Creation Destruction at Luminato Festival
For billions of years, everything was still. All life was bacterial. But still the wind blew.
That’s how it all began. And it’s also how Creation Destruction begins.
Creation Destruction is a multimedia performance by Animals of Distinction that brings together dance, experimental video art, and chamber rock. The film is by United Visual Artists. Members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor play the music. It’s on at Luminato until Friday June 17, and it begins at sunset on the lakeshore.
The piece is split into three distinct sections.
The first section feels like the titular “Creation”. At first, it’s just the dancers, swaying in the wind. Then the music starts. It’s ambient, like a hum from a distant planet. Finally, the film starts. A small pixel appears. It gets bigger: it’s a molecule. Bigger again: it’s a planet? The film is abstract, and has an early computer aesthetic: pixel pointillism. As the Creation goes on, it seems to zoom out, like in “Powers of Ten”. Or are we zooming in? Either way, something is growing. The music remains ambient, but the dancers begin to move. At first, they simply walk, but eventually, they begin some light choreography.
It’s hard to know where to look. The risers are amphitheatrically arranged, so most of the audience doesn’t get to see the playing space head-on. I was part of of this majority, so I had to choose whether to look at the dancers or the film. But in the first two sections, the dancers wear neon shirts — so, when I chose the film, I could still see flashes of neon swirling around my peripheries.
I call the second of the three sections “Innovation”. Before, the dancers walked, but now they run at full tilt, tracing out circles on the grass — they are cogs in a machine. The dancers don’t lead the Innovation, though: the music takes over, and drums kick in. Rhythm is born. An unstoppable momentum replaces the stillness of the Creation. Eventually, the pixels begin to resemble a human face, and the film dissolves into a full-on Sharits-esque flicker film. It’s beautiful, but it’s horrifying.
Finally, “Destruction”. The sun has set, and the digital world takes over; the film’s pixels begin to resemble a grid. The dancers don’t wear neon anymore — instead, like the film, they’re in black-and-white. They acknowledge the screen; they worship it. Eventually, the stage lights fade, and the dancers are lit only by the film, which has dissolved into a flashing wall of static. They huddle together, sheltering against the outside world. This is the end, but they resemble the bacterial murmurs of the Creation.
If Creation Destruction is vaguely pessimistic in the way it depicts destruction, and intellectually reads as a rather general indictment of technology, spiritually, it does not: the performance relies heavily on technology to create its thrilling effects, so we fall in love with it even though it is the source of all this destruction. Creation Destruction makes me feel small, but, as the glittering Toronto skyline towers in the background, it’s hard not be impressed by the bigness of our smallness.
Director-choreographer Dana Gingras has created a mammoth, existential work; a utopian dystopia for the digital age. It’s totally abstract, and entirely driven by moment-to-moment sensory effects. I can’t believe it exists.