Beautiful Renegades at The Theatre Centre (Peggy Baker Dance Projects)
Photo by Dahlia Katz
It’s 1974. Three dancers perform at 15 Dance Lab, a new Toronto venue for experimental dance. They’re only steps away from the hustle and bustle of Moss Park, but the piece they’re performing, Lessness, is emotional. Too emotional, perhaps — it features a heavy-handed poem by the choreographer, and the work is clearly not clicking. Only two people have showed up: a man, Hart (Jarrett Siddall), and a woman, Beth (Anne van Leeuwen).
After the show, Hart and Beth chat with the three dancers and the choreographer, Mia (Erika Prevost). Beth, a dancer herself, responds to Lessness with a hint of passive aggression: “must’ve taken a lot of effort!” Mia, an artist with a steadfast set of politcal and aesthetic ideals, deflects the comment: “if it was easy, they wouldn’t call it work.”
Scenes like this, of ambitious young artists butting heads, make up most of Michael Ross Albert’s new play Beautiful Renegades, which follows the six characters introduced in the first scene through five years of working and creating at the historic 15 Dance Lab. The Lab was strongly political, and produced work that genuinely pushed the artform’s boundaries: the “Lab” in its name was not just for show. But, as seen through Lessness, in the scientific process of making something new, failure is necessary. And failure is painful. Egos get hurt, loyalties shift, and values are put to the test. It’s one thing to write a manifesto; it’s another to execute it. Beautiful Renegades documents the less glamorous aspects of the Lab’s artistic process, reminding us that the legendary work created there was anything but inevitable.
The show is performed by three performers who are primarily actors, and three who are primarily dancers. But throughout the play, all six performers both dance and act. This choice axes some of the usual dramatic cohesion of professional theatre in favour of something more uniquely textured. The actors help the dancers through the scenes, and the dancers help the actors through the dances; in the end, it’s easy to forget who is who.
And all six have an extraordinary sense of space. The audience is on two opposite sides of a rectangular playing space, in an alley setup, but the performers don’t favour a certain half of the audience, or force themselves to cheat out more than they need to. Instead, they move through complex, inward-facing stage shapes with a dancelike grace. Director Eda Holmes handles two person confrontation scenes particularly well: rather than shouting in each other’s faces, the actors make use of the whole stage, circling each other like a duel at high noon.
Though we see choreography that doesn’t quite work, we also see choreography that does. Peggy Baker, who commissioned Beautiful Renegades, reassembled real dances from the 70s for the play, and many still startle with their creativity. Plus, while starting the show with a failed experiment does not help the show’s dramatic momentum, it makes structural sense, offering the chance to see the Lab’s work develop over time.
On a basic level, Beautiful Renegades functions as a time capsule of the work done at 15 Dance Lab. But it also draws attention to the very work of preservation it’s engaging in. At one point, Beth laments that no one will remember the Lab in “fifty” — she catches herself — “no: five years.” Beautiful Renegades doesn’t just remember the work: it remembers the need to remember the work. And by extension remembers all the groups of artists who don’t get plays written about them. Because they too experimented; they too pushed their art forms forward in their own way. Even if they didn’t do it in a lab.
In the play’s final moments, character dissolves. The six performers, dressed all in white, no longer seem to be from the 70s. They are nowhere and nowhen but here, in this theatre. Each isolated in a square of white light, they dance Withheld by Lily Eng. It’s a scrappy, athletic piece, and totally thrilling. Air punches fly, sweat falls, and the renegades push onward, searching through the dark for something new, anything new — boundaries to push, experiments to conduct, people to love, and meaning to find.
If Beautiful Renegades is mostly conflict, it’s not to deter young artists from trying to make something new. It’s to encourage them. To say: yes, it’s hard, but it’s always been hard. We, too, had to apply for OAC grants. We, too, got unfair reviews. We, too, had to balance the work we wanted to do with the work that would keep the lights on. We, too, were renegades.