Gracing The Stage

When the 2009 Next Stage Festival line-up was announced, the most pleasant surprise, for me, was the inclusion of “Take It Back“. Of the more than 50 Fringe shows I saw last summer, it stood out as the most unabashedly fun and enjoyable experience I had at the festival, and frankly, I’d felt it’d been one of the overlooked gems of the Fringe. Luckily for us all, there was at least one Next Stage juror who was a passionate advocate for the show…

(More on the flexible dynamos of Solid State Breakdance, and the linguistically agile actors in Kate Hewlett’s sparkling comedy “Humans Anonymous“, after the break).

The company, Solid State Breakdance, combines breakdancing and hip hop moves with traditional Lindy Hop and swing dance partnering. The focus for much of the show is on dancing in pairs – initiating, switching leads, and playing with each other -  and the company has a simple question they want the show to ask: why don’t we dance together like we used to? By the end of the show, they hope to have convinced at least some of the audience members to get up on stage and do just that.

Solid State Breakdance in "Take It Back"

The fact that there is some element of audience participation should not lead you to believe that the dance performed on stage is simple or rudimentary. It’s extraordinarily athletic, accomplished, and expressive; the dancers are incredibly present and connected, relishing their movement and interactions with each other, and obviously enjoying themselves. It’s that element that makes this show so infectious, even if you never plan to learn how to do 6 feet high grand jetes, 12 feet long head slides, or blitzkrieg jitterbugging.

The company has made waves in the dance community – Paula Citron of the Globe & Mail named them in her dance highlights of 2008, as winners of the “hip hop as art” category – and their next engagement after Next Stage is a festival in Switzerland. Their style of dance is the sort that could spread like wildfire, especially with the current popularity of shows like “So You Think You Can Dance?”.

Michelle Giroux examines on-line dating profiles in "Humans Anonymous"

More cerebral, but just as much fun, “Humans Anonymous”, when I first saw it at the 2006 Fringe, was a conventional comedy imbued with unconventional wit. Its heroine, Ellen, timidly ventures into the world of on-line dating, and ends up becoming the unwitting object of affection for another woman, due to a typo. Her best friend, recognizing this as the most enlivening thing to happen to Ellen in some time, surreptitiously encourages her same sex suitor, shaking Ellen out of her ordered, dispassionate life.

Since its Fringe premiere, playwright Kate Hewlett has tinkered with the play for a production in New York, put it on the back burner for a bit to write yet another Fringe hit, “The Swearing Jar“, and now brings “Humans Anonymous” back with yet another fine cast, including both new faces, like Stratford alumni Michelle Giroux (who impressed me mightly in Claudia Dey’s “Trout Stanley“), and returning cast member Philip Graeme, who played the title character in WhyNot Theatre’s adaptation of “Hamlet” with unusual (and welcome) vim.

The next few gracing the Stage posts are going to be focusing on music and film, but I’ll write one more Next Stage profile later this week after seeing the two shows I’m least familiar with: French clown fairy tale (courtesy of the Orlando Fringe), “L’Ange Avec les Fleurs“, and the woman power drama “First Hand Woman” (which trumpets on-stage simulated orgasms in its publicity). Stay tuned…