2010
9
Mar
Dancing love, sex and death – Cultural Olympiad Features : Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics
Last March, Barbara Bourget’s mother passed away. In the midst of her pain and the chaos, the acclaimed Vancouver-based choreographer, dancer and co-founder of Kokoro Dance started thinking about love and death. A few months later, two of her grandchildren were born.
“I wanted to explore this in the context of this incredible loss that I suffered personally. Love is so many things. It can be bitter, sweet, it can be profound, banal, it can be all sorts of things,” she says. “What is it that makes you feel that feeling in your centre? What is it that moves you to tears, or to laughter?”
The resulting work is Kokoro Dance: L.S.D. (Love, Sex and Death), a 24-minute three-section dance piece that explores these themes using butoh dance as the medium. Butoh, which is literally “dance step” in Japanese, is a post-World War II style that was first performed in 1959. (For an example of butoh, watch this video)
While western audiences may not be familiar with butoh, Bourget says it is starting to “infect” dancers around the world with its philosophy of mind-body-soul connection.
“For me, butoh investigates the authentic dance that is you. Whether that incorporates ballet, tap, circus arts, whatever, butoh is big enough to encompass everything that makes you an individual,” she says.
“I’m almost 60, and I’ve danced for 56 years. All of who I am, what I am, what I’ve done, what my experiences have been, are greatly informed by this idea of authenticity.”
Despite the turbulent emotions she experienced while working on the love section, Bourget says the first part is surprisingly calm and serene. The second section, sex, is slightly more chaotic, while the last, death, tries to evoke the chaos she felt with her mother at the hospital.
“The second section is really full of movement and it’s full of beautiful women flying and climaxing and all sorts of wonderful stuff,” she says. ““Because of my own losses, I think of death as chaos. Feelings came, feelings went. It was just chaos. [In the third part], I’ve tried to evoke that.”
As part of the L.S.D. series, which is being presented by the Vancouver International Dance Festival (VIDF) along with the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, dance companies Rosario Flamenco and Out Innerspace Dance Theatre will also be tackling these three universal themes in their own respective art forms: flamenco and contemporary dance. All three events can be seen, for free, at Vancouver’s historic Roundhouse.
As the VIDF enters its tenth anniversary year, Bourget says she and Kokoro Dance co-founder Jay Hirabayashi are looking forward to what the festival, which starts March 12, has to offer.
“We really look to produce things we like, and we’ve both been in the business a long time. We want to present what moves us, modern dance, butoh, post-modern,” she says. “It’s very exciting.”
Kokoro Dance: L.S.D. (Love, Sex and Death) runs March 12 and 13 at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre, 181 Roundhouse Mews, Vancouver. Tickets are free (no reservations required).
More information on Kokoro Dance: L.S.D. (Love, Sex and Death)