'Are you still alive out there?" Joel Gibb's question, not long into his performance with his band the Hidden Cameras, pointed out the one weak link in his joint venture with Christopher House and Toronto Dance Theatre. It's all very well to put dancers on stage, especially with a large band that seems to welcome anyone who can animate the playing space in interesting ways. But when you call it choreography and move it into a theatre, the audience tends to play by theatre rules; which means no dancing, swaying in the aisles, or anything other than clapping between numbers.

The songs were mostly from the Cameras' forthcoming CD, Awoo. True to past form, Gibb's new material has a bright, involving surface even when the subject of the lyrics is dark. He likes the sharp gleaming attack of xylophones, piano, banjo, oboe and guitars, as well as the warm blanketing tone of cello and string bass.

"I'd rather wallow in the mud of my own imagination," he sang, as a flexible ensemble of musicians (including some dancers, banging on drums or clacking bones together) performed the kind of rallying, everyone-to-the-unison ritual that Cameras' songs enact again and again. This band's overarching message is that no one ever need be alone, even when lonely.

With so much communion coded right into the music, a troupe of dancers giving the same concept visible shapes made sense. House's choreography took its cues from the pop energy and short-form repetitions of Gibb's music, as much as from its ostensible subjects.

One of the show's most charming moments came near the beginning, as three male dancers pranced around three xylophones, whacking out simple motifs while marching with knees as high as drum majors' (Gibb, meanwhile, was singing about being "under command of my own contradictions").

An ensemble number with bones turned into a game, while teasing at the multiple meanings of the show's title. Bones are associated with death, but also with human movement and sex.

A bright, up-tempo love song let House work a little more deeply, via a kinetic duo for rubber-limbed couple (hetero this time, though House, again taking his cue from the foreground sexuality of Gibb's lyrics, used a same-sex pairing in an earlier, more alienated duet). But too often House seemed to be mainly illustrating some aspect of the music, and not really putting movements on stage capable of resonating in the mind's eye later.

The most striking image, and the show's only approach to something like an epic scale, came during a wordless chorus that shuffled in tight formation around the stage, as a chain of organ chords and the rumble of thunder (lightning provided by a stage photographer's flash) suggested something to crack open the I-centred world of Gibb's musical communions. Gibb himself figured in another arresting scene, prowling stage centre with his beautiful hollow-body guitar, while a quartet of dancers caged him at four corners, and a lone woman clacked out letters on an old Underwood typewriter.

The leader of this show, and its only solo voice, had a curious presence on stage. Gibb's obvious desire to set off sparks played against his very sober command of the scene. He's a bit like David Byrne that way, and dressed the part, in a white dress shirt with tight-pleated front. Cheryl Lalonde's costumes for TDT put pleated trousers and singlets on the men, drab housedresses on the women. Just plain folks, with a Hupmobile waiting in the alley.

For a set, Lalonde and David Hoekstra used the open stage, with layered scaffolding for the band and any dancer nimble enough to scamper to the upper levels. Geoff Buckley's lighting design produced the fresh feeling most of these danced songs required, turning sombre at telling intervals.

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