We All Have a Place We're Not Meant to Give Away
A good piece of art takes you out of yourself. Last night, Toro , the ‘dance’ piece, allowed me to forget an unrelated incident from an hour previous that had left me shaking. I put dance in quotes for positive reasons, not to denigrate the performance. As Matthew Jocelyn likes to do, we were presented with a genre-bending performance that focused on dance but also employed world music, singing and drama to create the kind of eye-opening and enlightening CanStage offering that Toronto is beginning to expect from it. Toro was the quickly re-visioned performance after one of the two booked dancers, Israel Galvan, had a serious knee injury in Paris and had to withdraw. But the audience did not suffer for it: four remarkable musicians augmented the dance of Akram Kahn , and I had an education. David Azurza, countertenor, B C Manjunath, percussion, Bobote, flamenco and Christine Leboutte, contralto, provided an organic background of vocalization, and instrumental and body percussion wh...