reviewvancouver: 10 Things You’ll Hate About Me

Really, if I started counting, there had to be 10 things I loved about Holy Body Tattoo’s Noam Gagnon fascinating fusion of theatre and dance. Primarily, I found Gagnon’s own androgynous performance truly compelling. The dancer’s delivery of his own dance vocabulary was vital, at times even frenzied provoking stimulation of the senses.

10 Things is a vague semi-autobiographic concept blended with a phantasmagorical adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and the Swallow. Through a series of personal vignettes, Gagnon blurs the boundaries between interpretative dance and expansive theatricality. He first appears as a single dancer, wearing an ostentatious white dress and a homespun headdress prancing round the stage to Natasha Bedingfield’s Pocketful of Sunshine.

Marina Szijarto’s impeccable set consisted of a white plastic entirely covering the original wooden floors and a pewter-sprayed three-dimensional montage of everyday objects: a typewriter, a squash racket, a suitcase etc., initially seemed at odds with the dancer’s whimsical form.

Bard on the Beach artistic director Christopher Gaze provided a sonorous voice-over narration of our protagonist’s story while eloquent actor Laara Sadiq, also in voice-over, recounts the faerie tale. Stefan Smulovitz did a great job melding his own quasi industrial score with such diverse music from Natasha Bedingfield, Coldplay and Charles Trenet.

The least creative aspect of the 50-minute show was Gagnon’s choice of the oddly contrived title; perhaps paraphrased from Gil Junger’s 1999 film, 10 Things I Hate About You.

Some choreographers are talented in presenting dance that is virtuosic, some contribute theatricality. Noam Gagnon accomplished both.