Social Growl and Blunt Chunks team up for an Amorous Playlist
23 Mar 2019.

by Drew Rowsome -

"I think that in general I'm pretty obsessed with being in love," says Riley Sims, choreographer and co-creator of Amorous Playlist. "I made the switch a few years ago to realize that I'm not here on this planet to have a career and success and achievement and to be the best. I'm actually here to be in love and to be a lover."

But Sims is still ambitious, he's just merging his obsessions. Amorous Playlist is billed as a "darkly romantic dance creation and live concert experience" that "takes inspiration from themes of love and heartbreak, lust, loss and sensuality."

Sims explains, "It's a dance show paired with a live concert by Blunt Chunks who's a Toronto singer/songwriter. Her songs are all based on her experiences with ex-lovers and ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, the people she's dated that have touched her life. I decided to take journal entries of mine, break-ups that I've gone through as well. And I asked the dancers to bring in some journal entries that they wrote, and I made all the movement of the show based off of those journal entries. Reckless nights out where you meet somebody, or someone you've been pining over for years but it never worked out. Those themes run through the show."

Amorous Playlist is also crossing genres. "It's a kind of a rock n' roll vibe, there really is a concert thing going on," says Sim. "We're drinking throughout the show, there's beer in the space. It's a nice kind of bridge between people who may not have as much experience of being in an audience for contemporary dance pairing with the music. It's organized like a playlist, each dance is a song. Just like you curate a playlist for this show it's all about heartbreak. There's a song with a dance, that one ends, and there's another song with a dance."

Sims is excited that the hybrid is working. "This live music aspect was more of an experiment. We've had about a 12 week process and we've only really been with Caitlin [Blunt Chunks] for the last two weeks of it. I did that on purpose. I didn't just want to make dance to her songs, I wanted to make the show in its entirety, beginning to end, without her music. The last two weeks we've been seeing how to put my dance show with her album. And it's working out. Sometimes there are these beautiful moments where the dancers will be in an embrace or in a position and something that she says in her lyrics just happens to work really well with what is happening on stage."

Sims and Caitlin "were at Wexford School for the Arts in Scarborough, we were musical theatre kids," says Sims. They drifted apart but reconnected and admire each others' artistic directions. "She just has a way about her onstage, there's something where you just fall in love with her and her lyrics are so accurate. She reminds me a lot of Joni Mitchell in the sense that sometimes her lyrics have a way of speaking about situations that have happened to you that you've always thought about but could never quite articulate. I really wanted to see what would happen with putting my dance with her music. Not in a way where the dancers are back-up dancers for Caitlin or she's making music for the dancers, but in a way where both things can happen in a space at the same time and have equal power in the performance."

The dance and music dovetailed in another way. "All of Caitlin's songs are directly personal and all of the journal entries are from real things so there are a lot of very intimate moments," says Sims. "There's a lot of touch, a lot of sensuality. An intimacy that you would see in a relationship. There's kissing, there's groping. It's very, very human. We don't want the audience to feel like 'Wow, those are amazing dancers. I could never do that, they're soimpressive.' I want them more to look as if there is a mirror being held up. So they can see themselves in the work. See people being intimate. See people going through things. I want them to be reminded of themselves in their own relationships."

Sims has no qualms about being as revelatory as Caitlin, "There's an arc in the show between me and one of the other guys. It's kind of a bad relationship and we call it 'Ink Splat.' Basically I do lots of things to him and it just kind of shows how people can be so kind to each other and so awful to each other all in one relationship. We can be predators and prey. We can be kind and honest but we can also be fake. I straddle him and we kiss and we whisper to each other and then we slap each other. Then he pushes me off and then we drink a beer together. It's shows the arc of a whole relationship in a five minute section and we have that a couple of times through the show." 

Sims insists that love is alwyas worth it. "There's a lot of pain in the show but through that pain there are some really amazing moments of beauty and bliss. And ecstasy," he says. "You need one for the other to exist, they go hand in hand. There's kind of a grittiness it. They relentlessly continue to fall in love. They relentlessly keep putting themselves back in situations with people that are maybe not good for them but they keep doing it because they want this feeling of being in love. These are very talented dancers. They're all technically trained and come from dance institutions across the country. They're also human and have had real things happen to them. I wanted to focus on that rather than their amazing dance technique. When we're watching them onstage, it's not different than how they would be with a boyfriend. That's really important to me."

Intimate and intense with beer. "The show has that moody, romantic vibe going on," says Sims. "One of the main terms we talk about in rehearsal, where get the 'sad lover' vibe, is 'drinking your tears on the dance floor.' You have a beer on the dance floor and you're thinking of that person or something bad just happened and you want to stay on the dance floor so you're just crying and drinking. We reference that. The show is really just drinking your tears on the dance floor."