Saturday, January 29, 2011

PuSh Review #8: Sound Machine at The Dance Centre


Massimo Bertinelli (left) and Béatrice Jaccard in sound machine

Ever wonder what a mushroom sounds like? How about a tomato? What song would a fish sing if it could? These and other questions form the surreal, off-beat core of Zurich-based compagnie drift's sound machine, on at The Dance Centre through this evening in a co-production between PuSh and the Centre's Global Dance Connections series.

Beginning with the premise that the inaudible can somehow be made audible, performers/lab technicians Béatrice Jaccard, Massimo Bertinelli, and François Gendre use laptop computers, live and recorded video feeds, digitally wired gloves, and all manner of additional technology to first translate the sounds of silence into musical algorithms, and then to compose songs and movement sequences around them. The result is what they call a "musical concert in dance." And, indeed, the trio put me in mind of a Dadaist version of Jacques Brel, complete with Jaccard's body at one point doing a kinesthetic version of "La Valse à mille fois."

Absurd. Unexpected. Deeply satisfying. In other words, everything we've come to expect from a PuSh show.

P.

No comments: