A dark stage is lit by a beam of light, which falls directly on internationally renowned cellist Raphael Weinroth-Browne. With his bow, the show begins with a haunting solo.
Raphael Weinroth-Browne. Lighting design by Gabriel Cropley. Photo by Curtis Perry.
After several minutes, Yvonne Coutts, the show’s award-winning choreographer and dancer, appears on the stage. Coutts stumbles across the floor, but appears to be held in by four invisible walls. She crashes down again and again. With her feet keeping pace with the frenetic cello, she circles and paces the black room. The tempo opens and shuts. Finally, a single note bangs out and closes the introduction, jolting the Ottawa audience to attention.
The solo dance and music embody the meeting of two separate works by Coutts and Weinroth-Browne via the pair’s collaboration, Empty Space | Empty Time with Worlds Within, showing at the LabO Theatre this weekend.
With the creative use of looping, Weinroth-Browne’s striking cello work is given the liberty to stand on its own while simultaneously complimenting a more vivid picture of Coutts’ dance. The tense and driving rhythms are chaotic at times, but expansive and soothing at others. Those complex sounds are accentuated by lighting designer Gabriel Cropley’s sparse but carefully placed beams of light. At one point, Weinroth-Browne looks like he is floating in water, driving at one of the show’s main themes: the timelessness of nature.
Creators of Empty Space | Empty Time with Worlds Within say the idea was built from a simple seed that recreates itself into different forms. Those forms are reiterated both by the repetitive movements of the dancers and the live musical looping.
“Many of the choices I made in this process were purely intuitive and in relationship to the artists,” Coutts told Apt613. “The dance artists are generous and profound movers who understand the complexities of abstract composition and I just knew these four women would immerse themselves in the process. They have supported me beyond measure.”
Coutts’ bird’s-eye choreography skillfully carves shapes out of the dark room through the physicality and motion of her dancers. When the quartet appear on stage, they form a line, like they are representing a beginning. At one point, she places each one at four different points of the stage to form a square-like shape. The performances, by dancers Amanda Bon, Jacqueline Ethier, Alya Graham, Sarah Hopkin, and Weinroth-Browne on the cello, are highly physical. Together, they have coherence, but individually, they diverge via their own individual movements. One by one, they move in—and one by one, they peel away, touching on another of the show’s themes: presence and absence.
The pieces comes together to fall apart. One intricate song by Weinroth-Browne sounds like it’s attempting to tell a sensational story. Then, toward the show’s end, the music becomes more feverish and the dancers twitch like mere molecules, advancing ahead with jerky movements. Slowly, the individual figures meld, moving together with their arms extending over-head like ripples in an ocean. The haunting choreography was inspired by Weinroth-Browne’s equally soul-stirring album, Worlds Within.
“It was a chance occurrence that I came to hear Worlds Within and in taking a chance to speak with Raphael, it changed the direction of the work entirely,” says Coutts. “At one point, the dance material that is now the core of the work was discarded but has now become the full expression. A similar intuitive decision happened with the lighting designer in that I happened to see his work with another artist and just spontaneously inquired if he would work with us. All of them have altered every aspect of my ability to follow a new trajectory in the unfolding of work.”
Weinroth-Browne has described the album as an expression of “emerging into innocence and wonder (“From Within”), growing into self-awareness (“From Above”) followed by chaos and upheaval (“Tumult”), making peace with what is (“Fade[Afterglow]”), and returning to the infinite (“Unending II”).”
In viewing Empty Space | Empty Time with Worlds Within, I felt that being present versus being absent was effectively expressed through its use of space and energy. It did so by moving the audience’s attention from the black stage to a singular line of light; the dancers’ individuality that dissolved into togetherness; and the traditional music, which was layered to create more digitally modern textures. The breathtaking brilliance of this show was evident from the standing ovation it received from a packed LabO theatre.
Empty Space | Empty Time with Worlds Within has concluded its run, but be sure to follow Ottawa Dance Directive to find out more about performances like this in the city.
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