Eunoia

The Firehall is pleased to present Fujiwara Dance Inventions’ Eunoia from Wednesday, May 8 to Saturday, May 11, 2024.

Eunoia is a dance-theatre production and adaptation of Christian Bök’s award-winning book of poetry of the same name. It is a conceptual book written in the form of a lipogram where each of its five chapters is constrained to the use of one vowel. It is much lauded as a work, won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize, and became a bestseller in Canada and the UK.

Eunoia means ‘beautiful thinking’ and is the shortest word in the English language to contain all five vowels. In the book, the author imposed the severe constraint of working with only one vowel in each chapter. Remarkably, and despite the severe limitations to the usable vocabulary, Bök was able to create oddly narrative poems with characters, scenes, and coherent action.

“The choreography has imposed constraints as well,” says Fujiwara. “For example, in Chapter E, we use the neck, spleen, knees, etc. Rather than limit the choreography, we’ve found that these constraints have allowed us to create a delightful parallel world that is separate and yet, still relates to the poem in odd and unexpected ways.”

Throughout the production, poetry is used as text – spoken live, as a kind of score for the dance, in multimedia expressions and as the basis for movement invention. The work is rigorous, surprising, and frequently droll.