We shot at the Winter Garden theatre. For this piece I did get help from the Canada Council, which enabled me to shoot on film. What you just saw, Trio, was shot on Beta SP, a very basic format. I sometimes compare these to painting in acrylic or in oils. But I was able to shoot A Pairing of SwanS on film, and commission Matjash Mrozewski to do this piece. So here we had Matjash creating for camera, and me choreographing the camera with his choreography – the inverse of the Saint-Saëns Dying Swan.
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A Pairing of SwanS
The first performance of The Swan Sees His Reflection was actually onstage for a show called Dreams Come True, the gala celebration at the Princess of Wales Theatre of the Dancer Transition Resource Centre's fifteenth anniversary in 2002, and at the same time launching the Toronto Western Hospital's Artists' Health Centre.
Another aside – for this project it took me close to a year to raise the money from the Canada Council and various supporters. We had to talk to the Winter Garden, because they're IATSE-run, making it all incredibly expensive. Anyway, we reduced the filming down to one day. We filmed Evelyn in the morning and Rex in the afternoon – and just before we started, Rex came to me and said, “I think my calf is about to tear.” This happened after a year of conceiving the project and raising all the money and knowing that we couldn't shoot into tomorrow ... so I instructed my cinematographer that at best we would only have one or two takes. I had everything storyboarded, shot by shot by shot. I had intended to do several takes, but in the end it became fluid and what we had to do was go with a lot of hand-held shooting, and get the spontaneity of one or two performances – and then get creative with lots of beautiful editing. I still give this as an example of something that was choreographed for the camera because of this incident, and also Matjash had reworked the dance once he knew we were going to film it.
The film Shadow Pleasures was originally called Handwriting into Dance. It was a collaboration that began with Michael Ondaatje and myself; the idea was to make a quintet of dances that would take five passages from different books of his and translate them into dance. Michael didn't want any words to be in the piece but I really felt that there was a beautiful marriage between his words and the dance expressions that could come out of it. The books that we used were In the Skin of a Lion to which Andrea Nann had choreographed a brilliant work for stage; a piece that was newly created by Margie Gillis called Tropical Rumours inspired by Michael's memoir Running in the Family. Next was a stunning solo from Anil's Ghost that Andrea Nann had already choreographed. Robert Glumbek and Roberto Campanella re-worked The Nine Sentiments, and then I created The Cinnamon Peeler specifically for camera. I remember Michael saying, “I don't know that the Cinnamon Peeler can actually be choreographed.” Interestingly, this is the piece that has gone on to have a cinematic life of its own including a theatrical release ahead of Robert Altman's dance film, The Company.
Power is one of the pieces that comes from Andrea Nann's In the Skin of a Lion, which she called Cato and Alice. Again, it was a fascinating and lengthy process to do this film with Michael Ondaatje. He's an extraordinarily creative person. When he talks about handwriting into dance – the film actually opens with all of his manuscripts. He wouldn't allow himself to be shot, but he would allow me to shoot his hand while writing. So he was writing manuscripts as we designed the opening credits. He has an incredibly mesmeric voice and he did speak the poetry throughout the film for some of the pieces. He kept saying, “You don't need words” and I said, “But we're talking the language of handwriting into dance.”
Over a number of years, Andrea had worked quite closely with Michael on Cato and Alice and it was a hard sell for her to re-imagine the choreography for film. She was very, very concerned about leaving the black box environment where she felt the choreography was pure and wouldn't be altered or exploited. We did a lot of collaborating in order to get her comfortable with the idea of re-seeing it, and it was her imaginative ideas that inspired Astrid Janson's set design. Power is one of the sections in Cato and Alice. It is set in the twenties, at the beginning of the labour movement. We shot it at The Distillery District just as it was opening up and in the rough, before it underwent its gentrification.
Shadow Pleasures ended up being, as you heard, very successful, winning all those awards at Yorkton Film and Television Festival. Yorkton is actually not an arts festival. For it to have won “Best of the Festival” says so much for the power of dance. All kinds of documentaries are entered into that festival and it was really exciting that Shadow Pleasures, a dance performance film, took away a record-breaking number of awards.
Power was danced by Andrea Nann and Gérald Michaud, and the score is by John Gzowski. Andrea really did love the film. One of the first things I learned when I began in dancefilm was, in order to break the rules, you have to know them. So what has been interesting every step of the way is earning fellow artists' trust, because they know where I've come from. They know that I understand what the aesthetic concerns are – and how, if you have the soul of a dancer, you can break some rules in order to invent new ones.
In the process of conceiving the show, Michael said, “Read this poem, The Cinnamon Peeler”. I have since found out that it is one of his most celebrated pieces, and many people's favourite. He said to me, “I don't know how you're going to do that.” I said, “I think I have an idea ... I think there will not be music. I think it's words and motion, and I'd like you to read the poem. That will be our score.” And that's what we did. This is choreography that I did with Gail Skrela and Sean Ling.
Interestingly enough the film wasn't behind a scrim, we shot the shadows. Again, it was a really complicated process. After I'd done it many people said to me something about being behind a scrim, and I said “no, no”. The dancers were on this platform which you could see, and we actually shot their shadows on the wall.
And so, just to sum up and harkening back to Margaret Laurence's Dance on the Earth, I think that just as we dance our lives – let's think of ourselves as choreographers ... and keep the choreography light, let the music in, and let the soul out. Thank you.
Q: How closely do you work with a choreographer when you're actually doing the editing? Do they have choreographic say in where you cut? How close you get in?
VT: Interesting question. That first time, when Margie Gillis choreographed for camera, she was in the editing room. After that, I have to say that I am the choreographer of the film and I have to do the choreography of the editing. Especially when you are taking existing choreography and reinventing it and re-imagining it – in these cases, if the choreographer had come into the editing room then there would have been two different visions and it would not have worked. That is not to say that in the future I might not work this way. I adore Crystal Pite, and her choreography, and would very much like to work with her in the editing room. I think it would be a wonderful collaboration. But otherwise, so far, no – James gave me carte blanche, and really everybody has.
Q: So when you make those decisions, do you look at it in terms of an overall aesthetic as opposed to capturing the dance?
VT: Yes, absolutely. What I'm interested in is being in a new form. Capturing doesn't interest me. Re-imagining, reinventing – as I said I don't even like the word adapting. It is like giving birth. If I can't have that creativity, then it's not worth it; that is my choreographic outlet.
Q: It's not to produce a documentary of the piece, or chronology of choreography, but I think it's the process of the filmmaker and how the filmmaker sees the dance. The advantage that you have is you are a dancer and choreographer – I think that is the difference between documenting a piece and what you create in your films.
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