Mark Lyn­der­say

The au­di­ence, it's safe to say, knew they weren't in for an­oth­er dance recital from the first item on the show, The Strange Tale of an Is­land Shade, but the open­ing of Vapse, the clos­ing piece, re­al­ly pushed the bound­aries of any con­ven­tion­al un­der­stand­ing of dance. The dancers sat on the floor in the small the­atre space of the Trinidad The­atre Work­shop in Bel­mont and as the lights came up, slow­ly slid in a di­ag­o­nal to the oth­er side of the stage, mak­ing quirky snap­ping and chirp­ing sounds and oc­ca­sion­al­ly jerk­ing and col­laps­ing in spasms. These works are the first ef­forts of Con­tin­u­um, a per­for­mance com­pa­ny cre­at­ed by dancer and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Son­ja Du­mas to ex­plore more ful­ly her ideas for dance in the the­atre.

The com­pa­ny be­gan work­ing in 2004 as guests on Falling 2.0, a show by Dave Williams at the Cen­tral Bank. Du­mas has chore­o­graphed both ex­per­i­men­tal and more for­mal pieces for the Meta­mor­pho­sis Dance Co, but these works are framed around the group of per­form­ers she has as­sem­bled to ex­plore this as­pect of her chore­og­ra­phy and stag­ing.

The works, per­formed to a small au­di­ence on Au­gust 8 with a re­peat show the next night, were of­fered in­to two parts. The lit­tle stuff, Once Up­on a Caribbean Time, was staged as a more tra­di­tion­al mati­nee for chil­dren, with three of Du­mas' chil­dren's sto­ries; lat­er that night adults viewed the big stuff, Ex­per­i­men­ta, the ex­per­i­men­tal works that she opens to au­di­ence dis­cus­sion af­ter each per­for­mance.

LEFT: Con­tin­u­um dancers ref­er­ence po­lit­i­cal iconog­ra­phy in The Strange Tale of an Is­land Shade to the tune of Roar­ing Li­on's Pa­pa Choonks.

RIGHT: Anush­ka Achan, cen­tre, per­forms in In­dra the Cater­pil­lar, one of the chil­dren's sto­ries in Once Up­on a Caribbean Time­by Con­tin­u­um.

Strange Tale of an Is­land Shade was first per­formed for a small group of in­vit­ed guests in May at the Cot­ton Tree Foun­da­tion. It has since been re­vised to ex­plore more of the sto­ries of race that it weaves to­geth­er in an in­ter­pre­tive analy­sis of colour, op­por­tu­ni­ty and the chal­lenges of eth­nic clar­i­ty and blend­ing in T&T so­ci­ety.

"It's ex­per­i­men­tal dance per­for­mance," Du­mas ex­plained. "It's a lab­o­ra­to­ry for ex­per­i­men­ta­tion in move­ment, mu­sic and dra­ma. I hope to bring a dif­fer­ent set of aes­thet­ic con­sid­er­a­tions to the au­di­ence, hop­ing to break the au­di­ence out of the ex­pec­ta­tions of a cer­tain way of danc­ing to mu­sic."

"With the per­form­ers, I hope to en­cour­age them on their jour­ney to self ex­pres­sion. I ex­plain to them that they will be in­ter­pret­ing this form in this space across this path and then they work with it."

Du­mas chore­o­graphs the work, but it's a struc­tured im­pro­vi­sa­tion.

Eighty per cent of the work is de­fined by Du­mas, but there is room for the dancers to use their own in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the dance to de­fine char­ac­ter and ap­proach. Where Strange Tale ex­plores mat­ters of race through a com­bi­na­tion of spo­ken word, in­ter­pre­tive dance and of­ten wit­ty nar­ra­tive seg­ments, Vapse is far more ab­stract.

"We ex­plored the Gwo Ca, a Guade­lou­pean dance form, for­malised by con­tem­po­rary chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Lena Blou, who has worked with the na­tive dance forms and move­ments in her coun­try." The sounds made by the per­form­ers in the open­ing of the piece are based on the Guade­lou­pean bigi­di, a sound and move­ment com­bi­na­tion that Du­mas de­scribes as a move­ment sim­i­lar to the dop­tion of the Bap­tist faith. Con­tin­u­um plans to present a more for­mal stag­ing of their works in Oc­to­ber, in­clud­ing an ex­pand­ed ver­sion of Strange Tale and an­oth­er work that de­parts from the min­i­mal­ism of the young com­pa­ny's work thus far.

"It re­quires a set, and that's go­ing to cost some mon­ey that we don't have yet," Du­mas ex­plains. The com­pa­ny in­cludes a num­ber of per­form­ers, but it is, as the chore­o­g­ra­ph­er de­scribes it, a pick­up com­pa­ny. "When there is a project, I ask peo­ple to be in­volved.

There were eight peo­ple in­volved in this show, and we've had some help from Blue Cul­ture with the mu­sic. "It's more ef­fi­cient to work that way in the lo­cal arts en­vi­ron­ment. We can't pay peo­ple to be around be­tween projects, so all that's left is al­low­ing the free­dom to keep work­ing."