In Remembrance of Dance

David Earle's Passchendale,
a Reluctant Fascination with War

Passchendaele

by Dancetheatre David Earle
Waterloo Community Arts Centre
November 13,14,15, 1998
by Kathe Gray

I used to be indignant that there was a section in bookstores called 'War,'" says Elora-based choreographer David Earle. " I felt that documenting it - writing books about it, making films about it - glorified the idea of men killing one another."

He pauses. "Now I own quite a sizable collection of books written about war."

He's drawn on this collection for Passchendaele, the upcoming performance by Dancetheatre David Earle. Planned for performance in Waterloo next week, Passchendaele includes two new choreographic works, one by Earle, the other by his longtime associate D.A. Hoskins. The performance will also include Earle's Dora-nominated Maelstrom. Together these pieces represent explorations into Earle's reluctant fascination with war.

Or, more precisely, his fascination with how humans react to war and are changed by their exposure to it.

"Have you read The Iliad?" Earle asks me. "Homer wrote it over 2000 years ago. It's a description of war that should have brought war to an end - but it hasn't. We read this book; we recognize ourselves and wonder what happened. I really don't think our species has changed as much as we imagine.

"It's thinking about this - that we haven't learned from the past - that's interested me in the topic - war has changed so much. And that despite this, lives go on even though battles might be raging all around."

This is Passchendaele: intimate portraits of people during war. Tragic but suffused with optimism, the performance is intended to be a healing experience for the audience - both those that lived through the World Wars and those whose understanding of war comes only from televised coverage of Mogadishu and Kosovo. "It's meant to be cathartic," says Michael Moore, one of the company's dancers. "It's also a reminder of why we need to banish war."

Moore explains that Passchendaele, also known as the Third Battle of the Ypres, took place during WWI in Belgium, in the same fields that John McCrae's famous poem describes. "There was a tremendous loss of Canadian soldiers," he says, "Some 15,654 died in twelve days."

Earle comments that the name of the battlefield intrigued him.

"Translated to English it means 'the valley of passion'. This second meaning strikes me as most significant: that the meaning of existence becomes much more intense to us when it is threatened."

While the Canadian connection is symbolically important for the company, the performance is not particularly about this specific battle. "We can't pan over the field of action like a film can," says Earle. "We show close-ups instead: a soldier and his girlfriend trying to say good-bye, an old soldier going mad knowing the pain he's inflicted."

"Or, in a piece called Six Studies of What Remains, David presents vignettes of two soldiers and two women on leave," says Moore. "They are thrown together by circumstance, enjoying the brief time they have together. It's fun and engaging and poignant at the same time."

"This is where dance has its place," Earle adds. "It isn't like seeing reality. It has a dream-like quality. It doesn't require words to communicate. It can be a raw and emotional experience that audiences respond to instinctively."

For more than 28 years, Earle called Toronto Dance Theatre home, creating compelling dance that was as physically demanding of its dancers as it was emotionally demanding of its audiences. Almost two years ago, he said good-bye to the dance institution he'd helped found to pursue his own artistic vision. He also said farewell to Toronto, a place that he's called home for most of his years, to take up residence in Elora. "There's a saying," he tells me. "You are either on the East Coast, the West Coast, or in Elora."

His reputation as a dancer and choreographer has been built on his ability to elicit visceral responses from his audiences. He doesn't shy away from complex themes - the tension between the spirit and the flesh, and the conflict between Christianity and nature having preoccupied some of his past work. "This is dance for people who are curious, who love architecture, who need beauty, who wish to feel," he has said of his choreography. He is adamant that his dance belongs neither to the establishment nor to the avant-garde.

"I am interested in what is true," he tells me. "Not what is new."

This conviction that art must resonate with the general population combined with his pronounced individual aesthetic has garnered Earle numerous awards: a Gemini, a Chalmers, a Dora and an Order of Canada.

Earle appreciates these awards. However, he finds that the greatest reward comes from his audiences - "When someone tells you that something in your work has changed them forever" - and from the dancers he has trained, with whom he has collaborated.

"I tend to stay connected with the same people artistically," he states. "In fact, my relationships with them tend to last much longer than most of my personal relationships. My family are the people that I have shared my career with."

The core dancers in Dancetheatre - Suzette Sherman, D.A. Hoskins, Michael English and Michael Moore, Danielle Baskerville - have each been with the company for some time. "I've always had a hand in training the people I work with," Earle says. "As an instructor, my primary concern is with providing a supportive environment for dance artists."

"In our society, education is a kind of lobotomy that is designed to erase instinct. My training is about the people I work with recovering their instinct and coming to terms with existence. Their development as human beings - not just as dancers - is important to me. Our relationships are tender."

He laughs. "It's considered audacious and somewhat silly to create while there are other people in the room. You are vulnerable, you're not in a position of authority because you don't necessarily know what you are about to create, or how it is going to work out." Despite this, Earle likes to walk into the studio - where his dancers wait for him - a blank slate. "It's the trust between us that makes this possible. I like to believe that we are collaborating in the act of creation. I'm not creating alone. "

An offshoot of the dance training that Dancetheatre offers is a collaborative venture called Grande Orange. Established to encourage dance artists to develop secondary art skills, Grande Orange is predicated on the belief that one form of expression helps facilitate another. Thus far, the project has had an enthusiastic reception: D.A. Hoskins builds altars from wood and scrap metal while Michael Moore renders exquisitely in stained glass. Earle - an aficionado of cut and paste - creates rich montages from photos and colour lasers.

They are similar in ways to the creation journals he's kept for each of the shows he's choreographed over the past thirty years - these journals number over 100. A pastiche of handwritten notes, passages of inspirational text, images culled from magazines and books, David's own photographs: these journal pages represent his instincts at play.

"I find much of my inspiration in images," David tells me. Then, after a pause, "I am an image addict." He confesses that there are about 120 different categories of images that he is gathering at the present - death and sensuality, the beautiful executioner, a flight of stone steps. At home he has folders filled with images that he has snipped from here, excised from there.

I am reminded momentarily of a scene from Derek Jarman's film The Last of England. An older man is sitting at an aged wooden desk, photos, notes, ephemera of a life scattered around him. He is pasting them onto the yellowed pages of scrapbooks, jotting notes with pen and nib as he does so. Like Passchendaele, The Last of England is about the ravages of war and coping with the legacy it leaves. I wonder if Earle has seen it.

Earle plants another image in my head before I can ask. In it, he is five, watching the Victory Parade from the window of a dance studio on Toronto's Bay Street.

"We experienced a loss of honour with that war," he says of WWII. "It's the first war where technology and industry had as much impact on the battlefield as ideology and patriotism did. Humanity became inhumane just because of the weapons that it had at hand. "

He is reflective. "I don't think we ever healed from that. The whole century was scarred and we never healed. We've been bitter ever since. It's almost as if we need to live in a new century before we are able to move beyond the horrific experiences we've had in this one."

This is the direction he would like Passchendaele to take us.

"This is dance for people who are curious, who love architecture, who need beauty, who wish to feel." - choreographer David Earle

"In our society, education is a kind of lobotomy that is designed to erase instinct. My training is about the people I work with recovering their instinct and coming to terms with existence."
- choreographer David Earle

David Earle

Co-founder of Toronto Dance Theatre

Choreographed for:

    * Toronto Dance Theatre
    * Polish Dance Theatre
    * Canadian Childrens Dance Theatre
    * Les Grands Ballet Canadiens
    * Ballet British Columbia
    * The National Ballet of Canada
    * Edinburgh Festival
    * Stratford Music Festival
    * Guelph Spring Festival
    * Elora Music Festival
    * Banff Festival for the Arts
    * Spring Rites (Toronto)

Awards:

    * Order of Canada
    * Clifford E. Lee Award
    * Toronto Arts Award
    * Dora Mavor Moore Award
    * Jean A. Chalmers Award
    * Gemini Award
    * Muriel Sherrin Award