Dragons, the abridged version of a longer research piece by Henry Daniel, previewed at Woodward’s on June 1
The lights fade to black as the overflowing audience waits for the performance to begin. Choreographer Henry Daniel has made it clear to the audience that today’s performance of Here Be Dragons is a workshop performance.
“I’ve told the dancers to make sure to do everything they’re supposed to do as a group together, but for them to keep exploring the idea of play,” he said.
We wait in the dark, having no idea what is about to be presented. Sitting by the door, I can hear the muffled excited voices of the dancers just on the other side.
Gord Grdina walks across the stage and began to play the oud, a fretless Middle Eastern instrument similar to a lute. He plucks a string, and I am immediately transported into a dream. This weightlessness multiplies once the dancers enter the stage. They throw pieces of fabric into the air that seemed to be suspended in time for a moment before floating down to earth.
The acoustic element of Here Be Dragons is thorough and powerful. Grdina watches the dancers intently, accenting their movements. Live singers encircle the audience, and a musician takes to an amplified saxophone mouthpiece. There is recorded sound combined with electro-acoustic filtering. Sound emanates from all corners, increasing the ethereal, dream-like state the first images placed the audience in.
Here Be Dragons is part of Daniel’s Project Barca. “Barca had a double meaning,” Daniel explains. “It is a shortened version of Barcelona, and it also means a small boat in Portuguese. I wanted to make a boat to go on this journey [of creating the performance].”
The initial concept for Barca and Here Be Dragons came after Daniel’s recent trip to Barcelona. “As a Caribbean person with a history that has a lot of Spanish and colonial history, I thought about that date in 1492 when Columbus left Spain. They had no idea North America existed and no idea about the Caribbean. It created the rationale that if you go far enough west, you’ll end up in the East,” he says.
A refreshing aspect of the performance was the monologues spoken by the dancers in multiple languages — Japanese, a Trinidadian dialect, and a third I couldn’t quite place. Spoken word is not common in dance, since dancers speak with their bodies, not their mouths. The dancers spoke about their families’ histories, tracing them back to the year 1492.
“I asked some different people to come to the project, and I told them when they came that I wanted them to trace their family histories back to 1492. And of course, they couldn’t. But they would go back as far as they could go, then we would start to create virtual stories with links to real historical facts.”
As Daniel stressed in his pre-show piece, this was a workshop performance. The final version of the performance will take place in January 2013. Until that time, Daniel has a busy schedule with research in Spain.
“I want to work on the beginning of this piece with dancers from Spain. I am very interested in why this journey took place, what was the state of Spain at the time and why Columbus had to go.”
“In an ideal world, dancers from here would go to Spain and dancers from Spain would come here. I’m not sure if that is going to happen.”
