If you love jazz dance it won’t be long before you come across 20th-century jazz icon Josephine Baker. What you don’t come across often are retro mechanical horses primed to be danced with onstage. But when the two come together you get Decidedly Jazz Danceworks’ Year of the Horse: The Completely Fictional Adventures of Josephine Baker.
The horses — outfitted with fresh motors and batteries — come courtesy of visual artist Lisa Brawn who found them on Kijiji and thought that Decidedly Jazz Danceworks artistic director Kimberley Cooper could use them in a show. Year of the Horse showcases eight of them which have been soda-blasted for an “alien apocalyptic look” according to Cooper.
She had been toying with the idea of a show focusing on Josephine Baker and realized that the advent of the horses fit perfectly. “Josephine Baker was this exotic creature who was so many things in her life: she was a dancer and a singer and a film star and an activist she adopted 12 children and she was a spy” says Cooper. “She has such a crazy almost fictional life herself and I just had this image of who would be the perfect person to be in this strange landscape of these horses and she seemed right.”
Despite Baker’s interesting biography and the fact that one dancer (Natasha Korney) actually plays her Cooper says that Year of the Horse isn’t about telling Baker’s history — it’s more of a sensory and visual experience. “For me it was about a completely imaginary thing” says Cooper. “I thought it would be fun to put her in this place where she was in control of this fantasy. The show is set up that it’s her world and we follow her whims.”
Seven other dancers morph into different roles throughout the show. “Sometimes they are horses sometimes they are reflections of [Baker] sometimes they are her lovers sometimes they are her pals — so everything’s kind of blurry and whimsical.” The horses are similarly versatile acting as real horses toy horses landscapes and furniture.
Anyone not familiar with how Baker danced in the 1920s onwards can easily find footage on YouTube. The choreography for Year of the Horse references some of Baker’s movements but often takes them in a different direction. Luckily the source material is rich. “She was this exotic sex object but she was a clown at the same time for a portion of her career so that’s something that we play on quite a lot in the piece” says Cooper adding that dancer Korney had to learn to cross her eyes for the show.
Natalie Purschwitz’s costumes stick close to Baker’s heyday channelling the wild exoticism of some of the dancer’s outfits (including a little toplessness).
The music is newly composed (and improvised) by bassist Rubim de Toledo and pianist Chris Andrew with Jonathan McCaslin rounding out the live trio on drums. Because Year of the Horse is fictional and otherworldly Cooper didn’t want it to sound like the 1920s. “I thought it should sound like no time” she says.
The contemporary jazz score has a certain seriousness that Cooper think suits the piece — and Baker herself. “There was a weight to her too so even when she was clowning and crossing her eyes and being crazy that came from a history of trying to escape and trying to stand out and trying to survive.”
Year of the Horse: The Completely Fictional Adventures of Josephine Baker runs November 7 to 15 at Theatre Junction Grand.
