Artistic Director Christopher House can’t wait to get to rehearsal of his new Toronto Dance Theatre piece, Pteros Tactics. “This process of exploration is so necessary,” says House. “There isn’t a typical day at this point in the process!”
He clears his head of worries about tomorrow night’s opening, about grants or box office and focuses on the real time rehearsal. “Everything else goes out of focus when you’re dealing with the business at hand of working on the group. As a choreographer, you respond to what the performers do. You’re challenging each other, and the audience will help in crafting this, by the end of the five performances.”
The starting point for Pteros Tactics is an essay by Canadian poet Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet. House explains, “The piece is about desire—the instant of desire rather than the history of a personal love affair.” Carson writes about how desire moves between the lover and the beloved, like a ball being thrown from one person to another: “Desire moves. Eros is a verb.”
That idea of movement is the perfect jumping-off point for a choreographer like House. “This idea of the lover’s ball—we spent time playing ball, making these structures,” he says. “We used video a lot and very often these precise gestures disappear but the process of learning the movement takes us closer and closer to the truth of the piece.”
For Pteros Tactics, House is working with ten extraordinary dancers (Alana Elmer, Syreeta Hector, David Houle, Yuichiro Inoue, Pulga Muchochoma, Kaitlin Standeven, Brodie Stevenson, Nai Shi Wang, Sarah Wasik and Linnea Wong), along with composer Phil Strong and Belgian dramaturge Guy Cools. “The inspiration comes very much from the collaborative process. I used to want to be in control of every detail, and now I’m less interested in seeing perfectly-executed movement and more interested in watching the dancers negotiate the series of tasks in their way. The dancers are great—it’s such a huge privilege to work with these dancers.”
“I’m trying to create a frame for who these performers are—about the impossibility of desire,” says House. “Really, it’s as ephemeral as dance. And some of it is actually quite funny—we just did a performance of about two-thirds of this piece in Victoria, and it was nice to hear the audience enjoying the humour.” Pteros (in Greek) means the transformation of eros that Socrates called “wing-growing necessity”—a kind of epiphany or moment of enlightenment.
Pteros Tactics has taken ten weeks from first rehearsal to first performance—a lengthy devising time, especially considering today’s performance world, pressured by the cost of rehearsal space and dancers’ time. “Developing a new work takes the time that is available—and that said, this one took more time than usual,” admits House. But he refuses to get distracted by administrative worries when he’s engrossed in a new project. “Choreography is the main thing I do. Everything else is to make it possible! Every project you take on is a chance to learn something new for the audience.”
WHERE/WHEN: Pteros Tactics at Harbourfront Centre’s Fleck Dance Theatre (207 Queens Quay West) Feb 16 – 20, 8 pm; $25 – $38 (Students/Seniors $19 – $32), 416-973-4000.
Lisa Pasold is a Toronto-based poet, author and journalist; she is also co-organizer of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair. In 2009, she published her first novel, Rats of Las Vegas (Enfield & Wizenty). When she’s not busy reporting and writing, Lisa leads entertaining walking tours of Toronto.
Performance photos by Kristy Kennedy; portrait of Christopher House by David Leyes.
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Gorgeous movements captured to highlight what looks to be a fantastic show.