Vancouver-based Mascall Dance presented “The White Spider” at the Lester Centre of the Arts this weekend, a contemporary dance production full of impressive acrobatics that tells the story of the first successful group to climb Mount Eiger.
The White Spider was a fusion of different dance disciplines and mountaineering athletics. The dancers performed acrobatic-like moves on a number of different props that the dancers emanated climbing a mountain on including a large disc that rises, spins and tilts, as well as ladders and ropes that dancers climbed on.
The performance takes its name and inspiration from Heinrich Harrer’s 1938 book about the first team, which included author Harrer, to complete climbing the north face of Mount Eiger located in Switzerland.
The artistic director of the production was Jennifer Mascall, who established Mascall Dance in 1989 after being one of the six co-founders of the Experimental Dance and Music group. Mascall says that the dances she creates are the results of physical experiments and are her physical thoughts about how she perceives the world.
The White Spider crew has been traveling around the province perfo-rming the show.