WHEN DANCING GOES FULL TILT
Improvisation inspires choreography
Katrina Currie picks up a piece of colourful cloth and holds it to her face. It unfolds to reveal a robe, which she dons overtop her black shorts and pinkish-beige top.
In a sunlit studio in south Regina, she climbs up onto a tall black box, about two feet square, to continue performing.
She reaches out her legs, spins, holds out her arms, then stands, as a subtle, thrumming, beat emits from a speaker.
The dance is about emergence, choreographer Connie Moker Wernikowski says.
She sits on the floor and watches Currie — her daughter — in rehearsal for Kudro, one of four pieces to be performed on Friday and Saturday during Full Tilt.
Currie climbs down from the box to have the entire dance floor at her disposal. She throws up her arms and moves them like she’s swimming or scratching the air.
A video plays simultaneously on Moker Wernikowski’s laptop. It shows Currie emerging from a white sheet of cloth, her face growing as she approaches the viewer. Later in the film, there are two bodies mirrored under a sheet. These images will be projected during Currie’s performance.
Garry Wasyliw created the video and audio for this production, relying as much on improvisation as did Moker Wernikowski in choreographing the 22-minute dance.
“My philosophy of choreography is that I want the movements to feel really right for the dancers who are doing them. So I almost always start with improvising,” says Moker Wernikowski, a longtime dancer and choreographer in Regina.
“I give them an image and I let them improvise. And then I see what movements look great on them and they love doing and that suit them … and I pull those movements and integrate them into my choreography. So it really becomes their dance as well as my dance.”
For the video projections, “We improvised some scenes, then I went away and edited,” Wasyliw says, “… then we came back and reshot everything and we kept recycling it or recirculating it.”
When Moker Wernikowski and Wasyliw began discussing Kudro in summer 2018, they had no grand designs.
Moker Wernikowski knew she wanted a solo dancer, and their theme began with “the idea of stillness in the midst of chaos.”
In early workshop performances, the abstract dance “spoke to people in different ways,” she says. “It resonated with them and gave them different ideas that related to their own life and different meanings.”
“And that’s the intention,” Wasyliw adds. “Like, there aren’t symbols or secret meanings here or anything. …
“It’s a deliberate attempt through improvisation and review to let the art take its own course and not tell the viewer what to see. The viewer will bring their own personal associations.”
At this point, Currie has the dance down as “muscle memory,” and a goal during rehearsals is to work on her intention and visual focus: “There’s a lot of gestures … and wherever I look, I want the audience to kind of look.”
For much of the performance, Currie wears casual black boots.
“We were trying to develop a performance piece that could be performed in a number of places, not necessarily in a fixed dance studio,” Wasyliw says.
FULL TILT
Kudro is the final piece in Full Tilt: Contemporary Dance Choreography by Connie Moker Wernikowski.
Three others precede it, and they’re all very different works.
“One of my goals was to make a program that is accessible to all audiences and that has a variety of music and a variety of styles,” Moker Wernikowski says.
She wants to production to be “interesting for people who like one thing and people who like the other thing.”
The first piece, whatever they sing, is somewhat inspired by an ee cummings poem and features four dancers, including Currie. This is Moker Wernikowski’s “ode to birds.”
“I love birds and I’m worried about their diminished numbers,” she says.
In Salute to the Early Rockin’ Women, Carleigh Macdonald and Natasha Molnar-fluter dance to music by Grace Slick and Janis Joplin.
“I was deeply moved as a young woman, a young teenager, by their music and by their fierceness ... and their ability to kind of make it in the world of rock ’n’ roll, which was so male,” Moker Wernikowski says.
“I like my program to have variety so it’s not all the same, and I love that music. And I’ve been dancing to it since I was 13, so I just decided to choreograph to it.”
Between those two pieces, dancers from the Youth Ballet of Saskatchewan will perform Hold, choreographed by Josephine Craig Penner.
Moker Wernikowski wants to contribute to dance by “encourag(ing) and support(ing) younger dancers and emerging choreographers.”
Full Tilt has three showtimes, all at the University of Regina Riddell Centre Shu-box Theatre: Friday, Jan. 17, at 7:30 p.m., and Saturday, Jan. 18, at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
My philosophy of choreography is that I want the movements to feel really right for the dancers who are doing them.