First
February Post on Two Arts Docs and a Doc Fest Preview
3 February 2020
Directors Roger Frappier and Justin
Kingsley record the remarkable collaboration that took place during 2018
between the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Indigenous artists resulting in a
new work that traveled to Indigenous communities across Quebec’s northern
“Nunavik” region. The title comes from
the original composition, an opera “Chaakapesh: The Trickster’s Quest”, with a
libretto by Cree playwright Tomson Highway and music by Matthew Ricketts. An underlying theme is that of mutual
cultural encounters and musical expression as a means towards
reconciliation. Symphony conductor Kent
Nagano stresses this point. Of
Japanese-American ancestry, he could pass for an Inuit elder. Highway refers to the role of laughter in the
Cree mythology of the divine, absent from the gendered Christian concepts with
which he was raised. One performer
Florent Vollant speaks about overcoming his experience of residential schools. In bringing together different artistic
traditions the orchestra’s tour across Nunavik becomes a spirited learning
experience for everyone—with a program that ranges from the opera and Inuit
throat signing to pieces from the classical repertoire. We see the benefits of this in the rapt
attention of the Indigenous audiences, in the delight on the faces of children
exposed to the orchestra’s instruments for the first time, in the testimonies
of performers discovering novel modes of expression. It makes for a viewing experience as
enlightening as entertaining, and which one hopes will inspire more. A
Writer-director Alla Koygan’s homage to
the celebrated New York choreographer and teacher Merce Cunningham will be of
particular interest to aficianados of modern dance of which he was a
controversial innovator pushing the boundaries of the form in which the human
body is the prime instrument for artistic expression requiring a disciplined
combination of athleticism and grace, movement and control. Koygan’s profile intersperses mostly
black-and-white archival footage from the career of Cunningham and his company (the
master died in 2009 at age 90) with fresh performances of major works, in
chronological order, that he created over the period 1942-1972. Much of the musical accompaniment was
composed by John Cage (also Cunningham’s life partner). Although Cunningham
resisted any label such as ‘avant-garde’, his collaborations famously included
with pop artists Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. More than a conventional biopic, the
contemporary performances in varied settings summon an aesthetic effect showing
why Cunningham is regarded as a major figure in the development of American
dance. (The Toronto film festival version was in 3D while the Ottawa screening
I saw was 2D. But unlike Wim Wenders
acclaimed 2011 documentary Pina, a
tribute to the late German choreographer Pina Bausch, I’m not sure that 3D
technology would add much to the viewing experience.) B+
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