Kokoro Dance presents Standing Wave in Book of Love
November 25-28 and December 2-4, 8 pm
Roundhouse Performance Centre, 181Roundhouse Mews
$30/$25
Special 30th Anniversary Performance, Sat, December 5, 5 pm, $100 per ticket. See details below.
Kokoro Box Office: 604-662-4966 or online Kokoro Box Office
Ample parking is available at the Roundhouse and the Canada Line Yaletown Station is just across the street at Davie and Pacific.
Two years of preparation have gone into the creation of this exciting new work that celebrates our 30th anniversary of creating viscerally evocative and provocative dance. We are grateful for funding support for this new work from the City of Vancouver, British Columbia Arts Council, Province of British Columbia, Canada Council for the Arts, Hamber Foundation, Vancouver Foundation, and the Roundhouse Arts and Recreation Society.
Book of Love features choreography by Barbara Bourget and myself and we perform this work with two outstanding dancers, Molly McDermott and Billy Marchenski in a wonderous environment that includes costumes and set by British artist Jonathan Baldock, lighting by Gerald King, and beautiful music composed by Jeffrey Ryan that will be performed live by the superlative Standing Wave music ensemble. Standing Wave’s musicians are Olivia Blander, cello, AK Coope, clarinet and bass clarinet, Vern Griffiths, percussion, Christie Reside, flute, Allen Stiles, piano, and Rebecca Whitling, violin.
Barbara initially was inspired by the lyrics to a song entitled The Book of Love written by Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields. Here’s some of the lyrics:
The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It’s full of charts and facts and figures
and instructions for dancing
but I, I love it when you read to me
and you, you can read me anything
The creation of a new dance work is a magical process. We began by choreographing about 90 minutes of material to music that we were listening to including Texas Flood by Stevie Ray Vaughn, Nana Del Caballo Grande by Camarón De La Isla, The Book of Love versions by The Magnetic Fields and Peter Gabriel, Tony Wilson’s The Long Walk, Swan’s album, To Be Kind, and the soundtrack to Sankai Juku’s Tobari. Jeff Ryan came to our work-in-progress rehearsals and performances, erased the music as best he could from his consciousness, but kept the tempo’s and time signatures. He then wrote his own response to our theme of creating a Book of Love and distilled the score to sixty-one minutes in length. Jonathan Baldock flew in from an artist residency in Germany to take part in our creation process. Jonathan is inspired by Dada, the art movement in the early 20th century that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality. Dada challenged the status quo including the presumptions of prevailing artistic trends. Jonathan challenged us to do our choreography in vibrant costumes of saturated primary colours with floor length sleeves. He created large head pieces of sculpted wicker to exaggerate and confuse our personalities. Jeff’s music and Jonathan’s costumes transformed our choreography into something we could not imagine ourselves. We are blessed to be able to work with such talented artists. Still waiting to surprise us is Gerald King’s evocative lighting. Gerald has worked with us for thirty-one years. We met while performing with Touchstone Theatre a year before we formed Kokoro Dance. We have relied on him ever since to bathe our work in his own inspired emotive lighting textures. Molly McDermott and Billy Marchenski have been invaluable to us in this creative process. Their discipline, energy, intelligence, physical agility, and dedication have played a profound part in the building of this piece. Standing Wave’s interpretation of Jeff’s music is simply glorious. It is such a pleasure to dance to live music played by outstanding musicians.
We would love to perform Book of Love for you. If you want to help us continue for another 30 years, please consider coming to our closing night performance that takes place December 5th at 5pm followed by a 30th anniversary celebration event with food and drink and a silent auction of desirable goods and services. Tickets are $100 with at $65 tax receipt provided upon purchase. If you don’t want to wait that long to see the show, take advantage of our opening night two for one offer by using the code BOL25 when you purchase tickets for the November 25th performance. Simply purchase 2 tickets, enter the code, and you will be charged for only one ticket at the online Kokoro Box Office or by calling us at 604.662.4966.
– Jay Hirabayashi, Kokoro Dance
