{"id":33436,"date":"2019-10-11T03:59:32","date_gmt":"2019-10-11T10:59:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=33436"},"modified":"2019-10-10T23:37:40","modified_gmt":"2019-10-11T06:37:40","slug":"dancing-to-beethoven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2019\/10\/11\/dancing-to-beethoven\/","title":{"rendered":"Dancing to Beethoven"},"content":{"rendered":"

ProArteDanza\u2019s The 9th<\/em> will premi\u00e8re in Vancouver before heading home to Toronto. (photo by Alexander Antonijevic)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Ten years after its conception, ProArteDanza\u2019s The 9th<\/em>, a full-length contemporary dance performance, will have its world premi\u00e8re in Vancouver at the Chutzpah! Festival Oct. 26-28.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were originally planning to premi\u00e8re it in Toronto for November,\u201d Roberto Campanella, co-artistic director of ProArteDanza, told the Independent<\/em> in a phone interview. \u201cWe\u2019re opening in Toronto Nov. 6, which is a week-and-a-half after Chutzpah! And then Mary-Louise [Albert] called and said, \u2018How do you feel about bringing The 9th<\/em> here?\u2019 And I said, \u2018Well, it would not be a bad idea for everybody involved to have that opportunity\u2026. We love being at Chutzpah! We\u2019ve been before, we have a longtime relationship with Mary-Louise.\u201d (Albert is artistic managing director of Chutzpah!)<\/p>\n

Campanella created The 9th<\/em> with ProArteDanza co-artistic director Robert Glumbek in collaboration with the dancers. Inspired by Beethoven\u2019s Ninth Symphony and performed to the score, the show has four movements and is about 70 minutes long, with no intermission.<\/p>\n

Each dance movement was created and mounted on its own: the first, then the third, the second and, finally, the fourth, which the company performed this past June in Trois-Rivi\u00e8res, Que., for the festival called Dansencore. Regarding the full-length work, Campanella said \u201cit\u2019s one thing to put on one movement at a time separately, and we\u2019re realizing it\u2019s a completely different beast because we have to also layer [each movement] with the concept of a wall or, in this case, the symbol of the Berlin Wall, so it\u2019s taking almost a different life for me and for Robert\u2026. And it\u2019s only eight dancers and it\u2019s going to be incredibly physical and athletic and intense, so we also have to distribute our dancers in a way that we don\u2019t kill them in the first movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ten years ago, Dansencore commissioned Campanella and Glumbek to create the first movement. At the time, the festival was celebrating its 15th anniversary, as well as the establishment of Trois-Rivi\u00e8res, with Beethoven\u2019s Ninth, said Campanella. \u201cThe idea was that there were different choreographers allocated for the four different movements \u2026 and we put the whole thing together probably in one day or two with the live orchestra and the live choir, so it was a mega-super-project. It all came together then.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we decided to do, with the permission, of course, of the festival, we said, \u2018Can we present out first movement only for our company, ProArteDanza?\u2019 We were granted permission and we presented just the movement itself as part of a mixed program the year after, or the same year, here in Toronto. Then we looked at each other, Robert and I, and said, \u2018Why don\u2019t we do a long version of it? Why don\u2019t we continue? But let\u2019s take our time. Why don\u2019t we continue on the same path we\u2019re doing, a movement at a time, we present it, we look at it and see what comes out of it?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then, in 2010, I was in Berlin shooting a movie and I had a few days off,\u201d continued Campanella. \u201cI went to the Berlin Wall, which is essentially rubble, it\u2019s just bricks, there isn\u2019t much, but there are these audio-visual stations, where you can put headphones on and have a look at old footage of when they were building it; it\u2019s pretty much the history of the wall. And there was one image that still, I would say, hit the spot, which was these two families on [opposite] sides of the wall waving at each other, probably they were related to each other \u2026 and the waving at each other was different from one side of the wall and the other. And then I thought, could it be that this [image] is actually our Ninth Symphony concept? So, I talked to Robert and I said, \u2018Can we explore that and see where it goes?\u2019 And that\u2019s when the ball started rolling for us, but always maintaining the idea that we were not going to present the whole thing until we had all the four movements done and presented.\u201d<\/p>\n

The timing of The 9th<\/em>\u2019s completion comes with a few coincidences, said Campanella. Most notably, the final concert date, in Toronto, is Nov. 9 and, he said, \u201cNov. 9, 1989, is the actual day of the fall of the Berlin Wall,\u201d so the show will occur exactly 30 years after the wall\u2019s fall. He also noted that ProArteDanza\u2019s show, which is called The 9th<\/em>, ends on the ninth and that, at the 1989 celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth Symphony.<\/p>\n

For Campanella, the fall of the Berlin Wall is \u201cabout freedom, it\u2019s about brotherhood, it\u2019s about unity and diversity, celebrating all of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to the challenges of portraying these concepts, Campanella said it\u2019s been fascinating to reimagine the movements that were created in the early years.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe look at what we did 10 years ago and we cringe,\u201d he said. When he and Glumbek watched videos of the piece, \u201cyou should have heard us, we were thinking, \u2018Who choreographed that?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The pair have broken through many artistic walls since then in their respective careers, said Campanella, that they decided \u201cthis is not us anymore and so we are going to revisit it, reassess it, reevaluate what we\u2019ve done and why.\u201d<\/p>\n

He pointed out that the original first movement was also created by a different cast. \u201cThere is only, I think, one [dancer] left who\u2019s done everything. So, there are things that are born with a certain cast but there is a turnover of cast, [so] it will inevitably take a different direction naturally, as well as us being different now than 10 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of what\u2019s great about dance, he said, \u201cis that you have the ability to remount things. A painting, once it\u2019s done, it\u2019s done. You\u2019re going to hang it somewhere and you\u2019ll look at it; it\u2019s done, it\u2019s over. For us, we have that ability to remount and re-look at it and say, \u2018Who am I now that\u2019s going to be in this current version of it?\u2019 So, it\u2019s been a very fascinating process.\u201d<\/p>\n

Campanella said, in creating The 9th<\/em>, he and Glumbek \u201ctook our time because we really wanted to respect first and foremost the score of this magnificent piece of artwork,\u201d referring to Beethoven\u2019s composition.<\/p>\n

In The 9th<\/em>, more than one version of the symphony is used. Of those that were not chosen, Campanella said, \u201csome of the versions are what we think are excruciatingly slow for us. Maybe they are amazing versions for musicians, for the experts, [but] they\u2019re not conducive to the physical movement part of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

For tickets to The 9th<\/em>, visit chutzpahfestival.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ProArteDanza\u2019s The 9th will premi\u00e8re in Vancouver before heading home to Toronto. (photo by Alexander Antonijevic) Ten years after its conception, ProArteDanza\u2019s The 9th, a full-length contemporary dance performance, will have its world premi\u00e8re in Vancouver at the Chutzpah! Festival Oct. 26-28. \u201cWe were originally planning to premi\u00e8re it in Toronto for November,\u201d Roberto Campanella, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[785],"tags":[9361,9362,6769,31,9181,3119,9360,9359,175],"class_list":["post-33436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-performing-arts","tag-beethoven","tag-berlin-wall","tag-choreography","tag-chutzpah","tag-classical-music","tag-dance","tag-proartedanza","tag-roberto-campanella","tag-rothstein-theatre"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}