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what the critics say

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“Walking into Old Stories (by Maxine Heppner) is walking into another dimension. Dancer Takako is flawless." (in Moments in Time)”

Brittany Duggan

The Dance Current, 2015

“Reaching a new state of mind”


“Exposes the very heart of the human condition” 
(for Moments in Time)

 

Paula Citron

Globe and Mail & Toronto, and Classical 96.3 FM Canada, 2008

My Heart Is A Spoon… a tremendous show”
 

Samantha Wu

Mooney on Theatre, Toronto 2012

“The theatrical environment is surreal, flooded with visions of fantasy, memory, fear and longing.”
 

Sarah Hampson

Globe and Mail, Toronto 2012 

KRIMA! Simple in their power… A coup!”
 

John Kaplan

Now Magazine Toronto March 2009

“Wow…dance that springs from inspiration of brain and nerve impulse is just exactly ‘natural dance and media’ !!! This message gets through to audience, very good and very clear !”
 

Dance-Media

Japan, Tokyo 2006

“The performance was an inspiring, unsettling, beautiful, and haunting series”.
 

Cate Gable

Mindjack: the beat of digital culture, San Francisco, Jan. 2001

“Heppner is an intelligent dancesmith who layers her pieces with subtle details. The world she inhabits on stage is made up of elements borrowed from different media. Visually arresting, the work gently tweaks the senses, sometimes inspiring a dream state. Meaning is never concrete. This is dance that wants experiencing.”
 

Dierdre Kelly

Globe and Mail, Canada, June 1999

“As I watched, her work became an allegory about human survival.”
 

Xinna Tan

Singapore Inkpot, Dec 1999

"In Heppner’s Nine Bronze Pieces, the instruments interface with the dancers in delicate symbiosis. The score, composed by Mark Duggan, consists of nine different instrumental combinations, each one inspiring a separate dance idiom. Through a series of solos, duets and trios, the three dancers echo the various subtle shifts of sound performed by Evergreen’s eight musicians as if each note were travelling directly through their bodies. Heppner is a very precise choreographer. Thus, when a dancer moves a hand, it is in response to, or initiating, a musical element. Watching the work was like seeing with the ears and hearing with the eyes. Whether the dancers were standing in one place moving the body in gentle undulations, or leaping and turning about the stage, the dance and music was in total integration.

North of Java is a more dramatic piece for six dancers. The music (Andrew Timar) is a combination of taped nature sounds and live instrumentation, with the dancers confined to a small square of light as if we are focusing in on a one-minute microcosm of the jungle. What is remarkable is how Heppner manages to express so much physicality in such a small space. Sometimes, the dancers are in forceful synchronization, at others, they fall away into small or single groupings to portray arresting images of insect and animal life, or dense vines and tangled vegetation. One wonderful picture has the six leaning into each other like a giant worm. Another presents startled birds created by clever lifts. The piece works because of Heppner’s precision timing and her clean, clear articulation of movement.”
 

Paula Citron

Globe and Mail, Toronto, 2003

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Maxine Heppner's "ability to metamorphose attracts, fascinates, amuses and moves. Young and old, pretty and ugly, rejoicing, rebelling and despairing, she is deeply penetrating.”
 

Glos Pomorza

Poland, 1995

“a breath of fresh air”
 

Tempo magazine

Indonesia, 1991

“Half literal, half allegorical, but always poetic… a treat to watch the various permutations on the subject of Steel, concrete or not. The imagination was captured, the senses teased; the world seemed another place.”
 

Sherri Lee

The Flying Inkpot, Singapore, January 1999

"Snow was wonderful, quirky, so bizaaringly moving. There was also a brief moment when Heppner looked like this Japanese cartoon character I use to read as a kid!! "
 

Yvonne Ng

Princess Productions, Toronto, May 2002

“Always looking for a way to break down the fourth wall, the choreographer/performer cruises among the audience in a gold brocaded suit during a break between dances. Then she sheds suit and high heels and, in utilitarian undergarments, joins clarinetist Robert Stevenson on stage…. The self-denying approach to divinity is represented in her simple maneuvers on stage. While in the aesthetic camp…there’s an atmosphere of Versailles as the dancers per form in concentric circles…attention falls on Runge, who brings to the floor such graceful expression of the sentiments at hand that beauty needs no further definition.”

Susan Walker

Toronto Star, Canada, June 1999

“Heppner can really evoke images. This very very fine choreographer takes risks and she goes for it.”
 

Paula Citron

Classical 96.3FM, Toronto, Canada, 1997

“powerful, spirited”
 

Dancing on the Edge Festival

Vancouver, Canada,1998

“une performance pleine de charme et de nostalgie avec My past follows like a dragon’s tail. Une scène epurée où sont suspendues un douzaine d’ampoules accueillé une chorégraphie tantôt théatrale – une théatralité où l’on peut lire, en filigrante, les origines de l’interprête – tantôt energique et dense.”
 

Andree Martin

Ottawa Citizen, Canada, June 1998

“As I watched… I found myself feeling as I have at moments in a church attending a high mass in Latin: knowing that there was power and depth and grace before me and all around me – even if I didn’t know the language. It has been a wait of years now to get to see Heppner perform – and well worth that wait it was!”
 

W.Porter

Ascribe Newswire, San Francisco, January 2001

“An audacious choreographer”
 

Classical 96.3 FM

Toronto, Canada, 2009

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Moments in Time

reviews

Moments in Time

Toronto "Dora Mavor Moore Theatre Awards" Nomination

for best performance 2015

“The very heart of the human condition”

2008, Classical 96.3 FM

“Reaching a new state of mind”

Globe and Mail, Toronto

Globe and Mail
Paula Citron
2008

Moments in Time is a fitting name for the collaboration between choreographer Maxine Heppner and dancer Takako Segawa for more reasons than one: The veteran artists have been building the full-length work over five years and together they have produced a satisfying, thoughtful episodic work.

The piece is made up of 14 solos, each intriguingly named after a person and a state of mind. For example, the beginning solo is Jess’s serenity followed by Susi’s inspiration and Tina’s compassion.

The work can be viewed as specific snapshots from these various people’s lives, or collectively the solos may reflect the totality of a single life with its shifting emotional moods. In the latter case, the names, perhaps, become the people who have generated the response in the protagonist. Heppner as a choreographer is fascinated by both the whole physical cloth of dance as well as small details. The 14 solos range from Segawa executing highly energetic athleticism to almost slow-motion minimalism. The audience is kept abreast of the names of each solo by surtitles, which informs how we view the dance itself.There is also a parade of slides that splash over Segawa containing patterns of oriental carpets that also dictate mood.

Clearly, Heppner wants to direct us in our focus.Segawa is a compelling performer. She has a compact body that couples easy physicality with natural grace, but she can also play with gravity – at one point, she’s as light as a feather; at another, she’s weighted down by the pull of the Earth itself. Her subtle facial expressions play an important role in the piece. With just the hint of a smile, or a wider opening of the eyes, she can convey an intriguing shift in her interior monologue. As wonderful a dancer as Segawa is, she did at times overbalance and lose some of the crispness of her attack, particularly in changes between movement patterns, but this made her all the more human. Music also plays a key role in the performance. The compilation score includes early music, folk-inspired world beat, flamenco guitar, Indonesian gongs and abstract electronica. Silence as a backdrop is also used.Segawa also changes costume either by donning a whole new set of clothes, or by rolling up pant legs or taking off layers of tops. Thus each solo preserves its own individual integrity through movement, music (or lack thereof) and visual attributes.The solos each have their own movement leitmotifs. For example, Chin’s burden is executed with arms tightly folded across the chest and almost slow-motion physicality. In Galih’s present, Segawa loosens her body to embody a gangling teenager. Here the choreography is all about stamping of feet interpolated by fast and furious swivels. Sue’s desire is manifested by sensuous writhing on the floor, the legs slicing in scissor cuts.

 

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the work is that Heppner plays with her own choreographic signatures, those telltale repeating physicalities that hallmark a creator. They are the movement themes, but they are also the variations. The great swoop of arms, the high kick of one leg, the bent body turns, for example, are always present, but are assembled differently in each solo.

It is as if Heppner is deliberately saying, “Here I am as a choreographic writer and this is my vocabulary.”

Classical 96.3 FM

Across Oceans – Maxine Heppner’s Moments in Time


Choreographer Maxine Heppner and dancer Takako Segawa presented their thoughtful piece Moments in Time at the Pia Bouman Studio Theatre over the weekend. Two veteran dance artists collaborating together can produce very satisfying work. Heppner is an accomplished choreographer and Segawa is a compelling performer. Segawa’s subtle facial expressions played an important role in the piece. With just the hint of a smile, or a wider opening of the eyes, she could convey an intriguing shift in Heppner’s dance monologue.

 

Together, Heppner and Sagawa created a well-thought out dance piece that exposes the very heart of the human condition.

Sensational “Moments in Time”
 

Your sensational “Moments in Time” work resonated in me… images surfaced unbidden throughout the following week, and even now I conjure up memories of “characters” and feel moved. I liked the projection of women’s feelings, as we are more intense, I think, than is often projected or communicated. I rarely have such a response to performances although if I were wealthy I would like to be a patron!I hope that this work can be shown for larger audiences in the future or for more audiences and would not be surprised if “it has a life of its own”. Hurrah for you both! and warm congratulations on your enduring art.

Fran Khanna
Gestalt Institute, PhD-OISE

Moments in Time
 

I have watched a lot of dance over the years and was blown away by the exquisite performance. The work became translucent through Takako. Maxine and Takako are an unbeatable team. I wish my words could express as much as your performance did. I want to see more!

Lois Van Koghnet
Theatre Designer

KRIMA!

reviews

KRIMA!

In Toronto’s Top Ten Dance Shows of 2009 !!!
 

Now Magazine

“intimate and large scale…simple in its power…A Coups ! ”
 

2009, Now Magazine

“an audacious choreographer… nurture and survival… headlines writ large. ”
 

Classical 96.3fm

2009

“I didn’t think it was going to be so fun!”
 

dancer Andrea Nann

Sun Feb 9

“Awesome”
 

dancer Sasha Ivanochko

on Friday Feb 13

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“How can we sit by while tragedies are happening all the time? Maxine Heppner’s massively scaled project challenged our complacency and swept us up in a sea of 100 dancers, who crowded the Young Centre lobby in a series of powerful vignettes, some suggesting a Noah’s ark of survival and dignity.”

Glenn Sumi

NOW Magazine

“if I sing it again I will laugh …or cry”
 

unidentified voice

on Saturday Feb 14

“fabulous…what made you think of this?”
 

Evidance

interview, Sunday on Feb 15

“We need more Krima!”

Glenn Sumi

Arts Roundup, 2010

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My Heart Is A Spoon

reviews

My Heart Is A Spoon

TORONTO STAR
 

by Michael Crabb

Special to the Star
January 18, 2012

If you’ve ever felt the need to release some bottled up emotion or intense, indefinable psychic impulse you’re already half way to grasping what veteran choreographer Maxine Heppner is up to in her latest Toronto production, “My heart is a spoon”.

Heppner, whose more than 30-year professional career has taken her around the world investigating different cultures and aesthetics, has discovered a rich mine of meaning in the world of Japanese manga. Looking at these now internationally ubiquitous comic strips, evolutions of a 17th century heritage that have become an iconic part of today’s pop culture, Heppner was struck by their sense of containment, energy and unseen potential.

The more she thought about and discussed it‚ even convening a panel of experts on the subject, Heppner kept coming back to a central idea, that at their heart these small, boxed, line-drawn manga conveyed a sense of rage. Thus was hatched Heppner’s latest investigative obsession, what she calls the Rage Project.

Explaining her ideas during a break from rehearsals for the new hour-long work, she calls it the first incarnation‚ of an experimental dance-media performance, Heppner wants two things to be very clear.

 

First, /my heart is a spoon/, for all the included manga imagery, is not itself about manga. The esthetic is being used as a metaphor and compelling visual backdrop for Heppner’s central concern, the amorphous nature of rage. Equally, her chosen title plays on the notion of something that is often empty yet demands to be filled.

 

And, on her second point, the inherent nature of rage, Heppner wants us to remember that it takes many forms, not all of them negative but be a very creative force, as she explains. It all depends how you handle and direct it.

 

Translating abstract notions into a theatrical performance brings its own challenges. Heppner’s solution is a character-based situation, not precisely a narrative but certainly a story of personal experience and of a journey from one point to another expressed through movement, sometimes minimal, other times explosive.

 

Working in close collaboration with renowned Japanese lighting designer Takayuki Fujimoto, a pioneer in the use of high-tech LED devices, media artists Jerome dela Pierre and Elysha Poirier, and cosplay photographer Droo, Heppner evokes an almost surreal environment in which memory, fantasy and reality mix into a heady theatrical brew.

 

The Theatre Centre’s open performance space is transformed into a white box. Manga and cosplay (costume play) images hover on walls and floor. Takayuki invades the space with pulsating colours. Sarah Shugarman’s music is supplemented with the sounds of the Yoshida Brothers, hip young men who  turned the sound of the traditional Japanese shamisen, a plucked guitar-like instrument, into a pop sensation.

In the midst of this complex and evocative sensory assault are dancers Takako Segawa from Japan and Toronto-based Gerry Trentham, each representing different responses to the impulse of rage.

 

And it doesn’t stop there. Heppner has assembled a number of ancillary events around the performance. There was an origami group-in session to create props for the show, panels on manga history and the psychology of rage and a concurrent Theatre Centre exhibit of DROO’s cosplay photos. This Saturday, there’s a mini-festival of classic, manga-inspired anime. Heck, if you’re willing to show up for the performance dressed as your favourite manga character, you’ll get $5 off the price of admission.

Globe & Mail
 

Columnist Sarah Hampson 
Sunday, Jan. 29, 2012

Taking the rage route to finding peace


Happiness would make for boring theatre. It lacks drama and size, and has no sharp edges. Far better to work with a more extreme emotion, something that jumps out at you and demands to be understood.

That’s what Maxine Heppner began thinking about five years ago when introduced to contemporary manga or Japanese print comics. She had long been aware of the ancient art form, but hadn’t taken much interest in the pop culture version. “And when I saw them, I was struck by the energy that comes off the page, that comes out and meets the eye.”

She was also intrigued by the way a book of them is an act of containment. “It is this benign little volume of paper, sitting there on a shelf. You open it and go ‘wow’ and then you can close it and the emotion of it goes away,” says the award-winning dance artist, director and teacher in a phone interview.

An idea for the exploration of a human condition – a big, raw emotion we hold inside and only periodically let out – began to percolate. “The idea of rage is extreme anger. I don’t think of it as the opposite of happiness. That would be sadness, which has no energy and is a deflation. Rage is in a different realm. It’s extreme, like ecstasy. And I wanted to look at it in all its complexity.”

 

I thought about rage as the inspiration for art when I sat in the darkened theatre to see Heppner’s latest production, My Heart Is a Spoon. It’s well known from happiness studies that a sense of contentment makes us more productive at work and better citizens who want to volunteer and contribute. But does it help create art? I know many creative people – writers and artists – who feel that their discontent is the engine of their work. Friedrich Nietzsche would agree: “You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star,” he wrote.

 

The play takes place in a simple, white box of a stage set, onto which large manga cartoons and other images were projected. Two characters, a male and a female, one young, one older, offer different respond differently to their contained rage. Created in collaboration with light artist Fujimoto Takayuki, the theatrical environment is surreal, flooded with visions of fantasy, memory, fear and longing. The female character, performed by Takako Segawa, is constantly moving, writhing around on a large ball, unsettled, whereas the older male character (Gerry Trentham) is more self-contained. Part of his expression of rage comes out in the creation of small, origami tigers, which litter the stage at the end.

It’s an interesting investigation of an emotion often seen as something to be avoided, repressed – almost shameful in the largeness of its expression. We condemn it when we speak of road rage, the rage of a parent directed at a child, of one spouse raging at the other. We’re a culture obsessed with happiness, eager to achieve a peaceful, serene state, still as a pond, a lack of drama. We praise and desire the positive. But what Ms. Heppner, who has spent 30 years in theatre exploring human reaction and interaction, sets out to do is show how rage should not be feared.

 

As part of the creative process, she convened a “rage roundtable” with people who had experienced the extreme state (often characterized by a sense of injustice) as well as psychoanalysts. “It’s not in absence of happiness. It’s just this moment of extreme pressure. It’s energy condensed, like a little time bomb. It can vent very slowly. It can implode inside itself. Or it can explode. Something has to happen with the energy of it.”

 

And surprisingly, that can be good. “I think we have to face these things,” Ms. Heppner says. “If we ignore them, it’s not good. These strong emotions are intense. It’s more practical to recognize it, because then you can integrate it into your life, the same way we do with grief over a loved one.”

One revelation came while interviewing Hiroshima survivors who discussed how they coped with feelings of rage. “We were talking about what went on in Hiroshima and the aftermath of [the Second World War] in Asia Pacific. We found out that the Japanese government directed survivors [of the atomic bomb] to ‘swallow your anger’ if I can paraphrase. They had fought the war and lost, and there was this unimaginable destruction of people and geography. And I thought about that. If you swallow it, you digest it, and then it becomes something else. There’s potential for the positive. The possibilities are endless. If it explodes, it’s over and destruction is involved.”

 

The metaphor of the spoon helped explain the condition. “People spoke about feeling empty or very full. How do you live with nothing inside of you or with too much inside of you?” she asks rhetorically. “And the nature of a spoon is that it’s made to be emptied and filled, emptied and filled, pouring self-administered or force-fed sensations of hot, cold, sweet and sour into our bodies.”

 

I thought about that as I exited the theatre – it, too, a containment of sorts, a closed space apart from the dark rush of evening traffic, where we are asked to confront truths. Neil Munro, the late Canadian director at the Shaw Festival, once described theatre to me as “a signpost” for navigating daily life. We should take this direction I thought – that rage is a life force, not be ignored, dismissed or spat out, a state that can lead to greater understanding of who we are and, ultimately, to what we must resolve, what we must digest, to find peace.

FAB Magazine REVIEW
 

My Heart is a Spoon
 

Toronto Jan 22, 2012
Brian Batungan

Everybody enters a theatre with preset ways of interpretation – as a result of the brain’s default daily operations as formed by everyday experience. If you’re used to understanding a story in a play, you’re bound to find it more difficult to make sense of a performance which is not based on any narrative. In this situation, a viewer is bound to struggle with the performance because of his/her pre-set modes of understanding stimuli. It is much easier for a Japanese to understand another Japanese because they share the many different languages of the Japanese (verbal and non-verbal). 

Bring the Japanese on a Canadian stage without the benefit of language Canadians understand, there will be a lot of groping in the dark, even in the midst of fancy stage lighting and graphic images.

The thing about dance, as a language, is that there seems to be a sense of universality to it. Some movements are more understood as masculine or feminine across cultures because of a seemingly shared standard for masculinity and femininity. It is the same with colors (warmer colors are often perceived as more appetizing than the cold ones). Some sounds are more perceived as more relaxing than others across cultures. This is the solid foundation of Maxine Heppner’s work called My Heart is a Spoon. That while manga or any non-Canadian imagery may be alienating, sound, movement and colors bridge the language gap between the artist and the curious members of the audience.

Immediately, as one begins to absorb the explosion of lights, sounds, and movements in the show, one struggles with attaining visual focus. We all want focus. That’s how we are trained to understand. But perhaps, we have become so trained in verbal (written language-related) focusing, we struggle with finding focus in a non-verbal way. Perhaps, as the Japanese dancer in Heppner’s project (Segawa) dances away and disappears in the overlap of images and sounds, we are challenged to experience the bombarment of our senses than understand the details of the stimuli. There are no words or punctuation marks given to viewers in the performance, just slow and fast progressions of movements, sounds, and graphic images and colors. Instead of looking for well-sequenced elements, viewers are invited to witness the constant backward and forward movements of stimuli revealing the complexity of relations and dynamics of things that we associate with rage.

 

Gerry Trentham was a standout as he showed all that we associate with control and restraint, the tangible and those confined to time and space. Meanwhile, Takako Segawa’s engaging immersion in all that is transitory and uncontainable positions her as Trentham’s opposite. If one were to conceive Takako as anything associated with rage or that cathartic release of energy in a conflicted circumstance, then Trentham is nothing but her antithesis. If there is anything one quickly understands in Heppner’s piece, it is the opposition that Segawa ang Trentham presents in their performance. As such, manga images and spectacular lighting are but parts of a context where both are most overtly expressed, and the sounds are mostly ambient elements that highlight one’s experience of the opposition presented.

 

And the spoon! It is a visual tool used a couple of times that serves as a metaphor to how each of the dancers or their characters respond to energy which the world possesses. Trentham attempts to capture the energy from a lightbulb – a futile attempt if we trust our common logic. Segawa tries to feel the intensity from it – which, compared to the explosion of light and sound which she enjoys, is clearly an insufficient. In another scene, Trentham tries to draw out energy from an exhausted Segawa using the spoon. In the last scene, Segawa aims the spoon towards a leaping tiger. No discourse can be drawn from this as fast as one can understand the contrast between them. But for both of them, there simply is not enough room in a spoon to attain what they seem to be looking for. And if our hearts are spoons, we can only bear so much.

FAB Magazine

 

Preview
Brian Batungan

Maxine Heppner and Gerry Trentham on "My Heart is a Spoon"
 

Maxine’s experimentation, the “first incarnation” of its kind in her body of work, puts in the spotlight Toronto’s own veteran dancer Gerry Trentham and Japan’s Takako Segawa, in an explosion of multimedia imagery, movement, and sound. Captivated by the black and white aesthetics of Manga comics in Japan, the Harajuku culture that sustains it, and the hyper-media landscape we all live in, Maxine sought to shed light on the dynamics between a young character that goes ballistic and out of control, and an older one that controls too much, manipulates, and suppresses. 

Maxine Heppner, the creative director of the production titled “My Heart is a Spoon” explained that such a phrase, now used by young people and can more easily be traced back to Harry Potter, meant that one’s heart can only take so much. Beyond its limit, there is rage – rage that explodes, kills, destroys unless it finds an appropriate expression that moderates it. This is the inspiration behind the production, which, in a span of a year, listened to many people who have experienced rage in their lives and survived to share about it.

 

Drawn as well to the distinct styles of dancers Gerry and Takako, Maxine plays with androgyny, on the one hand, to highlight the yin and yang which all genders possess. Gerry stressed, “I actually think that the root of homophobia has less to do with gay and straight and all that stuff anymore but morewith feminine-masculine politics, and more of the whole idea that for a man to be given a certain kind of power in a male body to assume a role in a body of a female is quite fearful to our society still in a huge and enormous way. We can play with it as a parody but we don’t. There’s a taboo around it still. And it’s amazing to me that there’s so much fear around that.”

Gerry’s embodiment contributes distinctly to highlight gender ambiguity. “It’s interesting to have your own persona. Physically, because of the way I am constructed and a sort of an interesting awkwardness to my body, it’s assumed to be a very masculine thing. People project that a lot to me. That’s why it’s interesting for me to play (this). Even though I’m doing everything I can from the inside to assume a different kind of physicality people will still assume certain things.”

 

On the other hand, Maxine also aims to engage audiences to interpret each character using their own unique contexts – an involvement with viewers that she always aspires to achieve. “In a scene where I’m wearing a feminine garment, we’re not interested in making (the audience) see me as a woman (but in) seeing a masculine body in a very feminine landscape,” Gerry explained. “In a role, it is also not assuming that rage is (solely) associated with masculinity.”

 

Gerry distinguishes his aesthetic from Maxine’s as “a lot more (to do) with scripted text, spoken rather than sounded language.” “The source of it… Manga comics… is a very different aesthetic and I find it really provocative,” Gerry noted. After having performed a “fiery” role in “Four Mad Humours” which expressed anger and suppression of rage, such a stage persona has found its way to become one of Maxine’s characters immersed in Manga’s “sharpness, darkness and lightness, and all kinds of very moving images in an odd way,” explains Gerry.

 

Gerry believes that there is much that the LGBTQ audience can look forward to in the project. “I think the physicality and the brightness… some of the sounding that we do is really provocative. It’s not just rage in an angry (way) but it’s also the delight and ecstasy in allowing loud sounds to come out of the body.” “There are some really interesting interactive moments with media (too) which is really fun,” he teases.

Now 50 years old, he brings a lot more than his body and movements onstage. I bring my whole life into each project. Gender and rage issues, I don’t know why I’m attracted to them. I just seem to be motivated by injustice, and especially political and economic injustice. It creates a sort of suppressed rage in me. It’s a huge motivating factor (for me) as an artist. It is always seething somewhere underneath the choices I make. As a gay man, I also see all the phobia within the gay culture which is really disturbing sometimes, and the power dynamics and the politics of it all. I try to stay awake about that and not sleep because I can be invisible whenever I want.” He admits he does not sleep a lot now, literally and figuratively. “We’re in a war and there is not a lot of time to sleep, and I see that war becoming more difficult. And I also see that the community can be quite complacent.”

Despite lack of sleep, Gerry acknowledges that Maxine’s work brings life to a dancer at the peak of his career.”It’s fun to be hired as a dancer when you’re over 50. It’s a great joy.” Gerry enthused, “There is something about experiencing life here (in the production), in coming into an audience, with several people that can have a visceral impact, that can inspire and can make lives much richer, and (in) taking a look at a piece that’s about video interjection against the live performance. Experiencing that is a great way to become more conscious of what our environment is creating in you.” 

Old Stories

reviews

Old Stories

“Walking into Old Stories (by Maxine Heppner) is walking into another dimension.”


Brittany Duggan of The Dance Current, 2015

TORONTO STAR
 

by Michael Crabb

February 5, 2015

Many Stories Told Through Dance


Maxine Heppner presents Old Stories Feb. 5 to 8 after project was derailed by her bike accident and concussion. Fifteen months and one major concussion later, veteran Toronto choreographer Maxine Heppner is bringing her latest project, Old Stories, to the stage.

The two-part program, a Danceworks/CoWorks presentation opening Thursday at the intimate Scotiabank Studio Theatre in Parkdale, was originally scheduled for November 2013. Just two weeks before the premiere, disaster struck.

“I’d just finished up a production session at the theatre and was cycling back home,” recounts Heppner. “I was happy, thinking what a perfect fall evening. Then somehow wet leaves got caught up in the front wheel. It jammed and I ended up flying over the handlebars and landing flat on my face. The bike didn’t have a scratch.”

 

Fortunately, there were people around — Heppner call them “angels” — to offer assistance and summon an ambulance, but the concussion Heppner sustained, plus a few cracked teeth, knocked her out of action for several months.

 

“It was as if my brain stopped working for a while,” says Heppner. “Any sensory stimulus was too much so no reading, no writing, no computer, no television. Basically I was in the dark for at least the first month.”

The impending performances, of course, had to be cancelled. Now, more or less fully recovered, Heppner is excited that Old Stories is finally going on.

As Heppner explains, the germ of the program came from an earlier solo she performed as part of the popular ongoing series Older and Reckless, curated by Claudia Moore. In it, Heppner sat at a table, “dancing with my hands.”

 

For Heppner, this gestural language contained specific meaning but, as she discovered, audiences often read it quite differently, injecting their own meaning, their own stories, into Heppner’s hand dance.

She decided to explore the idea of personal stories and the effect of making them public, in the way we often share our stories with others.

 

In preparation, Heppner put out an open call for people to send in their stories. These, almost 80 of them, will be displayed in the lobby in written form to provide context for the ideas behind the performance. Heppner calls this, a “very SHORT STORY festival.”

 

In the program’s opening work, Old Story, Heppner is transforming the theatre into a “pseudo tavern.” The audience will sit at tables. Beer will be served. The 10-member cast could initially be mistaken for fellow audience members — Heppner plays tavern keeper — until the four principals among them dive into the meat of the dance, the actual telling of stories, in spoken word and gesture.

 

“Some of the stories are real,” explains Heppner. “Some are made up and some, like an Inuit tale, are borrowed. They are funny and joyous, tragic and sad. Some stories can only be expressed through the body itself, in dance.”

What interests Heppner in the work’s evolution is the way even personal stories, repeatedly retold, settle into archetypal frameworks. They share elements that transcend time and culture.

 

In the second part of the program Heppner has completely reworked a solo she first workshopped in 2008. Moments in Time is performed by Takako Segawa, Heppner’s longtime artistic collaborator. For this, the theatre reverts to a more conventional configuration with the audience no longer embedded in the action but seated as viewers.

 

Heppner explains the solo as one woman’s story, an exploration of her inner life. The 50-minute dance takes Segawa on a journey of memory and recalled emotions, in its own way transformed in the present through the act of telling.

 

“Telling stories is fundamental to us as people,” says Heppner. “It’s how we connect.”

Source:  https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/stage/2015/02/04/many-stories-told-through-dance.html

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