ROCKING THE BOAT
CELEBRATING QUEER CONTENT IN CANADIAN CONCERT DANCE
CONRAD
ALEXANDROWICZ
As a young dance artist in the mid-1980s, Conrad Alexandrowicz was evolving a distinct artistic voice that would lay the groundwork for his artistic path. Blending his interests in choreography and writing, he developed a hybrid form of creation grounded in dance but laced with extensive original or modified text. Also distinctive for the time was Alexandrowicz's recurring use of gender, power and sexual identity themes expressed in very frank terms. His dances were audacious and irreverent. He became adept at lightening weighty subject matter through humour and absurdity. By the early 1990s, the Toronto native had moved to Vancouver and then Victoria where he is the Founding Artistic Director of the physical theatre company Wild Excursions Performance and is Associate Professor in the department of theatre, University of Victoria.
Photo Credit (above): Conrad Alexandrowicz by David Lowes
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HARD DRIVE
Hard Drive deals broadly with conflicting urges to create and destroy and to dominate and nurture, as expressed in male behaviour. Against this is set the personal politics of love and lust in contemporary gay culture – with the contradiction between the need for love and intimacy and the urge for casual sex. Two urban gays find each other through the personals – today they would use cell phones – after which they fail as lovers, but become good friends. Entering the terrain of the fantastic, one finds himself to be pregnant. This provides humour, but extends the work towards men’s relationship to the generation of new life in the face of the unspeakable violence of the world.
– Conrad Alexandrowicz
Hard Drive (1992)
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- Choreography and Direction: Conrad Alexandrowicz
- Performers: Conrad Alexandrowicz and Sylvain Brochu
- Text: Conrad Alexandrowicz, with additional material from “Companions wanted” ads in Toronto’s gay newspaper Xtra!; stage directions from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra; and excerpts from Time Among the Maya by Ronald Wright.
- Sound Design: Philip Strong
- Vocals: Conrad Alexandrowicz, Francisco Alvarez, Stephan Beckon, and Sylvain Brochu
- Lighting Design: Adrian Muir
- Costume and Prop Design: Tracey Glas
THIS IS A DANCE
This Is A Dance is a wacky, surreal, solo dance work. Set to an elaborate original text, it deals with the struggle to express one’s identity freely and with courage. This is rendered metaphorically by means of the predicament of the unready performer, who is subjected to disapproval by a pair of taped voices. They abhor the fact that he speaks Polish (a language they don’t understand), his insistence on wearing a tutu, and almost all his physical efforts on stage. The figure carries on while the voices attempt to decode and comprehend what he is doing, devising interpretations of his actions that remain unconfirmed and hypothetical, but are almost always mocking and unkind.
– Conrad Alexandrowicz
This Is A Dance (1993)
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- Choreography, Text and Performance: Conrad Alexandrowicz
- Sound Design: Philip Strong
- Vocals: Greg Kramer
- Lighting Design: Adrian Muir
- Costume and Prop Design: Tracey Glas
To download an excerpt of the script for This Is A Dance, Click Here.
