Reading the Bones - 1 minute promo

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Choreographers: Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi
Direction: Jay Hirabayashi
Performers: Barbara Bourget, Katie Cassady, Molly McDermott, Deanna Peters, Salomé Nieto
Music: Joseph Hirabayashi
Lighting Designer: Gerald King
Assistant Lighting Designer/Stage Manager: Jessica Han
Set: Rush to the Heart - Mixed-media fabric by Judy Nakagawa
Video - Chris Randle -Sept 18-21 & 25-28, 2019 at the Roundhouse Performance Centre, Vancouver, BC Canada

Notes to Reading the Bones

Reading the Bones is an aleatory performance piece where we have thrown the bones of past choreography onto the stage to see if these favourite movement sequences still have significance outside of their original historical context. We looked for phrases and paragraphs from our past repertoire of over 190 dance works and picked Impending Death (1990), Truths of the Blood (1996), Embryotrophic Cavatina (1998), Crime Against Grace (2001), ( ) (2003), Here to There (2005), Falling Down (2006), Bellatrix (2007), F (2009), Music of Amber (2011), and Life (2013). We set these selections on five women of different generations who each perform all of these excerpts except for Impending Death (only Barbara) and Here to There (only Katie, Molly, Deanna, and Salomé). We structured the piece to allow overlaps in starting points, to allow at least one solo for each dancer, to allow individual freedom of expression, even in ensemble sections, while demanding allegiance to form and sequence. It is our practice to allow dancers to go in and out of phase with one another, to sometimes lead, sometime follow. Spatial and temporal relationships develop spontaneously or, possibly, they do not. Harmony and dissonance arise as a matter of course that is influenced by the prescribed structural sequence. The music and lighting also overlap with the dance as Jo’s music was composed only with his intuitive sense of what we were looking for and Gerald’s lighting deliberately lingers or foreshadows as movement enters or leaves his pools and shafts of luminosity. Kokoro Dance’s butoh expression gives recurring attention to the seven aesthetic principles of Zen philosophy: kanso — simplicity; fukinsei — asymmetry or irregularity; shibumi — beauty in the understated; shizen — naturalness without pretense; yugen — subtle grace; datsuzoku — freeness; and seijaku —tranquility. These terms are encompassed in a world view that the Japanese call wabi sabi — the acceptance
of transience and imperfection.

Reading the Bones draws reference from osteomancy, or “bone reading” - a divination ritual practiced and performed by many cultures worldwide for thousands of years. The practice of foretelling the future through fragments of the past, where bones are cast and through the shapes they create, infinity is revealed.

We explore the notion of returning to one’s roots and past in order to anticipate the future. We have set primordial humanistic gestures, tremorous cycles of breathing and erratic yet controlled movement on our dancers to convey the trials and vulnerability of different stages of life and being. Reading the Bones is a kinetic journey for each dancer. Each dancer wants to communicate with her body to your body.

We hope that these performances will stir your imaginations, awaken your emotions, and resonate with your humanity.

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