Crypto

From dancer-choreographer Guillaume Côté (Frame by Frame, The Little Prince) and librettist Royce Vavrek (Angel’s Bone, 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music) comes a dynamic work of contemporary dance infused with theatre and technology. Featuring the music of Swedish composer Mikael Karlsson, Crypto is a groundbreaking work about forced displacement and the human need to control and transform beauty in wholly unnatural ways. Côté and Vavrek create a dynamic and complex narrative that allows us to dive into the vast and varied musical landscape of the work, performed by a stellar cast of artists and dancers: Guillaume Côté, Matt Foley, Greta Hodgkinson and Casia Vengoechea.

SYNOPSIS

A young Man lives with his Wife in wedded disharmony. Tired of his gloominess, the Wife encourages her husband to tap into his childhood interest of exploration, suggesting that he go out into the world to identify a cryptozoological creature that his father often speculated about—a creature made up of features belonging to different species of birds, reptiles, mammals and fish. She tells her husband to go out and capture the hidden creature, heretofore unidentified, bring it back to her, and affix his name, their name, to it. They will be instantly famous. She will reward him with love and sexual affection.

The Man sets out on an expedition, travelling to an inhospitable climate that he believes to be the home of the Creature. The landscape consumes him, and he falls victim to the harsh environment, losing consciousness. When he comes to, the Creature is hovering over him, interested in the emaciated man. They introduce themselves to each other before the Man tranquilizes the Creature to bring it back home without incident.

Once home, the Man shows the captive Creature to his wife, who is shocked and enthralled. The Creature attempts to fit into the domestic life of the couple, and the Man and his Wife become closer through their shared excitement of this new addition to their life. A sensuality develops. The Wife becomes worried that the Creature is too valuable and that when word gets out that they are harbouring an undocumented scientific discovery, the Creature will be taken from them and most likely euthanized for biological study. She suggests that they call their friend, the Master of Plastics—a Surgeon—in hopes that he will be able to remove the pelt of the Creature so that it could be taken on a world tour to be studied and admired. They ask the surgeon to wrap human skin around the creature’s muscles, tissues and organs to conceal the cryptozoological identity of their finding. The Creature will live alongside them in human form, again hidden from the world.

The surgery goes as planned. The pelt is stripped from the meat of the Creature’s body. The Surgeon goes on a world tour, garnering great adoration and instant fame. The Man and his Wife live with the Creature in human form, training it to perform a domestic human function within the framework of their lives. The Creature cannot be contained and removes itself from its human imprisonment, leaving the Man and his Wife alone with nothing to prove of this discovery. They are again the victims of their own disharmony, asking us to wonder where the darkness of their human imaginations will lead them next?

Crypto is a co-production of the CanDanse Creation Fund, Danse Danse, National Arts Centre, Canadian Stage, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Crypto also received support from the Maison de la culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and the National Ballet of Canada.

Crypto is made possible through the generous support of the Emmanuelle Gattuso Foundation. Additional support for Crypto was provided by the Joan and Jerry Lozinski Foundation.