DanceWorks presents
The Vision Impure
Choreography by Noam Gagnon, Nigel Charnock, Daniel Léveillé
Part of Harbourfront Centre’s NextSteps Series
November 6 & 7 @ Enwave Theatre
By Tina Chu
I’ve been stacking anticipation onto the empty stage for the past half hour and as the lights dim, I’m overcome by the stillness hushing the audience, a stillness that produces what I’ve been waiting for all week, Noam Gagnon in his solo performance, The Vision Impure.
Beginning with his own choreography, Gone, Unfold me, and A few, Gagnon navigates through an experience of situating oneself in loss and mending. Punctuated by films composed through the combined efforts of Gagnon, Aram Cohen, and Jaimie Griffiths, the use of multimedia intensifies Gagnon’s movements and helps to immerse the audience without being overpowering. Though, to overpower a performer like Gagnon is probably not an easy undertaking.
Startling and thrillingly beautiful, Gagnon’s choreography holds the entire audience in breathless suspense as he saturates his body with the full momentum of insignificant gestures — a twist of the head, a bend of the fingers, and amplifies these otherwise negligible signs into shocking extensions of body and space. At once his body is yielding and resisting, enacting trauma, writhing, yet flickering between an agonized desperation and a dazzling resilience.
After Gagnon’s stark choreography, Nigel Charnock’s When that I was bursts onto the stage in an eruption of blaring music and strobe lights. At first the audience is disoriented, haunted by the deeply somber tone of Gone, Unfold me, and A few, but Gagnon’s charisma is so magnetic, it takes only moments to adjust and be taken to wherever Gagnon moves towards. And where the audience finds themselves is a space of absurd and flirtatious moments unified by Gagnon the comedian, the striptease, the lover, and versatile performer.
Charnock’s vision has Gagnon dancing to stand-up comedy, musical remixes and classics, spoken word, and, the most enthralling of them all, Gagnon’s own, live recitation of personal anecdotes en français. Though the complex pastiche is divergent within itself — at once, seductive, outrageously silly, tragic, then ecstatic — it never fails to delight and extract howls of laughter from the audience.
Following Charnock’s boisterous choreography, Daniel Léveillé’s is comparatively understated — even its title, Untitled No. 1, is an acute contrast. Set to clips of Outkast’s high-energy drum and bass beats then abrupt gaps of silence, the piece is a series of controlled, repeated, yet at times, wavering stances and movements. Its rhythmic cycle is reminiscent of a clock ticking, and, as a clock does, it seems to physically manifest and represent the passage of time.
On the whole, I feel ill-equipped to parse the meaning of Gagnon’s bare movements in Untitled No. 1. The only signals I am able to definitively discern are those conveying the piece’s end, which occurs subtly, culminating in two motions of the hand. Vanishing in an instant, it leaves me feeling stranded, as if at the end of a visual broken telephone, certain only of having missed the necessary indicators.
This difficulty and uncertainty is what makes Untitled No. 1 a potent finish to Vision Impure. “Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily,” quotes the performance’s program, a maxim credited to François, Duc de la Rouchefoucauld and like this maxim, Gagnon’s performance lays bare the inexistence of static meaning and cites perception as a phenomenon steady only in its imperfections and constant oscillation.
