Kokoro Dance

Reading the Bones

The Vancouver Playhouse

Reading the Bones is an aleatory performance piece where we have thrown the bones of past choreography onto the stage to see if these favourite movement sequences still have significance outside of their original historical context. We looked for phrases and paragraphs from from our past repertoire of over 190 dance works and picked Impending Death (1990), Truths of the Blood (1996), Embryotrophic Cavatina (1998), Crime Against Grace (2001), ( ) (2003), Here to There (2005), Falling Down (2006), Bellatrix (2007), F (2009), Music of Amber (2011), and Life (2013). We set these selections on five women of different generations who each perform all of these excerpts except for Impending Death (only Barbara) and Here to There (only Katie, Molly, Deanna, and Salomé). We structured the piece to allow overlaps in starting points, to allow at least one solo for each dancer, to allow individual freedom of expression, even in ensemble sections, while demanding allegiance to form and sequence. It is our practice to allow dancers to go in and out of phase with one another, to sometimes lead, sometime follow. Spatial and temporal relationships develop spontaneously or, possibly, they do not. Harmony and dissonance arise as a matter of course that is influenced by the prescribed structural sequence. The music and lighting also overlap with the dance as Joseph’s music was composed only with his intuitive sense of what we were looking for and Gerald’s lighting deliberately lingers or foreshadows as movement enters or leaves his pools and shafts of luminosity.