reservoir-pneumatic By George Stamos. Featuring Stamos, Owen Chapman, Clara Furey, Luciane Pinto. Sep 25-27, 8pm. Dancemakers Centre for Creation, 55 Mill, The Cannery, bldg 58, studio 313. 416-367-1800.
www.dancemakers.org.
George Stamos will not be going out clubbing tonight.
“Oh god, no,” laughs the Dartmouth-born, Montreal-based dance artist whose most talked-about performance piece, Schatje, featured stilettoed go-go dancers, outrageous wigs, a live DJ and lots of skin, ideas snatched from the New York, London and Amsterdam nightclubs where he himself used to go-go dance. “I’m too busy. I have to go to yoga.” Which isn’t to say that Stamos has totally mellowed. It’s true that an earlier 2006 incarnation of reservoir-pneumatic — a multimedia six-person piece opening Thursday at Dancemakers Centre for Creation — was, indeed, “a softer, more mature answer to Schatje.” The dancers wore a lot more clothing.
“But now I realize I didn’t want to lose all the tension, the fun and the grittiness,” says 39-year-old Stamos. “This isn’t the same piece. It’s about having fun, laughing, like at a party. We need to value fun a little more because if we don’t have it, life starts to feel really bad.”
Stamos’ early, globetrotting artistic education is the stuff of alt-culture legend. He started dancing at 15 “for survival” when he was living on his own, for a time on the streets. He connected with artists and anarchists he met in Halifax while attending gallery openings. He joined militant AIDS-action groups, sex-workers’ rights groups. During his time in London he hung out with performance artist, designer and club promoter Leigh Bowery. In New York, he made a video with writer and gay icon Quentin Crisp. He’s never had trouble finding out where the party’s at.
“He’s a very forward guy, a very exuberant personality,” says Benoît Lachambre, founder of Montreal’s par b.l.eux dance company, whose time in New York overlapped with Stamos’. “There are many funny stories but they’re quite personal.”
Lachambre will talk about the time they were in a dance piece together, naked except for furs. Stamos had 15 coats stacked on his head and started complaining about the weight. They built him a hanger and put a condom on top. “We joked he was giving head to the harness,” says Lachambre.
Although the work Stamos creates is often risqué, it is deeply rooted in ideas, particularly in class, gender and sexuality.
“The model walk for a man, for example, is different than for a woman. But the walk can be reversed,” he says. “I’m not so interested in the fashion world itself, but in how costumes change the perception of your body, the codes that carry gender.”
Stamos and Dancemakers’ artistic director, Michael Trent, hit it off when they met four years ago at the Canada Dance Festival.
“He had set up a bar to use as a performance space,” says Trent. (“Is Michael talking about when we were drunk at the bar at 4am?” laughs Stamos.) “He’s part of a new wave of creators who are looking at influences outside Canada. He has never lost sight of the popular culture around him.”
With his work so focused on the immediate, you have to wonder if Stamos wants it to stand the test of time.
“Yes, I do,” he laughs. “That’s why I keep changing it.”