Dance review: A bold survey of contemporary movement at Arts Umbrella Season Finale

Marco Goecke, Crystal Pite, Sharon Eyal, and Fernando Magadan provide a whirlwind of short work for tomorrow’s next dance stars

By Janet Smith

The dancers of Arts Umbrella’s Season Finale. Photo by Michael Slobodian ⁠

Arts Umbrella presents Season Finale at the Vancouver Playhouse to May 24

ARTS UMBRELLA’S Season Finale was like a whirlwind tapas menu of some of the most exciting names in contemporary dance.

The now internationally known dance program’s corps of students and grads executed excerpts and brief pieces from the likes of Crystal Pite, Sharon Eyal, Marco Goecke, Fernando Hernando Magadan, and even William Forsythe. These were short works, but with big, ambitious group formations. It was like a two-hour lesson in cutting-edge form and style—from Eyal’s club-beat, automaton stylings to Pite’s intricately detailed, liquid group patterning.

After the show, you could hear everyone gushing about their favourites—and to the show’s credit, there were endless choices. On one hand, Ballet BC regular Hernando Magadan’s Nothing But Still brought together exciting movement, driving music, and arresting lighting by Itai Erdal; as a soundtrack counted off eight, the light source would change, completely shifting perspective before your eyes. Full of whipsawing arms, torquing waists, and rolling shoulders, it built to a breathless momentum, with the entire group powered by some invisible force.

Then you had Goecke’s evening-closing All Long Dem Day, set to Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman”, with the troupe activating the signature rubber arms, shaking hands, and crazy wings recently seen in the German choreographer’s Woke Up Blind at Ballet BC’s DUSK.

Elsewhere, it took confidence to master Batsheva Dance Company alumna Eyal’s swagger, but that’s what this young group—dressed in white cotton undies—did for an excerpt of Love Chapter 2, capturing the alien-insect stalking and deep, punishing lunges, everything driven by Ori Lichtik’s pulsing beats. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Aszure Barton’s work made a welcome return to the Vancouver stage with a gentle excerpt from return to patience, in which bodies tilted off axis, a bit like trees in the wind. Understatement and subtlety is just as challenging as bold statements, and the corps found the necessary delicacy in this beautiful piece.

Even for old hands it was a chance to discover new voices. Among them, Arts Umbrella grad and Nederlands Dans Theater alumnus Paxton Ricketts created the riveting Four Verses and a Chorus, set to the old-timey music of Dave Van Ronk and the Punch Brothers.

It was also an opportunity to spot some of tomorrow’s contemporary dance stars: these days, Arts Umbrella draws students from as far afield as Australia and Mexico, and its grads regularly get scooped up by the likes of NDT, Batsheva, our own Ballet BC, and others. From the cheers that met them here—and the technical demands, not to mention guts, that some of these pieces required—they’ll go far.  

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