Performed at Intrepid Theatre, Victoria, BC on November 7th, 8th & 9th, 2024
A Review by Kyeren Regehr
Photos by Lia Crowe
Photography: Lia Crowe: Garth Martens (poet and producer), Jan Zwicky (poet), Gareth Owen (guitarist), and Denise Yeo (dancer) in the foreground
Two nights in a row, I emerged from the curtained cave of Intrepid Theater with a tear-streaked face, my hands shaking in elation. Dark Sounds is more than a performance—it’s a lived experience. I wept, not because it was sad, but because I’d been fed the remedy to all the sadness I carried. This living fusion of poetry, dance and music, offered by four masters of their art forms, became a receptacle of communion into which we could all empty ourselves.
It begins with the liquid rasgueos of Gareth Owen, a genius flamenco guitarist nourished on the tradition since birth—his fingers are water rippling the strings. At times such a ferocity of sound that my head snapped to Owen—did the strings just double? did he grow an extra hand? It’s as if the instrument is part of his body. And how does he personally prepare? Asked afterwards by writer, Melanie Siebert, in a captivating interview with the performers, Owen says, “I open my heart…” And if you watch carefully, you might see how deeply he plunges in order to draw out the richest music. He can conjure a dozen voices at once or split your heart with the haunting tremolo of a single note. And the silences he holds, the spaces he leaves—these are as moving and audible as any melody. His guitar is as effortless, natural and emotionally nuanced as speech.
Everything rests upon Owen’s music; everything grows out of it. The other three artists begin by listening, not simply with their ears, but with a rare full-bodied attentiveness—slowly they ripen with the music, becoming taut with a visible readiness, and then they feed/pour/explode their craft into whatever opening Owen creates.
When award-winning poet, Garth Martens, enters the music, he slingshots his poetry into the stratosphere and we’re flung along with it. His metaphors are both iconic and perfectly unique—they surprise us, even shock us, and yet somehow feel as if they’ve always existed. Later I heard the catharsis of his performance compared to punk rock in its ability to voice “everything you want to scream at your enemy”—this, over drinks, and from men who are not poets or dancers. Another man declared it was the antidote to all he’d been feeling—Martens’s artful abreaction allowed other men (in truth, everyone) immediate access to their emotions. Perhaps it is in part due to the proximity of the U.S. election, or because the world has been on fire for so long now, but it’s definitely due to the arranque of flamenco—the way performers of the tradition spontaneously burst with uncontrolled emotion and carry the audience with them. Martens’s voice sparks electric as his metaphors; his voice flies charged and raw with what it means to be a man, a husband, a son, a father, a human being in this culture that demands men carry the sins of a patriarchy we’ve all been fed and battered by. Martens’s stalwart presence, and his unwavering lyric storm, repairs all of this.
And indeed, this is what all of these artists do—they repair their audience. They carry us into the dark human places, into the grief we’re all feeling, and then they put us back together, lighter, freer.
Denise Yeo—an artist of astonishing talent and with compás comparable to any international flamenco dancer—is a master of making us feel. She portrays complex emotions and narratives using her body, her face and her spectacular feet. As an ex-dancer, I felt this performance viscerally—my body recognizing and involuntarily responding to a dancer who holds nothing back. Yeo is fearless and magical—it’s as if she’s channeling the collective unconscious through her body; from pathos to bathos, it all flows through her. Whatever poetry proclaims, whatever Owen says with his guitar, Yeo spins it into being—she’s a tower falling, she’s the sun, she’s every one of us, she’s violence, grief, desire, she’s mischief, punctuating this physical speech with lightning rematars. She becomes poetry and music incarnate—an almost inhuman entity partnered by duende. But like a shaman holding the gateway between two worlds, she’s also entirely her human self—present, grounded, and utterly generous. She stirs the liminal to life, welcoming us with her warm and expressive face—we cannot not feel what she’s feeling. Her dance is at once a healing and a celebration of what it means to be embodied.
The poetry of Jan Zwicky has healed me many times, and over many years (almost all of her books haunt my shelves). She writes like a classical musician plays an instrument, with her ear inseparable from the music. I felt concerned she’d stand out, that she’d not cohere with the impassioned world of flamenco. I was wrong to worry. From the moment she harmonized with Garth Martens, their voices gliding above Owen's guitar, I was sold. If Yeo is dancing with duende, then Zwicky recites with the angel. But she can only reach those heights because her feet are rooted to the earth (in fact, she’s on her knees in the garden, wings hovering behind her). It’s not just the meticulous witnessing of a master poet that tugs you in, nor is it the unmistakable truth on her tongue, it’s the way so much of what she says rings with beauty—in her own words, “truth’s brightest scar.” She wields it as a weapon and a cure. Whether it’s a woman’s unbidden desire or the unanswerable grief of climate crisis, Zwicky holds us still and we cannot look away. As humans, it’s impossible for us to refuse beauty.
Except for a small hand-built flamenco dance floor and three chairs set upstage right, the stage lies bare. The spareness allows our minds the space to build worlds as the words-music-dance rise and fall; we move with the performers as they flow from bulerias to soleares to alegrias and beyond, internally arranging ourselves into new tableau along with them (the mood always supported by the seamless lighting crossfades of technical designer, Miriam Dumitra). As a former choreographer, I must mention that the theatrical elements of the performance rest within a balanced and carefully wrought structure—and the transitions between each "scene" feel just right—which is what one would hope since this is the fourth rendering of Dark Sounds. But we're also seeing it built communally, and in layers, very much in the moment. This balance between the staged and the improvisational is one that requires a fine level of skill, artistry and careful listening as an ensemble—and it works.
In another time or place Dark Sounds might be called experimental theater—especially when we consider that each of the four versions of this show was pulled together in a mere five days of collaborative rehearsal. When I heard this, it got me thinking about studio musicians, and how when a producer calls them in, they’ll begin playing as a tightly knit band in a jiffy—this is because they’re all virtuosos. Part of the magic of Dark Sounds is that the guitar, the poetry and the dance have already been mastered; this is a synergy of professionals.
As I write this, I find myself offering the artists an almost mythical rendering—this is the effect of their performance. Throughout, the audience cannot help but attend to each moment; we're held in thrall as ninety minutes passes like thirty—how does this happen?
Photography: Lia Crowe (Jan Zwicky, Garth Martens, Gareth Owen, Denise Yeo)
In Siebert’s interview this je ne sais quoi was named as trust, listening, attentiveness…love; the spirit of duende was tossed about. And yes, it’s all of these things, and it’s also flamenco—which is known as an art form of immediate experience and deep community connection. The audience is invited to shout jaleo, words of appreciation and encouragement, and scattered throughout the seats are local flamenco aficionados (dancers, students, novice guitarists), inspiring everyone to join in. As we call out agua, hassa, as we exhort and sigh, applaud and cry, breathe into the silences...we become part of the performance-in-motion.
However, I believe that the lasting impact of this production is at least in part due to its necessity in our current lives. One audience member suggested they take it on the road, that it would sell out. People are not only ready for this, they need it. They might not know they need it, or even be aware they needed it after the fact, but they’ll be wrung clean regardless. As Garth Martens’s poetry says,
We know how the tale ends.
A change of face. Wattled cries
from Baba Yaga’s hut.
This soup is stirred a thousand years.
We have all consumed too much; we carry a dark burden; we’ve seen things we cannot unsee. We’re care-worn and aggrieved, so when such a generous table is spread, what else can we do but imbibe the remedy and laugh, weep, cheer, shout. Olé! Olé! Olé!
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