Adele Weder rond des jambes
A t the edge of Vancouver’s West End stands a paeon to motion, an 1884 turning-track and repair-shop for the Canadian Pacific Railway.Today, this jumble of brick stands resurrected, renovated and rechristened as the Roundhouse Community Centre, almost two decades after a gaggle of activists stopped demolition vehicles from razing most of the original buildings. At this year’s Lieutenant-Governor’s Awards for Architecture, Baker McGarva Hart’s refurbished Roundhouse was acknowledged with an Award of Merit. Then, as now, the structure was all about moving: trains shuttling in, engine car pirouetting 180 degrees to be redirected back east. But now the movement has been turned inside-out: everything lively happens inside the building, and the outside is dead as a doornail.The principal locomotive sits inert in a glass hall known as Engine 374 Pavilion, like a reconstructed dinosaur skeleton in a museum; not so much a tribute to train transport but an affirmation of its demise. The cryptically quiet circle of pavement around the turn-track could have been--should have been--a vibrant Beaubourg-like piazza animated by buskers, strollers, toddlers and lagabouts. But inexplicably, the concave wall of doors on the north façade--the logical choice for the main entrance--is sealed off.According to Baker McGarva Hart, it was the developer who vetoed the use of this suite of doors as a main entrance. Perhaps the intention was to preserve the sense of peace and stasis for the residents of the developers’ freshly built condos across the street.Whatever the motive,
the decision was in keeping with Vancouver’s growing reputation as No Fun City, where budding street life tends to be asphyxiated by the ruling powers. Yet inside, basketball, belly-dancing and drumming workshops shake up the house every day and evening, as the locals make use of this fusion of old brick and gleaming new hardwood.And, on Wednesday evenings, perhaps the most shameless body-space encounter of all: the Ballet course with the oxymoronic classificiation of Adult Beginner. The class happens within the slickly renovated hall — an unusually rich environment for attempting classical ballet, for better and worse.The principal instructor, Janet Clarke, will tell you that you shouldn’t design opaque storage-room doors smack in the middle of the mirrored walls. She will also tell you that it’s the best space she’s ever taught in: sunny, airy and floored with gleaming, forgiving hardwood.And big, with those gloriously high industrial ceilings.“If you dance in a small space, you tend to dance small” She means this literally: you get used to making tight pirouettes and abbreviated jumps.“If you dance in a large space, you dance way out there--you dance really big.” I thought about this as I walked home: we Roundhouse users are all jammed into puny apartments in the surrounding West End, False Creek and Yaletown districts.We tend to move small: we walk small, we gesticulate small, perhaps we even think small. It’s nice to go somewhere once a week where we can move big, even if our form is wanting and our time is limited.
Not that we, the hamfooted Adult Beginners, require a National Ballet-calibre rehearsal hall.The hope is more for something elusive that you might call grace, the quality which allows the human body to control and define the space through which it moves. Ballet, as Janet Clarke advices us, is a motion leading up to a single point. Certain other forms of dance suggest an attempt to negate space, to break out of it. Classical ballet, by contrast, seems to create space, as though the dancer were generating an invisible and ephemeral architecture in her wake. The basis of all movements in classical ballet begin at that long bannister called the barre. From this two-dimensional starting point, we carve out motions with irresistible French names: grand plié, croisé rond-des-jambes, soubresauts.Then, warmed up, we penetrate the broader, three-dimensional space of the room, with jetés, pirouettes, tour enchaines and sissonnes. The hall’s design imperfections neatly echo our own: even the unfortunate placement of storage-room doors provides periodical reprieves from the side of a galumping body. And the aging joints that still manage to quit the earth, if only for a moment; even while anachronistic and abandoned old Engine 374 stands forever still in its tracks.
Adele Weder is an architectural critic living in Vancouver.
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ON SITE review 5
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