Do you want to know Brian Webb’s secret to keeping dance fresh after decades in the discipline? Continually taking risks.
“I think risk taking in art making is really important,” says Webb, founder and artistic director of Brian Webb Dance Company. “I love risks. If I do the same thing over and over it just becomes a bit boring. I like what I call ‘the adventure of the new.’ What better place to have an adventure than on stage with people witnessing what you’re doing?”
His latest artistic adventure: Beth Graham & Brian Webb, in which he performs a deeply vulnerable monologue alongside — as the name suggests — playwright and actor Beth Graham.
The pair met while serving on a dance jury and immediately hit it off. Their spoken-word monologues comprising the performance are enacted separately, but both tackle the theme of “Who am I today?” and the pair will appear on stage together.
“I resisted it, resisted it — and then it was just coming out,” Graham says of her part of the performance. “I was also trying to rise to what I had seen Brian do. If he was going to take these risks to do this, then I had best rise to the challenge.”
For his part, Webb confronts the death of his longtime partner who died by suicide after years of dealing with illness.
“I’m inviting the audience to accept their own stories — it’s a big word now — with compassion,” he says. “One of the things I learned over the years is it’s impossible for me to feel compassion for other people if I don’t have compassion for myself.”
For Graham, there’s the added element of delving into a new medium. Dance and acting, after all, are not the same thing. “For me, the challenge was marrying movement and text or having a dialogue between those two,” she says. “I think part of it is touching on the emotional journey and the movement coming from there.”
Her contribution to the show has impressed Webb, despite her lack of expertise as a dancer.
“I came into rehearsal one day and she had created her own dance,” says Webb. “I said, ‘This is beautiful.’ So we worked on it and now it’s a central part of her monologue. Beth has become a dancing person. Dance is an art form, but dancing is its own particular thing. Dancing is a human activity. Every person on earth, if they understand the beat of their heart, they know dancing inside their body.”
Graham hopes her vulnerability will affect the audience. “I always want to engage with people emotionally, whatever their interpretation of that is,” she says.
Adds Webb: “I would say both of these stories are true stories. This is not fiction. We’re not playing characters. We are being our most intimate selves.”
To that end, he embraces the exchange with the audience that vulnerable performances tend to spark.
“Afterwards, people will come up to me to tell me their story,” he says. “It behooves me to listen. It’s very important that communication must go back and forth. I think we’re trying to be quite vulnerable towards the audience. But it’s just as important for us to listen when audience members are being vulnerable.”
Beth Graham & Brian Webb runs April 16, 17 and 18 at 8 p.m. at the Roxy Theatre.
The Roxy Theatre
Westmount | 10708 124 Street NW, Edmonton | theatrenetwork.ca
