BWW Reviews: MISFIT BLUES Understands at Firehall Arts Centre

The uncanny and ingenious artistic resemblance of human relationships, Misfit Blues performs the tragicomic complex of relative mental states, the interplay of caustic vagaries, and invites onlookers to peek into a womb of loving solidarity.

Choreographer and dancer Paul-André Fortier is a true national treasure. Together with his accomplice, dancer Robin Poitras, they enlighten the meaning of onstage chemistry. Misfit Blues is a wildly intoxicating ride through the incomprehensible abstractions and piercing truths of two people experiencing themselves as a unity.

Opening the 27th year of Canada's longest-running dance festival, Dancing on the Edge welcomed Misfit Blues with the warmest of smiles. Its legendary repute did not disappoint, as audiences were tossed from laughter one minute to the solemn gravity of witnessing a bitter love rivalry in the next.

Misfit Blues embodied the metaphor of dancing on the edge, so aptly fit for the festival opener. In life, everyone straddles the edge of his or her sense of self in order to reach out and truly touch the heart of another. And that, uniquely, is the artist's gift.

Fortier pushed and pulled at the hearts of a nearly full Firehall Arts Centre, a lovely venue nestled in the heart of Vancouver's controversial downtown east side. Flies buzzed in the open, humid air, as people filed in to their seats to gaze at the sparsely set stage. A mute ring could be heard as Fortier and Poitras walked onstage.

Robin Poitras performs with superlative dynamism; her stunning grace persuades even the stoniest of minds to bloom with wonder, and emotion. Vocalizing made-up speech and unbridled evocations, Fortier lunged against the boundaries of the dance formand entered into a theatrical treatment on the relationship of two idiosyncratic characters.

What began ambiguously etched in tight-knit choreography then spilled and cavorted with spontaneity and humor toward a breathtaking finish, bound to leave all in attendance with a warm heart, and a genuine smile.

For some dance lovers, Fortier's artistic honesty may also trigger that too-close-to-home feeling. He's hit the nail on the head with this one.

Photo: Xavier Curnillon