On Thursday night, I interrupted my series at the Festival of the Sound to go to Toronto and view the latest production from Echo Chamber Toronto, a production which raised the bar yet again for this daring and unusual artistic venture, in which dancers and musicians exist and work in the same space, and interact with each other throughout the performance. This performance took place at the Isabel Bader Theatre in Victoria University, University of Toronto, as part of the Toronto Summer Music festival.
As usual, Echo Chamber's Artistic Director, Aaron Schwebel, has turned to a choreographer and dancers who are new to the Echo Chamber audience -- with startling and exciting results.
The dance aspect of the production was entrusted to veteran choreographer and multi-faceted theatre artist William Yong, and three dancers from his Zata Omm contemporary dance company: Anisa Tejpar, Jarrett Siddall. and Christian Lavigne.
The two works choreographed by Yong together amounted to some fifty minutes of intense dance from the three dance artists. As well, Yong was responsible for the complex and stunning lighting plot which greatly enhanced the emotional and visual impact of the performance. It's the first time I've seen Echo Chamber mount a show in a properly-equipped theatre, and the results were definitely worth the effort, in spades.
The other aspect which was new to Echo Chamber in this show, entitled Poetry in Motion, was the reading of the poetry which inspired or was relevant to each piece, as part of the performance. Readings were done by musicians before each musical selection.
The programme opened with the freely rhapsodic The Lake Ascending, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, in the original version for solo violin and piano. The soaring lines and cadenzas of this piece, which represent now the movement, now the song, of the lark, found a clear counterpart in the circular movements and continual reaching upwards towards the sky of the dancers, as they moved about the stage, circling around the violinist who was himself moving about the space. With the final quiet notes, they settled back into their original positions on the ground, as if resting for the morrow's flying. The music was beautifully and evocatively shaped by violinist Aaron Schwebel and pianist Philip Chiu.
The next three selections from the French repertoire were each prefaced by the proper poetry, but not danced. It greatly pleased me that the French poetry was spoken in the original, a wise choice since poetic French has a distinctive music all its own -- and an English translation would only have sounded brutally flat-footed by comparison.
The famous Clair de lune and La fille aux cheveux de lin by Debussy framed the mélodie Après un rêve by Fauré. All were beautifully played, with Chiu's very subtle pianississimo in Clair de lune a delight to the ears.
The major offering was the complete string sextet Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 by Arnold Schoenberg, played with great passion and the widest range of tone colour by violins Aaron Schwebel and Sheila Jaffé, violas Keith Hamm and Rémi Pelletier, and cellos Leana Rutt and Julie Hereish. A bit of history, here: this work was previously staged by Echo Chamber in 2018, but with a different choreographer and different dancers. The 2018 version, while it remained somewhat abstract in tone, leaned towards a staged representation of the story in the inspiring poem by Richard Dehmel.
In this performance, Yong and his dancers worked towards an unveiling of the complex emotional currents rushing through the characters of the story. The musical work can be analyzed as having distinct sections which correspond to the sections of the poem, but this interpretation made no attempt to confine the different emotional visions to only one portion of the piece.
The musicians were seated in a broadly-spaced semi-circle which gave the dancers room to move around and between, as well as passing in front of and behind the strings.
One aspect which Yong's choreography uncovered for me was the strong tone of regret that suffuses the entire poem and indeed the music. Even when the tale moves towards emotional fulfilment at the end, the dancers continue to imply in their movements the "what ifs," the loose ends which are so intensely human, avoiding the unreal certainties of "they all lived happily ever after."
Powerful and emotionally penetrating, this interpretation of Verklärte Nacht couldn't possibly be more different from its predecessor of four years ago, yet both remain vibrantly compelling transfigurations of the music into dance. Which one was "better"? An unanswerable question -- although I found both versions to be visually and thoughtfully compelling.
Poetry in Motion through the length and scale of the performance, the quality of the staging and lighting, and the total amount of choreography created for it, has moved Echo Chamber Toronto to a new high level of artistic achievement. I'll be looking forward to more at the next staging of an Echo Chamber show.
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