Do You Know?....Denise Fujiwara
If you are following contemporary dance in Canada and don't know Denise Fujiwara you may have been living under a rock. This woman has been a force within the dance community for over 35 years. She started as a gymnast, as part of the Canadian rhythmic gymnastics team, graduated from York University's dance program, founded T.I.D.E. (Toronto Independent Dance Enterprise) and went on to cement her choreographic and performance career through Fujiwara Dance Inventions. She has been mentored by the best and is one of the best mentors herself. Never afraid of a behemoth, Denise's last ensemble work for her company was inspired by Sartre's No Exit. Now she's taken on Christian Bok's conceptual poetry EUNOIA.
Here are just a few burning questions answered by Denise.
What made you want to try EUNOIA as a dance/performance work?
I got the idea to use a piece of text as a score for a
dance work and pretty immediately thought of Eunoia. Robert Lepage, the great theatre artist advises, “Start with
a juicy fruit.” Eunoia is
juicy.
In creating his book of
poetry, Bök gave himself a major constraint, the use of only one vowel per
chapter. This device is transparent and the audience can see and delight
in the creativity and intelligence the author employed in the writing.
The content ranges from the fanciful, to the serious, to a retelling of
the Iliad, to smut, to literary criticism. Constraints provide wonderful parameters for creativity.
The specificity and detail in the
material was a wonderful challenge to create from. We made parallel constraints to create the choreography,
video, music and costumes that relate to the poem and expand it into an
alternate world of performance.
Bök set the bar very high.
The greatest challenge is working within the
constraints. Christian set the
vowel constraints and they were adapted to the choreography. I decided we would initiate movement
from vowel-specific body parts, and that we would use the verbs as sources for
the movement invention.
As well,
the other collaborators, Phil Strong, the composer and the video designer,
Justin Stephenson adopted constraints in their media, which effected the
choreography, the performers and the work as a whole.
At first we all thought that our constraints might get in
the way and make the creation of a good work impossible, but then we all found
that they pushed us to create from different places and we found fresh new
solutions.
I love many of them. They are by turns irreverent, witty, silly, profound, dirty
and delightful. I think the first
E poem is important because it gives the thesis of the book.
I started working with text and spoken word in the
early 1980’s. When I worked with
T.I.D.E., we experimented with original and found text over a period of 10
years. In the 90’s and for the
next 15 years I was mostly mute. I
decided that using text and spoken word was an easy out as a way for the
choreographer to create meaning in dance.
I became really interested in trying to discover what was specifically possible
to communicate with the body through movement without the help of language. This was the period where I immersed
myself in Butoh.
Butoh works from
a different paradigm and in a way, I learned a new language in Butoh. In 2007 we created a danced adaptation
of Sartre’s play, No Exit. In the
play, 3 people sit around in a locked room and talk. In the dance, the 3 people,
(Sasha Ivanochko, Hope Terry and Miko Sobreira) move with metaphorically
sourced movement that is incredibly specific, non-narrative, and yet, tells the
story. I studied that text long and
hard, and developed a deep appreciation for the play.
After that I thought it would be a challenge to use text as
a score like one might use music.
I chose Eunoia, even though, at the time I had no idea how to actually
realize the book in dance. That
seemed a challenge enough, but then Phil Strong, the composer, laid down the
constraint that all of the text should be spoken live by the dancers. That put a whole new spin on the
challenge and that’s when I brought Gerry Trentham onto the team to act as
Voice Director for the work. He’s
one of the core teachers for Canada’s Voice Intensive as well as being a hugely
experienced dancer and choreographer.
First of all, creating Eunoia has taught me how strict
and scary constraints can push creativity. The level of rigour involved in this work is very dense and
very satisfying. It has set
the bar higher.
Secondly, the performers, Sylvie Bouchard, Claudia
Moore, Lucy Rupert, Miko Sobreira, Hope Terry, Gerry Trentham, and understudy/rehearsal
assistant Lacey Smith, all trained in voice, butoh for this work, and
contributed their own particular skills as performers. They astounded me with their
ability to assimilate and perform the very specific ideas, dance styles, very
difficult text, improvise, do set choreography, using Butoh and Freeing the
Natural Voice principles. They
have also set the bar at a new very high level.
Thirdly, it has taught me how to work on a larger
scale. The team of collaborators
who created the music, video design, lighting and costume design have been a
pleasure to work with, enriched the dance and make it even more engaging in so
many delightful ways.
When I
proposed this large-scale work to Adina Herling, our fearless Manager, and my
amazing Board, they said, ‘We have to do this!’ It has taken all of us five years, and we are now finally
ready to present it.
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