An intimate connection

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This article was published 19/03/2018 (2226 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Most of us have spent too much time playing a video game. But very few of us have parlayed that experience into a rich creative outlet.

So points are duly awarded to Erik Kaiel, a dancer and choreographer who transformed the vintage video game Tetris into an amazing performance piece that has been traversed through “eight years, six different continents and thousands of kids.”

“It’s one of the first video games I played when I was 12 or 13,” says Kaiel, now 45. “I remember staying up all night playing that game. There’s something in it that is sort of autobiographical, too.”

That’s quite a statement considering the game, created in 1984, is an abstract exercise in arranging falling geometric shapes, called Tetrominoes, into unbroken lines.

“I don’t think there’s anything profound about Tetris,” he asserts. But the nature of the game suggests the challenge of fitting in, making the abstraction entirely relatable when filtered through the performances of four very talented dancers.

“The central theme is the tension between wanting to belong to a group and, at other times, feeling left out,” he says. “Sometimes, you want to be yourself in all your freakish charm and hope you’re still accepted, and other times you really want to belong to the group.

“There’s a tension between the desire for freedom and the desire to belong,” he says. “We pendulum back and forth between these two things.”

Since the hour-long show is entirely wordless, it falls on the performers to keep young audiences engaged with a show that goes beyond the parameters of a dance show. Such is the nature of the beast, Tetris recently played at a circus event in Brazil.

“The performers are trained dancers that graduated from dance academies and university dance programs, so we think of ourselves as a dance company,” he says. “But the piece itself, you could call it physical theatre, you could say dance, you could say circus. It’s a bit of everything.”

Do young kids even know what Tetris is in this era of more sophisticated fare such as Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed?

“Recently, when we’ve done questions-and-answers after the show, we ask: ‘How many of you know what Tetris is?’ They all raise their hands,” Kaiel says. “So, I think there’s been some kind of retro-resurgence.”

The beautiful irony of Tetris is that it encourages kids to get out of their chairs and participate in the very physical aspects of the show.

“For me, it’s about turning it upside-down,” he says. “Your intention is to get kids to put down their Playstations and get off the couch and go outside, and play and imagine and interact with other real kids in the real world.

“I thought it would be really funny to make a piece about that process, but then to name it after a video game so it’s sort of like a Trojan Horse.”

Indeed, the kids in the audience may hardly be aware that they’re enjoying what is essentially a dance show. That is all part of Kaiel’s modus operandi as a choreographer, to appeal to fans and newbies alike.

“I want to make performances where a guy walks in off the street and says, ‘Hey, this is neat.’ But the people who have been coming for 10 to 15 years see the overtones and they can see we have an understanding of dance history and other aspects of the field.

“So, it’s a sort of layered work in that sense,” says Kaiel, who has been living and working in the Netherlands for the past 15 years. “The Dutch expression is to ‘follow your nose into butter.’ It means something good will happen by accident. You don’t end up in the cow patty, you end up in the butter.

“That sort of happened with me and the dancers,” he says. “We’ve had a wonderful journey with this piece.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing