Future Futures: Company 605’s sci-fi adventure on CBC Gem - Vancouver Ballet Society
By Kathleen Smith
Questions of embodiment frequently crop up in this current post-pandemic moment. There’s tension between the newly urgent drive to digital and the inescapable fact that we live in bodies that are not machines, that need connection and company. We look to technology for better or longer lives, flesh enhanced with gadgets or extensions or sensory virtual realities — but what remains human in this is in question. Many of these ideas have made it into a video series, Future Futures, created by Vancouver’s Company 605, led by Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin, and director/cinematographer Brian J. Johnson, streaming on CBC Gem.
Moody and elegant, Future Futures takes the form of five six to 10-minute episodic films. The first, The New Normal, sets a distinct aesthetic tone. Production designer Kalyn Miles worked with a palette of neutrals, greys, and taupes on luxurious but minimal set dressing. A woman named Jasmine (Jasmine Chen) wanders her luxury home, asking a virtual assistant to change the flowers, observing several “digitals” (Martin and Justine A. Chambers) who have taken up residence for unknown reasons. A friend calls to express concern about her being alone with these beings. “I’m not alone, she says. “I’m just lonely.”
This strange new sci-fi existence is an unusual setting for contemporary dance, yet it works. What’s most interesting is the movement vocabulary: embodied and lyrical for the humans, and something else entirely for the digitals. The creative team embrace the sometimes pesky nuances of daily digital technology — glitches, latency, delays, temporal strangeness, disconnection, and an innate coolness of tone — in the choreography for the digitals. Some of it is baked during filming into the dancers’ movement, which stutters, stops, and starts; some of it is applied after the fact, digitally, with speed effects and static that amplify a sense of otherness. By contrast the human movement is familiar, weighted, organic.
As the films progress, a stand-off between human and digital beings is revealed. There is fear of the unknown and issues of contact or no-contact. The humans and digitals rarely acknowledge each other, until in one scene they do, briefly, and it’s noted. In the third episode, called Walter’s Very Bad Day, digitals appear to be replacing humans at work. Walter, performed by actor/dancer Billy Marchenski, growls through his frustrating workday, increasingly irritated by their presence. And then in the fourth episode, a watching human is subsumed into the digital group, a fear realized. The final episode, exquisitely danced by Gelley and Bynh Ho, addresses a more hopeful aspect, one of connection and understanding.
Over the course of the series, a few things aren’t fully exploited or explained. For example, in the first films a kind of heavenly dirigible appears in the sky, clearly a portent of something. “Digital Now!” it commands. “Become the change.” It could read like an inside dig at corporations (including arts funders) pushing the digital agenda, but it introduces an element of coercion that doesn’t get resolved. The dirigible just disappears. Maybe that’s sci-fi for you.
Future Futures is mostly a successful and fascinating collection, set to alternately ambient and propulsive electronic music by Matthew Tomkinson, with recurring characters that link the somewhat disconnected episodes and drive the understated narrative. You can read as much metaphorical meaning or cautionary digital reluctance into it as you like. Future Futures keeps it cool — and that’s part of its charm.
