I will preface this blog with an apology. This should have been published a week ago, but due to some critical failings in technology, I have lost the early parts of this writing a few times. I do know to save frequently, but the critical crashing of computers sometimes creates a condition when even saving is useless. I am working on sorting this out. In the meantime, I am happy to bring you this blog about a most enchanting and culturally Canadian evening at Centre in the Square on the 28th of December, the twilight days of the year of 2010.
I will first make the disclaimer that I am not a dance critic. I can only barely identity a triple pirouette from a quad, and I wouldn’t be able to identify what makes good form in a rapid sequence if I tried. I do not talk style, or technical ability in this review. What I will approach is content and how this particular production of The Nutcracker, danced and staged by Ballet Jorgen stands out in its cultural context. I am familiar with The Nutcracker as a musician and having seen staged a few productions ranging from theatre acting to ballet.
To pack up the family and go to a local stage to catch some rendition of Tchaikovsky’s best known work is a part seasonal tradition for many. Without criticism of the story itself, or explanation even (as The Nutcracker (Wikipedia link) is a well known classic with much written about it, sparing this writer the words), I was treated to a special feast of the unexpected despite my familiarity with this ballet.
The beginning of the story is placed in a Northern Ontario town and to my delight against Tom Thompson paintings as a backdrop. The denouement of the early story presents us with an artist dressed in tradition Voyageur garb with a traditional ceinture fléchée presenting the children with carvings of Canadian animals and a Tom Thompson style tableau to his beloved. The story carries on with the introduction of the nutcracker, right to his bitter demise in a fire orchestrated by a jealous youngster.
Next in the story, the battle. Traditionally, this is between more nutcracker soldiers and the Mouse King. Here, mounties come to the rescue in full dress uniform, saving the children from a most nimble, and horrifying bat. The creatures are all Canadian with beautifully choreographed dance moving the dancers as these animals would but maintaining the beauty of the ballet.
Truly the most charming is in the second act when the Spanish, Arabian, Chinese, and Russian dances are performed with brilliant choreography by Canadian animals. It was with delight that I watched teasing raccoons, scampering bears, frogs, squirrels, and the truly haunting and graceful loons perform a magical feast of beauty. The charm of the score is beautifully matched with the creatures and the spirit of the tale. What a delight!
Ballet Jorgen’s staging and choreography is innovative, and charmingly Canadian. From my amateur perspective, the dance itself was smart, performers truly professional and accomplished, including even the youngest of the cast. I do recommend this particular production if you have the opportunity to witness it.
Rob Reid’s article in The Record about this staging of The Nutcracker.
Upon entering this third room of installations by Ernest Daetwyler, in Gallery Stratford, I encountered an enormous installation that resembled initially a sputnik. life is but a dream is a large steel structure with protruding arms and it has a very satellite appearance. Its stem-like protrusions reach and demand exploration with each terminus having obvious circuitry on the ends. Again, this piece looms large and threatening, rather cyborg like in space. Approaching this piece in the dramatically lit room requires a degree of bravery. The lighting multiplies the piece threefold, and in larger dimensions onto the walls. It is in these shadows that we see the less threatening, less cybernetic beauty of the piece where it starts to resemble more a geranium, or a dandelion gone to seed, or a large toy.
Horror begins upon interaction with the piece. Several proximity sensors focused around the piece pick up movement and create a reaction in circuit boards attached the ends of the stems. From electronic noises, to lights, and speech, song, and even a set of illuminated lips, the piece begins a cacophony of confusion. It is a chorus of the unnatural: a symphony of all the most heinous sounds of modern toys that parents wish they could simply shut off. And yet, the piece draws you in.
“A visitor mentioned that the experience of life is but a dream is exactly as a person with ADHD experiences their surrounding,” said Daetwyler. The piece keeps the viewer in constant interaction yet never able to focus unless a certain piece really grabs particular attention. Even then, figuring out the triggers, the location of which proximity sensor for a particular reaction could require hours of experimentation. Even within the threat of this floating monstrosity, the desire to experience it from all angles, at different speeds of movement, is almost insatiable. The threat, however, is never diminished, as the intensity of the experience keeps the viewer horrified at the loudness of the sounds and noises, but intrigued to keep exploring.
Daetwyler lists the nuts and bolts of the construction as such
“There are close to a hundred dismantled toy speakers mounted on a transparent acrylic plate at the end of a 4’ galvanized steel rod. 32 motion detectors react to movement and activate each three toys, they send signals back to a programmed control board inside the steel sphere which then sends activates each of the three toys playing its tune from 5 seconds to 3 minutes. Depending on the movement of visitors the piece can be settle or all toys plus lights react at the same time, resulting in a rather confusing audio scape.”
It is the desire to control our environment that keeps the viewer interacting with life is but a dream. Once it is understood that proximity sensors cause the reactions in the piece, the desire to affect certain reactions, or even to turn it off by staying very still, is the ultimate outcome.
This installation requires a great deal of time to fully explore. It keeps the interest of the viewer, appeals to a sense of exploration, our desire to control or just a sense of play encourages interaction and return visits.
life is but a dream, as a series of installations, is a total escape from reality, but never denies the harshness of the real world. It may do just the opposite. The experience in the three rooms very much mirrors the natural world, flipped, or even exaggerated whereby the exaggeration brings into question just how preposterous our hyperreal lives really are. It is easy to view Daetwyler’s work and wonder about not only the loss of magic, play, imagination and creativity, but also about what things have caused their demise.
life is but a dream will be at Gallery Stratford till December 19th. For a small cost of $5 for adults, this show is not to be missed.
Please note: today is the last day to get to Gallery Stratford to see Life is But a Dream by Ernest Daetwyler. What are you waiting for? GO!
Gallery Stratford has just informed me that they have extended Life is But a Dream till December 19th! Still, GO!
The second space of this fabulous group of installations that I wandered into beckoned me with a strange cloud shaped object. Upon entering the room, I was blown away with three forms made entirely out of stuffed animals. Yet, the medium is so transformed that it will suspend your disbelief. These giant forms hang from the ceiling with a lightness and a humour that can only be garnered by the medium of creation. There is a ridiculousness and playfulness but also a threatening aspect exists. These floating monsters impose enormously over the space with eyes of hundreds of stuffed creatures glaring out of the sun, which isn’t the focus of the piece, but their presence is undeniable. Sun and Clouds are all beautifully crafted and float with whimsy overhead. The soft pinks and whites with the bright sun are like a scene from a fairytale.
On the wall across from this is what children see as a masterpiece, but there again to an adult has both a whimsical beckoning and a threatening push. The Wall of Nightmares and Dreams yells in loud colour to come and touch. Toys are fixed to the wall but in a way that they are still operable. Standing almost to the ceiling, thousands of toys stare out with a seductive call to be played with. Two things make this threatening above all:
- most of the toys are way out of reach. A child stood at this wall could play only so much with most of the toys in a plane over their heads. There is an increased desire for the toys that can’t be reached. Even as an adult who may or may not want to interact tactilely with the piece, the eye plays on the same desire. Many of the toys are from several different decades and the nostalgia of seeing a toy from one’s youth is an experience to behold. Combing over this wall in its height and breadth makes one hungry for more play with it. The feeling of missing something is intense.
- the wall has the sense of imposition, and the thought that i could collapse it really present. The toys are definitely all fixed onto the wall, and rationally the mind knows that it won’t move but still the sense height and breadth, that it pops out into space, the bright and bold colours, the nostalgia, the playability, the transcendence between “touch” and “don’t touch” in an art gallery, make this piece feel like it could jump off the wall and pull an onlooker into it’s well ordered mess- a closet being open and the contents falling into the opener.
- the extreme kitsch transformed into art by size also creates a sense of fear. Gazing at the piece, anyone can remember cluttered rumpus and toy rooms, and the adult reaction. That sense of a closet being opened and the contents tumbling - the packed density of toys in space where they do not belong. Dense toys belong on the floor.
- there is a frustration in having toys nails onto a wall. They beckon to be interacted with, however, they are stationary.
The final piece is Monster Sofa and Monster TV. These two pieces are a sofa and a television covered in stuffed animals. The sofa is meant to be sat on, and the television has a looping video of something seeming like snow, but perhaps more purposeful and sentient.
The “monster” of the sofa and television don’t only have to do with the fact that these have the appearance of being constructed out of stuffed animals, but also, that these are monstrous in appearance, and for their actual useful purpose. Sitting on the sofa (again, Daetwyler transcends the rules of art in galleries) is not an appealing thought. Much like the sun and clouds, hundreds of eyes, ears, bodies create the furniture. Being stared down by furniture makes the act of sitting an imposition. Also, the stuffed creatures wouldn’t present a particularly comfortable sit.
The television is so distracting by the brightly coloured creatures and again, the eyes staring back with the vapid grins stitched on that only stuffed animals can possess, that watching the video is difficult. When not distracted by the creatures, their open gaze and the vacuous appearance trivialises and ridicules the scene. Yet the video, it should be noted that the video is based on the movement of fireflies drawn into light. Amongst all the eyes, the garish colours, the threats, is a single moment of peace that is almost intangible due to it’s enclosure and threatening and uncomfortable viewing space. Not only is it the only non-commodity, non-disneyfied piece, it is only viewable through a screen. This room is like being in a toy horror film, looking through the screen to an outside space of serenity - an inverse hyperreality, a reality that is thrown at us with eyes, colour, and the kitsch of what we consider nostalgia. It brings to question what realities that are sold to us, and what we accept. The beauty of fireflies in a screen, versus a toy and commodity horror.
All this sitting and watching also happens under a pink and white stuffed animal cloud. A living room of fantasy but with its purpose skewed.
Stay tuned for the final part in this series concluding this group of installations by Ernest Daetwyler at Gallery Stratford.
Gallery Stratford is really a beautiful space. Tucked into a beautiful park, this gallery is currently featuring the work of Kitchener artist Ernest Daetwyler. Having read about Daetwyler’s works, and seeing his show in the KW|AG in Kitchener, Reality in Reverse [Barn Raising], I knew I was in for a treat.
The first space I entered contained the installation of a piece called Dream Spheres. The image above is of one of the spheres that draws you into the space. Once in, you are greeted with a whimsical scene of massive tree trunks and floating spheres in space. The escape into the space is complete as the space, with this site-specific installation, is completely transformed. I found it difficult to focus on a critical reading of the work as my desire for play and interaction with this new-found wonderful world beckoned me away from my usual pragmatic thought process.
The tree trunks are aligned against two walls. Carefully crafted to fit the space exactly. The craft is so perfect that the aspects of it disappear unless you force yourself to really examine them. The presence of these silent giants with the spheres, floating like enormous bubbles, pull you into what has the sense of a forest from a fairy tale. The balls, even though they are large structures constructed from steel, plywood, and plastic wrap, have a sense of the ethereal. Their presence looms with a shimmery softness, making the solidity of the silent tree trunks even more looming. We were invited to interact with the pieces, and even though my rational mind knew that the spheres were of sturdy construction (I could see the precision in the craft), I still hesitated with the apprehension of not wanting to burst this delightfully enormous soft bubble floating motionless before me.
There is also a contrast between the natural and the manufactured. The trees, even though are objects from the natural world, are unexpected in the gallery space and contrasted with the manufactured bubble-like spheres, they seem to reverse the notion of the natural and the manufactured by their unbelonging. Trees have the sense of being sculptured and manufactured, and the spheres seem to float as though they grew up as the natural beings of the gallery space.
I will be covering the rest of Daetwyler’s Gallery Stratford work in two more parts, and finishing it off in a fourth about the barn raising in the KW|AG. This group of site-specific installations, called life is but a dream, will be at Gallery Stratford until the 12th of December. The $5 admission fee is more than worth the cost to be able to enter to see this.
