Dance Preview: This Crazy Show is full of the folly and madness of childhood
Written for Daily Hive by @ileannacheladyn
The title says it all: this show is going to be crazy.
This Crazy Show, premiering at The Dance Centre, is Noam Gagnon’s latest work under his company Vision Impure, a satellite company of The Holy Body Tattoo. It’s full of the folly and madness of childhood, but maintains the choreographer’s trademark of impossible physical ferocity that never ceases to be a pleasure to watch.
With many, many disco balls, and a full range of gender roles, Gagnon hopes to break a few hearts with this show. Thankfully, heartbreak can almost be assured knowing his electric physicality that probes the deepest, darkest, and rarely touched places of the psyche. He takes the metaphor of plastic for human transformation to explore the synthetic, malleable, elastic, yet supportive, aspects of identity and emotion.
Despite Gagnon’s history of creating fearless work that goes into dark and transcendental places, This Crazy Show originated from a different impulse: a place of lightness, fun, and, of course, craziness. This paradox of breaking hearts while maintaining a we’re-here-to-party attitude, is both part of Gagnon’s personality and his work.
He cites Leigh Bowry, a London-based performance artist known for his shocking, challenging, and subversive work, as a big influence on this show. Bowry’s depictions of beautified monsters, his interconnectivity of pain and pleasure, and his perception-pushing corporeal performance, have informed the way Gagnon developed this work.
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“What we fear is what we love,” Gagnon says, “and tapping into a greater pain, a greater desire, a greater joy creates a larger than life performance.”
Gagnon hopes this “largeness” will invite a technicolour of opinions and experiences of the work from the audience. He wants to emphasize the myriad of colours that make life what it is by presenting a theatrical journey of shifting identities.
From beauty to sadness, absurdity to hilarity, exactitude to delicacy, This Crazy Show brings it all for the audience (and will bring it out of the audience). Try not to be fooled by the sweat bound to be flying off Gagnon’s body – he knows how to give just enough to let us, the audience, choose our own experience.
This Crazy Show
Where: Scotiabank Dance Centre – 677 Davie St, Vancouver
When: From Thursday, October 20, to Saturday, October 22, 8 pm
Tickets: On Tickets Tonight, $20-$32
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