TD AMPLIFY 3 Becomes a playground of sound and movement
Photo credit: Mia Smith
Another sold out TD Amplify show took shape on March 27, and by now, this turnout and recurring success feels less like a surprise and more like a promise: whatever unfolds inside the walls of the Engineered Air Theatre will only fuel the momentum of this year’s series that we’ve seen thus far.
Darya Ivanova sets the story of Episode 3 transporting the audience to this rainy night, one of the many shifting environments the set conjures with striking immediacy. Her presence — quickly established in the opening moments and carried through these visceral almost instinctive movements — becomes the thread of continuity, connecting and flowing between the unfolding storylines.
Photo credit: Mia Smith
When Aditya Chaudhuri and the four-piece band of Jed Arbour join the stage, a kind of commanding dissonance emerges and stays, one that never fully resolves. However, it is not jarring or disruptive, rather generative and alive, creating a space where contrast actually becomes cohesion.
Chaudhuri, drawing on his Hindustani classical music background while weaving in hints of pop, jazz and Bollywood, engages in this push-and-pull against the grounded and propulsive rhythms of Jed Arbour’s ensemble of two bass, drums, clarinet and synth. The result is this dialogue that is at once fluid, tense and unexpectedly harmonious, with a vibrant friction that charges the performance with eager unpredictability.
There were moments where all three acts improvised with each other, but there were also those that allowed each of them to take centre stage. This allowed for their individual voices to be asserted and at the same time still remain woven into the larger fabric of the overarching story, narrated by Ivanova.
Photo credit: Mia Smith
In particular, I was captivated with Jed Arbour’s “Parasite” and lead singer Jed Stein’s raw and emotional voice that refused to be contained and confined. Their vocals spilled across the stage, up to the balcony and into the audience evoking such an intimate vulnerability as they scream, “How can I reach inside, Without feeling your hand, And it’s painful to face you, Inside my womb.”
Ivanova and her fluidity to inhabit all corners of the stage became the propelling force, moving the performance with a quiet insistence. Two of the most memorable moments were these close, charged exchanges.
One was between her and Chaudhuri with a tanpura, accompanied by beats of the Dhol and projections by Tyler Klein Longmire mirroring the melt we have seen at the start of the spring. In this interaction, her movements seemed to trace and respond to Chaudhuri’s shifts in his vocal tone and rhythm.
Photo credit: Mia Smith
The other was between her and Stein, which erupted into this sprawling, tangled dance. Stein’s clarinet imperfect squeaking and wailing punctuated each gesture, whether they were recoiling from one another, circling in tight arcs or collapsing into each other before springing apart again. The stage became a playground of sound and movement, where boundaries between body, instrument and sound blurred into one continuous seamless pulse and rhythm of chaos and improvisation.
Witnessing TD Amplify: Episode 3 was to witness yet another performance where artistic boundaries vanish, and creatives come together to reimagine how storytelling through body, sound and words can be embodied when possibility, collaboration and curiosity are the only limits.