Café Nocturne
1995
Performance Works, Granville Island
Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
Vancouver, BC
Café Nocturne and Inter/Views are the result of a year’s exploration of the mysteries, powers and perils of Eros. The title itself came to me during a period in which I was researching countless volumes of material dedicated to this subject. I was inspired partly by my own experiences in the cafés of Greece and France, and partly by the name of a book by Alfonse Boudard, Le café du pauvre, as in “prendre le café du pauvre” (drink the poor man’s coffee) – a popular euphemism around the turn of the century for making love. The café creates an environment for people to partake of a cup of coffee and perhaps even some “café du pauvre”.
From Greek mythology, “the playmates of the god [EROS] in Aphrodite’s train are Pothos [desire, yearning] and Himeros [surging, flooding, gushing, torrent].” – Encyclopedia of World Mythology
Pothos and Himeros have directed my choreographic journey. With them in mind, the dancers and I have explored the many compelling and sometimes opposing forces that Eros plays in our everyday lives.
Café Nocturne is a piece for three men and two women as it explores the singular force of attraction and the moment its mysterious powers threaten to override social conventions and order as two couples torment and delight each other on stage under the fickle sway of the primordial god Eros. The movement of the piece is purposefully juxtapositional in order to create the overpowering urgencies of mating rituals; it veers from ecstatic to explosively violent, from playful to tenderly intimate. The driving forces of lust, love, and sex play out in the complexities of the performers’ interactions with one another. The idea of how an individual’s wants are intertwined with society’s ideas of what is taboo has long intrigued me as well as how these norms and conventions influence people’s behavior to one another and our ideas of love and sex. Café Nocturne in this way is an exploration of the rites of desire.
Café Nocturne is the second part of the Quest of the Human Condition trilogy.
Collaborators
Choreography, Concept & Direction:
Paras Terezakis
Interpreters:
Rhonda Lea Cooper, Daelik Hackenbrook, D-Anne Kuby, Fiona Macdonald, Raymond Milne, Alvin Erasga Tolentino
Lighting Designer:
Barry Hegland
Photographer:
Daniel Collins
Composer:
Jeff Corness
Costume Designer:
Kate Nelson
Production, Stage Manager & Technical Director:
Mila Yee-Hafer, Julie-Anne Saroyan
Assistant Stage Manager:
Nigel Brook
Text:
Eros and Thanatos by Duane Michaels
Half an Hour by C.P. Cavafy
Good Night… Ode to Eros 1995 by Paras Terezakis
Excerpt of Café Nocturne
1996 performance of Paras Terezakis’ Café Nocturne.
Film by James Wallace
We would like to express our deepest and sincere appreciation to our funders, partners, volunteers and supporters who made this project possible.
We would like to acknowledge that we are gathered and are creating on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations.
Review
by Michael Scott, Vancouver Sun
The ancient Greeks understood hormones. They ascribed erotic impulses to a child god full of impish pranks – pranks that left mere mortals winded by desire. Three thousand years later, we let biochemistry explain our hormones. But Eros, as choreographer Paraskevas Teresakis and Kinesis Dance demonstrate convincingly in Cafe Nocturne, is still hard at work stirring up our loins at the most inconvenient moments.
Review
by Renee Doruyter, On Stage, Province Showcase
Sex, sex and more sex on city stages.
It’s got to be more than a coincidence that, when the fear of AIDS has restricted the physical expression of human sexual urges, so much theatre and dance is concerned with eroticism and sex.
Joining the current crop (which includes Wet Dreams, Herotica II, IErotique) is Café Nocturne, a collaborative work involving Kinesis Dance artistic director-choreographer Paras Terezakis, composer Jeff Corness and dancers Rhonda Lea Cooper, D-Anne Kuby, Daelik Hackenbrook, Raymond Milne and Alvin Erasga Tolentino.
Café Nocturne is part two of a trilogy exploring social behavior that began with Terezakis’ A Parcel of Men’s Knowledge (which he’ll be taking to Montreal later this month), playing at Performance Works through the weekend.
As post-modern dance-based performance art, the piece has considerable appeal. The dancers are strong and focussed, and among their various combinations are some gorgeous moments that stay in the mind: A feather floats from the ceiling and is kept aloft on the dancers’ breath; after some seemingly disjointed running and chasing, all five suddenly explode into synchronized jumps; Tolentino moves from couple to couple, dropping rose petals on them.
There are disturbing images as well: Hackenbrook stabbing at his fingers with a knife; Cooper showing us her breasts and smiling inanely.
Before the performance, there’s the video installation, Inter/Views (Variations of the theme of Eros) running on five monitors on the floor decorated with various fruit, veggies and heart-shapped objects.