Nichole Canuso's 'Midway Avenue'

In its world premiere, Canuso explored what happens when “the house you grew up in squeezes into your current home, bending walls, twinning rooms, tilting windows.” She presented a large chalkboardlike stage with objects — a stool, a flower vase, a broom, a bowl — placed on it. She tore off lengths of masking tape; divided the floor into living areas; and created the shapes of a table, a couch, a piano and its keys.

Accompanied by the recorded sound of Chopin’s 24 piano preludes, Canuso reacted to the spaces and props with movements that varied between lyrical and athletic. Canuso also used her voice, minimally, speaking of minutiae like a remembered broken key on the family piano and revealing that “I like being alone. I learned to move by moving around my house.”

One gets the impression that Nichole spent a lot of solitary time, perhaps because her father was out earning a living and her mother was exploring a new lifestyle that led to a divorce. Because her parents are alive (her dad is a well-known actor and director) and she clearly respects their privacy, Nichole reveals very little personal information. The focus is on her physical reactions to her personal memories of the spaces she occupied.

The dance inspected the complex repetitions of patterns and desires. Canuso demonstrated the relationship between architecture and the body, and she asked audience members to reflect upon their own memories of the spaces that shaped their lives.

Other stories, other rooms

In her program, Canuso said “How does my story relate to your story?”

Here’s one example, albeit removed by a generation. This is about my father’s home. My 20-year-old son recently started exploring family genealogy. Just a week ago, he showed me a census report from the time when my late father was a child. I saw the handwritten report that the head of the household was my great-grandfather. Also living in that home was my great-grandmother; their children, who included my grandfather (then age 42) and my grandmother (35); and their children — my father and his sisters.

Why did my father never tell me about this? Was he ashamed of growing up in such cramped conditions? Was he embarrassed by the fact that his parents were dependents in a house that was not their own? All the members of that household are dead, and we’ll never know the answers. But the house on Passyunk Avenue still stands, and perhaps I’ll learn something if I visit that space and look at it.

Saturday’s performance was followed by Architecture, Memory and The Body, a panel conversation about bodies and the built environment, addressing the question, do we move differently because of the architecture we grew up in? Panelists included Canuso, Pulitzer-winning architecture critic Inga Saffron, and neighborhood advocate Emaleigh Doley; choreographer Andrew Simonet moderated.

(Above right: Canuso in front of her childhood home.)