The Firehall Arts Centre brings Fujiwara Dance Inventions’ dance-theatre production, Eunoia to the stage from Wednesday, May 8 to Saturday, May 11.
Adapted from Christian Bök’s award-winning book of poetry, Eunoia, a conceptual book written in the form of a lipogram where each of its five chapters is constrained to the use of one vowel. It is much lauded as a work, winner of the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize, and a bestseller in Canada and the UK.
Eunoia means ‘beautiful thinking’ and is the shortest word in the English language to contain all five vowels. In the book, the author imposed the severe constraint of working with only one vowel in each chapter. Remarkably, and despite the severe limitations to the usable vocabulary, Bök was able to create oddly narrative poems with characters, scenes, and coherent action.
“The choreography has imposed constraints as well,” says Choreographer & Director Denise Fujiwara. “For example, in Chapter E, we use the neck, spleen, knees, etc. Rather than limit the choreography, we’ve found that these constraints have allowed us to create a delightful parallel world that is separate and yet, still relates to the poem in odd and unexpected ways.”
Tkaronto/Toronto’s Fujiwara Dance Inventions is a repertory dance theatre company creating original works that develop out of research, improvisation and Japanese Butoh practices. Eunoia, is rich in spoken text and has complex design elements with performances by Sylvie Bouchard, Brayden Cairns, Jen Hum, Mayumi Lashbrook, Lucy Rupert, & Gerry Trentham,
Throughout the production, poetry is used as text – spoken live, as a kind of score for the dance, in multimedia expressions and as the basis for movement invention. The work is rigorous, surprising, and frequently droll.
For more information on Eunoia, and tickets visit firehallartscentre.ca/event/eunoia