Echo Chamber Toronto # 1: A Stunning Synthesis of Music and Dance

Chamber music has often been described as "a conversation between friends" -- a conversation conducted in musical pitches and tones. Dance, too, is an innately interactive art form, with the interaction arising from the dynamics of movement. What, then, becomes possible if you fuse these two different yet similarly conversational art forms together?

That is exactly the concept which Toronto-based violinist Aaron Schwebel has set out to explore with his new performance series, "Echo Chamber." The idea arose out of his interactions with the dancers in his role as concertmaster of the National Ballet of Canada's house orchestra. After the first Echo Chamber performance on Friday night, it's plain that this new series is going to be a fascinating artistic adventure, for performers and audiences alike.

Conflict of Interest Alert:    Choreographer/dancer Robert Stephen is my nephew.

For this first performance, Schwebel approached Robert Stephen, First Soloist with the National Ballet and a choreographer whose dance creations have always intertwined very closely with the music he has chosen. Stephen choreographed the entire programme, and danced with fellow First Soloist Jenna Savella. The musical works, all for solo violin, were performed by Schwebel.

The National Ballet has often presented works which call for one or more musicians to be on stage, but they have usually been relegated to the corners, or the back, to give maximum space for the dancers.

This performance, entitled "Origin," took a totally different approach, integrating musician and dancers closely together in their use of space, and in their actions and reactions towards and around each other. The result was a stunning synthesis of music and movement where the boundary lines between the two weren't simply blurred but utterly erased.

The continuous 40-minute performance began simply, with Schwebel (in the wings) playing the Preludio from Bach's Partita No. 3 in E Major, while Stephen moved slowly around the stage, stretching and extending one moment, and crouching or sitting the next to touch the floor, all done as if testing the limits and possibilities of the space.

Schwebel appeared on the stage as the Preludio came to its end, and moved immediately into the Sonata No. 2 by Eugène Ysaÿe. The movements of this sonata were interspersed with excerpts from Signs, Games and Messages by György Kurtág. Stephen's choreography in the Sonata became much more sweeping and dramatic, while still clearly responding to the ebb and flow of the music. At the same time, he frequently moved around behind Schwebel, as well as reaching in to pluck finished pages of music off the music stand. 

The more cryptic and jagged idiom of the Kurtág pieces found dancer and violinist interacting in a more comical manner -- sudden darting figures in the music were the signal for equally sudden movements by each into the other's space.

After a brief pause, Kaija Saariaho's Nocture brought an appropriately dreamy blue-silver lighting plot as Jenna Savella appeared, making her own discovery of the space and its possibilities.

The programme then concluded with the monumental Chaconne in D Minor from Bach's second Partita for solo violin. For this work, Savella and Stephen took the stage together, creating a hauntingly lyrical pas de deux in which certain passages and movements were regularly repeated, even as the same notes recur regularly in Bach's perfectly structured music. Meanwhile, Schwebel was moving slowly around the stage as he continued playing throughout the entire fifteen-minute span of the work, now stepping forward, now backing and turning away, even dropping slowly to his knees at one point for a couple of the variations before rising to his feet and moving on.

Put that all together, and the result was a complex interaction of fast and slow motions woven by dancers and violinist around each other, and all in the closest response to the music. It was a breathtaking technical tour de force, a powerful creation of heart-tugging beauty by the three performers. Here, above all, we saw and heard the fulfilment of Aaron Schwebel's vision for what the integration of dance and chamber music could become.

I look forward eagerly to the next Echo Chamber performance!