In the Winter 2017 issue of Canadian Art <\/em>magazine, a series of tarot cards are reproduced over several pages, each one picked by a different artist from their personal deck \u201cto predict the future of art.\u201d The first of the group is Los Angeles-based artist Hanna Hur\u2019s selection, the Empress. \u201cThis is an exciting card to pull,\u201d she writes. \u201cI think the future for art is calling for more pleasure\u2026 Pleasure-driven thinking, talking, writing, making, looking, collaborating, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hur\u2019s prediction seemed to dangle overhead during Alicia Grant\u2019s TDT HOUSE OF DREAMS<\/em>, part of Toronto Dance Theatre\u2019s Emerging Voices <\/em>program, presented at the Winchester Street Theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, this pleasure principle was already present in rehearsal: one afternoon, Grant displays prospective costumes in a delicious array of pastel hues\u200a\u2014\u200aa palette somewhere between Sofia Coppola\u2019s Marie Antoinette<\/em> and the softly coloured Instagrams of artists like Arvida Bystr\u00f6m, Monica Moraru, or Simon Fortin. As these intertexts signal, it\u2019s an aesthetic that is equal parts delightful and timely\u200a\u2014\u200adancer Megumi Kokuba\u2019s pants might even be described with the decidedly time-stamped moniker Millennial pink. But if, as The Guardian <\/em>proclaims, \u201cMillennial pink is the colour of now,\u201d its present-tenseness acts more as a framing device than a comprehensive rule in Grant\u2019s work. The pleasing colours that drape the dancers\u2019 bodies form an aesthetic container for an even richer range of pleasurable movement and interaction, evidenced in minor gestures like the curl of dancer Justin de Luna\u2019s grin below his turquoise-painted moustache.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grant\u2019s choreography builds through the often joyful ricochet of movement. \u201cWe have five minutes of bouncing,\u201d Grant tells her dancers shortly before a run-through. And indeed, both the logic and the texture of the bounce seem central here, as gesture bounds and rebounds both within and between bodies. In some instances dancers pick up flicks or contractions from one another; in others their bodies lit\u00aderally rebound through repeated koala bear jump catches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only the body, but the gaze too, becomes enmeshed in this echoing exchange. While rehearsing a section of the piece wherein three dancers slowly shift postures, with one hand always framing their groin or behind, Grant remarks, \u201cYou\u2019re just confronted with being a person, in front of people.\u201d In other moments, the performers confront each other: intimately surveying the body of another, face gliding centimetres from the surface of forearms, shoulders, legs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Emily Law\u2019s Mercury dust<\/em>, which shared the Emerging Voices <\/em>program with TDT HOUSE OF DREAMS<\/em>, also called on its dancers to turn toward their own, and each other\u2019s, corporeality. The creative process integrated a practice that Law began when working on her 2016 solo Wood<\/em>. She explains that the collaborators researched and sought to embody \u201cthe Traditional Chinese Elemental images that were connected to each person\u2019s sign.\u201d \u201cThrough this practice we devised a score for the artists to embody their element. Then we created a score for how the other artists would support each dancer\u2019s experience of their element.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mercury dust<\/em> progresses through a series of interchangeable episodes, ordered on the spot by the dancers themselves, as they deploy the infrastructure of the concert stage\u200a\u2014\u200alighting, projection, sound\u200a\u2014\u200ato delineate spaces for one another to move through. The performance\u2019s absorption of the theatre\u2019s technical foundations might recall how Constantin Brancusi\u2019s sculptural work \u201creaches downward to absorb the pedestal into itself,\u201d as Rosalind Krauss \u00adwrites in her well-known essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field<\/em>. Considering Brancusi\u2019s sculpture The Cock<\/em>, Krauss suggests that \u201cthe base becomes\u2026 the morphological generator of the figurative part of the object.\u201d There may be a similar relationship between foundation and choreographic<\/em> object in Mercury dust<\/em>. In one section, the dancers reframe the area that extends from the house-left entry, with a corridor of light. Here, the infrastructure of the theatre, itself a locus of choreography, re-spatializes the choreographic material of the dancers\u2019 movement. What\u2019s more, this arrangement of the stage space, what might conventionally be thought of as the analogue to sculpture\u2019s pedestal, actually influences the work on the level of gesture. In one moment, dancer Jarrett Siddall turns away from the audience, placing his gaze onto the crisp shadow of his body created by the specifically directional lighting. He seems to move almost in response, articulating his arm downward, something like a wave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Krauss writes that in Brancusi\u2019s work, the sculptural form\u2019s absorption of the base redefines it, \u201cas essentially transportable, the marker of the work\u2019s homelessness integrated into the very fiber of the sculpture.\u201d The synthesis of theatre space and choreography in Law\u2019s work, however, does something very different. Rather than rendering the work itinerant, this relationship roots it all the more deeply in place. Light sources and soundboards may become mobile for Law, yet they remain perpetually in relation to the Winchester Theatre\u2019s architecture. And this built space seems an essential home for Grant\u2019s choreography too. The large arch that anchors the centre of the stage\u2019s back wall\u200a\u2014\u200aand which, at one point, frames the pulsating bodies of the work\u200a\u2014\u200aseems as integral to the structure of the TDT HOUSE OF DREAMS<\/em> as the invisible energetic matter that the dancers fluff-up, shape, and build during the piece.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A longstanding base for TDT, the Winchester Street Theatre evokes history. Yet it also houses emergence, futurity. Another premonition that Hur derives from her selection of the Empress is a call for \u201cmore feminine energy.\u201d Hur continues: \u201cFeminine (please interpret broadly)\u200a\u2014\u200adriven think\u00ading, talking, writing, making, looking, collaborating, etc.\u201d Indeed, as Akram Khan\u2019s misogyny-laden 2016 comments (\u201dI don\u2019t want to say we should have more female choreographers for the sake of having more female choreographers.\u201d) keep echoing, as statistics show that women in dance continue to earn less than their male-identified counterparts, the invocation of the feminine that Hur sees in the cards feels especially crucial. And it is encouraging to imagine that emerging choreographic voices, like Grant\u2019s and Law\u2019s, might indeed propose some responses to the Empress\u2019 call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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