneko Kokubo and lighting by Gerald King, the score and elaborate set pieces will create a visual and aural canvas against which seven dancers including — choreographers Bourget and Hirabayashi — will bob, weave, and otherwise invite audiences to consider life and its wonders right along with them.
"[Life is] expressive of a lot of emotions, and we want people to feel the emotions as a transmission from our bodies to their bodies," says Hirabayashi.
Life runs October 9 to 12 at the Roundhouse Community Centre.
