What’s so exciting about Throwdown Collective’s revolving stage? Depends how you look at it

If you happen to be looking for a revolving stage, the pretty little community of Madoc, Ont., nestled about halfway between Toronto and Ottawa, is apparently the place to go. That’s where Zhenya Cerneacov, Mairéad Filgate and Brodie Stevenson managed to lay hands on the very piece of stage machinery that — materially and metaphorically — is central to their new work, “Liminal.”

The slipperiness of perception and of the passage of time are themes the three Dora Award-winning dance artists, who collaborate as Toronto’s Throwdown Collective, began exploring more than five years ago during a residency at the celebrated Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Mass.

“With each project we’re trying to push off of what we’ve done before,” said Filgate. “We’ve done props. We’ve done abstract; indoor and out. Now we’re pushing ourselves in a different theatrical direction.”

Usually, in the theatre, audiences view dance from a fixed point. The Throwdown trio wanted to offer a continuously shifting perspective with the deliberate goal of messing with the audience’s perception of what they’re observing.

“The images we’re working with leave room for ambiguity,” said Stevenson. “The audience might go, ‘Is that two people hugging lovingly or fighting each other?’ We want to keep it amorphous. Sometimes it’s one thing, sometimes it’s another.”

A revolving stage seemed an ideal way to achieve their objective; ideal until they found out how much it costs to rent what is essentially a huge turntable — in theatrical argot a revolve — from a commercial production company. Then, through word-of-mouth, they found in Madoc a retired theatre technician who happened to have built a revolving stage for a film set in the 1990s.

“He had held on to it thinking it might come in handy one day,” said Cerneacov. “We’d been to all these companies and they gave us quotes that we simply could not afford. So we discussed it with him and he basically expanded it from 10 to 16 feet in diameter for us.”

In Sorcha Gibson’s design the revolve is set within a square platform that will rest on the floor of the Theatre Centre’s Franco Boni stage. With the further aim of disrupting conventional perspective, instead of aligning the platform with the side walls of the space it is being rotated to present a “V” shape with one corner thrust toward the audience.

With atmospheric lighting by Arun Srinivasan and a mood-shifting score by Joshua Van Tassel that even takes into account the hum of the revolve’s electric motor, the work’s creators hope to take audiences to a liminal space where time speeds up and slows down, everything is transitory and nothing is quite what at first it appears to be.

Some of the imagery, dressing and undressing, giving someone a hug, is in essence quite ordinary but can become unsettling when it transforms into something unexpected.

“The moment something seems to be becoming clear we try to twist it and take it somewhere else,” said Cerneacov. “A gentle loving embrace over time becomes a choke, but it’s hard for the audience to know precisely when the change really occurred.”

The varying speed of the revolve has a direct bearing on playing with perceptions of time and motion. At its slowest, the rotation is barely perceptible. The performers can pretty much do what they want. Turn the dial to the maximum 15 revolutions per minute and it’s all they can do to stop getting flung off.

“To be spatially in the same place from an audience perspective we have to keep moving,” Cerneacov explained. “But if you want to move you have to stop. It completely flips the whole notion on its head.”

Starting in 2009, Throwdown Collective endeared itself to audiences with a succession of three high-spirited, family-friendly and athletic works for Toronto’s outdoor, summertime Dusk Dances. In 2017, Danceworks brought the trio indoors and showed them dancing the work of a commissioned choreographer, Montreal’s Lina Cruz.

Now, after the inevitable pandemic-related postponements, Danceworks is co-producing Throwdown in this new venture, the group’s first full-length production and one that takes it into more reflective territory than it’s explored so far.

“It’s the most daring and ambitious thing we’ve done so far in every possible way, in scale, in complexity, in difficulty both as choreographers and performers,” said Cerneacov. “It’s been very exciting and we’re eager to share that with audiences.”

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