Photo: Alex Huot
There was a great community vibe in the new black-box performance space opened by CCOV, Studio Ginette Laurin, on Ontario Street East, named in honour of the company's founder. The inaugural show was Alanna Kraaijeveld’s not-to-be-missed Heavy Lifting, an improvised evening of dance and live music.
As people filtered into the beautifully open space, a former neighbourhood bar with gorgeous high ceilings, Kraaijeveld and her musicians were already on stage warming up. She and dancer Alec Charbonneau wore kickboxing sweatpants and glistening tops. Centre stage stood a heavy upright piano. It has heft, takes up space, and brings with it all the attributes of musical history. It becomes a kind of dense force field within the piece.
I wasn’t prepared to see the extent to which the dancer-choreographer employs the instrument to its fullest capacity. Harkening back to what John Cage did in the 1940s, when he turned the piano into a one-man percussion orchestra, she mobilizes the instrument in similarly inventive ways, striking keys with her hands and fingers, working them like beaters. It is pretty terrific. I love live music, and to see an artist engage with a piano not as cacophony but as a site for spontaneous, controlled, and layered exploration of its potential is a pleasure. From my seat in the theatre, I couldn’t see Scott Bevins, working on live audio processing and trumpet, but the sound design and amplification he creates carve out a richly textured dynamic around the sounds she plays.
The piece unfolds in sections, and when Charbonneau, a good twenty years younger than Kraaijeveld, enters the space with some nice sinewy movement, he circles the piano again and again. There is both lightness and strength in the movement as he extends a leg, then an arm. At this point, Kraaijeveld is on an old-fashioned rotary phone, engaged in a running conversation, while Charbonneau continues carving out spatial possibilities with his body. Throughout, Gregory Kustka-Tsimbidis is on drums, partnering as a kind of musical engine, building on the conversation. The intensity of all these elements steadily increases, with Kraaijeveld eventually switching to tambourine and driving the momentum further. The piece feels alive, risky, and completely engaging.
When both dancers occupy the space, Charbonneau opts for a small hop, his arms cutting the air wide and high, while Kraaijeveld begins moving gently at first before developing the same helicopter-like movement into a full-throttle exploration.
In another section, the two come together as a playful and punchy duo, negotiating the space while voicing their strategies for moving through it, an unexpectedly rollicking record of thought in action. They then test those trajectories, sometimes flubbing attempts at coherence. There is something spry and alive about this section, as there is when they play off one another while attacking notes on the piano, again building and building on their capacities with brio.
A couple of other sections, one involving a plastic bag and another in which he is on roller skates and she in tap shoes, do not have the same intensity or level of engagement, but even these passages remain interesting.
In the final movement of the piece, Kraaijeveld, alone on stage, is joined by Jon Cleveland, the lighting designer and her partner, who captures her in the glow of a flashlight. She is on the floor, leaning against the piano, in a position suggesting vulnerability, a soft landing perhaps after all this activity. It resonates as a final image, intimate in its rendering and full of all that has come before. This is a work crafted with great integrity, guided by smart instincts and intellectual playfulness, underpinning a joyful evening that truly pays off.
Heavy Lifting, Studio Ginette Laurin, Centre de creation O Vertigo (CCOV), October 22-24, 2026.
