Earle's Evocations

From the Georgia Straight, February 18, 1998

Maelstrom & Sacra Conversazione
by Dancetheatre David Earle
Performance Works
February 17, 1998
by Janet Smith

In a scene from Maelstrom, bare chested men slowly drag seemingly lifeless bodies by their heels, back and forth, across the stage. The image is immediately recognizable: there are no guns, no barbed wire, and no smoke, but these men are clearly pulling their dead from a battlefield. It is just one, small part of an aging soldier's flashback to the horrific acts of his past, but it is a perfect example of the way choreographer David Earle can tell a story through a familiar, expressive movement without resorting to anything literal or obvious.

This dark work is well-suited to a collaboration between the veteran, Order of Canada winning choreographer and Edmond Kilpatrick, whose White Rock based Dance Ensemble is a showcase for new talent. The two have similar styles - ballet-influenced contemporary movement, with generous touches of Martha Graham - and they've gathered a remarkabley expressive core of male dancers, among them Kilpatrick himself, D.A.Hoskins, and Michael Moore.

Maelstrom has a somewhat simplistic narrative, and, like much of Earle's work, it is based in an essintial humanism that speaks directly to the audience. It opens with the old man, wearing a tattered military trench coat, wandering the stage with a white-dressed woman hanging from his back; she could be an angel, or she could be his memories, literally weighing him down. We travel back in time to his carefree youth, then to a a mesmerizingly intimate, sculptural duet between a young man (Hoskins) and a woman (Danielle Baskerville). The man leaves this behind to face the horrors of war - events that will haunt him until his death.

Given a larger stage, more elaborate lighting, and a high-quality sound system, Maelstrom could be a work as epic as its subject matter. As it is, it's one of the most affecting dance works to grace a local stage in years.

Sacra Conversazione, the second part of the program, was choreographed by Earle for the 1984 Banff Festival of the Arts. Earle has set the piece to parts of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Requiem. It's largely a play on the contrapuntal music, with female and male dancers bursting into action at the sound of their choral counterparts. Sacra Conversazione is less narrative-based than Maelstrom; it's images are more expressive of a generalized human striving. It's also less fully realized than Maelstrom; the dancers seemed inconsistent in their passion and focus, and the recorded music failed to convey the physicality of Mozart's monumantal work.

Still, I couldn't help imagining the 11 dancers performing the work in a more majestic setting, with a live orchestra and chorus. Perhaps Performance Works was just too small a stage to contain Earle's grand visions.