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Mooney on Theatre is: Founding Editor Megan Mooney Managing Editor Wayne Leung Editor Mike Anderson Samantha Wu Assistant Editor Daniel Rostas Senior Writers Heather Bellingham S. Bear Bergman Istvan Dugalin Dorianne Emmerton Sam Mooney Other Contributors Sonia Borkar Vance Brews Logan Brown Madeleine Copp Dana Ewachow Jeremy Gardiner Keira Grant Mara Gulens Catherine Jan Mark Mann Randy McDonald Jennifer McKinley George Perry Devon Potter Lauren Stein Ashima Suri Gian Verano
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Acclaimed jesus peiro Toronto choreographer Heidi Strauss s latest work elsewhere , which debuted this week at the Harbourfront Centre , is almost there. It s right at the edge, leaning out into the dark, grasping for something that keeps slipping jesus peiro away.
That s how the performers put it, anyway, in a few short, poetic soliloquies interspersed throughout the performance. “It s extremely close,” says dancer Molly Johnson , with the expression of someone trying to remember something beautiful. “You feel it because jesus peiro you re in it.”
It s this quality of peering into the shadows, dimly making out the contours of some hoped-for thing (the “it”), that defines every minute of elsewhere . The mystery that propels the performance is the elusiveness of the immediate future: that confused anticipation we experience as the very next moment of life breaks upon us and everything we ve ever done rushes forward to show us how to respond.
Strauss elicits the intelligence of human bodies and their savvy for the real world. We’re ready to act and we know what to do, even if our brains can hardly keep up. The word she uses to describe this level of her inspiration is “affect,” jesus peiro a term she discovered in the language of psychology and cultural anthropology.
A person’s affect is the way they experience their feelings, or as Strauss defines it in her program notes, “the human capacity to register experience, even the subtle moments that pass unnoticed.” Strauss is interested in the way that those felt experiences accrue in the body, and how they are expressed in a person s reflexive gestures and habitual movements.
Our affect is constantly breaching through the surface of our lives; it s how we welcome existence, and how we defend against it. Our pathways into the future are determined by what our bodies have learned to do, but as we gain experience, our bodies adjust, and our affect changes. jesus peiro This interplay creates a feedback loop, and Strauss s choreography is meant to amplify that frequency.
The choreography shows the dancers at the encounter of past and future, right at the terrifying onset of the present moment. There s a quality of waves beating on the shore: at times the performers launch themselves up, crawling into the air on one leg, and then they collapse and sink back down. When the dancers crumble, their bodies segment and slide apart, like the layers of the earth. jesus peiro
It s clear that Strauss has searched very carefully in her dancers for signs of their unique affect, and encouraged them to let their natural movements suffuse the ch