Breakthrough
move

Andrew Turner turns dancing with himself
into a career-making performance

IN OVERDRIVE: Turner

by MARITES CARINO

Back in the fall at the TransAtlantique dance fest, I saw a show with a friend who is often reluctant to sit through contemporary dance, but at curtain call, she bounced to her feet and whooped along with everyone else. I turned to gauge her reaction. She looked at me and said “Awesome!” with a smile plastered on her face.

Andrew Turner’s Duet for One Plus Digressions, a self-choreographed solo—well, technically a duet—raised a ruckus that night. The local choreographer’s first stab at creating a half-hour work resulted in a refreshingly accessible, witty, well-crafted work that pokes fun at the art of choreography and obsessive self-analysis.

Half dance and half text, that night, Turner performed the French version of the piece he’d shown at Tangente earlier in the year. As an anglophone Montrealer who grew up in NDG, he was “ultra frightened” about performing the piece in la belle langue, but he more than pulled it off.

The idea for the piece sprouted in university when Turner was supposed to perform a five-minute duet, but his partner was a no-show. With a devil-may-care attitude, he strutted on stage and did it anyway, sans elle. That was five years ago. Since then, Turner wanted to push the idea further. Duet for One does this through a PowerPoint presentation, encouraging the audience to use their imagination, and a bang-on delivery of text and dance.

Like a lot of guys in dance, Turner got a late start. A bout with tendonitis during his early 20s forced him to quit playing the bass and look for another way to be artistic. Without any prior experience, except for dancing out at clubs, Turner decided to try it out. “I was in my early 20s, which is when you just jump into things,” he explains.

So he went to the Concordia dance department. “I had an awful audition. I had no idea what I was doing. Everyone would go right, and I would go left,” he reminisces, laughing. “They actually thought I had a sight problem!”

He made it through, and after graduating in 2004, spent from creating, he made a conscious decision to interpret and danced for movement makers like Hinda Essadiqi, Sasha Kleinplatz and Marie-Julie Asselin.

Fast forward to 2009. Turner is travelling with Duet for One to France in March for Les Réperages, a showcase for young choreographers, and then back on home turf for the Vue sur la Relève festival in April. Not bad for someone who didn’t even know what a plié was not too long ago. Keep an eye on this one.