Margie Gillis is to Canadian dance what Atom Egoyan is to our cinema and Emily Carr to the cannon of our visual art.
Gillis, 57, has been an icon of Canadian dance for over three decades, and last night at the National Arts Centre, she showed a packed NAC Theatre audience why.
Gillis danced in a self-choreographed show called THREAD. The show is about “the connections that fill our lives,” maturity, aging and a fear of death. But, ultimately it is about life itself.
THREAD is mostly a one-woman show, and that’s the way it should be. Gillis has a magnetic presence on stage – this one being mostly empty and dark, save for a canvas of black fabric and cubes of hanging threads (to me they looked like some sort of existential carwash) – so that her fellow dancers, although they serve their purpose well, pale in comparison. Eleanor Duckworth and Ian Yaworski, respectively representing her fear of aging further and the vitality of youth, moved in and out of the performance space like specters, occasionally intertwining with Gillis, but primarily serving to change the set.
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THREAD
Choreographed by Margie Gillis |
Gillis’ clean, precise movements cut through the dark. Her long, iconic hair – now white – whipped around her shoulders in a tight braid that slowly unraveled as her character aged.
Gillis danced her way across the black stage through the stages of life. THREAD opens with her in the womb, waving her arms as though floating, fighting against strings attaching her to some point offstage, a slightly sinister representation of an umbilical cord.
Later she rolled up her leggings to reveal knobby knees, dancing with the careful uncertainty of a toddler taking her first steps. Gillis then leads us through the landmarks of womanhood, miming the surprises, sadness and joys of intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth and miscarriage.
But by far the most powerful moment of the performance came when Gillis appeared on stage in a white nightgown, the sort of nightmarish hospital scenarios, with long, trailing sleeves. She entered hunched over and interpreted the fight against an aging body by fighting against the bonds of those sleeves. In a raw moment of intense intimacy and bravery, Gillis shed the nightgown altogether, presenting the audience with her naked body, both succumbing to its age and confronting it directly.
THREAD is a powerful work overall, one that’s incredibly relatable. I feel privileged to have witnessed it, and last night’s audience did too; the performance concluded to thunderous applause and a well-deserved standing ovation, gratefully accepted by a testament to Canadian artistic talent.