31 (TouchX + I am the Child of…) at Harbourfront Centre (Kaeja d’Dance)
This weekend, Harbourfront Centre’s eclectic contemporary dance series Torque premiered the second show of their 2022-2023 season. The show, 31, was performed by Toronto dance company Kaeja d’Dance, who have been around for 31 years. It consisted of two world premieres: Karen Kaeja’s TouchX, and Allen Kaeja’s I am the Child of….
As its title suggests, TouchX explores the concept of touch. Or, more often, the lack of touch.
The dancers start under a large plastic sheet. So they aren’t touching. But they all touch the sheet, so they are sort of touching by proxy. It’s a middle ground, a state of “is this touch?”.
TouchX explores liminal states like that throughout, and plastic features heavily in many of them. At one point, a dancer wrestles with plastic that is stuck beneath her clothes. At another, a dancer travels across the floor by trying to step on either side of a narrow floor-length strip of plastic without touching it.
TouchX is associatively structured, spurred on by its exploration of form and touch rather than any sort of narrative. It milks a lot of beautiful images out of those plastic sheets.
Eventually, though, people do touch. And not just the piece’s eight professional dancers: towards the end, over 25 “community dance performers” fill the stage. And hold hands. And sing. Since so much of TouchX is about loneliness, this grand monument to community provides much-needed texture.
TouchX runs about an hour, and it alone made the evening worth it. It’s quite a stunning piece.
But there was another piece in 31: Allen Kaeja’s I am the Child of…. The piece pairs “Augmented Reality” dancers with real life dancers. The audience is meant to connect to a special website and watch through the camera of their phone; the virtual dancers should appear on top of the stage image.
Unfortunately, on opening night, the technology did not work at all, and most of the audience gave up on seeing the virtual half of the show.
And without it, the show didn’t make a lot of sense. It seemed to be exploring childhood stories, and was infused with lots of playfulness, but, beyond that, I couldn’t get much out of it.
Of course, issues like that are always a possibility when experimenting with technology in live performance. That’s why I’m grateful that I am the Child of… was part of a double bill — no doubt aware that the second piece had the potential to go off the rails, Kaeja d’Dance ensured they still had a great analogue piece to offer.