A Kinesis Dance production. At the Firehall Arts Centre on Thursday, October 7. Continues to October 9
What a huge amount of unleashed testosterone and brute imagery choreographer Paras Terezakis has packed into this little box.
Sweat sprays throughout Box4, illuminated by the hard fluorescent light from poles at four corners of the square stage. The four dancers throw themselves on the floor, hurdle over giant stacks of newspapers, and catapult each other through the air. Vocalists appear out of the dark, screeching, panting, and riffing operatically. And in the cataclysmic finale, the performers frenetically whip up knee-deep newspapers like they’re caught in a twister.
It’s all overwhelming, and that’s the point. We’re watching men being pummelled by information overload. The newspapers, which they move about and stack neatly in the early parts of the work, are metaphors for that media onslaught. At one point the dancers read headlines aloud in an overlapping cacophony; at another they try over and over to count the papers in four different languages.
Kinesis Dance’s Terezakis not only pushes his performers to their physical limits, but finds endless ways to invent new choreography. The piece is as packed with dense, punishing movement as it is with anguish and alienation. Every one of the young, athletic dancers commits here, and each is magnetic in his own way: Manuel Sorge and Hayden Fong, with their hip-hop influences; Cai Glover with his ballet grounding; and Billy Marchenski, with the emotional transparency of theatre. Fong convulses like he’s been electrocuted, or grabs at his legs, arms, and head like they’re being zapped; and somehow, Sorge manages to cross the stage by bouncing on his behind, never touching the floor with his hands or feet.
If there is a complaint it’s that the work is simply too full, and by the end, as the men tear, crumple, and throw about their papers, finally stuffing the pieces into the clothing they’ve stripped off, it starts to unravel. Box4 is out-there, no doubt, but there’s a raw appeal in watching so much male energy being released. It can be transfixing. Thankfully there are no overt dance clichés about masculinity—no gracefully choreographed fight scenes or pushing matches. And Terezakis has a few bizarre surprises in store for the audience; suffice to say you’ll witness an interpretation of the Rolling Stones hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” that’s so eerie it makes Devo’s look staid.
Terezakis, late in his career, is proving himself more fearless than a lot of younger choreographers, and his themes are more immediate than they have been in the past. He has said Box4 is a “re-visioning” of his 1994 all-male piece, A Parcel of Men’s Knowledge, which had cardboard boxes instead of newspapers. But the earlier work seems sedate and controlled by comparison. Then again, we weren’t all being driven to insanity by e-mails, Twitter, or online news alerts back then, were we?
