Saturday November 3
This is it. Today is the last show to wrap up Homewerk Tour
2012! We’re staying in a Best Western on Cliffe Avenue, which coincidentally is
the same street where we find our Courtenay performance venue, the Sid Williams
Theatre.
Courtenay...how to describe it? A bustling little big
fishing-town island. I suppose when
you’re stationed in Vancouver, every town seems like a “small town”. What I
have learned on this tour is that the size of a town is correlated with its
number of big banks. CIBC? BMO? Yes, we’ll find dinner. I even happened upon a
live jazz trio at a café at 9pm on the first evening.
While falling asleep last night to Darcy serenading me on her
ukulele, I decided I’d wake up early and go for a run. However, in the deep
darkness that was our hotel room this morning, that didn’t quite happen. Call
time was just around noon so I got some stretching in before we headed off.
It was a pretty full day in the theatre, so photos are
severely limited, I’m afraid. The
theatre is beautiful even though the stage is certainly the smallest we’ve
performed on yet. Tech was as per usual,
except for one big thing—our cardboard tables were missing. Loading into the
theatre yesterday we were stunned to find that a part of our set didn’t make it.
And so Bruce, Jennifer and Darcy had the fun task of hunting someone down in
Vancouver who would be willing to haul three large cardboard set pieces onto
the ferry and over into Courtenay. The winner? Jennifer’s husband, John, who
heroically threw open the backstage doors at around 4pm with our boxes in tow.
As we did tech, I
realized this was the first (and I suppose will be the last) time I got to hear
the Nail to House lecture in full. I think it really is an incredible journey
into Jennifer’s mind and creative process. I love what she says about contact improvisation
bringing dance from a visual art back into a physical art, about what stories
we choose to tell on stage, about collaboration and about how the audience
provides form with content. Prior to the show, Jennifer delivered each of us
gifts, a package of homemade cards with an image on the front of our cast
performing at the Russian Hall!
The show itself was a tricky one with my sprained hip flexor
and as we battled our cardboard partners on the small stage. At one point Lexi
and my cardboard got jammed between the stage’s floor panels at the exact same
time. It was so perfect I nearly burst out laughing. We had a wonderful Q&A session with a curious older crowd who asked some nifty questions about choreography, improvisation and the history of the work. Questions like, what is your favourite moment with the cardboard? really made me think about the relationship I had developed with these cumbersome things. Someone else asked, do you miss home? And funny enough, I do.
The afterparty we took to a posh little restaurant where,
over margaritas, we reminisced jovially about all the things that went wrong
with the cardboard that evening. With daylight savings time on our side, no one
was particularly rushed to depart from celebrations.
Back at the hotel, I went hunting
for ice in the middle of night, when I bumped into a woman stretching in the hallway. Turned out it was our videographer from this evening! We spoke for what must’ve been almost an hour.
She works in film but a part of her wishes she had chosen dance as her career
path. She urged me to get in touch with her daughter in Vancouver, an avid
recreational dancer. She asked me about what this tour had been like, why I
dance, how I started and what now? It
was a fitting conversation to end this epic cardboard adventure. I hobbled back
to the room to be serenaded by Darcy’s ukulele and pack for home, for the last time.
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