Review - ENTER/EXIT

The Vancouver Sun

March 4, 2005, Vancouver, BC

By Greg Buium

Multimedia show is a frenzied ride through the city…Enter/Exit sweeps you up in its energy and leaves you craving more

Created by John Korsrud with The HardRubber Ensemble
Choreography by Martha Carter

In its opening minutes, Enter/Exit, the 2005 Alcan Award-winning multimedia show at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, seems a rudderless mishmash of modern art. Musical ideas jerk from one to the next, visual images idly roll by. When the dancers arrive on stage, you're just hoping the point of it all might actually become clear.

But these impressions don't last for long; pretty soon you feel rather shallow for ever letting them cross your mind. Indeed, the Vancouver composer and trumpeter John Korsrud has created a sometimes spectacular, sometimes sprawling abstraction that gradually sweeps you up in its energy and ideas and leaves you just enough room to breathe. Enter/Exit is a stunning 85-minute gift to the senses. If it were a motion picture you'd probably want to stay for the second show.

Emboldened by Alcan's largess, Korsrud -- longtime leader of the Hard Rubber Orchestra -- has practically created a theatre company out of thin air. He's hired a new, 11-piece group (with musicians from the city's jazz and classical music communities), four dancers, three visual artists, a lighting designer and a choreographer, Martha Carter.

He calls the project a "highly theatricized concert." But it's much more than that. Billed as a "psychedelic, rave-inspired, non-linear theatre experience," Enter/Exit is a kind of wild performance piece fuelled by a series of recurring musical moods and patterns. Thirteen loosely tied-together compositions are the framework; a storyline doesn't exist, although many of the songs have their own unconventional beginnings, middles and ends.

The cumulative effect is a kind of fragmented, edgy landscape of urban life. Carter's choreography and the visual creations -- film projections, computer designs -- seem to hold up a mirror to the city, and to our own, crowded inner life. Somehow it's easy to see something familiar in the dancers' abstract tales. In one scene they're standing on boxes -- four sizable Lego-like blocks, the stage's only prop -- looking about. Are they waiting for the subway, or are they models walking down a runway? Are they depressed? Confused? Exhilarated? High above them images shoot up, sometimes cinematic, sometimes pure geometry.

Throughout, the music drives everything forward: there's often a compulsive drone, hypnotic bass and churning percussion. But it's really an incredible mix, sometimes reminding you of late-Miles Davis or Philip Glass or even Deee-Lite.

Korsrud's compositions are woven into a series of improvisations and scores by local composers Giorgio Magnanensi and Brad Turner. Magnanensi's insidie cromatiche, in particular, is a concentrated instance of the thematic pairs alluded to in the show's title, a kind of new music collage, where fragmented events pile one on top of the other, in swells and a thick electronic haze, eventually fading out like a long-playing record stuck in a groove.

Greg Buium is a Vancouver music writer.