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Plastic Orchid Factory brings audience into the loop

Dance company presents interactive Digital Folk at SFU Woodward's
Digital Folk
Vanessa Goodman and Lexi Vajda are featured dancers in plastic orchid factory’s Digital Folk.

plastic orchid factory and SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs present Digital Folk, until Sept. 25 at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver. Tickets: $18-$28 at sfuwoodwards.ca.

Plastic orchid factory isn’t your typical dance company, so it’s not surprising that the group’s latest production, Digital Folk, isn’t your typical dance show.

When guests walk through the doors of the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, they are invited to rummage through a wardrobe and don costumes – an early indication they aren’t in for a traditional sit-and-watch theatre experience. The costume party atmosphere is accompanied by video games, music, dance, and installation work, resulting in an immersive and interdisciplinary experience.

North Vancouver-raised Lexi Vajda is one of 11 dancers featured in the contemporary work, which she describes as “part installation, part party, part performance, part participatory.”

“It’s very interactive,” she says. “But it’s gentle and respectful and generous in the way that the audience participates, so there’s no forcing anybody to do anything.”

In development since 2014, plastic orchid factory’s artistic director James Gnam created Digital Folk out of a desire to revisit how communities gather to play music, dance and tell stories in the wake of video game culture and technology. The work explores a generation’s approach to identity, physicality, social dance and performance.

For a professional dancer like Vajda, who is used to memorizing and executing choreography, this piece represents a liberating departure from the norm in that there is no formal choreography to speak of. Instead, the dancers move their bodies in reaction to video games Rock Band and Dance Central, investigating the difference between mimicking on-screen avatars and complete spontaneity.   

“There’s a lot of improvisation and a lot of investigation on our behalf of memory and embodiment,” Vajda says.

Meanwhile, the roving performers also interact with the intimate audience of 55.

“It wouldn’t feel right to dance a piece of choreography around an audience without having the ability to respond and react to what they bring to the space,” she says.

Digital Folk runs three times per night and guest are invited to stay for as many loops as they’d like within one evening. Due to the improvisational nature of the work, each show will offer something different, Vajda says.

Dancing since she was a young girl, Vajda started her training at North Shore Academy of Dancing, where she is now an instructor. After high school, she followed her passion and trained with Vancouver-based dance education program Modus Operandi.

“I’ve predominantly trained in ballet, jazz, hip hop, and then have been focusing on contemporary dance practice in the past little bit,” she says, explaining she is drawn to the contemporary genre for its “vastness and expansive possibility.”

“It’s not necessarily codified the way other forms are. There’s so many avenues and influences that are being explored right now,” she says. “It can’t ever get boring and it’s a form that continues to question instead of executing something that already exists, so that’s really crucial and necessary for me.”

Digital Folk marks her first time working with plastic orchid factory and, after nearly three years of planning and preparation, she’s excited to be part of an outside-the-box work that is sure to challenge audiences.

“It’s a contemporary dance work that is going to be really different from what most people expect a dance show to be,” she says. “I hope that it’s fun. It’s a party. The energy is going to be hopefully really abounding and exciting and I think it’ll be an enjoyable experience. I also hope that people are brought to a place where they can question our culture and question how they exist as bodies in our culture, with technology in particular.”