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.