Articles
Creature Feature
Choreographer Jolene Bailie’s latest work fills a harmonious world with imaginary animals
Winnipeg dancer-choreographer Jolene Bailie hands the stage over to an ensemble for her latest work, Sensory Life, Infinite World.Winnipeg dance artist Jolene Bailie has gone forth and multiplied.Expanding on her best-known solo, Switchback, in which she portrayed a lizard-like creature, Bailie has choreographed a new work depicting a colony of seven imaginary organisms.
Dance Preview
Sensory Life, Infinite World
U of W’s Canwest Centre for Theatre and Film
Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 4 p.m.
Tickets $20 (students/seniors $15) at www.gearshifting.org or at the door
“Even though you were looking at this lone creature, you did get the feeling that there were more of them,” Bailie says about Switchback, which she has performed more than 100 times in Canada and the U.S. since 2006.
The dark-eyed, black-haired Bailie will be watching from the audience this weekend as five female and two male dancers perform the new Sensory Life, Infinite World at the University of Winnipeg’s Canwest Centre for Theatre and Film.
It’s a major career step — the first full-length ensemble work for the 32-year-old, who has made her name as a solo performer and choreographer. The show, presented by Bailie’s company, Gearshifting Performance Works, also marks her first decade as a professional artist.
The February cover story of the national magazine The Dance Current is about Bailie’s creative process for this work, with photos by her longtime lighting designer, Hugh Conacher. She and Conacher have ended their 10-year romantic relationship, but continue to collaborate.
The dancers in Sensory Life, Infinite World depict instinctual creatures who co-exist in an ecosystem of balance, harmony and mutual acceptance.
“These creatures are very abstract… but there’s an illogical logic to it,” Bailie says. “They have this innate intelligence, sort of like sonar…
“It’s this imagined, fantastical world of androgynous, unidentifiable creatures. It’s magical to be freed from the common assumption of gravity and time, which are what we (humans) revolve our life around…. To me, it is a utopia.”
The 75-minute piece is performed to a soundscape by Winnipeg’s Susan Chafe. Bailie choreographed the movement in silence, then Chafe designed the sound in response. The show also includes video, set elements and a “white foreign substance that the dancers are covered in.”
Bailie says all her works have dealt with, in one way or another, her concern that contemporary life is too pressurized, frantic and judgmental, and that we’re enslaved by technology. With the new piece, she’s exploring a nature-inspired alternative.
Many of the ideas, she says, came from observing her dog and cat, visiting the zoo and watching nature-documentary TV series such as The Trials of Life and Planet Earth.
“If I wasn’t a dancer, I’d definitely want to be involved with animals in some way,” she says. “Their understanding of each other is not infiltrated by the mass media and the technological world. I know, like, in the gorilla colony there will be the prima donna, there will be the boss… but it has developed naturally, not because somebody has $250 shoes.”
Many Canadians have followed Bailie as a solo fringe-festival performer. But after eight straight years on the fringe circuit, she decided not to apply for the summer festivals this year.
As her productions have become more elaborate, she says, it’s become clear that fringe economics don’t work for dance. Another reason she has abandoned the fringe is that she’ll be working on a higher-profile ensemble dancework this summer. Hybrid Human is described as a multimedia collaborative production between visual art, dance and music.
Initiated by distinguished Winnipeg painter Wanda Koop, it will be part of a major retrospective called Wanda Koop: on the edge of experience, slated for the Winnipeg Art Gallery from Sept. 11 to Nov. 21. The exhibition is co-organized by the WAG and the National Gallery of Canada. Hybrid Human will be performed right in the gallery space. Bailie hopes it will go to Ottawa with the exhibition.
Koop invited Bailie, Chafe and Conacher to collaborate with her on the project, which deals with humans’ increasing reliance on new technologies.
It turns out that Koop, a member of the Order of Canada who is in her late 50s, is a big fan of Bailie’s work. “She’s been coming to my shows since 2003 or 2004,” says the choreographer. “She has a similar aversion to technology that I do.”
No clocks in this jungle
Choreographer Jolene Bailie builds a creative utopia with Sensory Life, Infinite World
by Jen Zoratti
Jolene Bailie is curled up in a chair, intently watching her seven dancers rehearse scenes from Sensory Life, Infinite World, the first full-length ensemble work from the acclaimed local choreographer and artistic director of Gearshifting Performance Works.
“It’s like watching fish in an aquarium,” she whispers.
The comparison is dead on. Although there’s a controlled athleticism in the dancers’ movements (those familiar with Bailie’s solo work will have no trouble seeing her in the piece), there’s also lightness, fluidity and calm.
Within that juxtaposition lies the whole inspiration for the show, which clocks in at around 80 minutes. Sensory Life, Infinite World is a glimpse into an imagined ecosystem in which creatures co-exist in perfect harmony without the stress, expectations and pressures of modern life - and with the complete freedom to give in to their primal urges.
“The spirit of the piece is my own little vision of utopia,” explains Bailie, 32. “There’s not this pressure of time. These days, everything moves so fast - we’re all trying to be superheroes and cram everything in, yet we don’t see each other or reward ourselves for all our hard work.
“I also really love animals,” she adds with a laugh. “I wish humans could view each other like animals and accept each other for who they are, not for what they know or what they do or who they will become.”
To create her utopia, Bailie worked with a whole host of talented collaborators, including lighting and set designer Hugh Conacher, costume designer Anne Armit (the brains behind the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s wardrobe) and sound artist Susan Chafe, who rose to the task of creating an original, textural soundscape for the piece - after it was choreographed.
“The whole piece was created without music,” Bailie says. “I’m so easily swooned. I didn’t want to get influenced by music.”
Bailie also made sure the studio was a stress-free refuge for dancers Freya Olafson, Claire Marshall, Tiffany Thomas, Mark Sawh Medrano, Emma Rose, Sarah Helmer and Tyrell Witherspoon.
“I’m anti-stress and making stress for other people,” she says. “That’s been a huge part of the creative process. I think I’ve always felt a tremendous amount of pressure myself, performing. But I think you can create art and work hard without being destructive to the human spirit. I think people are losing their spirit because they’re working so hard - and that saddens me so much. It makes people feel bitter and it makes them feel unjust. And it is unfair. Everybody I know is doing their best - but the expectations are too much.
“In rehearsal, as soon I saw stress I tried to clear it right away. I didn’t want a part to be associated with frustration, and I didn’t want people to start feeling like what they were doing wasn’t good enough.”
That supportive, positive environment yielded many rewards.
“It’s been a gift,” Bailie says. “I’m really grateful for everybody. Everybody’s been so unusually cooperative and harmonious. It’s something I’ve never experienced in the studio in my life.”
With that in mind, it’s hard to believe that Sensory Life, Infinite World comes from a solitary place. It grew out of Switchback, a signature solo Bailie has performed over 100 times. Still, as strange as it was at first for her not to perform her own work (another first for Bailie), she’s incredibly proud of what her dancers have done with it.
“I knew I couldn’t be in the show, period, because I wouldn’t have been able to do my job,” she says. “I’d love to be up there, but this would not be what it is if I was in it.
“This project is bigger than me.”
SENSORY LIFE, INFINITE WORLD
Gearshifting Performance Works
Feb. 19-21, Canwest Centre for Theatre and Film
TAKING a show on the Canadian fringe circuit is no piece of cake. It’s not even a cheap cup o’ joe.
It’s a gruelling feat of low-budget travel, unpredictable lodgings, financial risk, loneliness and punishingly hard work, says acclaimed Winnipeg modern dancer Jolene Bailie, whose one-woman company is called Cuppa Jo. Fringe veteran Bailie, 29, is doing her fifth festival tour, this year starting here and hitting Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, Victoria and Vancouver before wrapping up Sept. 16.
“The lifestyle can be really uncomfortable,” she says. “It’s the ultimate test of dedication. I have done many fringes alone and it is really, really, really, really hard.”
The Fort Garry-bred graduate of the School of Contemporary Dancers looks as delicate as your average ballerina. But she is a shrewd and gutsy self-marketer who has forged an unusual career path. Rather than joining a company or attempting to get roles as a freelancer, she commissions choreographers to create solo works for her (and creates some herself).
This year’s piece, Private i, is the work of Calgary’s Denise Clarke. It opens with video footage of Bailie that is projected on two life-sized black cutouts of her, creating the illusion of multiple Jolenes. Bailie spent on two small video projectors to create the hologram-like effect. And of course, she has to invest the up-front entrance fee, usually , for each fringe. “Many artists lose a lot of money touring the circuit — thousands and thousands,” she says. “It’s a big risk, and artists generally are broke.
“I know someone who went off to teach English in Korea to pay off his fringe debt.”
The fringes’ varying showtimes, designed so that no one monopolizes the good timeslots, can play havoc with one’s body, says Bailie. “It’s comparable to doing shift work. You can have a late-night show, followed by a noon show the next day.”
And the festivals’ timing — this year Calgary ends on Aug. 18 and Edmonton starts Aug. 19 — can create pressure and stress. “At times you need to practically jump offstage and get to the airport to get to your technical rehearsal in the next city.”
It’s financially unwise, Bailie has learned, to tour anything but a bare-bones set. “It could cost you over $1,000 to ship a big fake rock around the country, which I did in 2003.” Over the years, she has been billeted in homes ranging from an oceanside condo to a camper in a back lane.
“One of the most shocking things for me, being the frugal dancer, was how much it actually cost to stay alive on tour,” she says. At home in Winnipeg, the only time she ever splurged on a taxi was when she had a broken foot. On tour, she often has to use cabs to get all her “show stuff” to the venue.
“I have grown up a lot,” she says. “I sure do know the value of a dollar and how far it can actually be stretched.”
This year, Bailie is “excited and grateful” that for the first time, her partner and lighting designer, Hugh Conacher, is able to go on tour with her.
Overall, she says, the positives far outweigh the negatives. She has learned, out of necessity, to be her own company manager, publicist and producer. Most importantly, she says, “the fringe circuit has allowed me the opportunity for quantum leaps of growth as an artist.”
The Winnipeg Free Press
July 24, 2007
Alison Mayes
Altering the Abstract
Jolene Bailie changes her MO for a more straight-forward dance show
Reality sometimes bites, but Jolene Bailie is happy to be dancing in it again
For the 29-year-old dancer, whose past works have often been imaginary, fantastic and especially angst-driven, it was important to get back into the real world, which she’ll be doing with private i. Bailie’s latest solo show was created by Calgary’s Denise Clarke and is a theatrical dance investigation of the self.
“I really had a hard time having fun (in the past),” Bailie says. “I know that sounds bizarre, but this show is about a person living a great life, and she loves her life, even though there are ups and downs. So what? It’s life.
“To be that character and take that home opposed to my previous monstrous shows, that invade every part of your life, it’s very refreshing to me.”
To craft the reality-based piece, Clarke ran Bailie through an intensely personal interview process. The purpose, however, was never to put the dancer’s life on display.
“She took that line of questioning and what she learned about me and used that as the basis for the writing, but it’s done in a way where it wouldn’t necessarily have to be about me,” Bailie says. “It creates this world, this character and an environment that worked. The odd line is directly what I said, but mainly she just used it as inspiration, as a foundation to create the character.”
Story aside, the actual dancing also has a firm grip in reality. She may be trained, but Bailie can get her groove on like anybody else.
“Often in modern works I have worked on in the past, the goal is to do something very abstract, something maybe not seen before, something completely different,” she explains. “This show plays off the dance clichés, so I do dance steps, which often I don’t do in my shows. It’s very much like I’m dancing. It’s clear what I’m doing is dancing around to the music.”
That music is the instrumental indie pop of Toronto’s The Hylozoists, so it’s evident that Bailie is really putting the contemporary in contemporary dance, with private i promising to be very of the moment, a real look at a modern-day female.
“I’ve never had such current, real and human elements in my show,” Bailie says. “Usually the show is often abstract, maybe a little bizarre, but this show, well even though there might be some bizarre elements in it, is about a real person. It’s very relatable to everyday life.”
You really don’t want to miss Bailie stepping out a bit - so be sure to be on time
Dancer Takes an i-Opening Voyage into Theatrical Work
Local dancer Jolene Bailie likes to dip her nimble toes in new water
In her latest show, private i, the Winnipeg performer explores the landscape of dance theatre for the first time. The hour-long solo show weaves together dance and storey-telling as it follows a female character’s emotional roller-coaster ride on a journey of self-discovery.
“This is new territory for me,” says the energetic and always enthusiastic modern dancer, who runs her own one-woman company, Cuppa Jo, and has performed over 180 shows since graduating from The School of Contemporary Dancers in 2000.
“I wanted to challenge myself to do something I may not be comfortable with. I wanted to do something completely different…to break some new ground, for me.”
She admits that speaking on stage is very different terrain from dancing.
“I was so petrified that I lost my voice during my first working rehearsal,” says Bailie, who has established herself on the modern-dance scene as an expressive performer, with a chameleon-like ability to create many different characters on stage.
“I have worked really hard on the text to ensure it comes across naturally, like a conversation.”
Private i also marks Bailie’s first full-length solo show. She typically mounts mixed-repertoire shows featuring several shorter works from various established choreographers, although she has also created her own short pieces as well.
In the case of this project, Bailie commissioned choreographer Denise Clarke of Calgary’s acclaimed One Yellow Rabbit performance theatre company to create a dance especially for her.
“Denise Clarke’s work intrigued me; she is very experimental and avant-garde,” explains Bailie.
The resulting choreography is more animate and theatrical in style than her previous performances, she adds. It’s also unique for her in dance that the dance is set to rock music by Toronto indie band the Hylozoists.
“The choreography is very athletic with big, expansive range of movements,” she says. “The dances come from a very emotional place and the choreography is there to relay that emotion.”
Bailie also points out that this is one of her most accessible and fun performances to date.
“The character is very human and tangible and vulnerable and someone we can all relate to,” says Bailie.
“At the beginning she is really cool and projects confidence. She is a bit of a diva. Then she slowly removes her shell and shares herself with the audience. She is questioning herself, her life, the world, and that encourages the audience to question themselves, too.”
“But it is done with humour, and in a very entertaining way, not in an overly sentimental, chick-flick way. It is a very spirited piece.”
May 04, 2007
The Winnipeg Free Press
Cheryl Binning
One of the most feted new dancers on the fringe scene
-Eye Magazine, July 07, 2005
finely honed interpretation
-The Vancouver Sun, July 06, 2005
This year’s top pick is Chasing Bliss.
-Now Magazine, Hot Summer Guide 2005
Winnipeg’s Jolene Bailie is considered by some to be the great new Canadian solo
artist, and heir (gulp!) to Montreal’s legendary Margie Gillis. Working within various
idioms of modern dance, the charismatic siren performs works by…
Marie-Josee Chartier, Joe Laughlin and Julia Sasso.
Her Toronto debut is long overdue.
- Paula Citron
Toronto Life Magazine
June 2004
