“Eunoia” from Fujiwara Dance Inventions plays the Firehall in May

by Mike Usinger on April 8th, 2024 at 2:20 PM

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Fujiwara Dance Inventions’ production of Eunoia will take place at the Firehall Arts Centre from May 8 to 11.

Combining dance and theatre, the work is based on Christian Bok’s award-winning poetry book Eunoia, where each of the five chapters features words with only one vowel. A bestseller in Canada and the UK, the book won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Bok’s self-imposed writing constraints created challenges for choreographer and director Denise Fujiwara, with spoken-live poetry acting as a score for the dance in Eunoia.

“For example, in Chapter E, we use the neck, spleen, knees, etc.,” Fujiwara says in a release. “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.”

As your favoure linguistics obsessive knows, eunoian, which means “beautiful thinking,” is the shortest word in the English language containing all five vowels.