In the words of bad stand-up comedians everywhere... ”I know you’re out there, I can hear you breathing”. In this case “breathing” means page views tracked by Blogspot. And since this is the 16th post, you’re presumably enjoying it. Or at least enduring it, hoping it will get better at some point. In either case, you’ve seen how much fun we’ve been having putting the show together and you’re at least a bit curious as to what the finished product will look like.

But you have questions. You have concerns. You have doubts. Fear not, faithful blog followers. As a public service to you, here on VIVID4 World Premiere Day, I have taken the liberty of putting together a VIVID4 Audience FAQ.

1. Pick a day to attend the show. Thursday is the Premiere with all the pomp and circumstance. But Friday and Saturday offer a discussion on dramaturgy at 8:00 between the shows with Kathleen and Tristan Whiston. Never heard of “dramaturgy”? I hadn’t either until I became exposed to all this contemporary dance production stuff. Tristan is an interesting guy and well-spoken. You will likely learn something here. And then there’s the Sunday matinee, and it might be fun doing the outdoor knitting installation on a beautiful late June afternoon.


2. Go here and pre-purchase your tickets:

VIVID4 tickets on TicketWeb

Do it now.

Online price is $22 plus a $3.75 service charge. So you’re saving $4.75 over the door price and have the peace of mind of knowing you have your ticket and won’t get all the way down to the theatre only to find it’s been sold out. I have noted that it is a relatively small venue.

TicketWeb is operated by Ticketmaster, the world’s #1 ticketing portal, so your online transaction is as safe and secure as it can be. If you still have concerns about putting your credit card info over the interwebs, you can call TicketWeb at 1-888-222-6608.

When you purchase tickets through TicketWeb, they will not be mailed to you. We will have your tickets at the Winchester Theatre box office. Simply come on down, give your name and have the credit card you used to purchase the tickets. You can pick up your tickets anywhere from 30 minutes before the show up until the start of the show.


3. Get down to the theatre.
Winchester Street is east off Parliament, between Wellesley and Carlton. The theatre has a map and info here: Winchester Street Theatre location
For a specific TTC recommendation, this site is useful: myttc. Just put in your home address, put the "To:" address as “80 Winchester Street” and it will give you the best route.

Here's how the theatre looks from the Google Map car:

View Larger Map


4. Schedule
The first show at 7:00 (1:00 on Sunday) is the youth company performance entitled “The Wild in Us”. Admission is free to this show for youth 15 – 25 years old. Those of us who may be slightly older than 25 are asked to pay $5 - $10. All box office proceeds from this performance go directly to the youth company performers. This show is not ticketed.

When the youth show finishes, you will be directed outside the theater to a lovely outdoor space beside the theatre. You will see about 30 chairs set up in roughly a circle and running between the chairs is the 100-ft long scarf you’ve read about. At each chair, there is a ball of yarn and knitting needles attached to the scarf. Sit down and knit. If you don’t know how to knit, there will be professional knitters on hand to help you. This may be your opportunity to learn a useful skill. If you don’t/can’t/won’t knit, then in the centre of this massive scarf, dancers from the youth company will be doing what is called “flocking” and you are encouraged to join them. This basically involves slow movements in which you follow the person in front of you. The movement turns and twists around so you’re always following someone new. I did this “flocking” in the Casa Loma stables during Nuit Blanche at about 3:00 am a few years ago and it was a lot of fun.

At 8:15, you will be asked to start heading back inside for the main show, "Unravelling the Tight Weave". This show does require a ticket and if you don’t have one by this point (and really, given this helpful and informative FAQ, there’s no excuse not to), you can get one at the box office, assuming it’s not sold out. The Winchester Street Theatre does not have numbered seats. There will be a number on your ticket, but it’s just a ticket number, not a seat number. Seating is first come, first served. But don’t worry, there are no bad seats.

5. Running Times
The youth show is a half hour. The main show runs about an hour and a quarter. There is no intermission, so visit one of the funky two level washrooms (straight through the door before you go into the theatre) before the show.
Afterwards, why not enjoy a late dinner or drinks from one of the fine restaurants in the Cabbagetown neighbourhood. Here’s a list: Cabbagetown Restaurants. On Thursday night after the show (9:45-ish), the audience is invited to join the dancers and crew for our opening night reception at the Peartree Restaurant.


If you have any questions I haven’t covered above, drop me an email at jeff.moskal@reasondetre.com, or leave a comment below. I look forward to seeing you sometime this weekend.

Having a toddler means never sleeping in much past 7:00 am. And even though Sunday was Father’s Day, I was up at 7:15 when I heard our son stirring.

I was letting Kathleen sleep as long as possible before she had to go to rehearsal at 10:00 am. She had been up practically all night, working on character details, uploading videos of the run-through to YouTube for the dancers and finalizing music editing.

So I woke up with our son and went downstairs to find a Father’s Day cake Kathleen had baked. Baked at 5:00 am, just before she had gone to bed. That’s pretty special. So I was more than happy to let her sleep.

As I was making our son’s ‘toast soldiers’, Kathleen’s Blackberry went bing. Normally I wouldn’t check her messages, but with so much going on, I hit the button to see what had caused the phone to bing. Interview at CIUT radio– 9:30. Well, that was news to me. I recalled there was a dance show on the University of Toronto radio station Sunday mornings, and apparently she was supposed to do an interview regarding VIVID4.

I went upstairs and whispered in her ear. "CIUT? 9:30?"

Her eyes shot open. "Oh yeah..."

I offered to drive, and threw some clothes on myself and our son as Kathleen took a bath. No matter how late she is, she always seems to find time for a bath. Traffic was light and we made good time, pulling up to the campus radio studio building at 9:25. Perfect. Except for one thing...

The building wasn’t there.

In place of the old house on St. George Street across from the Robarts Library that had been CIUT, there was a shiny new glass and steel building under construction. Definitely no radio station there.

Calls to the station went unanswered, since they were on the air. Kathleen’s Blackberry again came to the rescue as we looked up the new address. It was now in Hart House, kind of an arts and cultural student centre at UofT. But when we arrived, we didn't see any signs to indicate the studio location. Fortunately a fit and friendly staff member from the Hart House Athletic Centre led the way inside. In the end, Kathleen had a great interview with Ted Fox and the Evi-Dance crew, talking about the youth show, the knitting and how her husband thought the piece was going to be so cool because of the mythology aspect of the Norns. I listened to the interview in my car, parked outside, smiling every time she mentioned her husband.

After the interview, I dropped her off at the rehearsal studio and was on my way home when my phone rang. The room with the sound equipment was locked and she needed a CD player right then and there. Nothing fancy, just a basic CD player. Where could I find that on a Sunday morning??? I made a quick left and found Zellers at the Galleria Mall was open already. Good news.

Bad news that I had to actually go inside the Galleria Mall... but that mall is a whole ‘nother story.

Now, back in my day, everyone had those big plastic-y boom boxes with garish lights, an AM/FM radio, dual tape player and CD player. Alas, this is something that can now only be found in a museum. Zellers had some i-pod docking stations, but nothing that was “just a CD player”. Fortunately, a discount store in the mall had a small, cheap CD player. I bought it and hustled out across the grotty brown floor tiles and past the lunch counter with the curious and entirely unappetizing green-hued pictures of their food.

I triumphantly returned to the rehearsal studio with my find. Alas, cheap CD players from discount stores in depressing malls don’t play audio CD’s burned from a laptop. Kathleen was in her “do WHATEVER it takes to get the show on” mode, so she matter-of-factly asked if I could go home, get her laptop, (which she left at home, uploading the rehearsal videos) and bring it back to the studio. Though this wasn’t how I had pictured my Sunday morning going, I agreed, since I am the administrative and support staff of her company (...and I love her and want to help support her!)

After grabbing the laptop, power supply, speakers and speaker cables, I was on my way back to the studio when my phone rang again. She told me that Michael, the stage manager, had arrived with his laptop that could play the CD and they wouldn’t need her laptop after all. So I could just go home and relax.

Just a normal Sunday morning in the life of the husband of a modern dance choreographer and producer.

The cake was delicious.

Kathleen uploaded this video to her facebook page, but I thought I would post it here again because it's fun to watch. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again... that’s a lot of yarn:



This was filmed and edited by Jaqui Brown, a dance student of Kathleen's, and she's done an amazing job.

After seeing these clips and hearing Kathleen talk about how the piece is developing, I’m really looking forward to the show. And I’m not just saying that!

I enjoy watching Kathleen’s work. She incorporates a sense of whimsy with characters you can relate to and a lot of neat athletic moves based on Contact Dance. These are all good things for a novice-to-intermediate dance viewer such as myself because it gives me stuff to relate to. I like seeing a story. I like seeing flying moves. I like seeing dancers portray characters that grow and develop through the piece. Check, check and check... this has it all. Join me next Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday.

Oh, and at 0:53, are they doing Tai Chi???

I mentioned earlier how there was yarn all over our house. Now I’m convinced that it’s multiplying. There are pieces of yarn everywhere I look... the floor, tables, on the couch, in the kitchen sink. I was cleaning the counter yesterday and found a piece of yarn behind the spice rack. I think the yarn scraps have learned to crawl and are seeking out dark corners of our house to set up a comfy little yarn house where they can raise little fuzzy wool children. I have this feeling that two years from now, I’ll move aside jars of tomato sauce on the bottom shelf of the pantry and find a little yarn community in full swing with a little woolen post office and woolen café and little yarn kids gleefully maneuvering their little wool bikes between the cans of organic garbanzo beans.

Currently there is another wool “scarf” laid out on the floor, spanning our living room and dining room and heading down our back stairs. The “scarf” that we dyed in the epic chemistry experiment on our stove was a stage prop. This new scarf is for the outdoor interactive knitting installation between shows.

The click-clack of knitting needles has once again filled the air as Kathleen races to get this piece of knitting done. She’s enlisted volunteers from Wise Daughters Craft Market to contribute to this piece. Even my mom has been recruited to provide a section of knitting. If you’re reading this and you knit and you have some spare time over the next week or so, pleeeease drop Kathleen a line at kathleen.rea@reasondetre.com and volunteer your knitting skills. The faster we get it done the less chance there is for the yarn to gain sentience and take over our house.

In addition to knitting, Kathleen is also preparing costumes. This involves getting pants and t-shirts from the pride of Bentonville... and dying them!!! Until now, I never realized that textile dying was so important to modern dance. The night staff at the 24-hour Shoppers on The Queensway must be getting used to seeing me coming in after midnight and buying multiple boxes of blue and black textile dye. Who else buys dye? It’s in the back corner of the store at the bottom of the tiny rack of shoe polish.

And when Kathleen is working on props or costumes, nothing is safe. My first exposure to her bulldozer drive to create was back on Long Live where we had to make a prop that looked like the headlights and front grill of a car. For the grill, without batting an eye, Kathleen pried off the grate from the bottom of her refrigerator and we screwed it in place on the front of the “car”. We still have that prop in our basement, and the fridge in her old apartment still doesn’t have a bottom grate. Yesterday she casually asked me if I had any sweaters I didn’t want. Ten minutes later and voila:

During the outdoor knitting installation, if you see one of the yarn-ball pockets that looks like tan Eddie Bauer material, that would be my contribution to the cause.

On Saturday, we went to the theater to check out sightlines, get dimensions and other logistical details. It’s an intimate theatre, which I think is perfect for this piece. It will really help you connect with the dancers and the characters they portray.

If you’ve never been to the Winchester Street Theatre, an added bonus to going to the show is checking out the building and the neighbourhood. The red-brick theatre is a former Presbyterian church, built in 1891, with the original stained-glass windows. It’s situated on a quiet tree-lined side street in old Cabbagetown surrounded by Victorian row houses with gorgeous front gardens. Come early and walk around a bit.

Trivia Time: A few houses east of the theater at 94 Winchester Street is a house where magician Doug Henning lived before embarking on his career in magic. Now you know.

Saturday afternoon was spent putting up posters and flyers at local Cabbagetown businesses along Parliament Street. If you’re a Cabbagetown regular and you see a VIVID4 poster up somewhere, post a comment and let me know where. There are a lot of great independent businesses here with a fantastic sense of community, and supporting them gives us a warm fuzzy feeling. Warm and fuzzy... just like a little community of living yarn...

I can't promise the yarn will actually come to life during the show. Then again, as Doug Henning always said, "Anything the mind can conceive is possible." But even if the yarn does stand up and take a bow, you wouldn't notice because the dancing will be so good.

Norns weaving destiny, by Arthur Rackham (1912)

“Yves, you’re not a Norn.”

I’m sitting in on a rehearsal for Unravelling the Tight Weave and Kathleen has just issued this cryptic instruction to one of her dancers. Yves nods and takes his place with the Regulars. There is a story behind this dance piece, involving Norns from Norse mythology. Being a sci-fi/fantasy geek, this excites me, as J.R.R. Tolkein derived a lot of his inspiration from Norse mythology.

Kathleen even has a storyboard, with numbered scenes and everything. This surprises me, as I always believed her creation process was more random. At one point, the dancers cluster around her with their scripts trying to follow which section comes next. Kathleen explains how this has been removed and that has been renumbered and the other one will have to move here and basically she will have to re-do the whole storyboard because everything is out of order. Now this sounds more like the chaotic Kathleen I know and love.

The rehearsal goes in stops and starts. They finish running through an ensemble section involving the giant wool “scarf” that I last saw simmering in a bunch of pots on our stove. There’s so much movement, and yet the dancers all seem to know where they’re going and what they’re doing. And then Kathleen tells them to make a “boxing ring” with the yarn. In contrast to the previous section, there’s much confusion as the dancers bounce around, trying a three-sided square and then a five-sided square before finally working themselves into the more traditional four-sided square.

Much of the rehearsal is like this – some parts are more complete than other parts. The more polished sections are gorgeous and I love watching the movements. The dance style is mostly based on contact improv and involves a lot of fluid lifts and intricate partnering where each dancer balances their partner’s weight. The dancers are beautiful to watch and have such presence. Kathleen has told me she chose this particular ensemble because of the presence they bring to the stage. I have to agree – and this isn’t even the stage yet.

And there are parts where the dance is still evolving. In an earlier post, I pondered how choreography is communicated. It’s obvious to me now that it involves a lot of demonstration. Kathleen is constantly popping up to show the dancers how she expects them to move. To try and make sense of the visions in Kathleen’s head, the dancers have made up their own words to describe the movements – there is a brief, but serious, conversation about “jumpy jumps”.

It is more precise than I would have imagined. Not precise like when I used to do tai chi and Sifu would come along and correct an arm position by an eighth of an inch. But Kathleen knows how it should look and makes sure the dancers know it too. At one point, the dancers are lifting Holly, who is one of the Norns.

“Don’t move your legs up like that,” Kathleen tells Holly, “keep them down, more like this.”

She demonstrates, Holly does it perfectly the next go through, and in testament to the dancer’s memory, I know that Holly will perform this leg movement like this from now on without needing to follow anything in writing.

But demonstration of the choreography is not the only part of the process. The dancers offer input as to how they think something should look. I wonder if this interactive approach is a necessary part of the creative process? Kathleen has a vision and tells/shows how she wants it. But it’s not like Tai Chi or a Mahler symphony where things must be exactly precise each and every time. While Holly will keep her legs down in that one section, she won’t keep them down in exactly the same way each time. I think this is a good thing, as it leaves room for the personal expression and fluidity that makes modern dance so expressive.

The rehearsal is relaxed. The dancers are friends as well as co-workers, and enjoy a good laugh over the liberal use of berry-scented hand sanitizer. But there is intensity. Kathleen gives the dancers a 10-minute break and many head outside to find some sunshine. A few have a snack. Yves does handstands. Kathleen doesn’t take a break, which doesn’t surprise me. She looks through her notes and scrolls through the music playlist.

A lot of hard work has obviously gone into getting to this point and from what I’ve seen, it looks fantastic. But it’s difficult for me to see how this is all going to come together. I remember her previous piece Long Live, where I mostly just saw the finished work. At this stage of VIVD4’s development, maybe everything is already there, it just hasn’t been assembled into its final shape.

Let me try a cooking analogy. I love stir fry (both eating and cooking), and I’ve been working on my wok hay. A stir fry requires a lot of upfront preparation. After what feels like hours of chopping vegetables and mixing sauces, my kitchen looks like a tornado went through. Piles of chopped vegetables, bowls of sauces and condiments, various chopping and grating tools scattered about and a plate of browned meat that the cat keeps trying to lick.

But then I fire up the wok and all this disorder instantly comes together. I dump the mounds of carefully prepared ingredients into the hot wok, and after a couple of minutes of sizzle and steam, I have a single tasty dish that has come together out of the chaos. Maybe dance is a bit like this. The preparation looks a bit messy and the end result isn’t obvious. But in the heat of performance, all the elements come together.

I’m really looking forward to the VIVID4 premiere. The dance movements are a step beyond anything Kathleen has done in the past, the piece has characters that I found myself drawn to after only a brief glimpse in this rehearsal... and there is a lot of yarn. This is going to be fun.

There is yarn all over our house. The dining room table is piled high with balls of gray yarn. The hallway is an obstacle course of various bags of wool and knitting. And the living room floor is scattered with random lumps and bits of yarn that our son enjoys playing with.

The knitting props are important to Kathleen’s piece and create just the right atmosphere as they help to tell her story. But in the end, they are secondary to the dancers and the dance. And yet, much of this blog has been about the creation of these props. I suppose that’s because this is the part of it that I get to see and become involved with.

She’s designed the costumes, and that process I understood, and offered my opinions based on watching more episodes of What Not To Wear than I care to admit. “Yes, the grey sweaters really go well with the burgundy frock underneath”... and so forth.

Right now she’s choosing and editing music for the piece and “choreographing” the music and sounds. All I hear is musical snippets and excerpts that start and stop randomly and sometimes play over and over and over again, like a radio knob being whizzed all over the dial. It’s just a jumble of noise. I understand wrapping yarn around an exercise ball. But this hyperactive jukebox of sound is where I start getting lost. Yet somewhere, somehow it makes sense to Kathleen, and in the end I know the music will flow as gracefully as the dancers.

And speaking of the dancers, the most important part of this crazy process, the development of the choreography is invisible to me. It takes place entirely in Kathleen’s imagination... her “liminal space” as she would call it. She doesn’t share much with me about the choreography or the creation of the dance. She’ll show me videos from rehearsal and tell me a rough outline of the story as it comes to her. But the dance, the movements, the raison d’etre, so to speak, of the piece, is something mysterious. Perhaps it’s something mysterious even to Kathleen. She knows what she’s doing, but she doesn’t “know” what she’s doing. She can create beautiful movements that make your heart ache, but she can’t put into words how or why these movements come about. They just do. So, alas, there’s not much I can write about the choreography.

There is a popular saying: “writing about art is like dancing about architecture”. This aphorism has been attributed to dozens of people, but is generally though to originate, in this form, from comedian Martin Mull back in the late 1970’s. The saying is meant to illustrate the inherent difficulty of a task by using hyperbole.

But it’s not so ridiculous. Kathleen could totally dance about architecture. I’m convinced she could dance about bacon and eggs, or about the first twenty elements on the Periodic Table. Come June 23rd, we’re going to see performers dance about knitting. No way Martin Mull could’ve seen that one coming.

In addition to the giant balls of yarn, the Unravelling the Tight Weave piece in VIVID4 includes a large scarf. Well, it’s not really a scarf. Kathleen calls it a “piece of knitting”. Granted, it is 50 feet long, but to me, it looks like a scarf.

Part of this was leftover from a previous dance work she created for Nuit Blanche a few years ago. And part she’s added over the past few days. For three days straight, I listened to the click-clack of knitting needles as she made the scarf longer. Finally, with gnarled and cramped hands, she announced the knitting work was complete. Complete, but not finished. Apparently the scarf was not exactly the right colour and the colour of the new additions didn’t properly blend into the old colour.

“I need to dye it,” Kathleen announced. “Tonight, for rehearsal tomorrow.” I quickly deduced this was code-speak for “Jeff, I know it’s past midnight, but I need you to go to the 24-hr Shoppers Drugmart and get a bunch of boxes of black fabric dye.”

Now, when you dye an item, it needs to be simmered on the stovetop in the fabric dye like making some sort of black wool soup stock. We found a metal bucket downstairs, but of course the 50 ft scarf wouldn’t fit inside. “We need two pots,” I concluded. Our gaze fell on our two pasta pots sitting on the kitchen shelf.

So we plopped the pots on the gas range, stuffed half the scarf in one pot and half in the other, poured in water and dye and fired up the burners. Sensing imminent disaster, I quickly grabbed the fire extinguisher hanging on the kitchen wall and checked the charge. I was envisioning wool touching the gas flame and the whole scarf igniting like the Hindenburg. Meanwhile, Kathleen had grabbed a wooden spoon from the utensil drawer and was stirring the black soup, humming happily to herself.

They say wool repels water. Not in the weird physics experiment Kathleen was conducting on our stove at 2:00 am. Each half of the scarf was sucking up water, and there was hot black dye dripping on the stove top between the two pots. “More pots,” I shouted. We shoved in another pot and a stainless steel bowl to catch the drips. Kathleen grabbed a white tea cup, dipped it into a pasta pot and drizzled the black potion over the exposed ends of the scarf, still humming happily. This was the most bizarre sight I have ever seen in our kitchen.

In the end, the colour of the scarf had changed marginally (apparently the wool just did not want to take dye), our wooden spoon was now black, and the ignition on our gas stove had become wet so that it kept going click-click-click-click even after we turned the burner off. I unplugged the stove and we went to bed.

Check one more prop off the list.

If you come over to our house for pasta in the future, you may want to forget you read this.

Having taken piano lessons in my younger days and having played some guitar, I understand how a composer uses musical notation to communicate notes and tempos to the musician. Those black dots scattered on five lines let anyone “read” the music and know what to play. And people have been writing down how to play music for the past 4000 years.

But I’ve never understood how dance movements are communicated from choreographer to dancer. I’ve often asked Kathleen how she lets the dancers know how to move. What is the system to write down and record steps and movements? She usually gives me a look like I just asked how high is up. “I just tell them what to do,” she says. Okay, I pursue, but how do they remember from one day to the next if the steps aren’t written down somewhere? This usually causes her to give me a look bordering on pity. “I don’t know, they just do.”

So imagine my interest when Kathleen gave me this video of her developing part of Unravelling the Tight Weave, part of VIVID4. Aha, I thought, now I’ll see this mysterious choreographic process in action.

Turns out she just stands around and tells people what to do. And this seems to give her a great deal of joy. This bears some resemblance to a typical weekend around our house. So when I find out on Saturday morning that apparently we’re going to spend our Saturday afternoon in the studio wrapping giant balls of yarn, I feel better knowing that she’s not telling me what to do... she’s choreographing me.

Check it out...

So, as I mentioned previously, Kathleen really does not know what the finished dance piece will look like until she starts it. But in this case, she knew, somehow, that she would require larger-than-life balls of yarn. Like 2 ft, 3 ft, 4 ft diameter large.

Now, you can’t just head off to the nearest knitting supply store and get a 3 ft. diameter ball of yarn. We would need to make them by wrapping yarn around something spherical. The answer appeared one evening while I was soothing our 14-month old son by bouncing with him on our exercise ball. The next day I was in the sports store.

“Is the exercise ball for you?” the clerk asked me.
“Well… it’s for my wife, actually.”
“How tall is she? We need to find the right size ball.”
“Well, she’s about 5’10”, but it doesn’t matter. We’re going to wrap the balls in yarn to make giant yarn balls for a modern dance piece.”

Surprisingly, this revelation didn’t freak him out. Turned out he had two daughters taking dance lessons, and as I paid, we chatted about dance in the manner of non-dancers who become involved in the dance world... we don’t exactly understand it, but we’re happy to be supporting our loved ones.

The next hurdle was how to get the yarn to remain in place on the slippery rubber ball. Spray adhesive seemed to be the way to go. So late one night after we put our son to bed, we pushed back the dining room table, spread a drop cloth on the dining room floor and sprayed an inflated exercise ball with adhesive. One of us would then hold the ball and twirl it, while the other held the yarn and fed it onto the ball, pausing every once in a while to spray more glue.

After about ten minutes, it looked like the concept would work. Then came a frustrating two hours of twirling, feeding yarn and spraying glue where it seemed like the ball would never get completely covered. Believe it or not, it takes a lot of wool to cover an exercise ball. And then, after a few more turns, a giant ball of yarn appeared in front of us.

We were both slightly sticky from adhesive overspray. The dining room floor was slightly sticky. And we had probably inhaled enough toxic volatile organic compounds to knock about three days off our life expectancy. Funny, Kathleen is so health conscious, she won’t eat canned beans, for example, even if they’re organic, because she’s concerned about ingesting BPA from the can lining. But she had never even thought of wearing masks or doing this outside. A certain madness overcomes Kathleen when she’s lost in her art.

Alas, we still had three more balls to go. To help keep the yarn on the ball without needing a whole can of spray glue, we came up with the idea of gluing foam padding to the ball and then wrapping the yarn around that. This brought up another problem that sent my engineer’s brain into overdrive. How do you cover a spherical surface? For some reason, I thought the concept of Buckyballs had to be involved. Turns out it’s a lot simpler. A baseball is covered with two pieces of leather, stitched together. So I simply googled a basic pattern for a baseball cover, cut out the two pieces of foam, and voila:

For the big ball, we had concerns about fitting it through doors and transporting it. So we took the large exercise ball to the rehearsal studio, inflated it, covered it and then rolled it around the studio while holding the yarn.

This was actually a lot of fun, and we got a good workout.

In the end, the former exercise balls looked like balls of yarn, and Kathleen’s vision had come to life. Now she just had to figure out how the dancers would actually use the balls in the piece. For me, when I see those yarn balls come out on stage during the premiere, I’m going to try and resist the urge to turn to whomever is standing next to me and say “I made those. They’re exercise balls, you know.”

A few photos from the recent photo shoot for VIVID4. From this photoshoot, all the flyers, posters and press kits will be developed.

Kathleen organising her photoshoot

One of the touched up photos ready for the press.
photographer Greg Schilhab, dancers Suzanne Liska and Lee Walder

People have started to ask where they can get tickets for VIVID4. If you scroll way down to the bottom of this blog, there is information on dates, times and locations.

You can go directly to the ticket sales page here: VIVID4 Tickets.
Or else, go to the Ticketweb main page at www.ticketweb.ca/ and search for "dance" or "VIVID4".

Note that there are no spaces in "VIVID4". That's important...

VIVID4 = an upcoming modern dance/theater piece featuring some of Toronto's top dancers and giant balls of yarn

but...

VIVID_4 = a cardiovascular ultrasound machine manufactured by GE Medical Systems.

Ultrasound is a way to see inside the human body. In a way, dance also is a way to see inside ourselves. The advantage to dance is that you don't need that cold gel slathered on your skin.

Do you ever go to the theater or to a dance show and wonder where the props came from? No, me neither. Props, sets, lighting... it's all just there "setting the stage" as it were for the dancers or actors you're enjoying watching.

Check this out:



Yup. Giant balls of yarn.

Stay tuned... I'll take you inside the prop building process in the next blog post.

One of my favourite expressions is “like herding cats”, a phrase originally coined in the IT industry during the late 80’s dot-com boom to describe a near-impossible task. I work in a group of engineers, and while we’re not software engineers, this phrase applies perfectly when trying to get consensus on the best technical solution to any given problem. I never would’ve thought a similar situation could exist in the caring, sharing love-in that is the arts community.

VIVID4 has a cast of twenty-seven dancers in total: seven senior dancers, six mid-level dancers and fourteen in the youth company. For rehearsal, all of these dancers aren’t required at the same time. Her employer, Ballet Jörgen Canada has graciously allowed Kathleen use of one of their studios for rehearsal during times when the studio is free.

So, trying to coordinate twenty-seven dancers, divided among three groups into one studio at certain times results in a logistical planning exercise only slightly less complicated than the tactical planning for the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day.

The cat herding aspect of this exercise comes into it because each one of these twenty-seven dancers has unique personal and professional schedules and agendas. Now, I’m an office jockey… I know that every single day for the rest of my life, I’m going in to work for 8:30 am, will be in the office for 8.5 hours and leave somewhere around 5:00 pm. Dancers, on the other hand, are more likely to be “creatively employed” and thus have lives that are much more random.

I think Kathleen updated the rehearsal schedule about twelve million times before finally getting consensus from all. During this time she was battling an eye infection, so I would often come downstairs to her office to find her squinting at an über-complicated Outlook calendar, her face inches from the screen. Her sigh of relief when all was finally said and done caused the curtains to flutter in her home office. “There,” she said, “thank god that’s finally done. Now I can start working on the piece”.

Start working on the piece?

Science is pretty good at explaining the mysteries of nature. Birds know when it is time to migrate by sensing changes in the length of the day. Moths navigate with respect to the moon, so when they see a porch light, they fly towards it and then circle in confusion, thinking “oh my god, I’ve reached the moon, now what?” Even the phenomenon of beached whales has a number of plausible theories related to sickness or navigation by Earth’s magnetic fields.

But science still can’t explain what drives an artist to create.

My wife danced with the National Ballet of Canada and then with a modern dance company in Austria before she retired from professional dance. Now she choreographs – creating dances for others. And every two years, like a moth to a flame, she is drawn to create a big dance production.

So, back in January, Kathleen frantically announces the grant deadline is Feb 1 and we need to have the application completed. Obtaining funding via government-sponsored grants is the first step in putting on a production. No matter how “pure” the art, realities like theatre rental, prop construction and dancer’s salaries require money to give the art life.

Grant writing is a creative art all in itself. Basically, you have to convince a jury that your artistic vision is worthy of their money. Unfortunately, “art” and “money” mix about as well as oil and water. And the funding bodies don’t have a lot of money to throw around. In the recent federal election, arts funding wasn’t exactly a hot-button issue. Curiously, there is even a segment of the population who are offended their tax dollars are given to artists. In light of this, funding bodies desire to maintain some appearance of accountability.

The Arts Council wants to see a solid business plan – budget, timelines, project summary. How will you accomplish your project and what will be the outcome? Squeezing a creative vision into a business plan is difficult at best. For Kathleen, it’s even more difficult. You see, her style of creating is totally in the moment. She arrives in the studio, stands in front of her dancers and via instinct or inspiration or channeling the universe’s energy, concepts and dance steps spontaneously flow out of her. The results are brilliant, but it’s a hard sell to the Arts Council. “Going with the flow” isn’t seen as a solid business model.

In the past, she’s jumped through the hoops and submitted a project description that sounded great, but in the end, bore little resemblance to the finished project. This time, she just laid it out, described the themes and concepts she had in mind and referred to the end result as an “exciting unknown”. As she put it, “I’ve been doing this long enough to know [going with the flow] is what I need to create high quality work.”

As an engineer, I spend my days planning, analyzing and calculating. Despite the impending chaos of putting VIVID4 on stage, “going with the flow” sounds pretty good to me.

There was a movie back in the 80's called "Married to the Mob". A movie about my life might be entitled "Married to a Choreographer/Producer". And when there is a show in full tilt production, I honestly find it hard to tell which of these would be more frightening.

Hi. My name is Jeff. And in this blog, I'm going to give you my behind the scenes perspectives on what goes into a modern dance / theatre production, as created and choregraphed by my wife, Kathleen Rea.

The current show in question is called VIVID4 and will premiere on June 23, 2011 in Toronto, Canada. Sure, there will be the occasional shameless plug to get you to come out and see the show. But my main goal will be to educate and entertain you with what goes into devloping a dance theatre production. Modern dance is nowhere near as scary as you might have believed. One of the mandates of Kathleen's company, REAson d'etre dance productions, is to make dance more accessible and to teach and inspire the world about dance. Hopefully, over the next few weeks, this blog will do just that.