My Vancouver Dance History: Story Movement Community 9780228002468

Table of contents :
Cover
My Vancouver Dance History
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction Whose Dance History?
And: Time
Chapter 1 Friendship’s Folds: “Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory
And: Space
Chapter 2 Walking and Talking and Laughing with Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg
And: Company
Chapter 3 Between Sand and Water: Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance
And: Festival
Chapter 4 Like Is as Like Is Not: Making (and Unmaking) Correspondences with Ziyian Kwan and Vanessa Goodman
And: Training
Chapter 5 Putting Words in Motion with Rob Kitsos and Lesley Telford
And: Institutions
Chapter 6 History Dances Whom? Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Justine A. Chambers and Alexa Mardon
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

My Vancouver Dance History

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston

|

London

|

Chicago

My Vancouver Dance History

Story, Movement, Community

PETER DICKINSON

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020 isbn 978-0-2280-0107-2 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0108-9 (paper) isbn 978-0-2280-0246-8 (epdf) Legal deposit second quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding was also received from Simon Fraser University’s University Publications Fund.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: My Vancouver dance history : story, movement, communtiy / Peter Dickinson. Names: Dickinson, Peter, 1968- author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200169211 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200169246 | isbn 9780228001089 (softcover) | isbn 9780228001072 (hardcover) | isbn 9780228002468 (pdf) Subjects: lcsh: Dance—British Columbia—Vancouver. | lcsh: Dance—Social aspects—British Columbia—Vancouver. Classification: lcc gv1625.5.v36 d53 2020 | ddc 792.809711/ 33—dc23

Contents

Figures vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction

Whose Dance History? 3 And: Time 22

Chapter 1

Friendship’s Folds: “Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory 31 And: Space 64

Chapter 2

Walking and Talking and Laughing with Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg 75 And: Company 107

Chapter 3

Between Sand and Water: Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance 117 And: Festival 164

Chapter 4

Like Is as Like Is Not: Making (and Unmaking) Correspondences with Ziyian Kwan and Vanessa Goodman 174 And: Training 212

Chapter 5

Putting Words in Motion with Rob Kitsos and Lesley Telford 220 And: Institutions 261

Chapter 6

History Dances Whom? Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Justine A. Chambers and Alexa Mardon 273 Notes 323 Bibliography 345 Index 359

Figures

1.1 James Gnam in _post (2011). Photo by David Cooper. 32 1.2 Henry de Gissy’s portrait of Louis XIV as Apollo in Le Ballet de la nuit (1653). 33 1.3 Bevin Poole Lienweber and tutu in _post (2011). Photo by David Cooper. 46 1.4 Digital Folk’s Sally Field Project (2016). Diego Romero, Bevin Poole Lienweber, and James Gnam. Photo by Chris Randle. 55 1.5 Vanessa Goodman, Kayla DeVos, Hannah Jackson, Lexi Vajda, James Gnam, Rachel Helton, and Rachel Silver in Digital Folk (2016). Photo by Chris Randle. 57 1.6 Natalie LeFebvre Gnam and James Gnam in rehearsals for I Miss Doing Nothing (2018). Photo by Evann Siebens. 62 2.1 Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg in Nick and Juanita: Livin’ in my dreams (2007). Photo by Christopher Morris. 81 2.2 Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg in Nick and Juanita: Livin’ in my dreams (2007). Photo by Christopher Morris. 82 2.3 Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg in a publicity still for Porno Death Cult (2014). Photo by Clancy Dennehy. 88 2.4 Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg and Silvia Gribaudi in a publicity still for empty.swimming.pool (2017). Photo by Wendy D. 93 2.5 Peter Dickinson and Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg in rehearsal at the Firehall, August 2015. Photo by Tara Gallagher Harris. 105 2.6 The author performing to “I Ran” at Tara Cheyenne Performance’s Lip Sync Battle IV, May 2018. Photo by Greg Bricknell. 106 3.1 Molly McDermott, Barbara Bourget, Jay Hirabayashi, and Billy Marchenski in The Book of Love (2015/16). Photo by Peter Eastwood. 123 3.2 Jay Hirabayashi in Rage (1986). Photo by Judith Felix. 126 3.3 Ziyian Kwan, Barbara Bourget, and Jay Hirabayashi in a 2004 remount of The Believer (1995/2004). Photo by Chris Randle. 127 3.4 The seagull sequence during Wreck Beach Butoh 2015. Photo by Vincent Wong. 132

viii

3.5 Before Wreck Beach 2016. Yvonne Chew; Peter Dickinson; Keith Lim; Brie-Ana Laboucane; Jay Hirabayashi; Dana Marquis; Bronwyn Preece; Molly McDermott; Irene McDermott; Michael Garfinkel; Tuan Ahn Luu; Henry Wong; Barbara Bourget. Photo by Ngoc Hoa Tran. Courtesy Yvonne Chew. 153 3.6 After Wreck Beach 2016. Look, even Barbara is smiling this time! Photo by Ngoc Hoa Tran. Courtesy Yvonne Chew. 153 4.1 Vanessa Goodman and Ziyian Kwan in In Vertebrate Dreams (2016). Photo by David Cooper. 176 4.2 Ziyian Kwan and James Gnam in a slow awkward (2014). Photo by Chris Randle. 183 4.3 Ziyian Kwan in bite down gently and howL (2014). Photo by Chris Randle. 189 4.4 Ken Blaschuk, Noam Gagnon, and Ziyian Kwan in The Mars Hotel (2015). Photo by David Cooper. 192 4.5 Josh Martin balancing a bag of balloons on his head in Vanessa Goodman’s What Belongs to You (2014). Photo by David Cooper. 197 4.6 Vanessa Goodman in Container (2016). Photo by Ben Didier. 201 4.7 Alexa Mardon, Arash Khakpour, Bynh Ho, Dario Dinuzzi, and Karissa Barry in Vanessa Goodman’s Wells Hill (2017). Photo by Ben Didier. 208 5.1 Jane Osborne, Olivia Shaffer, Kim Stevenson, Roxoliana Prus, Justin Reist, Leigha Wald, and Cort Gerlock in Wake (2009), by Rob Kitsos. Photo by Chris Randle. 226 5.2 Justin Reist and Victor Mariano in The Objecthood of Chairs (2010). Photo by James Proudfoot. 229 5.3 Justin Reist and Victor Mariano in The Objecthood of Chairs (2010). Photo by James Proudfoot. 231 5.4 Iratxe Ansa in Lesley Telford’s Brittle Failure (2013). Photo by Rahi Resvani. 238 5.5 Jay Clift as Reid, and Melissa Oei as Lucy, in Long Division (2016/17). Photo by David Cooper. 241 5.6 Nicco Garcia Lorenzo as Paul, and Kerry Sandomirsky as Alice, in Long Division (2016/17). Photo by David Cooper. 246 5.7 Ria Girard in Spooky Action (2018), by Lesley Telford. Photo by Cara Tench. 251 5.8 The collaged sensorial landscape of Saudade (2015), by Rob Kitsos. Photo by Rob Treniak. 255

6.1 Alison Denham, Kate Franklin, Tiffany Tregarthen, and guests in Family Dinner (2014), by Justine A. Chambers. Photo by Yvonne Chew. 279 6.2 Justine A. Chambers and guest in Family Dinner (2014), by Justine A. Chambers. Photo by Yvonne Chew. 279 6.3 Josh Martin, Lisa Gelley, Alison Denham, Aryo Khakpour, and Kate Franklin in Family Dinner: The Lexicon (2015), by Justine A. Chambers. Video frame grab by Josh Hite. 283 6.4 Our Present Dance Histories lobby installation, The Dance Centre, November 2017–April 2018. Conceived and designed by Natalie Purschwitz. Photo by Natalie Purschwitz. 301 6.5 Close-up view of Our Present Dance Histories lobby installation, The Dance Centre, November 2017–April 2018. Conceived and designed by Natalie Purschwitz. Photo by Natalie Purschwitz. 302 6.6 The front of Justine A. Chambers’s OPDHODHPOVDAIHOTP T-shirt. Photo by Peter Dickinson. 305 6.7 The front and back of Deanna Peters’s and Jane Osborne’s OPDHODHPOVDAIHOTP T-shirts. Photo by Peter Dickinson. 305 6.8 The OPDHODHPOVDAIHOTP T-shirts laid out at The Dance Centre, ready for distribution to Modus Operandi students. Photo by Peter Dickinson. 306

Figures ix

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I thank all of the dance artists discussed in these pages: for the generosity of your time, the gift of your friendship, and the complexity and integrity of your work. I must offer an additional note of thanks to Justine A. Chambers and Alexa Mardon for inviting me into their own project on Vancouver dance history and for showing me how it really should be done. I am also grateful to all the generous individuals who have allowed me to reproduce their words or their images as part of the telling of this story. At Simon Fraser University (sfu) I have been blessed to work with students, colleagues, and visiting scholars who share my passion for the Vancouver dance scene and have helped shape it. For their conversation and insights, embodied and otherwise, I thank Megan Andrews, Carolina Bergonzoni, Jennifer Chutter, Carolyne Clare, Henry Daniel, Marla Eist, Judith Garay, Sasha Ivanochko, Rob Kitsos, DD Kugler, Cheryl Prophet, Celeste Snowber, ilvs strauss, Daisy Thompson, Megan Walker-Straight, Britta Wirthmüller, and Meagan Woods. I extend my thanks as well to colleagues Sabine Bitter, Allyson Clay, Arne Eigenfeldt, Kyla Gardiner, Steven Hill, Sky Hopinka, Claudette Lauzon, Cole Lewis, John McFarlane, Laura Marks, Denise Oleksijczuk, Chris Pavsek, Elspeth Pratt, Eldritch Priest, Judy Radul, Simone Rapisarda, Noé Rodriguez, Sabrina Schroeder, Owen Underhill, Wladimiro Woyno, and Jin-me Yoon: for listening to me talk about the ideas in this book; for helping to provide space for the pedagogical elaboration of some of those ideas; and above all for modelling what compelling and thoughtful artmaking, scholarship, and community engagement look like. Nobody integrated all three of those practices better than Ker Wells, and it saddens me that he is no longer with us to contribute his unique vision to Vancouver’s performance ecology. I have spent more than fifteen years talking with Alana Gerecke about Vancouver dance, to which Alana has herself made significant artistic and critical contributions. My thinking on movement in the city has been enriched immeasurably by Alana’s unique insights, and I hope this book will

xii

be read as a companion to Alana’s own forthcoming monograph on Vancouver site dance. A theorist of a different kind of embodied knowledge, Kelsey Blair has nevertheless taught me an immense amount about the transmissibility of technique. I owe everything I know about how to do (and not do) performance ethnography from Dara Culhane: thank you, Dara, for your wisdom and patience in teaching me to think more deeply and more feelingly about the stories of this place. Whatever I have gotten wrong in the telling is my fault alone. However imperfectly, I have shared ideas from this book at meetings of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Congress on Research in Dance (now the Dance Studies Association), the Canadian Society for Dance Studies, Performance Studies international, the World Dance Critics – Americas, and various additional university and community gatherings. For listening and sharing their feedback, I wish to thank Megan Andrews, Susan Bennett, Sima Belmar, Seika Boye, T. Nikki Cesare-Schotzko, Mique’l Dangeli, Kate Elswit, Alex Lazaridis Ferguson, Heather Fitzsimmons-Frey, Anne Flynn, Jane Gabriels, Nadine George-Graves, Alana Gerecke, Evadne Kelly, Laura Levin, Allana Lindgren, Susan Manning, Deborah Meyers, Bronwyn Preece, VK Preston, Joyce Rosario, Marlis Schweitzer, Ahalya Satkunaratnam, and MJ Thompson. To Aiko, Angel, Dana, Henry, Katie, Molly, Salome, Tuan, and all the other drop-in members of Barbara Bourget’s dance class at kw Studios: thank you for the infectious joy of dancing together every week, and for covering my mistakes. Thank you, Barbara, for your insistence on calling those mistakes out. To the undergraduate students of Rob Kitsos’s contemporary technique class, which I have been known to crash (sometimes quite literally): thanks for accommodating me, and also for not laughing. I first met Jonathan Crago, editor-in-chief at McGill-Queen’s University Press (mqup), when he was a student in my maiden graduate seminar at sfu. The critical insights on cultural theory and performance he articulated back then have only sharpened in the years since, and there is no better testament to this than the many groundbreaking books he has helped shepherd into print. I can’t claim mine will be one of them, but I am nevertheless extremely grateful to Jonathan for his unwavering support of this book (including its somewhat unusual form), and of research in Canadian dance and performance studies more generally. Thanks as well to everyone else at mqup, especially Finn Purcell, Kathleen Fraser, Erin Rolfs, and Matthew Kudelka, for their contributions to the production of this book. I am also profoundly indebted to the two peer reviewers who provided anonymous

feedback on my manuscript. Such an acknowledgment is standard protocol in our profession, but in their deep and sustained engagement with the work, their critical generosity, and the substance of their suggestions for improvement, there was nothing at all standard about these reviews – and one in particular. I am truly humbled to have had my writing on contemporary Vancouver dance read with such care and I have tried as best I can through my revisions to reciprocate that responsibility to the material I am analyzing. Research for this book has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by Simon Fraser University. Portions of Chapters 3 and 4 have previously appeared in these respective publications: “Choreographies of Place: Dancing the Vancouver Sublime from Dusk to Dawn,” in Performance Studies in Canada, ed. Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 90–114; “Showing Support: Some Reflections on Vancouver’s Dance Economies,” Canadian Theatre Research 162 (2015), 10–15; and “Moving into Wells Hill,” http://www.actionatadistance.ca/media. Finally, I reserve my greatest thanks for Richard Cavell, who has accompanied me to most of the dance performances discussed in this book, and who has supported me emotionally and intellectually during the long process of its completion. Thank you, Richard, for being the best Vancouver dance partner one could hope for.

Acknowledgments xiii

My Vancouver Dance History

INTRODUCTION

Whose Dance History?

In the interests of full disclosure, and counter to accepted convention, I should state at the outset that I do not pretend to be a very good dance historian. During the writing of this book, I spent very little time working in official archives, and the pages that follow do not pretend to adhere to standard chronologies or timelines. No doubt influenced by my training as a literary and theatre/performance studies scholar, I much prefer the narrative logic of story, with its temporal and spatial gaps, its circumlocutions and digressions, its willingness to make room for perspectives that are elliptical and particular alongside those that claim to be conspectival and all-encompassing. Put simply, this book is the result of listening to the stories told to me by a range of contemporary Vancouver dance artists, and of watching the stories they have told through movement on stage. It is my story of those stories. Which is another way of saying that this book does not purport to be a definitive history of Vancouver dance. That possessive pronoun in the title is there for a reason. If the “my” were replaced by the article “a,” I might feel more of a responsibility to start, as it were, at the beginning, and to be as comprehensive and inclusive as possible. Then again, the indefiniteness of that article also hints at the necessary incompleteness of such a project, as well as an inevitable narrowing of focus. Thus, a history of ballet in Vancouver might start with the series of attempts, spanning multiple decades, to establish a permanent professional company in the city. Rather arbitrarily, one might date the origin of these attempts to the 1930s and the founding of the bc School of the Theatre by Vivian Ramsay and Yvonne Firkins, and their parallel recruitment of June

4

Roper as their first ballet mistress.1 Ramsay and Firkins would go on to found the Vancouver Civic Ballet Society in 1946 (later simply the Vancouver Ballet Society) in order “to coordinate the efforts of local teachers and to sponsor cooperative performances.”2 One of those teachers was Mara McBirney, who shortly after settling in Vancouver in 1948 (and helping to train everyone from Lynn Seymour to Paula Ross to Barbara Bourget) formed a semi-professional troupe called the Panto-Pacific Ballet.3 Meanwhile, Roper, having established her own bc School of Dancing in 1936, would help to train and launch the professional careers of a succession of Vancouver dancers who distinguished themselves internationally. Among these was Kay Armstrong, who after two years in New York dancing at Radio City Music Hall and on Broadway, returned to Vancouver to teach, first alongside Roper and then at her own school. Recruiting her best students, she would eventually establish two semi-professional companies: Le Ballet Concert performed at the Canadian Ballet Festival in 1950 and 1952, and their best-known work, the Armstrongchoreographed Étude, was the sole Canadian work included in the National Ballet of Canada’s (nbc) inaugural 1951 show; the Kay Armstrong Dance Theatre later made two well-received tours of bc and Alberta in the days before government funding.4 Really, however, the more popularly received history of ballet in bc, the one that culminates in the establishment of the company called Ballet bc, is much more recent, and encompasses the founding of Ballet Horizons in 1970 by Morely Wiseman, its morphing into Pacific Ballet Theatre (pbt) in 1974 under the initial directorship of Maria Lewis, and the subsequent rescuing and reconstitution of pbt into Ballet bc by David Y.H. Lui and Jean Orr in 1985.5 Likewise, a history of modern and contemporary dance in Vancouver would probably also begin in the late 1960s and early 1970s, zeroing in on figures like Paula Ross, Helen Goodwin, Norman Vesak, Anna Wyman, Mauryne Allan, Jamie Zagoudakis and Gisa Cole, and Karen Jamieson, Savannah Walling, and Terry Hunter, whose respective companies – Paula Ross Dance Company (1965–87), TheCo (1968–71), Western Dance Theatre (1969–71), Anna Wyman Dance Theatre (1970–90), Mountain Dance Theatre (1973–80), Prism Dance Theatre (1974–84), and Terminal City Dance (1976–83) – all made important, if sometimes brief, West Coast contributions to Canada’s emerging modern dance scene.6 Allan, Jamieson, Walling, and Hunter all met while taking dance classes in the 1960s at Simon Fraser University’s experimental, non-credit Centre for Communication and the Arts, the forerunner to the interdisciplinary academic unit that became sfu’s School for the Contemporary Arts, where I now teach.

Introduction: Whose Dance History?

Indeed, another way to approach a history of contemporary Vancouver dance would be to frame it institutionally, concentrating on the evolution of various pre-professional programs in the city, including at sfu (where legendary instructors like Iris Garland, Santa Aloi, and Grant Strate were instrumental in developing the curriculum),7 the Goh Ballet Academy (founded by Choo Chiat Goh and Lin Yee Goh in 1978, and currently directed by their daughter, former nbc principal dancer Chan Hon Goh), the now defunct Main Dance (established by Cole in 1984), Arts Umbrella’s Post-Secondary and Professional Dance Programs (overseen by Artemis Gordon since 1990), and Modus Operandi (begun in 2007 by Out Innerspace’s David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen). I do touch upon contemporary dance training in Vancouver later on in this book, but not in a way that would be very helpful in accounting for the historical presentation of and participation in western concert and social dance in Vancouver in the years between colonial settlement and the Second World War, or the thriving – and in Roper’s case, justifiably renowned – industry of dance training in the city during the same period; as Kaija Pepper has shown, both were crucial to the cultural fabric of the city in the years leading up to and following its official incorporation.8 Even more dangerously, diachronic accounts of the sort elaborated above, no matter their origin point, or how expansive or delimited they be, risk overwriting the history and “survivance”9 (including during the potlatch ban) of Indigenous dance traditions among the Coast Salish peoples that have taken place on these lands for millennia. As Aaron Glass has demonstrated, following the amendment of the Indian Act in 1884 to criminalize the celebration of “the Indian festival known as the ‘Potlatch’ or the Indian dance known as the ‘Tamanawas,’” many First Nations of the Northwest Coast, and especially the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples on Northern Vancouver Island and across the Salish Sea on the central bc coast, “proved most successful at maintaining performative practices through the period of colonial infringement,” adapting “dance display to non-ceremonial contexts, including tourist visits to the coast, residency in ethnographic villages at World’s Fairs, celebration of provincial and federal holidays, and openings of art gallery and museum exhibitions.”10 These anthropological performances of “authentic Indianness” frequently subverted their colonialist premises, asserting Indigenous agency and sovereignty.11 Then, too, it does not necessarily follow that the current vibrancy of Vancouver’s contemporary dance scene flows logically – and linearly – from professional foundations begun in the 1970s. That would be to ignore mul-

5

6

tiple paradigm shifts in aesthetic styles and presentation models initiated by successive generations of younger dance artists and curators relocating or returning to Vancouver since the 1990s. And, again, to continue to ignore the ways in which Indigenous dance in bc has always already been contemporary, not just in its persistence over time – and in the face of repeated state-sanctioned attempts to suppress or eradicate its expression – but also in its living assertion of territorial sovereignty. I take up ideas of the contemporary as they apply, and also have failed to be applied, to Indigenous dance in Vancouver in the first of this book’s short inter-chapters, or movement intervals. For the time being, however, it is crucial that I acknowledge the important work of Tsimshian dancer, choreographer, and scholar Mique’l Dangeli, who has compellingly demonstrated how the “transmotion of protocol” connects Coast Salish history, ceremony, and tradition to current political realities through an expressly embodied system of cultural inheritance and governance, in which the custodianship of different family, clan, community, and Nation songs, dances, oral stories, and regalia is passed down from generation to generation in a complex network of “ownership and permission.”12 As a way to begin decolonizing the telling of dance history, it is useful to compare the temporal multiplicity and spatial locatedness of Dangeli’s notion of “dancing sovereignty” with Randy Martin’s idea of “kinesthemes,” which he defines as “embodied forms of sovereignty or rule,” that is, the ways in which “cultural scenes are made from people in movement. They come and go, etch pathways, leave traces, inhabit and abandon, deposit and withdraw their treasures.”13 Elaborated by Martin over a series of essays investigating how “the social logic of the derivative” might be wrested from its conventional associations with economic financialization and applied to more generative kinds of risk, including the dispersed and precarious “ways that people have learned to move together, to act upon certain sensibilities and interdependencies,” the term kinestheme is posited as a way of countering the ebb and flow of epistemic thinking, of what counts as valid knowledge when.14 As Martin has elsewhere suggested, a glance at the professional dance listings of any major city belies the notion that the telling of dance history must somehow be undertaken, in Martin’s words, as the succession of historically “sovereign” styles – for example, from classical to modern to postmodern.15 Instead, by focusing not just on how people, including dancers, are called to move in certain ways, but also on how they respond to, reorient, and seek to establish their own sense of rule over such movements, kinesthemes acknowledge that bodily knowing is a dis-

Introduction: Whose Dance History?

tributed, multi-layered, and temporally and spatially entangled process: “If epistemes suggest some sort of progressive succession, kinesthemes demand a body to be many things at once.”16 Likewise, Judith Hamera’s application of Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope” to the temporal and spatial locations of dance’s aesthetic and social intersections in the global city reminds us that as dance history is constituted through affective and interpersonal relationships as much as through training and technique, its present will always be haunted by its pasts, its unique here and now by multiple theres and thens.17 Hamera’s book, Dancing Communities, serves as an important touchstone for my own. In it, she documents her observation of and participation in different dance cultures and movement practices in contemporary Los Angeles (from ballet and concert dance to butoh, classical Khmer dance, and Pilates training), arguing that the various performers and spectators, professionals and amateurs, students and teachers, who embody these communities not only contribute to a thriving and diverse cultural geography of dancing in LA, but also constitute “a vital urban infrastructure” for the city;18 that is, the daily practice of technique – in class, on stage, at community gatherings – choreographs locally specific templates for broader social and civic engagement by helping to shape bodies, fashion identities, and build the foundations (sometimes very materially) for community networking and interaction. If, as Hamera convincingly argues, dance’s “mobile intimacies” are central to contemporary urban place-making,19 then it makes sense that an examination of how those intimacies form and transform over a given period would also serve as a rich lens through which to examine a locally emplaced history of the present. Just such an examination provided the impetus for the Our Present Dance Histories project that I discuss at greater length in Chapter 6, in which I collaborated with Justine A. Chambers and Alexa Mardon to interview fifty-three Vancouver dance artists about their personal movement histories. Our aim was to produce, over a range of platforms and formats, a rhizomatic map or web of artistic and community connections that would simultaneously document the movement in and of the city that all of us had chosen to make our home. Implicit in the collaboration with Justine and Alexa, one whose goals and methods ended up informing my approach to the material in this book’s other chapters, was the idea that the movement practices of dancers are crucial to understanding contemporary urban social choreography more generally. From the neighbourhoods in which they can afford to live to the spaces they choose to rehearse in, the embodied histories of contemporary

7

8

Vancouver dance artists posit “bodily movement as a form of cultural information” that, in SanSan Kwan’s words, helps ground my own “kinesthetic experience of the city” in making “determinations about community identity.”20 Like Kwan, and also Hamera, in this book I focus on “the intertwinings of choreography, place, and history”; I do so through an avowedly personal and presentist lens, using my ethnographic observation of and at times artistic and critical collaborations with a succession of Vancouver dance artists to ask “how looking at corporeal movement through specific places at precise historical moments can illuminate the production of those places and those moments, as well as of the bodies that move through them.”21 To the extent that Hamera, Kwan, and I are also all by and large focusing on dance communities in Pacific Rim cities, the stories we are seeking to tell might be seen as countering the “placeism” that Emily Wilcox has recently suggested plagues the writing of much dance history, in which the globalizing traffic in cultural exports, including modern and postmodern dance, has resulted in the hegemony of certain universalist national and urban (i.e., US and New York) movement genealogies at the expense of particularized studies of more “provincial” regions, including in her case China.22 This study happily adopts Wilcox’s call to “provincialize” global dance history by focusing on a group of dance artists whose work, as I hope to show, is very much in dialogue with contemporary international conversations and trends, but is also deeply rooted in both the opportunities and the challenges afforded by living and working here. Both Hamera and Kwan, in writing their own studies of dance and community in the contemporary globalized city, draw on the principles of performance (and specifically dance) ethnography, not least in calling attention to how their own bodily relationships with the sites and subjects of their research enact a kind of choreography, a way of making sense of space and time, and also a sense-making that sets the fields of their research in motion. In the anthropology of performance, it was famously Victor Turner who reconceived performance as “making, not faking,”23 as poeisis rather than mimesis. Turner’s framework provides us with a way not just of valuing the material and bodily labour that goes into the production of both aesthetic and everyday performances, but also of accounting for the performativity of these performances – that is, what these acts do, and why they are consequential. However, it was Dwight Conquergood who challenged us to conceive of performance not just as poeisis, but also as kinesis, “as movement, motion, fluidity, fluctuation, all those restless energies that transgress boundaries and trouble closure.”24 For Conquergood, kinesis involves a rad-

Introduction: Whose Dance History?

ical breaking and remaking of what we thought we knew, as well as an honest accounting of what we do not know – in other words, a movement toward uncertainty.25 As D. Soyini Madison has put it, kinesis is “the point at which reflection and meaning now evoke intervention and change.”26 Not so coincidentally, an emphasis on “kinesthetic empathy,” on the cognitive and proprioceptive experience of feeling, as an audience member, what another body is feeling on stage, has become a robust area of research in dance and theatre studies, and in performance studies focused on the senses more generally.27 I wish to take seriously the role of kinesthesia in stimulating “the feel of feeling,” that is, in providing a set of embodied techniques that can help give us a feel for how something goes.28 And, moreover, I want to think about what that means when we move across academic disciplines, which we might frame as a version of the following groping question posed by the dance ethnographer Deirdre Sklar: how does a spectator/ethnographer “sensitized to one modality learn to move into synch with a performance that emphasizes another?”29 I have tried to keep this question in both mind and body as I have worked on this book, which is in many respects an extension of previous academic work in theatre and performance studies focused on the Vancouver live arts scene in the twenty-first century.30 But its subject is also one, I now realize, that I have been dancing around for much longer. Thus, heeding calls from other Canadian dance scholars about “the potential danger of interdisciplinarity that leads to research tourism or academic dilettantism,”31 and wishing to provide some deeper (personal) context and history for how I have come to move into – if not always in synch with – the study of dance in Vancouver, and how it in turn has moved me, let me tell a story. It begins in 1980 when as a twelve-year-old boy in Chateauguay, Quebec, I read a Scholastic Magazine article in Mrs Morrison’s grade seven English class about another boy around my age studying ballet among a sea of bunheads. Experiencing something of a Billy Elliot moment avant la lettre, I told my parents that I, too, wanted to enrol in a dance class. I remember that there was some discussion about this, and in retrospect I like to think it had more to do with worries about already stretched finances than with concerns regarding my apparently non-gender-conforming recreational behaviour as a son. In the end, my parents compromised by buying me a guitar. Four years later, having moved with my family to Mississauga, Ontario, I enrolled in an extra high school English elective course with Ms Hillen at Erindale Secondary School. Ms Hillen was fond of screening old nfb documentaries, including classic dance films like Pas de deux and Narcissus,

9

10

by Norman McLaren, as well as Cynthia Scott’s documentary short Flamenco at 5:15. For one assignment, Ms Hillen asked us to write about the experience of watching these films, and I remember how excited I was to attempt to capture on paper the uncanny feelings of doubleness I had registered in my body as I had watched McLaren’s films – not just as a result of the filmmaker’s technical feats of replicating the dancers’ images on screen, but almost as if, seated at my desk, I was somehow moving in muscular response to the dancing bodies I was observing. Then, too, there was what I didn’t end up writing about, including my blushing attraction to the sculpted torsos of the shirtless male dancers in Narcissus, and my fascination with how, in their virtuosic staccato footwork, and their boneless, blooming floreo, the male National Ballet of Canada dancers learning flamenco technique in Scott’s film were unafraid to appear feminine. Let us now jump to 1995. I am twenty-seven years old. I have survived a stint in the chorus of a high school production of South Pacific, which included some tricky unison footwork to “Bloody Mary.” Still in mourning from the cancellation of the tv series Fame, I have watched and secretly practised the choreography from every contemporary cheesy Hollywood dance film (from Flashdance and Footloose to Beat Street and White Nights), as well as most of Madonna’s and Janet Jackson’s videos. Currently studying for my PhD comprehensive exams in literature at the University of British Columbia, I’ve finally decided to sign up for an introductory ballet class offered by my local community centre – in part as an effort, once a week for a couple of hours, to get outside of my head. The plan is foiled when, after having bought a pair of tights, a dance belt, and some ballet slippers, and having practised ahead of time my turnout and non-existent plié, I show up to the first class and discover that a senior professor from my department whom I don’t much like is also enrolled. I did complete the twelve-week course, but decided against proceeding to the next level. Instead, I took up running. Ten years, several marathons, and one successful tenure decision later, my middle-aged body was in need of some healing, and so I began Pilates classes in order to strengthen my core. I liked that, as a somatic practice, Pilates felt butcher than yoga – maybe because of all that medieval-looking equipment. I also liked that so many of my instructors were dancers, or former dancers, and in the years that I was a regular at the Dianne Miller (now Vancouver) Pilates Studio, I would often chat with former Ballet bc principal Edmond Kilpatrick and former Dancemakers company member Carolyn Woods about shows we’d recently seen. By this time my partner

Introduction: Whose Dance History?

Richard and I had become regular fixtures at most dance events in Vancouver, and I’d also started a blog in which I began to record – at first hesitantly, and then with increasing confidence – my responses to the work that I was seeing. Partly as a result of this blog, partly owing to the talkbacks and other speaking gigs I had also begun to facilitate around the dance community, and not least because of a concomitant shift in focus toward that same community in my research and teaching, several dance artists started to invite me to become more intimately involved in some of their projects and processes: as a writer, researcher, facilitator, outside eye, collaborator, and even occasional mover. Relatedly, I had also begun to seek out different choreographers to contribute to research-creation processes of my own. Over the course of our collaborations, I began to learn more about these artists’ training and personal and professional histories and choreographic inspirations and research and devising methods. This was a story, a history, of Vancouver dance that I suddenly realized I was uniquely qualified to tell. And, as importantly, that I wanted others to hear. Hence the book you are presently reading, which mixes interviews, studio observation, critical performance analysis, and ethnographic reflections on my dance(d) relationships with nine contemporary Vancouver artists/companies. Just as I have no formal institutional training as a dancer or a dance historian, so I cannot pretend to be an expert in the field of ethnography. As with dance studies, I have come to ethnography through performance studies, and in particular via the important – and mutually informing – contributions made to both areas of study by artist-researchers like Conquergood, Madison, Sklar, and my colleague Dara Culhane, who has been especially instrumental in pushing me to understand how critical, or what she prefers to call “imaginative,” ethnography helps to set in motion the doing, or the performance, of one’s theories.32 That is, as a way to “story” history, critical ethnography doesn’t just reject classical anthropology’s traditional division between observing researcher and observed subjects; it also asks us to situate and account for our own embodied and emplaced experience and knowledge in relation to what or who we are studying. Madison uses the metaphor of “turning” to frame this idea of reflexive positionality: “it is a turning back on ourselves. When we turn back on ourselves, we examine our intentions, our methods, and our possible effects. We are accountable for our research paradigms, our authority, and our moral responsibility relative to representation and interpretation.”33 As Kwan notes, this at once locative and locomotive turning helps one “make the analytic move from the personal to the communal, all the while recognizing the inherent failure

11

12

of such a leap.”34 As with my dancing, in writing this book I have not always known which way to turn next, and I have frequently worried about falling flat on my face. But I have learned to take responsibility for such uncertainties, and I foreground them here as a testament to the sincerity of my attempts.35 I realize that in labelling my work “history” and “ethnography,” I set up certain methodological expectations that the ensuing chapters may not always fulfill. I acknowledge this fact not to exempt myself from critique from scholars in both fields, but rather to make a specific place-based intervention into how we might write dance history and dance ethnography differently. Key to this is my own emplacement within the Vancouver dance community, which is the starting point for how I am telling the stories (both historical and ethnographic) in this book. In this, I once again take my cue from Conquergood, and specifically his claim that for the performance ethnographer, both the subject matter and the method of one’s research is “the experiencing body situated in time, place, and history.”36 I also must pay further homage to the influence of Justine A. Chambers and Alexa Mardon; over the course of working with them on the Our Present Dance Histories project that is documented in Chapter 6, they kept prodding me to tell my dance history, and I kept insisting that I didn’t have one. Writing this book has proved them right and me wrong. And so to account for the non-traditional and intersubjective ways that I am attempting to combine historical analysis and (auto)biographical reflection in the ensuing chapters I additionally consider this work to be a kind of ethno-kinaesthetic memoir. In making this move, I am partly taking my cue from Jennifer Fisher, who in her recent book Ballet Matters deploys the term “memoir ethnography” in order to refer to a hybrid way of writing and knowing that “tacks back and forth between crafting [her] own stories, and referring to the scholarship, biography, and memoirs of scholars and practitioners.”37 Trained in both dance history and cultural anthropology, Fisher is particularly invested in this book, as she was in her classic study Nutcracker Nation, with how one might write an ethnography of Western concert dance (and, specifically in her case, ballet) that grapples with questions of subject position (including the politics of race, class, and gender) while also expressing one’s longstanding passion for the form. Studying “[her] own,” she thus employs “‘autobiography as fieldwork,’” experimenting with how, as a former dancer, dance spectator, dance writer, and now dance studies scholar, she might tell the story of her “adventures” in dance “through a performing,

Introduction: Whose Dance History?

researching, and writing life, in the hopes that they register with the experiences of others and suggest the possibilities when art becomes interwoven with life.”38 Like Fisher, I use memoir ethnography – rather than, say, a more disciplinarily recognizable term like autoethnography – to telegraph not just my situated and inherently partial take on contemporary Vancouver dance history, but also the expressly affective nature of my relationships with the dance artists whose stories I recount here. To put things plainly: all of the artists discussed in the core chapters of this book I consider friends, and these attachments have formed and deepened across a range of shared aesthetic and social experiences, and have also survived some intense working collaborations. It is the substance of those collaborations, which have ranged from serving as an outside eye on or public interlocutor for their work, to dancing in their work, to having them set work on me or to plays that I have written, to co-creating work with them, that comprises the chapters that follow. By avowing the personal connection I have with these artists and their material, some readers may argue that I forfeit the requisite degree of “critical distance,” which in turn impedes full analytical engagement with the work. I respectfully disagree with this perspective. Given my close collaborations with these artists, I think it would be disingenuous of me to claim to be writing from a position that is somehow above the work, rather than beside – and sometimes very much inside – it. In this respect, I am taking my cue from performance studies scholars like David Román and Jill Dolan, who in formulating notions of “critical generosity” and “colleague criticism” suggest that it is possible to “revel in [one’s] love for theater and performance, and challenge [oneself] to write from within that feeling … rather than masking that sustaining primary emotion behind a veil of abstraction or obfuscation.”39 Interestingly, in asking how one might subject different moments of performance to “the rigor of our sharpest analysis while preserving the pleasure, the affective gifts that these moments share,”40 Dolan quotes dance critic Ann Daly, who opens her book Critical Gestures with the following question: “Why else would anyone practice criticism, except for love?”41 My own critical practice comes from a similar place, and as a work of “public criticism openly informed by private, collegial knowledge,” this book seeks to “offer an informed understanding of process, context, subjectivity, and the critical object or event,”42 as they relate to a range of recent Vancouver dance performances whose material circumstances of creation and reception I have been privileged to witness first-hand.

13

14

Finally, in foregrounding my relationships with each of the artists I write about, I am also challenging myself to attend carefully, where appropriate, to the power dynamics embedded in those relationships. Each of the following chapters thus aims to do three things: (1) to tell a portion of the story of these artists’ own dance histories; (2) to tell a fuller story of our particular collaboration, or collaborations; and (3) to contextualize the first two stories alongside a cumulative elaboration across all of the chapters of the story of Vancouver dance performance as I and others have witnessed and experienced it over a decade-long period between 2008 and 2018. I do this latter bit of storying in two ways. First, alongside excerpts from my interviews with the dance artists discussed in each chapter, I sometimes include examples of their own critical self-reflection or commentary, or that of others responding to their work, or to being a participant in one of their artistic processes. In this way, I am seeking to practise what Gail Simon has called a “relational ethnography,” one that “veers away from the monological to the dialogical,” and that in attempting to capture a plurality of voices within the telling of my Vancouver dance history recognizes that, much like a memoir, a “research endeavor and its telling will be influenced by many others, directly and indirectly involved with it.”43 Second, in between each chapter I include a series of shorter movement intervals that attempt to provide a more aggregate picture of Vancouver dance from 2008 to 2018 by using key moments from my own spectating history to think through some of the social, political, economic, and infrastructural issues that, for better and for worse, have helped shape the practice and reception of dance in the city during this period, and that distinguish aspects of the contemporary Vancouver dance scene – again, for better or worse – from those of other movement centres in Canada. More specifically, I employ different keywords to frame a selection of blog posts reviewing/reflecting on/responding to works by local artists not otherwise represented in the main chapters, and to gesture toward some of the material realities (including aesthetic prejudices, access to space and funding, institutional gatekeeping) affecting what kind of dance gets seen in Vancouver, where, and by whom. My primary model for these intervals is Thomas DeFrantz’s use of “breaks” in Dancing Revelations, his superb study of Alvin Ailey. Drawing inspiration from African American music, “in which an insistent beat is interrupted by a flash of contradictory rhythmic ideas,” DeFrantz describes the “short, self-contained essays” that make up his breaks as “a counternarrative to the main body of writing,” as well as a series of literary pauses that might “periodically revive the interests of read-

Introduction: Whose Dance History?

ers.”44 Extending DeFrantz’s musical metaphor, I see the issues explored in my movement intervals as both conjunct and disjunct to the chapters they bridge, and thus reminiscent of the half or “and” counts in a typical danced eight-count, in which the extra beat or step, to adapt Rebecca Schneider on the “copulative” work of the ampersand in her book Theater & History, signals both a movement of relation and one of distinction.45 By grounding these supplementary counts in a critically self-reflexive reframing of excerpts from the Vancouver performance blog I maintained over the ten-year period documented in this book I am attempting to further yoke together the narrative conventions of history, ethnography, and memoir in order to locate my body, and the bodies of my readers, in relation to my objects of study. In so doing, I am seeking to practise, in Susan Leigh Foster’s words, an “ambulant form of scholarship” that oscillates between at least two different bodies “in motion”: the one doing the writing and the one(s) being written about.46 As Foster has so eloquently pointed out in her introduction to the edited volume Choreographing History, dance historians and their historical subjects re-enact on the page “a kind of improvised choreographic process,” and in ways that often demand new and more creative modes of representation: “As translations from moved event to written text occur, the practices of moving and writing partner each other. And as emerging accounts about past bodies encounter the body of constraints that shape the writing of history, new narrative forms present themselves.”47 Even in an account such as this one, which is about the very recent past of Vancouver’s dance history, I have found that to do justice to the kinaesthetic experience of the works I have seen and at times been a part of, I have had to be open to pushing my writing practice in new directions. At the same time, in reflecting on what I did and did not write about in previous blog posts about Vancouver dance, I wish to attend to Randy Martin’s call for a form of ethnographic writing on dance that not only affirms the crucial participatory role of the spectator in dance fieldwork, but also “fully displays the disruptive potential of that which it represents in analysis”: by identifying rather than seeking to elide tensions, and by joining a “historical project” to “historical possibility” through a focus “on the moment of reception in relation to the object.”48 Martin’s desire for dance historical documentation that focuses on situated and reflexive analyses of moments of disruptive and contingent possibility resonates with Linda Tomko’s Foucauldian bracketing of a genealogical narrative of causation in the writing of dance history (i.e., the tracings of artistic influence, the development of and passing on of repertoire, and

15

16

the lineage of specific dance pedagogies) in favour of an examination of the “conditions of possibility” that might enable historical rupture or change at a given moment in time and in a specific location.49 Her specific focus is on how the modernist pioneers Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and Ruth St Denis were well-placed (including socially and financially) to access key philanthropic and educational opportunities in order to forge their influential careers. Nevertheless, Tomko’s discussion of how individual agents are embedded in different constellated relational systems and structural networks – ones that can be both enabling and constraining – helps me account not just for how the specific contributions of the artists discussed in this book are in dialogue with larger aesthetic and financial and institutional shifts in Vancouver’s dance community since the middle of the aughts, but also why I started to take notice. Indeed, beyond factors such as dancers relocating or returning to Vancouver during this period, or major company implosions and government funding contractions leading to a rethinking of creative practices and presentation models, or the influx and influence of important international work coming through the city as the result of new festival and series programming, or the building, renovation, or reclaiming of new rehearsal and performance spaces – all of which are part of the larger story being told in this book – it is, fundamentally, what made it possible for me to forge deeper connections with each of the artists discussed here that explains this book’s non-teleological and highly idiosyncratic “historical” focus. It also explains some of its more glaring gaps. While I have followed the career of Vancouver’s most famous contemporary dance world export, Crystal Pite, since she presented her first work of choreography while still a member of Ballet bc, and while I have published extensively about the work she has made for her own company, Kidd Pivot,50 I have not had the kinds of more intimate studio and peer-to-peer exchanges about her choreographic practice that I have experienced with the artists whose work is discussed in the chapters that follow. (This is not for lack of trying, and it is significant that even though there is no chapter devoted to Pite in this book, her work nevertheless runs like a red thread throughout it.) I also regret that none of the estimated forty Coast Salish and Northwest Coast First Nations dance groups active in the Lower Mainland51 are examined in any of the core chapters of this book. That the specific conditions of possibility that have enabled the sorts of interpersonal collaborations documented in those chapters have not as yet arisen within a more expressly intercultural dance framework in Vancouver (though, more recently, they have in other

Introduction: Whose Dance History?

performance contexts) says more about my own historical blind spots and aesthetic prejudices than about the work being produced by Indigenous dance artists in Vancouver and bc. To state things plainly, I have failed to invest the time required to build relationships of trust and respect with these dance artists that would enable me to witness and receive the consent to write about their work in the same way I do that of settler artists working in more familiar Western concert dance traditions.52 Thus, in the spirit of Martin’s call for a dance ethnography that is unstable and disruptive, and that does not seek to smooth over – or white out – the tensions and contingencies of the historical project it is seeking to represent, it is the very question of Indigenous dance’s temporality within Vancouver’s movement imaginary that I wrestle with in the first movement interval of this book. Having talked at length in this introduction about who is not represented in this book, I should now clarify who is. I begin with a discussion of plastic orchid factory (pof), the company founded by life partners James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam in 2008. James and Natalie met while company members at Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, and their own artist-run society was constituted in the wake of James’s involuntary termination from Ballet bc as a result of that company’s sudden financial insolvency and near collapse. Thus, one of the things the chapter aims to do is chart, on both a personal and a creative level, the shifts that James and Natalie have made as artists in transitioning from the world of classical dance to a more contemporary movement practice, from a technique and institutional structure that is vertically aligned to one that is more horizontal. Anchoring my examination of this trajectory are two pof works, _post (2011) and Digital Folk (2014–17), in which the Baroque origins of Western concert dance are put in dialogue with the neo-Baroque aesthetics of immersive movement- and rhythm-based video games. I played a small role in the development of the latter piece, which in many respects crystallized the playful, process-oriented, collaborative, interdisciplinary, and environmental approach to dancemaking toward which James and Natalie had naturally been progressing. Thus, an ancillary goal of the chapter is to show, via my own and others’ material engagement with their work, how pof models both an aesthetics and a social practice for being together, as bodies, in space: in which the simple act of gathering matters as much as what happens as a result. Certainly what isn’t supposed to happen in most contemporary dance performances is laughter. Yet I defy anyone to not do so when watching Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, who has been creating her unique brand of dance-theatre, which mixes movement with much character-based verbal

17

18

humour, for more than a decade. In Chapter 2 I begin by situating Tara’s practice within a physical theatre tradition of bouffon, arguing that her expressly feminist and dance-forward take on this form of clowning burlesques normative gendered assumptions in both comedy and contemporary dance. By talking and walking on stage, and by constantly moving in and out of different expressive characters (including several male ones), Tara resists prescribed techniques of gender and/in dance, constantly inventing new branches and pathways to explore what her body can and should do.53 It was for these very reasons that I sought out Tara’s help in discovering my own vocabulary for moving differently on stage – or, in this case, in front of a camera. The chapter thus concludes with a discussion of our collaboration on the creation of a short video in which, under the auspices of exploring the ethnographic applications of humour to my own research practice, I recite a comic monologue while also moving in a decidedly nonvirtuosic way. It was virtuosity that I was told I should aspire to, and that I was as frequently reminded I was failing to achieve, as an ensemble member in two Wreck Beach Butoh (wbb) processes led by Kokoro Dance’s Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi in 2015 and 2016. For several years before this, I had followed the company’s work – so stylistically distinctive with its dancers’ shaved heads, all-white bodies, and signature fundoshis (when, as in wbb, they weren’t completely nude). I’d also attended many of the performances the couple programmed as part of the Vancouver International Dance Festival, which they also oversee. But I really only knew Barbara and Jay by reputation – and most of what I’d heard told me to keep my distance. In conducting field research for a separate project on site-based dance in Vancouver, however, it soon became clear that I needed to talk to the famously combative Kokoro principals about their many years leading outdoor community dance performances on Vancouver’s favourite nude beach. The interviews I conducted with them were enormously instructive, but as Barbara made clear, in order to understand what makes wbb so unique, I really had to participate in one of their annual workshops. Thus, following an opening contextualization of Barbara and Jay’s broader historical contributions to the Vancouver dance scene (including as founding members of edam), the bulk of Chapter 3 is devoted to an autoethnographic account of two wbb creation and performance processes that I was involved with. Reflecting on my field notes with the distance of some years, I offer additional commentary on the history and practice of butoh as a global dance form (albeit one with important trans-Pacific associations), on the evolution

Introduction: Whose Dance History?

of wbb as a local work of environmental performance, and on Barbara and Jay’s in-studio collaborative methods as deviser-choreographers. In doing so, I take a page from Sondra Fraleigh, who in mixing aesthetic interpretation with more personal and phenomenological meditations on her own study and practice of butoh attempts to account not simply for the quality of “metamorphic alchemy” at the heart of this form of movement, but also for the transformative effect it has had on her own body.54 Ziyian Kwan spent many years dancing as a company member of Kokoro, as well as for a host of other local, national, and international choreographers. In 2013 she launched Dumb Instrument Dance as a multidisciplinary platform through which to pursue her own choreographic projects and collaborations with other dance artists, including James Gnam, Noam Gagnon, and Vanessa Goodman, who when not dancing with Ziyian or sharing a program with her, frequently contributes technical expertise or offers ideas as an outside eye. Goodman, of course, has a busy practice of her own: as choreographer and artistic director of her company Action at a Distance; until 2019 as a collective member, along with Jane Osborne and initially Leigha Wald, of The Contingency Plan; and as a frequent collaborator on or dancer in other Vancouver-based artists’ work. In Chapter 4 I situate my engagements with both Ziyian’s and Vanessa’s work not just in terms of a reading of its content, form, and development processes, but also with respect to the ways in which both artists have reached out to me for critical commentary on their choreographic and performance practices, whether via studio visits or post-show talkbacks or online writing. Taking my cue from the artists themselves, I call our reciprocal exchanges – their gifts of art to me, my gift of a response to them – acts of love. The mutual admiration continues in Chapter 5, which is organized around a discussion of my collaborations with Vancouver choreographers Rob Kitsos and Lesley Telford on productions of two separate plays that I wrote in 2010 and 2016. The Objecthood of Chairs and Long Division were both composed with the idea that they would be accompanied by parallel movement scores. Together with the plays’ directors – DD Kugler and Richard Wolfe, respectively – I reached out to Rob and Lesley, asking them to bring their own interests in the mutually interanimating properties of text and movement, language and gesture, to bear on my scripts. I describe aspects of the development, workshop, rehearsal, and performance processes for each production, analyzing some of the choreographic choices made by Rob and Lesley in relation to a selection of their works of dancetheatre. While in this chapter, more than any of the others, I am far from a

19

20

disinterested participant-observer, I am nevertheless interested in positioning my ethnographic reflections aslant ongoing critical and creative conversations about what it means to “co-compose” in dance, theatre, and performance more generally. To this end, underscoring my remarks on the respective collaborations with Rob and Lesley are ideas and concepts gleaned from Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, who in recounting their experiences auditing rehearsals by William Forsythe talk about how language and movement can be made to meet “in the middle” by emphasizing the cognitive, or “notional,” properties of motion and the gestural capacities of words.55 The intersection of gesture and language is certainly at the heart of Our Present Dance Histories, or Dance Histories Project, or, Vancouver Dance: An Incomplete History of the Present, Part 1, a multi-year and multi-platform research-creation project that I undertook with Justine A. Chambers and Alexa Mardon as part of Justine’s 2015–17 artist residency at The Dance Centre,56 and whose genesis, practical elaboration, and performance outcomes I discuss in my final chapter. As previously mentioned, this particular collaboration involved a series of video interviews with fifty-three Vancouver dance artists in order to document their individual dance histories, as well as the temporal/spatial/institutional/affective convergences (and divergences) of those histories. Initially, we imposed a ten-year time frame, from 2006 to 2016, on the project; this decade coincided with something of a generational shift in – or perhaps, more properly, supplement to – Vancouver dance practice, with many younger artists (several of them, like Justine and Alexa, relocating or returning to Vancouver from elsewhere) beginning to form companies and make new work and get noticed locally, nationally, and internationally. However, as we anticipated, the stories told by our interviewees inevitably opened up cracks in this timeline, with questions of aesthetic influence, and dance training, and performance collaboration and mentorship necessarily pointing backwards as much as forwards. That such narratives were additionally – and necessarily – influenced by how the three of us positioned ourselves in relation to the material we were gathering in part explains my own situationally emplaced and embodied approach to Vancouver dance history more generally in this book as a whole, and why I repeatedly draw upon, in both the chapters and the intervals, our interviews with these dancers so as to orient and, where appropriate, disorient the story I am telling. Questions of temporal location and spatial positionality also accounted for our decision to make the cumulative performance event that resulted from our research a deliberately fragmented and decentralized choreography

of words and thoughts, one that was “housed” in The Dance Centre (via a series of visual, sculptural, and sound installations), but just as importantly in the bodies of the community that moves through this space every day. Crucially, then, gesture became the means to bridge the institutional and interpersonal versions of Vancouver dance history that formed the twin – and sometimes opposing – poles of our project. We collected a repertoire of gestures from our interview subjects and then distributed a selection of them to other community movers, who were tasked with repeating them in public over the course of the 2017 Dance In Vancouver Biennial. If the history of dance is, at its most basic, the trace of what remains in the body, then why not disperse those historical remains through the gesture of re-enactment?57 It is in that spirit that I close Chapter 6, and this book as a whole, with a set of instructions for the repetition of the gestures collected from our Vancouver Dance Histories interview subjects. Regifting to my readers what has so generously been shared with me, I offer these gestures as a self-generating dance card, a transcorporeal score, an invitation to move with the history in these pages as it has moved me.

Introduction: Whose Dance History? 21

INTERVAL 1

And: Time On what counts as contemporary in Vancouver dance …

A sense of time – how to keep or lose track of it, harness or reclaim it, shape or be shaped by it – is as central to the practice of a dance historian as it is to that of a dance artist. Yet even in a project like this one, which covers a delimited and very recent temporal period, I find myself worrying not just about all that escapes my impulse to secure “in history” the “eventness” of certain contemporary Vancouver dance performances with which I have a personal connection, but also about all the movement practices in the city that tend to get excluded from the category of “contemporary Vancouver dance” more generally. Here, as in other Canadian and international dance locales, we run up against a paradox in the application of the word “contemporary” to dance performance, training, and technique. Notwithstanding the “kinesthemic” interventions of Randy Martin and others cited in the introduction, this paradox has worked to entrench a dominant Western genealogy of dance history. That is, rather than “contemporary dance” simply denoting any movement practice occurring “now,” in the present, it more often refers to a style of Western concert dance, one that blends classical, modern, jazz, and lyrical techniques, and that while frequently borrowing from non-Western dance cultures is usually not so capacious as to include current works rooted in those cultures under its big tent canopy. Instead, such works get labelled “folk” or “ethnic” or “traditional” dance – in other words, the antithesis of what is “contemporary.” In British Columbia and Vancouver this wilful atemporality affects the programming of a range of acclaimed local dance artists, including Jai Govinda, Anusha Fernando, and Suijit Vaidja (all Bharatnatyam performers

and choreographers), Rosario Ancer (flamenco), and even Alvin Tolentino (whose Co.erasga frequently explores the fusion between Western contemporary and South Asian dance idioms, including through collaborations with Pichet Klunchun, a master of traditional Thai khon dance). It has also had serious repercussions for the presentation and reception of Indigenous dance, which despite persistent colonialist attempts to eradicate its existence has never stopped being contemporary.1 As Margaret Grenier, artistic director of the North Vancouver–based Dancers of Damelahamid, noted in her interview for the Our Present Dance Histories project discussed in Chapter 6, “I consider myself a contemporary dance artist. But I have a hard time using that term, because people will interpret that term so much more different[ly] than what I’m trying to say with the word.”2 Moreover, as she has elsewhere stated, until very recently most dance festivals and presenters in the city claimed that the work of her company “didn’t fall within [their] mandate,” even though Dancers of Damelahamid defines itself “as a contemporary dance company rooted within a Gitxsan dance vocabulary.”3 Margaret made the latter comments on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Coastal First Nations Dance Festival, an event she helped found in 2008, but that I was not prompted to attend and write about until 2015.

S U N D AY, 8 M A R C H 2 0 1 5 Coastal First Nations Dance Festival at MOA Two years ago, at The Dance Centre, while sitting on a panel with Alex Lazaridis Ferguson and Deborah Meyers at the World Dance Critics – Americas Conference, the subject of locally produced contemporary dance festivals came up. Dancing on the Edge, Dance In Vancouver, and the Vancouver International Dance Festival (opening this week) were all duly mentioned. Mique’l Dangeli, co-artistic director with her husband Mike of the First Nations mask-dancing troupe Git Hayetsk, was festival out. The Coastal First Nations Dance Festival (CFNDF ), produced by North Vancouver’s Dancers of Damelahamid in connection with the University of British Columbia’s

And: Time

in the audience and quickly piped up that we were leaving one prominent dance

Museum of Anthropology (MOA ), celebrates the vibrancy and sustainability of the stories, songs, and dances of the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America. Drawing inspiration from the pioneering efforts of Ken and Margaret Harris, who oversaw the Haw yah hawni nah Festival in Prince Rupert from 1967 to 1986, the CFNDF began in 2008; it brings together dance groups from BC , Yukon, Alaska,

23

and Washington and also features guest artists from across Canada and other countries, thereby allowing the CFNDF , in the words of executive director Margaret Grenier (also the daughter of Ken and Margaret Harris), “to connect with a global community of Indigenous dance.” Among this year’s invited international artists are Urseloria and Nikollane Kanuho, Dine’ sisters from Arizona who, judging from yesterday’s brief display of their artistry, are amazingly accomplished Fancy dancers. In addition to its weekday series of school performances and its ticketed evening mainstage shows, the CFNDF features two weekend afternoon programs that are accessible to anyone who buys admission to

MOA .

Yesterday I arrived a bit late, just

in time to see the second group on the program, Dakhká Khwáan, begin a song in the main rotunda of the museum before proceeding down the ramp to the great hall of totems where, against Arthur Erickson’s signature wall of windows, a stage had been set up. Dakhká Khwáan is an Inland Tlingit group from the southern Yukon. Their lead singer and spokesperson, who in teaching us a few phrases in Tlingit insisted we weren’t speaking correctly unless the spit was flying in front of us, was incredibly adept – and funny – at contextualizing the significance of each traditional dance in contemporary terms. For instance, he noted that the mask dance in which raven tries to woo a woman from the wolf clan is essentially a lesson in how to flirt; raven eventually succeeds in his task by giving the woman a shiny new purse, which prompted our MC to crack that “Tlingit ladies love their blingit.” Next on the stage were the Dancers of Damelahamid, producers of the Festival. Representing the cultural traditions of the Gitxsan peoples, the group shared four masked dances. Grenier, who was one of the group’s two main singers and drummers, explained to the audience that Coast Salish singing and dancing is an intergenerational practice, which accounts for why we see very young children alongside Elders on stage. In the case of the Dancers of Damelahamid, a little boy of four who had only been dancing with the group for two months very nearly stole the show, especially during a song about a dragonfly and a sleeping frog; when the buzz of the dragonfly awakens the frog, this is the cue for the little boy and his older masked partner, both of whom are sitting on their haunches, to begin leaping all over the stage. Indeed, in terms of technique it behooves Coastal First Nations male dancers to have strong knees, for the lower they are to the ground, the more accomplished the dancing. By contrast, most of the female dancers in all of the groups were more upright and their footwork more intricate. This is just one of the commonalities I 24

noted in the different offerings; to be sure, given their regional proximity and common connection to the land, the different Coast Salish First Nations are bound to have shared stories, similarly patterned regalia, headdresses, and masks, as well

as complementary symbolic traditions (including the use of eagle down as a marker of peace between peoples, and which by the end of the afternoon festooned the floor). However, it would be a mistake to homogenize these groups solely based on an analogous art form comprised of singing, drumming, dancing, and storytelling. For one thing, they all speak different languages and have distinct cultural and hereditary protocols – which is something that George Me’las Taylor noted in introducing a traditional Kwakwaka’wakw song danced by his Le-La-La Dancers. Then, too, there is a history of cultural displacement and recovery that is in operation here. This was brought out by David Boxley, leader of the Tsimshian group Git Hoan. At the end of their set, which included a dramatic eagle song featuring three men who roamed the audience delighting children with the clacking beaks of their masks, Boxley noted that in the 1880s his people had followed a missionary from

BC

to Alaska. As part of this relocation, they had to give up their singing and

dancing. It was only when Margaret and Ken Harris came up from BC nearly a hundred years later to teach the community what had been lost that they began reconnecting with the traditions of their ancestors. What this story, and the entire afternoon of which it was a part, has taught me is that in my talk about Vancouver dance in this blog and elsewhere there is a huge gap – one that is comprised largely of these ancient yet very much alive talking dances. I’ve got some serious learning to do – thank you, Mique’l, for giving me the kick in the pants I needed on this front.

And: Time

Looking back at what I wrote about the 2015 iteration of cfndf, I can clearly see how I end up reproducing a temporal asymmetry between the traditional content of Northwest Coast First Nations dance and its contemporary formal practice. This is something that is reinforced for me by the Festival venue, with ubc’s moa, despite having hosted a range of works by other contemporary dance artists over the years (including Lesley Telford, whom I discuss in Chapter 5), here serving to frame the movement in a manner akin to the ethnographic display of its other artifacts. Margaret challenged me on this reading at a 2016 Made in bc–Dance on Tour gathering of out-of-town presenters,4 noting that as a co-presenter of the event moa, through its education and public programming mandate, is interested in the ways in which the festival connects the museum’s collections to living arts and cultures.5 And, indeed, to suggest that Indigenous dance in Vancouver is somehow frozen in time is to ignore the ways in which, as per my discussion of Mique’l Dangeli on the “transmotion of protocol” in the introduction, its present-day practice reasserts the ongoing historicity of First

25

Nations territorial sovereignty. It is also to gloss over the ways in which local Indigenous dance companies continue to innovate, with the period of historical recovery and intergenerational transmission and instruction following the lifting of the potlatch ban in 1951 gradually being supplemented by “new dance choreography and new song composition.”6 To this end, since 2012, Margaret and the Dancers of Damelahamid have been producing a series of original full-length performance pieces that combine Gitxsan mask dancing and storytelling with multi-media projections and immersive soundscapes in order to reach new audiences and, in turn, incite a dialogue about the different vocabularies – kinetic and cultural – underpinning otherwise arbitrary decisions relating to the programming of hybrid dance-theatre works in the city. Watching Spirit Transforming (2012), Flicker (2016), and Mînowin (2019), among other works, one is reminded not just of how fine a line there has historically been between animistic and abstract movement, and between dance as ritual or ceremony and dance as drama, in settler-choreographers’ codifications of modern dance in the Americas (from Martha Graham to José Limón),7 but also of how contemporary Indigenous choreographers have felt free to employ the choreographic tools and presentation techniques of Western concert dance to deepen audience engagement with local tribal knowledge systems. As Jacqueline Shea Murphy has written of Michelle Olson (Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in), artistic director of Vancouver’s Raven Spirit Dance, whose work I briefly discuss in this book’s fourth movement interval: Today, artists such as Olson are articulating their own indigeneity through modern dance-based choreographic practices, not in the interest of a racially unmarked universalism but as acts and practices of Indigenous knowing. In so doing, they redirect the effects of earlier colonizing incorporations of Indigenous culture, instead themselves engaging contemporary choreographic tools to locate, mark and strengthen Indigenous epistemologies accessed within what has been seen as a “western” artistic terrain.8

26

The arbiters of this terrain finally seem to be taking notice. Flicker, originally presented at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre (The Cultch), went on to be shown at the National Arts Centre (nac) in Ottawa as part of the Canada Dance Festival in June 2016, at Montreal’s Danse Danse in November 2017, and at Toronto’s Harbourfront Theatre, in a presentation by DanceWorks, in February 2018. Subsequently, Dancers of Damelahamid

And: Time

has been taken on as a client by Vancouver’s pre-eminent dance management agency, Eponymous, which under the leadership of Jim Smith represents such powerhouse contemporary companies as Company 605 (Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin), Compagnie Vision Impure (Noam Gagnon), Kidd Pivot (Crystal Pite), Les Productions Figlio (Serge Bennathan), and Wen Wei Dance (Wen Wei Wang). Eponymous provided production support for Dancers of Damelahamid’s most recent full-length piece, Mînowin, which premiered in Ottawa in September 2019 as part of the Mòshkamo Indigenous Arts Festival launch of the nac’s first Indigenous Theatre season, and which subsequently toured Ontario, Newfoundland (Neighbourhood Dance Works’s Festival of New Dance), and Mexico (Festival Internacional Cervantino), before arriving back in Vancouver in November for its local premiere at The Cultch. At the same time, reviews of and commentary on the company’s work that consistently draw attention to the “slow-paced storytelling”9 and the “gentle, meditative” nature of the movement10 speak to another temporal illogic governing the presentation and reception of contemporary Indigenous dance in Vancouver. Put simply, the time signature that hovers over most dance creation and performance models in the city – from the limited hours for research and rehearsal to rearranging one’s schedule in order to meet with curators to the belatedness of contracts and funding notifications to the finite window for tech to the rush to pass critical judgment – does not easily accommodate the full measure of what it means to create and present a work of Indigenous dance. Acknowledging the additional time required to consult Elders and community knowledge-keepers, to prepare or ready a space (perhaps by means of a smudging ceremony), and to establish relationships of mutual respect between Indigenous artists and non-Indigenous presenters means asking tough questions about what infrastructural shifts need to be made in order to support dancers and choreographers whose work does not fit – to cite two terms I use to frame my reading of the work of plastic orchid factory in the next chapter – within either the “corporeal chronotopes” of classical Western dance instruction or the timeis-money “chrononormativity” of Western dancemaking and dance performance.11 At the 2017 Dance In Vancouver Biennial, which showcased a suite of Indigediv listening and sharing circles on Indigenous creative practices coordinated by Raven Spirit Dance, one innovative strategy used in service of amplifying the time for dialogue about the dance was to coordinate a series of “artist/presenter walk + talks,” in which out-of-town presenters could sign up for ambles between venues with different artists in order to

27

28

learn more about their work and ideally have a frank conversation about how they might disseminate that work to new audiences. If, like me, those audiences have mostly been trained in the accelerated rhythms of contemporary dance spectatorship – one shows up just before curtain, the piece is ideally no more than fifty minutes in length, and the metering of one’s post-show applause is calibrated precisely to public transit schedules or how much one has paid for parking – then any interruption or interrogation of this timescale can be profoundly unsettling. In the period I have been active as a dance spectator in Vancouver – which is to say the period that roughly coincides with the history being documented in this book – Indigenous artists have been at the forefront of effecting just such a temporal disruption, not only by insisting that we make time for the presentation of their work alongside that of settler dance artists, but also in asking that we take the time – that is, freely give it up, or consciously withdraw it from something else – to meet this work on its own terms. I think about what this means in relation to how, in 2015, I gave no thought to arriving late to the afternoon performances at the Coastal First Nations Dance Festival, nor to writing about this fact on my blog. I think, as well, about Margaret and fellow Dancers of Damelahamid performers Andrew Grenier (Margaret’s husband) and Jeanette Kotowich giving so freely of their own time while in rehearsals for Mînowin, generously agreeing on a warm evening in August 2019 to teach a group of Cultch donors (myself included) a selection of Gitxsan dance phrases and songs, and then patiently explaining their meaning and proprietorship. Finally, I think about how different settler-colonial and Indigenous approaches to time are thrown into relief by the now customary land acknowledgments that precede most dance presentations in the city, events which of course take place on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including lands belonging to the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm), Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (Sə’lílwətaɬ) First Nations. In 2008 being reminded of this fact was by no means a common occurrence, and even today some settler audience members can take offence to the imposition on their time of having to listen to such acknowledgments. By and large, however, the sedimenting of this gesture into the protocols governing the introduction of each new dance performance in Vancouver has helped to prompt deeper and more sustained reflection – especially among a younger generation of settler dance artists in the city – on how dance might encode one’s relationship to and responsibilities toward the land upon which one lives as an uninvited guest, how embodiment and emplacement are nec-

And: Time

essarily conjoined concepts – that place is always perceived kinaesthetically, in movement. Perhaps no one has done more to encourage this kind of thinking among Vancouver dance audiences than S7aplek (Bob Baker), leader of the Squamish dance group Spakwus Slulem, and greatly in demand at myriad public events in the city as someone called upon to sanction the official terms of host/guest relations at said events.12 Observing S7aplek perform these duties over the years (and with greater or lesser degrees of irony depending on the occasion) has been an ongoing lesson in redefining my understanding of the time of dance’s performance in Vancouver. Whereas initially I saw his oratory and singing and, when present, his group’s dancing as a segmentation of time, that is, as the prelude to the actual event – and which, if I’m being honest, I could be more or less receptive to depending on my mood – I now understand that S7aplek’s songs actually stitch together what at first might appear to be discrete temporalities. They do this, on the one hand, by “ancestraliz[ing] the present through their assertions of Squamish hereditary rights”13 to the lands upon which what is to follow will be enacted and, on the other hand, by inviting those enactments to unfold in a dialogic and contiguous relationship with that history in a way that seeks to honour what Dylan Robinson refers to as “the specific instance of our gathering.”14 This doubled enfolding and unfolding of temporal contexts was brought home to me at a performance of the Austrian-born and Belgian-based choreographer Simon Mayer’s Sons of Sissy at The Dance Centre in April 2019, just as I was beginning revisions on the manuscript to this book. At the end of his welcome, S7aplek invited Mayer and his co-performers (Matteo Haitzmann, Patric Redl, and Manuel Wagner) to join him on stage for a signature Spakwus Slulem dance: “Eskaugh ta Spakwus” (“Gathering of eagles”). It’s a dance I myself have been taught by S7aplek (at a conference I helped to organize in 2014), and while it looks easy enough, I can attest that it requires paying careful attention to the drumbeats, as well as some deft on-the-spot changes of circular direction. At the end of the dance, S7aplek complimented the dancers on their work, noting they did a “pretty good job for beginners.” Taking a moment to catch their breath, Mayer and his crew thanked S7aplek for his welcome, and then launched into Sons of Sissy, which is billed as a contemporary deconstruction of the gendered foundations of the Schuhplattler, a traditional Austrian folk dance in which performers stomp their feet, clap their hands, and strike the soles of their shoes, their thighs, and their knees with their palms. In Western performance we tend to signal our historical distance from, and critical reflection on, earlier periods of artistic expression – even

29

as we seriously engage with the broader technical and cultural contexts of those periods – by appending the prefix “post” to a given era or form. As in post-Baroque, a style whose dance-world travels and (post)colonial permutations from fifteenth-century France to contemporary twenty-firstcentury Vancouver I take up in the next chapter. But on this particular evening at The Dance Centre in 2019, as on that afternoon in 2015 at moa listening to Margaret talk about the intergenerational training and stewardship of Gitxsan dance, I was reminded that there is another, more coeval way of understanding the historicity of a word like contemporary: as that which lives or exists or occurs at the same time.15

30

CHAPTER 1

Friendship’s Folds “Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory

One of the first full-length works I saw by plastic orchid factory (pof) was _post, which premiered in 2011 at The Dance Centre. It begins with the company’s choreographer and artistic director, James Gnam, entering as a latter-day Louis XIV: James wears white Lycra shorts, white leg warmers, and a white vinyl corset attached to a plastic saucer-like skirt. Atop his head is an immense coiled crown of white tulle that evokes the grand ostrichplumed aureole of the god Apollo that Louis wore in Le Ballet de la nuit in 1653 (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2). At the same time, I couldn’t help thinking when I first saw it that James’s headpiece looked like a giant turban run amok, a reminder that in his frequent essaying of roles in Molière’s comédiesballets, Louis appeared not only as Apollo once more (in Les amants magnifiques [1670]), but also as one of the dancing Moorish gentlemen at the end of Le Sicilien (1667). Such representational doubleness is just one example of pof’s sly burlesquing of Western dance history, from its Baroque origins to its digital present. How the latter gets folded back into the former is the subject of this chapter, in which I contextualize pof’s own origins as a company and several of its early works, including _post, alongside a discussion of my observations of the development process for Digital Folk, an immersive dance party that attempts to track the new courtly rituals of social dance for a generation raised on motion-sensing video games. But how to account, historiographically, for this opening link between contemporary dance in twenty-first-century Vancouver and court performance traditions in seventeenth-century France? A place to begin is with the narrative of James’s own dance training, as well as that of his life partner,

Figure 1.1 Opposite James Gnam in _post (2011). Figure 1.2 Henry de Gissy’s portrait of Louis XIV as Apollo in Le Ballet de la nuit (1653).

“Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory

collaborator, fellow performer, and pof’s artistic producer, Natalie LeFebvre Gnam. As Judith Hamera notes in Dancing Communities, in a chapter focused on a performance ethnography of a ballet studio in Los Angeles famous as the launching pad for Misty Copeland, ballet technique is an example of what, after Mikhail Bakhtin, she calls a “corporeal chronotope.” By that she means that ballet training is at once insistently local and transhistorically foreign, the assimilation of a tendu or a battement or a développé into the bodies of each new generation of bunheads requiring a “backward glance” that stretches across time and space to Bourbon-era France even as the practice of the movements themselves is always already in the here and now.1 In the case of James and Natalie, their personal enactments of the chronotopes of “roam and home” – balancing what Hamera refers to as local attachments to family and friends with the necessarily peripatetic and itinerant life of a professional dancer2 – also map a familiar

33

eastward trajectory in this country. That is, until relatively recently, young Canadian dancers west of the Rockies seeking further professional ballet training have had to head to Winnipeg or Toronto or Montreal.3 For James, who grew up in Nanaimo, the destination was the National Ballet School. For Natalie, a francophone from Prince George, it was Montreal’s École supérieure de ballet du Québec, for whom she auditioned on the advice of Mary Louise Albert (now managing artistic director of the Chutzpah! Festival), who along with Joe Ink artistic director Joe Laughlin was one of the Vancouver-based dance artists whose visits to Prince George opened up Natalie’s eyes to what dance as an art form could truly be. Natalie LeFebvre Gnam: I went to ballet school, which is so weird, because I was a jazzerina. And then all of a sudden there I am at a ballet school.4 James has called _post his “emancipation” from ballet,5 a nearly decadelong process that for both James and Natalie involved more than one unanticipated and premature liberation from the companies to which they had allied their careers. Having met and fallen in love as members of the corps at Les Grands Ballets Canadiens (Natalie told James how much she admired his legs), the two suddenly found themselves out of a job after only a year when then artistic director Lawrence Rhodes decamped for Julliard in 1999 and the entire company was replaced. Hurt and broken, both physically and psychologically, the couple returned to the west coast, moving to Victoria, intent on taking a hiatus from dance, one that at the time they thought might in fact be permanent. But soon Natalie found herself teaching ballet at a local studio owned by Lynda Raino, who was also quite open to James experimenting choreographically on his own work in the evening. This led to Jim on the Phone, a solo for Natalie that was first presented by Raino at her studio’s Upstairs Dances salon series, and then by Desirée Dunbar at a similar series she curated out of Vancouver’s Moberly Arts Centre. Dunbar and Natalie had met when Natalie auditioned for Judith Garay’s Dancers Dancing at the end of 2003. A five-month contract with the company precipitated the couple’s move to Vancouver in early 2004, and James’s subsequent hiring by Ballet bc later that year is initially what kept them here. 34

James Gnam: I think John Alleyne would probably be one of the most important influences on my career as a dancer, as a dance artist … It’s interesting: John didn’t hire me because he thought I was a great

dancer. John hired me because he saw my work, and he wanted to help me develop as a choreographer. So all of the work that I did at Ballet bc was focused through that lens cognitively; it was very clear … It was really amazing, but also difficult … Then in 2008 the company kind of imploded.6

“Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory

Before _post there was James, a 2010 collaboration between James and battery opera’s Lee Su-Feh that reveals further dance historical ties between Vancouver and France – albeit of a much more recent vintage. I refer to the fact that for the piece James and Su-Feh draw on conventions of autobiographical storytelling and lecture-performance in ways that are very reminiscent of Jérôme Bel’s series of talking dancer portraits. Specifically, James uses his personal (and working) relationship with The Nutcracker (which he has danced more than 300 times) as the starting point to explore the institutional ideology of classical ballet training more generally. To this end, the piece progresses from memories of James’s first ten-year-old walk-on part as one of dozens of skipping children from the National Ballet of Canada School to behind-the-scenes anecdotes about adult roles as a fill-in Cavalier in a 2008 semi-professional production in North Vancouver, and his first time playing the Prince as a member of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens.7 Particularly in these last two sequences James and Su-Feh strip away the romanticism of ballet – and the sugar-coated fantasy of The Nutcracker, especially – revealing the economic and bodily labour, or work-time, that goes into the “timeless” execution of these familiar, and apparently effortless, steps. We learn, for example, that James took the North Vancouver gig following the collapse into financial insolvency of Ballet bc. Needing a job, he assumed the role of the Cavalier, whose main task is to accompany the Sugar Plum Fairy in the penultimate sequence of Act 2, a classically gendered scene of ballet partnering that is here re-created by having James reproduce, to the strains of Tchaikovsky’s music, various poses of male structural support, holding his invisible teenage partner’s waist as he first moves her into a penchée and then dips her into an arabesque. However, in the studio there wasn’t time to rehearse the Cavalier’s solo variation that is meant to follow this pas de deux, so as James explains, when the music for said variation came on in performance he simply remained immobile, as he had nothing prepared to display. Similarly, James’s debut as the Nutcracker Prince was a far less starryeyed experience than one might at first expect. Suffering from food poison-

35

ing, weak with fatigue, and having dragged himself to class for the first time in more than a week, a still shaky James is informed by the rehearsal director at the barre that he’ll be going on as the Prince that night because the company member with whom he was sharing the part had broken his foot. This scene – and the piece as a whole – ends with James repeating the sequence where the toy Prince, having magically come to life before Clara, shifts from fifth position into a plié, before executing an explosive tour en l’air that is meant to end with the dancer landing on one knee, extending the other leg forward as he bows deeply before Clara. In that original Montreal performance, James tells us, with his recent illness still lingering in his body, he had to extend a hand to the floor on the landing. But in the 2013 performance of James that I saw at the Firehall Arts Centre, the wobble is allowed to become, in this retrospective showing of excavated kinaesthetic memory, a signature part of the movement, with James repeating it over and over again until, as he tells us, he manages to elicit a smile from the statuary Drosselmeyer perched atop the Stahlbaums’ clock. As in Bel’s dance portraits (particularly Véronique Doisneau and Cédric Andrieux), theatrical speech is used in James as the Brechtian gestus of dance gesture, helping to ex-pose (in the double sense of presenting through exposition and decentring through arrested, suspended, and fragmented movement) the conceit of technical virtuosity, revealing in turn (quite literally in this case) the material conditions that always circumscribe moving bodies on stage.8 And on that note, it is worth mentioning that it is a deconstructed port-de-bras phrase that serves as the choreographic refrain of James, one that links the various classic scenes from The Nutcracker that James recreates for us. Perhaps the simplest move in ballet from an audience perspective, its various positions (from en bas through fifth, and all the variations in between) are intensely codified, with the correct placement of arms, elbows, wrists and palms something that the dancer labours over intensely in order to make it seem effortlessly graceful.

36

Natalie LeFebvre Gnam: During James’s time with Ballet bc, on all of his layoffs, we’d always make pieces. We would always work on something, the two of us … It didn’t exist yet as plastic orchid factory. We didn’t know what we were calling ourselves … And then when Ballet bc exploded … it really shifted how we wanted to structure the work we were doing … So we incorporated the company as a society because we knew that we had to if we wanted to get bc Arts Council money! … Brand new baby, and now a company, an official society

that I somehow had to manage. I mean, what the fuck, who does that? But it was great, because it kind of pushed us to really take our projects and the things that we were really interested in, and put them forward … So the explosion was terrifying, but at the same time, I think it was really good, you know? For both of us, because it … opened up our eyes to our relationship with the city.9

“Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory

There is a companion piece to James. Unsurprisingly, it is called Natalie, and it is also a solo (of sorts). As LeFebvre Gnam explains via a series of oversized title cards at the top of the piece, in a conceit reminiscent of the famous black-and-white video of Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, both works were born out of the detritus of what was originally to have been a duet choreographed for husband and wife by Lee Su-Feh. However, when Natalie sustained a knee injury just two weeks prior to the premiere, the work went ahead as the aforementioned solo for James. The plan was then to have Su-Feh craft a similar work for Natalie, but after a series of delays Su-Feh had to drop out. Thus, the work that I eventually saw as part of the 2014 Dancing on the Edge Festival was the collective result of a creative collaboration between husband and wife and brothers Gilles and Jacques Poulin-Denis, of whose Montreal-based Grand Poney company James is an associate member. Like James, Natalie adopts a discourse of theatrical representation reminiscent of what we find in the work of Bel, again in order to expose the institutional frames of dance and the dancing life. Indeed, there is a specific intertextual dialogue with Bel’s Véronique Doisneau in that Giselle serves as an autobiographical plot point in both pieces, with Adolphe Adam’s music swelling at various moments throughout Natalie as, for example, LeFebvre Gnam rounds her arms into first position and demonstrates with her hands and fingers an expert arrondi – the gestic counterpoint to James’s port de bras. Mostly, however, the piece is concerned with the funding institutions that govern – and put limits on – the creativity of contemporary dance artists. A digitally manipulated voiceover loop of emails to Natalie from various government agencies detailing their application, disbursement, and reporting requirements plays throughout the piece, accounting (in more ways than one) for both its form and its content. To this end, a series of hula hoops are employed in increasingly clever and comic ways throughout the piece, with Natalie not just jumping through them, but also playing games of hopscotch and pick-up with them, encircling her body with ring after ring in a telling visual metaphor for everything else she is balancing in her

37

life in addition to her creative practice (husband James and son Finn figure at key moments). By the end of the piece, however, Natalie is able to turn this plastic bureaucratic enclosure into something aesthetically beautiful and potentially liberating, the hoops eventually arranged along her arms and back in such a manner as to suggest the fairy wings of Giselle or, even more powerfully, the entire celestial sphere that the Titan Atlas holds up with his shoulders. On such a tiny frame as Natalie’s, the latter image speaks volumes about how much artists can achieve with so little. A similar visual conceit concludes endORPHIN (2009), the first full-length work choreographed by James for pof, and for which Natalie won Vancouver’s Isadora Duncan Award for Excellence in Dance Performance. The piece concludes with five of the dancers (Alexis Fletcher, Kathryn Crawford, Jacqui Lopez, Clinton Draper, and Connor Gnam, James’s brother, and also a Ballet bc alumnus) removing their hooded parkas and piling them one by one onto Natalie until the outline of her body disappears completely under their combined massing and weight and she staggers about the stage like a blind spelunker trying to exit from the deepest recesses of a cave (an added conceit of the piece, which at points is performed in near-total darkness, being that the parkas previously had lights attached to their hoods). Natalie has said that the combination of having Finn and working on endORPHIN changed her relationship to her body, and to dance, and that as a result it remains a watershed moment in her career.10 Certainly, the piece seemed to punctuate a transition for both Natalie and James from the world of ballet to the world of contemporary dance, a transition underscored by the fact that just prior to her death, having seen an early version of the piece (as well as having championed Jim on the Phone), Lola MacLaughlin nominated James and Natalie for a Mayor’s Arts Award in Dance. Then, too, James was by this time already working with MacLaughlin’s former edam colleague, Peter Bingham, which likewise had a profound effect on his body and his practice. James Gnam: For about six months I only did contact and Pilates … It was kind of rad and scary and really empowering. We were able to repattern a lot of the physical residual damage and then refocus a sense of personal agency within my practice.11 38

Transitioning from a dance culture that, technically and institutionally, was all about maintaining vertical hierarchies to a way of moving and making work that emphasized the shared distribution of weight and effort and

“Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory

support no doubt influenced the creation of _post. James and Natalie, together with collaborators and fellow dancers Alison Denham and Bevin Poole, initiated their research into the piece via an autoethnographic writing exercise in which they reflected on their individual classical dance training and their current relationships, as contemporary dance artists on the west coast of North America, with the history of ballet as a form. In other words, _post consciously draws on the traditions of Baroque dance and theatre to, in James’s own words, “frame a conversation between the contemporary reality of our Pacific North West and [seventeenth-century] aristocratic France.”12 To this end, much of the writing produced by the dancers was excerpted in the extensive company bios included in the program accompanying the work, a quasi-libretto that functioned as its own future anterior performance – not least in its dialectical and synchronic references to place. Indeed, it is striking the degree to which all of the performers, in the bios (which I reproduce below), sought to locate their early dance pedagogy not just in terms of why, how well, or with what degree of enthusiasm they were or were not learning this inherited classical technique, but also specifically in terms of where, in British Columbia, that learning was taking place: Saanich; Williams Lake; Gibsons and Roberts Creek; Prince George. In terms of both an ethnographic history of dance in bc and a history of the province’s settlement, it seems crucial to point out that these place names overwrite earlier Indigenous ones: Tsartlip; T’exelc; Schen’k and Ch’kw’elhp and ashwah-sam; Lheidli T’enneh. That is, the overlaying of the genealogical (and geopolitical) inheritance of the French “noble” steps that begat ballet with the performers’ personal ruminations on the physical and emotional highs and lows they experienced at their respective institutions of dance training is a reminder that at the moment that Baroque dance and theatre and music were being codified in various Western European court systems, the Americas were being colonized by these same powers. And indeed, in terms of performing the “spectacle of empire,” we need look no further than the tradition of the Baroque masque, with Marc Lescarbot’s Théâtre de Neptune, staged at Port Royal, New France (now Nova Scotia), in 1606 paradigmatic of the way in which theatre and dance were instrumentalized as part of both the representational and material project of imperial conquest.13 How such danced embodiments of Canada’s colonial history are chronotopically ghosted in both the movement and the written scores accompanying _post helps us rethink the politics of dance history, with the province of bc – and the apparent “provincialism” of its far-flung and remote dance communities – clearly illustrating how the westward

39

movement of ballet training maps directly onto the geography of Turtle Island’s settlement. Bevin Poole’s training in the Cecchetti method (officially codified in the United Kingdom in 1922 and then exported to various Commonwealth nations) at Maureen Saunders’ School of Dance in Williams Lake and her enactment at different moments in _post of a vocabulary of ornamental steps (contretemps, pas de sissonne, chassés) derived, however ironically, from the divertissements of Baroque French operas: in this meeting of embodied histories, and their temporal and spatial pathways, we also register the nexus of the imperial powers foundational to Canada as a national project. This needs to be part of the conversation of contemporary dance in Vancouver, James is saying, and we can initiate that conversation in part by talking about training – both kinetically and ideologically. Hence the following stories included in the program to _post, which audience members were invited to read pre-performance.

40

james gnam was an energetic child [who] struggled with the sustained focus required for school. During one of many meetings between his parents, teachers and school counselors, James’s parents were advised that an extra curricular activity that offers a physical outlet and reinforced focus, discipline and hard work could help him adjust to the rigors of elementary school. The [counsellor] suggested either karate or ballet. Ironically, these meetings historically dealt with “playground altercations” with other children and his parents were disinclined to “refine his skills” in that respect. So, ballet it was. James reluctantly took his first ballet class at The Stages School of Performing Arts at the Cedar Hill Recreation Centre in Saanich. His first teacher, Mary Berg, loved ballet. She was a gifted teacher [who] enjoyed sharing her love for dance and was able to cultivate that joy in her students. A month into his classes, Mary suggested to James’ mother that he audition for the National Ballet School of Canada. He did, and six months later he was attending a “ballet school” in Toronto, far, far away from his family. James’s time at the National Ballet School gave him many things. A strong academic education, world class ballet training and an enormous extended family. At 14, James sustained serious injuries to his feet. In June of 1991, he had reconstructive surgery on both of his feet. James remained in the hospital for two weeks and was bed ridden for a month. He began his rehabilitation at the University of Victoria’s physiotherapy department and slowly began walking by the end of the summer. It would take three years for James to reha-

bevin poole complained about having to go to ballet every Saturday morning until her father told her to just stop dancing, at which point she decided she loved it. She performed her first competitive solo, “Traffic Cop,” at five years old knowing that recovering from mistakes on stage was easier to do alone. Bevin booked her first professional show in 1992, tying balloon animals at children’s parties through her entertainment company Party Animals. She went on to co-choreograph and tour “The Lion King,” at family functions with her sister, Danica. Bevin progressed through Cecchetti Ballet exams at Maureen Saunders’ School of Dance in Williams Lake, bc. Bevin was advised that she was “too tall” and should pursue a career outside of dance. Bevin began working as a waitress at White Spot to save money for a pre-professional dance program in university. Bevin followed her sister to Simon Fraser University’s School for the

“Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory

bilitate his feet to the point where he would be able to dance again. During those years, James attended Victoria High School. One defining fall semester, the school’s administration erred and scheduled all of James’s electives for the first half of the year and his academic classes for the second half. That fall, his mornings were spent working with acrylic paints, clay, K-1000 cameras and darkroom chemicals. His afternoons were spent in the theater discussing, writing, crafting and directing plays. For the first time in his adolescent life James was wholly engaged in what he was doing. James finished high school and his feet had recovered. He began working in restaurants as a line cook to save money and return to the National Ballet School. In 1996, James returned to his second home in Toronto and completed his training. In 1998, James began his first professional contract with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal. It was there that he met his future wife Natalie LeFebvre. In 2000, James and Natalie moved to the West coast to be closer to family. In 2003, the couple married under an apple tree in Cadboro Bay and had a party at the Upstairs Gallery on top of Faris’s Oyster Bar on Fort Street in Victoria. James worked with Ballet British Columbia from 2004 until 2009. Natalie became pregnant in 2006 and their son Finn joined them in 2007. That year, Natalie and James conceived, created and incorporated the plastic orchid factory. James sits on the Board of Directors for the Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists/bc Chapter. He also sits on the landscaping committee for his co-op in Kitsilano.

41

Contemporary Arts in 2003, taking her first modern class with Judith Garay, where she learned how to use her long limbs and spine. Between semesters, she worked in an open pit copper mine, returning to dance in the fall after a summer clad in a hard hat, hi-viz vest, and steel-toe boots. After graduating with a bfa in Dance and English Literature, Bevin was hired as a company member with Dancers Dancing in 2008 and has since performed independently with Vancouver Opera, Tara Cheyenne Performance and Co.erasga. She attends daily technique class and bathes in epsom salts each night. Bevin is also a certified Pilates instructor and has chocolate every day to maintain her emotional strength. In 2009, she stopped eating meat and began teaching dance to children with special needs.

42

At six years old alison denham took her first dance class. It was in a studio above the local movie theatre in Gibsons, bc. She was told to stand still like a tree and feel her arms like branches waving in the wind. She told her mom she didn’t want to go back and would rather play baseball. When Ali was ten they discovered she had scoliosis and doctors recommended doing ballet. Her first class took place in a squash court in Roberts Creek, bc. She lasted the year but hated her teacher and thought ballet was boring. Her plan was to quit at the end of the year but then the year-end performance happened and she fell in love with performing. A few years later Lois Smith became her teacher and mentor, and everything changed. At 15 she decided she wanted to try to become a dancer. She had seen Ballet bc perform Rapsodie Espagnole by Mark Godden, and it was Crystal Pite’s magnetic presence that inspired her. She convinced her parents to let her move to Vancouver. For a short while she attended the Goh Ballet. When they told her that her thighs were too big to ever be a dancer, she happily stopped going and instead found everything she was looking for at Arts Umbrella. In the summers she would work as a server on the Sunshine Coast to save money so she could go out east to do summer school in Toronto. One year she was a deckhand on her brother’s prawn fishing boat to pay for her tuition for the Ballet bc mentor program. When she was 19 Ali saw Dancemakers perform Sable/Sand by Serge Bennathan. Dancer Julia Aplin particularly blew her mind and she decided she needed to be in that company. A few years later, at 21, she moved to Toronto and joined Dancemakers. Independently she has worked with many choreographers in Vancouver and Toronto, including Wen

Wei Dance, Co.erasga, Lola Dance, Out Innerspace Dance Theatre, and Peggy Baker. She is currently involved in projects with Peter Chin, Shannon Moreno, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, Serge Bennathan, Susie Burpee and Justine Chambers. Ali is honoured to be a part of the plastic orchid family.

“Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory

natalie lefebvre gnam had her first encounter with dance at the age of five at Judy Russell’s Enchainment Dance Studio in Prince George. Her dream then was to be able to fly like Tinkerbell, and so her mother, afraid for the breakables in the house, enrolled her in a ballet class. Bunny Murray was her first dance teacher, [and] class was in a small studio with a battle ship linoleum floor. Though Natalie’s maternal language is French, the language of ballet didn’t immediately make sense to her. Her first performance was as a heliotrope flower. Also, “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” in The Pine Centre Mall’s main court. At nine, Natalie decided that she would quit dancing on account of it being boring, but seeing the senior jazz class preform to New Order’s “Blue Monday” inspired her to try jazz. Her favorite moves to do were jazz runs, push turns and stag leaps. Her early relationship to performing was primarily cultivated through competitive dance festivals. Natalie’s final performance on a Prince George stage as a recreational dancer was at 14. That year, she wore her first “real” tutu. She decided then to pursue a career rooted in ballet. Small town high school life was not very enjoyable for Natalie, but when she left home to attend L’École supérieure de Ballet du Québec in Montreal, she finally felt stimulated. Natalie was told by her teachers that she would likely never be a classical dancer. This only pushed her to commit more. Over the course of five years in Montreal, she lived in various apartments with friends. She moved every year, on July 1st, and returned home once a year in the summer. Natalie’s first professional contract was with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens; she was 16. Her first company class quickly taught her everything she needed to know about spatial awareness. A few years later, during a run of Nutcracker, she met James. She told him he had nice legs, and he cooked for her. When the company welcomed a new director and her contract was not renewed, Natalie worked at Au Printemps, a kitchen and bath trinket store. Following a very brief career in retail, the couple moved west and Natalie went back to school to study science. Although successful in her academic adventures, Natalie would, out of necessity, eventually find her

43

way back to dancing … James and Natalie married in 2003, [and] four years later their son Finn was born. In 2008 they founded plastic orchid factory.

44

Interestingly, _post’s rethinking of the traditional dance biography anticipates the impetus behind the Our Present Dance Histories project discussed in Chapter 6. The motivation for this collaboration between Justine A. Chambers, Alexa Mardon, and myself was to have Vancouver dance artists tell their own movement histories in “the first person.” Notwithstanding the use of third person in the excerpts reproduced above, the fact that pof collaborators focus as much on the personal as the professional, the quotidian alongside the dramatic, the service and manual labour that parallels the performance labour, is exactly what we were striving to capture with the opdh project. At the same time, it is striking the degree to which the counterpointing of verbal text and dancing bodies in _post corresponds to the shifting social and semiotic relationships between each that Mark Franko tracks in his important study Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, originally published in 1993 and reissued in a revised edition in 2015. That is, it is possible to read the various movement sequences that comprise the piece as choreographic “interludes” that serve as de facto dramatizations of the dancers’ biographies contained in the program-cumlibretto. Exemplary, in this regard, are Natalie’s affecting off-balance solo on “half point” (that is, she wears only one point shoe, with the other foot remaining sock-clad and resolutely flexed); and Alison and Bevin’s rhetorical exchange of explanatory text during an extended staging of different warmup poses and exercises. However, just as prominent in _post are those moments of “autonomous” visual spectacle,14 when the figure of the dancing body signifies thematically on its own terms, or else citationally in relation to other dancing bodies, rather than to any textual narrative it might seem to be mimetically enacting. Key, in this regard, is the work’s central prop, the forty feet of white tulle alluded to at the start of this chapter, and that in addition to serving as a grand pompadour-style wig for James-as-Louis variously functions as a cocoon, wedding dress, winding sheet, and, finally, perhaps the world’s longest and most grotesquely outsized tutu for each of the female dancers (see Figure 1.3). Indeed, the self-conscious and highly theatrical repetition of the ritual of unfurling, inhabiting/costuming, extracting of the body/disrobing, and refolding undertaken by the women in _post with respect to the tulle is a reminder that the “ideological imper-

“Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory

ative of self-display” that Franko sees as circumscribing the self-expressive freedom of the noble body in burlesque court ballet of the middle Baroque period in France15 is arguably transferred onto the even more constraining imperative of gendered self-display that becomes entrenched with the institutionalization of story ballet a century later. This point is additionally reinforced not only by the fact that, as at court, _post is meant to be performed in the round, but also by one of the work’s most visually burlesque moments, an energetic duet performed by Alison and James in matching plastic spherical tutus (the costume design by Kate Burrows follows a Regency space-age aesthetic). How then to read the work’s final set piece, in which James reverts to his Louis XIV persona? On the one hand, the repetition of the signature entrée grave of Baroque dance – nicely reinforced by the halting, hiccupy time signature of Taylor Deupree and Kenneth Kirschner’s musical score – underlines the extent to which French noble dance during this period was resolutely masculine. As Rebecca Harris-Warrick has written, the entrée grave was “reserved exclusively for men” and “stands at the opposite end of the expressive continuum from the comic dances,” matching technical virtuosity to irregular musical rhythms and a mostly forward-facing body in order to convey “strength and control.”16 Is this then James punctuating the piece with his stamp as male choreographer? Only if we ignore the ways in which the ending of _post is once again paratextually extended through a discourse on dance. Thus, as I rather obliquely alluded to at the outset of this chapter, James’s final entrée might also be seen to function even more specifically as a synecdoche for what Franko argues is the third phase of French Baroque theatre dance, in which Molière “rehabilitated the use of interlude” in his comédies-ballets, with dance “again bounded on both sides by dramatic texts.”17 Here it seems especially important to mention that my initial experience of _post was framed not just by the extensive (auto)biographical text included in the program, but also by a post-show talkback that likewise centred on the performers’ personal histories of dance training. And in both cases the dramatic core of the conversation was about the legacy of ballet, not Baroque theatre dance. Which is to suggest, once again, that we read the “post” of the work’s title not just diachronically but also synchronically, backwards as well as forwards. In this scenario, Louis, as founder of the French Royal Academy of Dance, becomes the crucial transitional figure between Baroque social dance and balletic concert dance, between dance as an adjunct to theatre and dance as an independent art form. More specifically,

45

Figure 1.3 Bevin Poole Lienweber and tutu in _post (2011).

“Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory

the beginnings of Pierre Beauchamps’ systemization of dance notation – undertaken as per the royal edict of Louis and overseen by the Paris Opéra’s Jean-Baptiste Lully – together with what Harris-Warrick describes as Raoul Anger Feuillet’s subsequent “intellectual property theft” of that system,18 resulted in a way of writing dance that freed movement from its subservience to the prior blueprint of a theatrical script. As such, it is possible to conceive of the dancers’ notes in the program as an a priori retheatricalization of an independent dance score that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Because, of course, in the twenty-first century cellphone cameras and other screen and digital recording technologies have made conventional written dance notation mostly a thing of the past. Coincidentally, in Digital Folk (2014–17) James and the pof family explore ideas of the mediatized dance score as a kind of “retroaction” of the different rules and hierarchies of social dance, examining “the role that immersive movement and rhythm based videos games have played in defining a generation’s approach to identity, physicality … and performance.”19 James sees these video games as in many ways encoding the folk identity of a generation of millennials who have become virtuosic adepts of mimicked musicality and movement in the private courts of their own and friends’ bedrooms and basements, but in ways that paradoxically alienate them from a kinaesthetic awareness of their own bodies in social time and space and that thrust them into an isolated feedback loop with the technology that then becomes an extension of themselves. Only Kinect versus “only connect”: Microsoft’s introduction of the now discontinued motion-sensing input devices for Xbox game consoles in 2010 allowed users to interface with said consoles “invisibly,” using only gestures or spoken commands; but effective navigation and performance of the interface also meant blocking out any competing background noise or movement. Moreover, because Kinect’s main dance game franchise, Dance Central, “privileges a frontal orientation and well-defined twodimensional silhouette,” its sensor “has trouble tracking overlapping bodies,” meaning that multiple players must avoid physical contact or exchanging positions, instead performing “side by side, maintaining a mirroring relationship with [their] on-screen characters.”20 At the same time, as Kiri Miller notes in Playable Bodies, her excellent ethnographic study of some of the many players, game designers, and choreographers of Dance Central and the rival Just Dance franchise (initially designed for the Nintendo Wii console), over time and through repeated practice, these dance games can and do choreograph repertories of intimacy: by inviting players to imagine how it might feel to dance in someone else’s body; and by inspiring a range

47

48

of player-produced gameplay memes and videos and comment threads that get shared across other media platforms, yoking “the intimate affordances of dance to those of contemporary social media.”21 The interface between media, dance, and intimacy, or how we “dance alone together,” is also at the core of Digital Folk, and over the course of its development, I have been privileged to have an inside view of – and also to contribute in a small way to furthering – its successive phases. That began, in August 2014, with a by-invitation showing of a thirty-five-minute version of the work that was the result of a three-week residency by pof at the Vancity Culture Lab, which forms part of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre (The Cultch). The interdisciplinary collaboration included contributions by visual artist and costume designer Natalie Purschwitz, sound designer Kevin Legere, and lighting designer James Proudfoot. It also showcased the expert simulacral movement and air guitar skills of James, Natalie, Bevin Poole, Vanessa Goodman, Jane Osborne, Lexi Vajda, and Dario Dinuzzi. In a kind of “reverse engineering” of the operations of media technologies, what we saw in this first version of the piece was the dancers responding to different dance routines supplied by various immersive videos, before turning the cameras on themselves as, in a series of slow duets, they started to mirror one another’s movements in more intimately responsive ways. We also saw the six dancers call upon the arsenal of standard club grooves that gets repeated in many of these videos (fist pumps and hip thrusts and booty shakes) as they responded collectively, and in a strict geometric formation, to a looping set of instructions in digitally altered voice-over. The precise spacing between the dancers and the highly figural presentation of their repertoire of gestures recalled for me not just the different massings of contemporary club kids, but also now in retrospect, and especially in the context of my above discussion of _post, what Franko calls the “discursivity” of early Baroque dance.22 Eschewing once again standard proscenium staging, and exploiting the porous enfolding of different serial screen images, Digital Folk even at this early stage was all about exploding the frame not just between the audience and the performers, but also between the performers and their virtual avatars. And it did so in a way that, following from Angela Ndalianis, is consistent with the “neo-baroque aesthetics” of contemporary multimedia entertainment platforms, which combine “the visual, the auditory, and the textual in ways that parallel the dynamism of seventeenth-century baroque forms,” albeit in “technologically and culturally different ways.”23

“Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory

What remains consistent, however, is the aligning of virtuosity with (hyper)visuality, a state of heightened spatial perception in which we are doubly awed by the screen spectacle of Xbox Kinect’s Dance Central and by the dancers’ live technical mastery of the video’s broadcast moves. Indeed, the euphoric experience of watching former Ballet bc principal dancer Dario Dinuzzi rack up points and kudos like “awesome” and “rock star” as he performed an immersive solo to “Pump Up the Jam” was a reminder, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, that “the essence of the Baroque entails neither falling into nor emerging from illusion but rather realizing something in illusion itself, or of tying it to a spiritual presence.”24 Crucially, pof’s interrogation of how dance and technology combine, in these videos, to effect such intermedial transcendence at once depends on and exposes an inherent principle of Deleuzian subjectivity – that an understanding of ourselves and the world cannot be premised on simple divisions of self and other, inside and outside, mind and body, human and non-human, but must instead be attuned to how each folds into and unfolds out of the other. In her study of dance games, Miller is likewise interested in “how they configure intimate relationships among humans, interfaces, musical and dance repertoires, and social media platforms.” Crucially, for Miller, these relationships are produced not instantly, but rather cumulatively, and in a manner “that entails deferred agency, vulnerability, and struggles to communicate.”25 Thus, just over a year after the initial Cultch showing, I headed to the Anderson Street Space on Granville Island for the next iteration of Digital Folk. Presented as part of Boca del Lupo’s Micro-Performance Series, I’ll call this the “house party” version of the piece. Digital Folk centres around our kinetic experience – as players and spectators – of immersive dancebased video games, so James always knew that he wanted to find a way to incorporate direct audience participation into the piece. The Anderson Street Space’s intimate confines certainly encouraged interaction, and both while audience members were waiting for others to arrive, and during the show itself, there was ample opportunity to take one’s turn at what is essentially a movement-based version of karaoke. Except with the dance videos it’s a competition, and you’re scored – which can be an intimidating proposition given that you’re learning the choreography on the spot and that you’re playing alongside professional dancers. Nevertheless, I was happy to give the game a whirl several times over the course of the evening, shimmying and grooving and funking alongside returning DFers Natalie, Dario, Bevin, and Lexi. I also took a turn playing bass on the Queen/David

49

50

Bowie song “Under Pressure” as part of the house band that accompanied – often in a radically juxtapositional manner – the video dance sequences. As I recall, after the conclusion of this version of Digital Folk there was a lot of discussion among the creative team and the invited audience of the relationship between the participatory sequences and the more obviously presentational sections of the piece, which included a fairy tale storytelling frame riffing on The Legend of Zelda video game; a group cellphone dance (complete with selfies); three different multilingual solos in which dancers narrativized in French, Italian, and Mandarin their movements, reflecting in real time on the relationship between language and gesture; and a transfixing bit of mirroring in which Lexi and Natalie attempted to mimic the moves of Bevin, who was herself following a virtual avatar on the screen. For some, the obvious role we were cast into in the dance games, and the clear build to an outcome (winning or losing), threw into relief those moments when we retreated to the riser and chairs set up along one wall and watched the events as “traditional” spectators. However, I didn’t mind this back and forth in modalities. If in part this work is meant to function as a danced ethnography of the folkways of “digital natives,” then it made sense to me to thematize as part of the staging ethnography’s classic methodology of participant observation. More interesting to me this time around was how the space necessarily changed the scale and the feel of the show. At The Cultch, there were screens on the walls, which broadcast the dancers’ interactions with the video games they were playing. At the Anderson Street Space, there was only a single monitor, positioned to face the raised dance platform, but also visible to half the audience depending on where they were positioned. As Ziyian Kwan noted in the post-show discussion, for those positioned near it, the screen necessarily draws one’s attention, in part because digital media operate under the principle of the serial absorption of information (for example, hours spent surfing the Web or playing video games or bingeing on Netflix). But here’s the key: the live dancing body’s attempt to mimic what the virtual body is doing on screen is an analogue response; it is a relaying of information using signals that are continuously variable in terms of physicality, spatial position, intensity, and so on. In the “digital/embodied divide” of dance gameplay, in which computer code choreographs bodily action, “it is the player’s embodied performance that is figured as unique, while the on-screen performance is stable and repeatable.”26 And that haptic dissonance between what and how we are seeing and feeling in Digital Folk is what I have continued to find so endlessly fascinating about its successive incarnations.

James Gnam: For me it’s really been about … moving the exchange past transaction, like none of the things that I can engage in, that I feel compelled to engage in, are connected to transaction: I will do this for you, in exchange for this, whether it’s money or opportunity … or whatever. There has to be an equal level of mutual investment and I think friendship is a medium for that, for sure.27

“Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory

As James has stated, because in Vancouver the presentation and curation model for contemporary dance is so festival-dependent and/or series-driven, programming often has very little to do with the quality of the work itself, or with encouraging risk and fostering new voices. pof always knew that they wanted the final version of Digital Folk to be fully immersive, with audience members free to come and go over the course of an evening in which looped performances of the piece would repeat at timed intervals. Building upon the first two test-runs of the work, they also knew that they wanted to combine the ideas of home and theatre by building a black box set within an existing playing space. To do both things meant that Digital Folk 3.0 would likely have to be self-produced. This was hardly something that was entirely new for Natalie. After all, pof has successively produced Vancouver presentations by the Montreal-based companies Grand Poney and Mayday, both of which James works with as a regular collaborator. But negotiating the relationship of one’s dance practice to ways of making work structured around “commerce and [the] institution”28 is never an equal bargain. And that’s where I come into the narrative of Digital Folk’s development. Recognizing that they would benefit from the infrastructural and financial support of a producing partner, and wanting to stage the show in Vancouver following a final summer 2016 technical residency at Burnaby’s Shadbolt Centre for the Arts (whose director, Corey Philley, has been a huge supporter of the Vancouver contemporary dance scene), Natalie approached me to intercede on pof’s behalf in setting up a meeting with Michael Boucher, director of sfu Woodward’s Cultural Programs. This I duly did, instructing Natalie to charm Michael with her French, and also brainstorming out loud about how an sfu Woodward’s staging of Digital Folk might involve or engage with students from the School for the Contemporary Arts’ Dance Program. In the end, five sca students were taken on as interns, helping with the final development of the piece between July and August 2016, and also performing in the work later in September. Three of those interns turned out to be former students of mine, with Rachel Silver, as talented a dance writer as she is a dancer, additionally tasked with documenting her

51

experiences of the process in regular blog entries posted to pof’s website. In redacting my experience of what Digital Folk, the performance, eventually became, I have chosen to excerpt some of Rachel’s public ruminations, thereby providing a further ethnographic layer to the story of the piece’s development. I do this not to suggest that my and Rachel’s experiences of the piece are coterminous, nor to de-emphasize how the institutional power accruing to my position as an sca professor helped enable Rachel’s participation in the first place, not to mention the entire staging of the work at sfu. Rather, taking my cue from Miller’s application of what she calls diy/dia (“[d]o it yourself, and do it again”) ethnography to video game fieldwork, I want to suggest that analyzing the repetitive practice of my spectatorship of Digital Folk alongside Rachel’s accounts of the repetitive practice of rehearsing and performing the work helps thicken the cumulative description of the piece, as well as the embodied relationships of doing being choreographed in and through it.29 Those relationships coincided when, after an intensive rehearsal process in July and August that included the aforementioned residency at the Shadbolt, and that culminated in one final by-invitation showing to beta-test the performance-readiness of the show, Digital Folk opened at sfu Woodward’s Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre on 21 September 2016, welcoming members of the paying public for the first time. During its long gestative journey (the metaphor seems appropriate given that Natalie and core collaborator Bevin Poole were both visibly pregnant by the time the show opened), the piece evolved into the mostly immersive experience envisioned by James, incorporating elements of video game design, a bit of cosplay, music and dance, and an interactive set-cum-installation designed by Natalie Purschwitz and lit by James Proudfoot. That said, James and Natalie and their collaborators never lost sight of the key ideas they wished to probe through the research and creation process: how interactive media technologies have fundamentally altered patterns (cognitive and kinetic/physical) of group socialization; and how to transfer and interrupt such patterns within a live performance environment.

52

Rachel Silver: In these early stages, we are adapting to our new environment and learning to navigate the objects around us as we dance. [Natalie] Purschwitz has created a set that fuses the digital and the tangible world through imagination. The cubes and textures framing the space make it feel like we are caught somewhere between a screen and

a hard drive, where our moving bodies are pixelated and undefined … James Proudfoot has been experimenting with colours, strengths, and sources for light as we work. He has a quiet and bold presence, in gentle yet firm command of the light spilling around the room.30

“Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory

The first idea plays out through a proliferation of mirroring techniques in the piece. There are, for example, the myriad screens with which performers and spectators interact: the television monitors that play the dance and music games with which we are invited to interface, mimicking the grooves of various cross-species avatars; the larger screens upon which the record of these efforts is sometimes streamed; even the screens of performers’ smart phones, which they take out at one point in order to attempt a hilarious real-time re-enactment of a group folk dance posted to YouTube. On the one hand, the ubiquity of screens foregrounds – whether knowingly or unknowingly – a fundamental paradox of dance games: they employ surveillance technologies in order to “offer private dance experiences,” with the relationship of seeing and being seen established between players and on-screen performers raising further issues of consent and control.31 On the other hand, Digital Folk in its final iteration complicates this particular feedback loop of connectivity by including other kinds of mirroring, including that which takes place all the time in a studio between dancers practicing their technique or learning new choreography. At various points throughout the piece, one performer will begin following another, attempting to reproduce the other’s improvised movement as their partner wends this way or that way throughout the space; after a while, however, it becomes difficult to tell who is following whom, and for what specific purpose. As Miller has shown, notwithstanding the frequently ambiguous or unmarked or deliberately therianthropic identities of many of their on-screen avatars, players’ mastery of choreography through mirroring in dance games is premised on implied racialized and sexualized logics that govern the authenticity of one’s moves, with many of the dance routines and the dancer-choreographers hired to perform them via motion-capture technologies coming from “African American, Latinx, and/or queer communities of practice.”32 Digital Folk does not directly address how dance games, and dance repertoire more generally, reproduce and/or destabilize different identity categories. But in juxtaposing two-dimensional reaction with three-dimensional choice, the piece uncloaks the shared choreographic labour that goes into both stage dance and screen dance.

53

Rachel Silver: We interns have our first experience with the dance video games. “Just Dance” fills the large studio with popular songs and we take turns imitating its dancing avatars on the television screen. It is difficult, and there is a lot of laughter, with a slight edge of competition … In these two-dimensional games, there is only reaction, anxiety and impulse. There is no comparison to our movement work in the studio this week, where we have discovered the possibilities of mirroring and reaction in real space and in real time with another dancer. With another body, there are infinite options. We can honour the other dancer’s intention, and create our own. We can transform it, filter it through our own desires, and add to it. With the games, there are no decisions, just reactions.33

54

Mirroring is also transferred to the grain of the voice, with the deliberately awful vocal mimicry of The Sally Field Project house band (see Figure 1.4) to classic tunes called up through competitive multiplayer music-based video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero providing an interface between both the “digital” and the “folk” aspects of the work’s neo-Baroque aesthetics. That is, the quasi-ethnomusicological and seriously kinetic instrument-playing of The Sally Field Project reminds participant-observers that one of the performance’s key gaming intertexts, The Legend of Zelda franchise, frequently uses musical instruments to trigger game events, with Ocarina of Time – the franchise’s first 3D game, released in 1998, and still considered by many to be the best video game of all time – requiring gamers to play instruments and use songs to progress through the game.34 It should also remind us that dance games “rely on popular music and associated listening practices for both their pedagogical efficacy in teaching choreography and their commercial success as media products.”35 Likewise, the reciprocal and recursive relationship between music and movement in Digital Folk gestures to a historical precedent in the intimate correspondence between Baroque dance and music, with the suite of movements comprising an evening’s entertainment in each form sharing the same terms: prelude, entrée, allemande, courante, minuet, bourée, and so on. Relatedly, the mirroring precipitated by the software memory of the Rock Band game contrasts with the virtuosic display of human memory as James and Jane Osborne take turns echoing each other during a shared recitation and riff on a scientific article dealing with perceptual and spatial recall. The event of the echo, a vocal delay, returns sound to one altered, changed, so that the singular voice becomes double, something also neatly captured in this performance through the polyphonic – and polyglot –

Figure 1.4 Digital Folk’s Sally Field Project (2016). Left to right: Diego Romero, Bevin Poole Lienweber, and James Gnam.

telling of a folk tale in multiple languages by Natalie, Diego Romero, Shion Carter, and Vanessa Goodman. Of course, the contrapuntal earworm of a Bach fugue finds its kinetic equivalent in a dancer’s remembered response to a partner’s steps, something Digital Folk plays with in a series of mirrored duets that break off suddenly into solos, or else get absorbed into larger group massings, a process referred to by the creators as “dancing alone together” (see Figure 1.5). Rachel Silver: After dancing with a partner, we create solos “remembering” the sensations and movements of the duet. This is very cerebral work. It feels like you are dancing with a ghost. Just like a dream, certain moments emerge in my memory as I dance, and it is rarely chronological. We do this exact same process with the video games. After flailing, punching, and hip-swaying in front of the screen to pumping pop music, we improvise solos in silence with remembered movements. Rather than just recreating what happened, we pick certain gestures and explore what they were, what they are now, and what they could be. Finally, there is room for our own desires to creep in, and the moves can be what we want them to be. In a way we have liberated ourselves from the games.36

56

More so than in previous iterations of the piece, in this version of Digital Folk the audience becomes a fundamental part of the tale being told. Invited to don various bits of costume as we enter the performance space – an immersive installation built within the Wong Theatre – we are then free to roam about Purshwitz’s Pee Wee Herman–esque set, taking a seat on the stacked blocks in the centre, lying down on a bit of indoor/outdoor carpet, joining the performers and fellow audience members in a group dance to one of the videos, or just standing and watching in the corner. There are certainly moments in the piece - for example, at the end, when Diego and Bevin perform a duet of David Bowie’s “Starman” on the ukulele – where the audience is prompted to adopt the spectating habits of a traditional proscenium setting, becoming silent and still and directionally attentive. And that all of the screens in the piece are in turn mediating audience response is evidenced by how passive several audience members chose to remain in spite of the performance’s design and form. After the first few minutes of dress-up and exploration of the site and its different play stations, many spectators took up a fixed standing or sitting position and watched the action unfold around them. But precisely because this unfolding was happening all around us,

Figure 1.5 Left to right: Vanessa Goodman, Kayla DeVos, Hannah Jackson, Lexi Vajda, James Gnam, Rachel Helton, and Rachel Silver in Digital Folk (2016).

repeating and expanding and looping infinitely on screens large and small, in bodies that refused to adhere to conventions of leading and following, back or front, Digital Folk failed to reward the single-point perspective that Timothy Murray has associated with “Euclidean systems of projection” and spectatorship.37 Instead, the piece’s “labyrinthine continuousness” – which includes the folding of its beginning and ending into consecutive looping performances – instantiates a version of what Murray calls the “Digital Baroque,” a constituent feature of which is the enfolding of “the user in the energetic present,”38 a temporal “nowness” that live performance shares with digital systems like video gaming. Natalie LeFebvre Gnam: I think we’re creating the now, now.39

57

In my own memory of this version of the show, I am struck by how much I wanted to participate: twice getting up to shake it, shake it alongside Vanessa and Lexi Vajda and others to different dance videos; and accepting without hesitation a slow dance to Freebird with fellow audience member (and longtime edam company member) Walter Kubanek. And it is in these unscripted – or rather, unprogrammed – bodily encounters that Digital Folk as a live performance interrupts the one-way circuitry of human/computer interaction. Nowhere was this more apparent to me than in that space of free play that occurs between the end of one nightly iteration of the performance and the start of another, and also in the agency one was granted to ignore start and end times altogether. As per James and Natalie’s wishes, this version of Digital Folk ran on a three-hour loop over the course of five successive evenings, with performances beginning on the hour, and with audience members free to come in and out and to stay for as long as they liked. The first evening I attended, I chose to leave after the first hour; later in the run I dropped by in the middle of the second hour and stayed through till the end of the third. In ceding my show garments to new arrivals in the former instance, I was able to pass on a bit of recently acquired folk wisdom about the rules of this particular performance game. In the latter instance I was able to reinvent those rules, and even ignore them altogether.

58

Rachel Silver: Well, it would be fair to say everything changed today. We held a “beta” run, and experienced the show with a small audience. It was chaotic, surprising, frail, and rich, with pure and beautiful moments. In James’ words, this show is more of a wild animal than a house pet. Most surprising for me was how human the show felt. The audience members in the space with us were three-dimensional, active, decisive bodies … They were really there, (embodied), making decisions of where to stand or sit, playing the games, and getting involved … Since the dancing happens in the same space as the audience, sometimes audience members would be sitting or standing exactly where the dance usually occurs. So we danced around people, above and beside people. They became objects to navigate but also potential dance partners … After the show I think about how much care and thought has been put into this show, by James and Natalie and all of us. Yet it has the energetic, casual exterior of a party or a rock show. In that way it is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In the performance we mention concepts of mirroring and digital “folk culture.” We show connection and disconnection between bodies, cognition, and responsiveness. We blur

lines between individual and social dance, memory and imagination. The richness and density is palpable, just under the surface. The audience will be the ones to peel back the layers.40 Peeling back, or unfolding, the layers of my experience of Digital Folk in this chapter has involved a parallel enfolding of the seriality and simultaneity of the work as a performance event into the iterative and recursive narrative of its performative development, as well as what I see as pof’s larger “post-Baroque” aesthetics. In this regard, Deleuze’s description of the fold as symptomatic of the multiplicity and supplementarity of Baroque art is instructive:

Deleuze’s use of kinetic metaphors (“a flexible or an elastic body,” “bending movement”) to describe the fold’s operational attachments reminds me, in turn, that what is also gathered up and pleated into the cumulative experience of Digital Folk is a daisy-chain of professional relationships and dance-world friendships, the various collaborators on, performers in, and attendees of the successive versions of the piece pointing to a practice of mutual support that fuels not just pof’s creative process, but that of many of the other Vancouver dance artists discussed in this book. On the one hand, this is a function of the insularity and the precarity of contemporary dance-making in the city; the Vancouver community is relatively small, space to rehearse and perform is expensive, institutionally contingent, and curatorially driven, and the cost of living is extremely high – factors I examine at greater length in the next movement interval. On the other hand, why not push back against these obstacles by exploring the social obligations and affective intensities embedded in the micro-aesthetics of your work instead of succumbing to the macroeconomics of infrastructural scale that demands the work be more: more spectacular; more excessive; just more?

“Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory

a flexible or an elastic body [that] still has cohering parts that form a fold, such that they are not separated into parts of parts but are rather divided to infinity in smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion. Thus a continuous labyrinth is not a line dissolving into independent points, as flowing sand might dissolve into grains, but resembles a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending movements, each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surroundings.41

59

60

pof has been instrumental in spearheading a material intervention into such questions by taking the lead on the development of a new co-located rehearsal and performance space for the independent Vancouver dance community that opened in 2016. Left of Main is a 1,500-square-foot open studio that was repurposed from the site of a former Dim Sum restaurant in Chinatown. Natalie sourced the space after instigating two consultant-led planning sessions; she also oversaw the capital campaign needed to undertake necessary renovations, including laying a sprung floor, installing a lighting grid, and carving out a small flexible backstage/office space, as well as room for washrooms and a narrow kitchen. pof shares and maintains Left of Main with the companies Tara Cheyenne Performance (the subject of my next chapter) and machinenoisy (Delia Brett and Daelik); however, it has already become a sought-after venue for other dance artists to rehearse, perform or hold showings, lead or take class, and gather to strategize and socialize. Thus establishing itself, in a relatively short period of time, as a key temporal and spatial fold within the cultural fabric of the city – the faded red stencilling on its windows pointing to its edible past, the activity inside gesturing to other kinds of future moveable feasts – Left of Main became the logical site for yet another staging of Digital Folk when the piece played there for two nights during the 2017 Dance In Vancouver Biennial. Busy with my contribution to the Our Present Dance Histories project that also formed a part of div 2017 (see Chapter 6), I delayed in purchasing my ticket and of course the performances sold out. Hoping to tap my insider connection with the company and this work in particular, I emailed Natalie to see if there was a way she and James could squeeze me in to one of the performances. I didn’t hear back: either there was no space, or my message got lost in the virtual ether. Either way, here at last I was confronting a paradox of the “Digital Baroque”: the intensity and seriality of friendship’s flow was nevertheless still subject to the algorithmic vicissitudes of its servers. This also helps to explain why, half a year later, I so enjoyed celebrating with James and Natalie and assorted friends at Left of Main their company’s tenth anniversary: because I just had to show up; and also because I didn’t have to worry about what to do or when to leave. Building upon the idea of “dancing alone together” explored in Digital Folk, for the work marking pof’s first decade of creativity James and Natalie created a study in chillness, intervening in what theorist Elizabeth Freeman has called “chrononormativity”: the yoking of time and bodies to a neoliberal emphasis on productivity through work schedules, appointment calendars, deadlines, even show opening and closing dates.42 In I Miss Doing Nothing, James and Natalie,

“Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory

together with collaborators Nancy Tam, James Proudfoot, and Vanessa Goodman, attempt to interrupt the serial- and output-oriented logic of time and labouring bodies in two ways. First, rather than using their rehearsal and development process to make a “new” work, they chose to play with the kinetic repertoires that continue to linger within their bodies, re-calling over the course of this piece bits of choreography from past works, and seeing how this movement in, through, and across time can create different kinds of affective rhythms and flows. Watching James and Natalie feel their way into how something felt, the slow and often surprising real-time discovery of where an arm was positioned, or in what direction one is meant to be facing, imbues time with a layered, ludic quality, in which the past and present can be made to touch (see Figure 1.6). As with the reverberating echoes and feedback loops of Nancy’s live mixing of sounds – a combination of field recordings, rearrangements of old pof music scores, and miked noises from outside the Left of Main studio – such uncanny perceptual relays are also available to the spectator, as an energetic bounce up and down by James or a bit of subtle finger work by Natalie will trigger flashes of memory for those audience members familiar with the company’s repertoire. And it is in their invitation to audience members to self-curate how they wish to be with them in this space experiencing I Miss Doing Nothing that James and Natalie and company made their second intervention against the organizational march of time-as-usual, not least in terms of how dance and performance works are often shoehorned into hour-long presentation slots. As with Digital Folk, there is no obvious beginning or end to I Miss Doing Nothing. Subtitled “a lived retrospective installation for experiencing time differently,” the work unfolds durationally over a three-hour period. Upon entering Left of Main, the first thing one is invited to do is pause: sitting down on the steps up to the studio and affixing a pair of headphones to listen as Natalie gives instruction in what it might mean to open up an interval – even a small one – in the routine pace of our daily lives. Thereafter, and with a lazy mid-afternoon spritzer mixed by battery opera’s David McIntosh in hand, we are free to watch and linger with James and Natalie in the studio for as long as we like, lounging in various states of languorous repose against a chosen bit of wall, or moving freely about the space, or coming and going as we see fit. In this respect, it is not as if time stops completely in watching I Miss Doing Nothing. Whether or not we choose to look at our watches or phones, we are made aware of time’s passing via the movement of sunlight and shadows in the space, a choreographing of natural illumination that is slowly revealed via James P. and Vanessa’s expert manipulation of a set of

61

Figure 1.6 Natalie LeFebvre Gnam and James Gnam in rehearsals for I Miss Doing Nothing (2018).

62

louvered vertical blinds on the west-facing windows, and the successive removal of the shimmery panels and wooden frames initially covering up the south-facing windows. These panels and frames, together with additional rolling screens, are moved about the room and configured into various architectural formations by Vanessa and James P., whose purposeful – and purposefully timed – activity contrasts with the seemingly more unplanned and aimless progress of Natalie and James G. Yet it is precisely in the different kinds of attention solicited by these parallel movement scores that we discover that being “in time” together does not have to be reduced, if you’ll forgive the boy band metaphor, to being “in sync”: with one another, or with the prescribed rhythms of daily life. At different moments on the lazy July afternoon that I attended I Miss Doing Nothing I was alert, sleepy, bored, stimulated, contemplative, anxious, worried, bewildered, absorbed, distracted, and transported. At no moment, however, did I think there was anywhere else I would rather be.

Watching Natalie move in and with the last slat of light from the middle of the west-facing windows as its slow disappearance marked the approach of six o’clock (yes, I stayed for the whole three hours), I thought of how productively this time doing nothing had been spent. In arguing for a more longitudinal approach to time, especially as it relates to the historical survival of different marginalized communities, Freeman invokes the term belonging to refer not just to identification with a group, but to denote a way of “being long,” of a group persisting over time.43 I thought about this idea a lot in the months following my viewing of I Miss Doing Nothing, a period that coincided with final work on this book. How to be long as a dancemaker in Vancouver is something all of the artists discussed in these pages must confront on a daily basis: whether taking class or rehearsing or writing grants or visiting one’s physiotherapist. It definitely helps if one has a community of friends and collaborators with whom one can dance alone together. And a space, whether real or virtual, to do it in.

“Dancing Alone Together” with plastic orchid factory 63

INTERVAL 2

And: Space Tallying dance real estate in Vancouver …

At one point in A Choreographer’s Handbook, his widely cited compendium on the hows and whys of dancemaking, Jonathan Burrows brings up the subject of dance studios, noting somewhat obviously that “the place where you work will have an effect on what you can do.”1 This comes after the observation that “practical limitations” can be a spur to creativity, an admission that he himself likes to work “in the kitchen,” and a quotation from French choreographer Jérôme Bel about saying “no” to working in studios because of the formulaic structures they impose on his practice.2 Many of the Vancouver dance artists Justine A. Chambers and Alexa Mardon and I interviewed for the Our Present Dance Histories project documented in Chapter 6, when asked to enumerate their dance spaces in Vancouver, also volunteered that they choreographed in their kitchens. And their living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, garages, and local parks. Not necessarily because of any conceptual or ideological aversion to the fundamentals of studio-based composition and rehearsal. Mostly it had to do with affordability and availability. In short, as with so much else in Vancouver, it comes down to real estate. In this regard, and also anticipating some of the working methods of Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg that I outline at the start of the next chapter, it helps if we do a little math. As trumpeted by the British Columbia Arts

And: Space

Council on the second page of its newest (2018–22) strategic plan, “British Columbia has the highest concentration of artists in Canada.”3 It has also historically spent less per capita on arts funding than any other province, with cumulative provincial and federal government funding (as a percentage of total revenues) tracking lower for most bc arts organizations than for comparable organizations in other provinces.4 Add to this the fact that, as reconfirmed by the latest (2019) Hill Strategies Statistical Profile of Artists in Canada, dancers in Canada continue to earn the lowest median income of all nine arts occupations surveyed, with an average total individual income of just $15,100 in 2016, much lower than the medians of all artists in Canada ($23,100) and all Canadian workers ($41,900).5 At just $42,100, median household incomes for dancers, who are largely female (87 percent) and young (with 42 percent between fifteen and twenty-four years of age), are also well below the median of other artists;6 this is important when one considers that, notwithstanding a recent cooling in the housing market, Vancouver continues to have the highest average monthly rents for apartments, the second-highest average monthly rents for condominiums (after Toronto), and the lowest rental vacancy rate in the country (just 1.0 percent as of the end of 2018).7 The crunch for space extends to dance studios in the city, which if attached to popular pre-professional programs like Arts Umbrella or Goh Ballet Academy are always looking for ways to expand their square footage: in the former case, by moving into the old Granville Island buildings of Emily Carr University of Art and Design (the campus having relocated to Great Northern Way); in the latter case, by opening three new studios in the Oakridge Centre, a commercial property development earmarked by the city for significant residential growth.8 For private studios located within or above commercial properties – as is the case with Harbour Dance, the venerable if now somewhat down-at-heel institution on Granville Street where almost every mover in the city (myself included) seems to have either taken or given a class – the issue is different, the threat of potential demolition, a result of unchecked and revanchist policies relating to private residential development in the city, always looming over one’s lease extension. This is why the opening of Left of Main has been such a boon to the community. Not only does it provide the three tenant companies, supported by cada, with an affordable and reasonably sustainable material infrastructure for the creation and presentation of new work; the space is also offered to other artists at some of the lowest rates in the city ($15/hr, $100/day, $700/week), or else in-kind as part of occasional residencies. And while,

65

66

referencing the (neo)Baroque lens through which I analyzed pof in the previous chapter, the space may not technically function in a manner akin to a seventeenth-century French salon, there is a very real way in which Left of Main operates not just as a dance studio, but as a theatre of conversation and exchange on the discourse of dance in Vancouver. The post-show discussions I have attended and occasionally facilitated there have often been as stimulating as the movement works that preceded them, and precisely because the interlocutors have felt free to dissent with one another aesthetically and politically, while also showing support for the work. The space continues to evolve, and likely so will the composition of the resident companies/artists, especially as the current lease does not expire until 2031. Then again, it also comes with a demolition clause. A short walk from Left of Main are the new kw Studios at the Woodward’s development, which is also home to Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts, where I teach. A 7,000-square-foot cultural amenity space owned by the city, and formerly occupied by W2 Media Arts, KW Studios were leased to Kokoro Dance in October 2014 as part of a cooperative arts tenancy that also includes the Vancouver International Dance Festival, Raven Spirit Dance, and Vancouver Moving Theatre. After a capital campaign overseen by Kokoro’s Jay Hirabayashi, the studios underwent $900,000 worth of renovations and improvements to convert them into flexible spaces for dance classes, rehearsal, creation, and production. A state-of-the-art recording studio is also part of a complex I have come to know quite well through semi-regular classes with Kokoro’s Barbara Bourget. What is historically significant about this project, in addition to its mandate to support low-income, not-for-profit, Indigenous and Downtown Eastside artists, is that it completes a unique kinetic map of the city that now sees the remaining Vancouver-based members of the pioneering edam collective all tenanting their own dance facilities. Not only does this ensure the ongoing transmission of a legacy of west coast dance technique through teaching, workshops, choreographic labs, and performances; it also helps to redistribute access to material resources, specifically space, in ways that challenge established institutional frameworks, Vancouver’s “home for dance,” The Dance Centre, having by far the most studios to offer the community, but also the most complicated rental and priority booking system, with much of the space given over to bigger operations like Ballet bc.9 I will have much more to say about my relationship with Kokoro in Chapter 3, where I will also sketch in broad strokes the formation and subsequent dissolution of the original edam collective. For the remainder of this move-

And: Space

ment interval, however, I want to talk very briefly about the legendary Vancouver dance spaces overseen by Jennifer Mascall and Peter Bingham, in part by conveying something of the materiality of those spaces as I have experienced them through performance. Jennifer officially launched MascallDance in 1989, soon after she left edam. Four years later she found the studio that has been her company’s home ever since. The Labyrinth is a 2,100-square-foot open hall on the upper floor of St Paul’s Anglican Church in Vancouver’s West End that was once used as a theatre and a basketball court. Its name derives from the inlay pattern on its wooden floor, a full thirteen-metre replica of the medieval labyrinth laid in the stone floor of the thirteenth-century Cathédrale de Notre-Dame de Chartres, south of Paris. Perhaps because of this, or maybe just because of the associative dance historical connections I make with the hallowed Judson Memorial Church in New York City (Jennifer having studied with Merce Cunningham in New York and Judson Dance Theater members Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer having hosted a series of influential Intermedia-sponsored workshops in Vancouver in 1968–6910), the space has always retained for me a sacred quality, even when, as I’ve mostly experienced it, the floor has been covered in white Marley. Not that Jennifer is precious about how she uses the space, or in making it available to other dance artists. The Labyrinth can be rented for $17/hr ($12/hr for cada members) during the week, and more recently Jennifer has blocked off semi-regular two-hour periods of “free real-estate where dancers of all backgrounds, experiences and levels are invited to come and use [the space] however they see fit.”11 As with everything Jennifer does, this “experiment on sharing space together” is a facet of her larger research process and comes with a set of questions: “Do we know how to be together without being told? What different ways can we be together? Do we always look for/rely on a leader? Can collaboration exist without a leader? How do we use the resources and people around us to inform our own decision-making?”12 This last question also informs the series of choreographic labs and movement intensives Jennifer has led and hosted at The Labyrinth over the years. For example, through her Bloom residencies, which have been ongoing since 1994, Jennifer invites emerging choreographers in Vancouver to apply for training, mentoring, and editing under her direction, providing use of her studio as a public showcase for their works-in-progress. And at her annual Way Out West conference, every August Jennifer and different guest faculty explore a range of somatic movement practices, with a particular focus on

67

putting Jennifer’s pedagogical interests in experiential anatomy in conversation with contemporary dance technique. The spacious, high-ceilinged expanse of The Labyrinth seems especially suited to such inquiries, and also to elaborating what this might look like in public performance, with the room itself, and its own attendant and agential resources (including the audience), frequently becoming co-participants of the action.

S U N D AY, 1 0 J U LY 2 0 1 6 The Outliner at DOTE One of two indoor Dancing on the Edge shows not taking place at the Firehall this year is MascallDance’s The Outliner, a compilation of pieces that choreographer Jennifer Mascall has made over the years in dialogue with different material objects, and that the company is presenting at its home base, The Labyrinth studios at St Paul’s Anglican Church on Jervis Street in the West End. An expertly curated and imaginatively staged evening of five short dances that showcases the talents of a diverse array of dancers and designers, and featuring music by Stefan Smulovitz and lighting by John Macfarlane (both colleagues in Contemporary Arts at SFU ), The Outliner quite literally takes audiences on a ride they won’t soon forget. For one of the conceits of the show is that audience members sit on wooden pews that have been placed atop moveable platforms. As one piece transitions into the next we are wheeled about The Labyrinth’s white Marleyed floor by an army of stagehands standing at the ready behind us; they move us into different geometrical and spatial configurations as the dictates of each work’s choreography – and the shape and dimension of each set of objects – demand. But in so doing Mascall and her creative team have also cannily choreographed a sixth piece, the audience’s quixotically sedentary movement with the pews constituting yet another dance between humans and objects. At the top of the show the pews are facing each other in two diagonal rows. Between them the great Robin Poitras, her arms and waist and legs entwined in a series of circular wooden rings designed by Nathan Wiens, moves with delicacy and grace, advancing the length of the diagonal in the first part of We Are an Unfinished World, the only piece on the program receiving its premiere. Poitras and her rings will return three more times over the course of the evening: first as a magically 68

moving conical triangle that completely obscures Poitras’s body hiding underneath; then as an inverted bowl, with the top of Poitras’s head just visible; and, finally, back to the deconstructed rings encircling different limbs.

Profilo Eterno, from 2011, features Elissa Hanson as a grounded skydiver, or a space traveler from another planet trying to make it back home. Racing onto the stage wearing a black vest from which I was half expecting a parachute to emerge, Hanson dons a helmet adorned with three plumes of bendy white plastic. Over the course of the piece, which features text by Susan McKenzie, Hanson will fix additional strips of plastic to her body via the vest she wears, metamorphosing into a multi-antennaed insect or satellite dish depending on one’s perspective (the design is by Elliot Neck, after a concept by Catherine Hahn). Either way, there is no denying the force of the signals Hanson is both receiving and sending out. Kaspar is the earliest work on the program. It dates from 1984 and in this iteration features Ballet

BC ’s

wonderful Gilbert Small wielding two sets of branches

like truncheons against an invisible enemy. It begins with Small on demi-pointe, one leg behind the other, his back arched, but with the weight of his upper body shifted forward and his arms in front of him clutching the stems of the branches, the tops of which graze the floor. Slowly he begins to undulate his torso, rounding and arching his back as he begins a slow forward walk, his head every now and then shifting suddenly from side to side, alert to potential threats. It was quite thrilling to see Small up close like this, especially when he steps up the tempo and begins flying through the air like he’s Solor in La Bayadère, the branches slicing through the air like so many blades cutting into enemy flesh (though I am aware, as is often the case with the roles in which Small is cast, how this image reinforces tropes of the exotic other). Next up was The Politics of Meaning (2010), a witty duet featuring the young dancers Eowynn Penny-Hugeot and Amy Donnelly that is about the mechanics of writing (Alan Storey is the design engineer on this one), and that also doubles as an allegory about dance notation and physical versus linguistic scores. Finally, the evening concludes with Graft, a 1991 solo structured around an arachnid-like fan of plastic poles designed by Ines Ortner (from a concept by Susan Berganzi), and here expertly manipulated by the gorgeous dancer Renée Sigouin. All of this unfolded in just under an hour, and I could have easily sat through a and technical execution, a multi-disciplinary study in the myriad ways we dance with things.

Peter Bingham has been dancing in and with the ground floor studio at Vancouver’s Western Front almost since the influential artist-run centre first opened its doors in 1973. It was there, for example, that he began studying with Linda Rubin, briefly joining her Synergy dance company. Another

And: Space

half dozen more such vignettes. The Outliner stands out for its conceptual rigour

69

70

student of Rubin’s was Jane Ellison, and in terms of the embodied history of the Western Front, it is significant that to this day Peter and Jane continue to share its dance studio, with Peter’s morning contact improvisation classes and edam’s rehearsals and performances being complemented by Jane’s famous evening and weekend all bodies Boing classes. Virtually every working contemporary dance artist in Vancouver has at one point or another taken a contact class with Peter, and among significant personal dance spaces in the city the edam heritage studio was by far the single most cited spot in the interviews conducted by Justine and Alexa and I for the Our Present Dance Histories project. Peter’s teaching has thus helped to connect successive generations of Vancouver dance artists to the origins of contact as a form, as he himself studied with Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith during their regular visits to Vancouver from the mid-1970s (when contact was still being practised on floor mats) through the early 1980s.13 Other participants in those early Western Front contact workshops included Helen Clarke and Andrew Harwood (with whom Peter would go on to found his first contact company, Fulcrum), Jane Ellison, and Peter (now Lola) Ryan, who would also become one of the founding members of edam. When Peter Bingham took over sole leadership of edam in 1990, he began to work with and train a succession of company members in his own ongoing experiments with contact, maintaining a focus on flow and the sensory awareness of how one composes with one’s improvising body (including, as the years have evolved, through more structured improvisations or specific choreographic instructions), but also working to define a signature style based on a grounded centre, hyper-articulate limbs (especially hands and feet), and a penchant for speed and sequencing. That style is sedimented in the bodies of a range of dancers who continue to be active in the Vancouver dance community: from early company members like Susan Elliott and Noam Gagnon to longtime collaborators Anne Cooper, Farley Johansson, Chengxin Wei, Delia Brett, Daelik, Olivia Shaffer, and Walter Kubanek to a younger generation of movers that includes Elissa Hanson, Arash Khakpour, and Diego Romero. As important as the regular teaching that goes on within edam’s dance studio are the annual spring and fall choreographic series that Peter presides over in the space. In these mixed performance programs, which Peter has been putting together for more than twenty years, local guest choreographers are invited to showcase the beginnings of new work alongside an offering from Bingham set on the edam company. Established and emerging choreographers are given time and space and technical resources

to test ideas, take risks, and explore new directions in their practice. Indeed, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg has said that the invitation to present as part of edam’s spring 2009 choreographic series is what prompted her, after many years of solo creation, to conceive of her first group piece, Highgate, which I briefly discuss in the next chapter.14 Then, too, it is no real exaggeration to suggest that my own immersion in Vancouver’s contemporary dance history – both in terms of who I am writing about in this book and the larger embodied genealogy represented by edam as a presentation space – owes much, over the past fifteen years, to my attendance at and documentation of many of the performances that have taken place in edam’s storied Studio Theatre.

T H U R S D AY, 1 5 D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 6 After the Fall at EDAM Last night I dashed from a board meeting to make it to EDAM ’s latest choreographic series presentation, After the Fall. I’m glad I made the extra effort to be there. Not only was the Western Front teeming with people I knew, but the program was excellent (albeit with minor caveats about one piece). It was just the restorative re-immersion I needed into the work of this community. First up was Julianne Chapple’s Self Portrait, a work created and performed in collaboration with Maxine Chadburn and Francesca Frewer. With the windows on the western wall of the first-floor EDAM studios left uncovered, and thus admitting a degree of extra sparkle from the streetlights outside, a dancer enters from the open upstage left door. She is wearing black shorts and a white push-up bra; her long mane of hair tumbles down in front of her face. As she begins a slow journey across the width of the upstage wall, we gradually become aware of another figure seated downstage in shadow watching her progress along with us. And what fascinates about the upstage woman’s slow and sinuous movement is that it is as much vertical raises one leg in a gorgeous arabesque, before resting it against the wall and then raising the other leg to join it and pausing there in a pose that put me in mind of all those surrealist photos of disembodied, upside-down mannequin legs by the likes

And: Space

as it is horizontal. That is, more than once she dips her torso downward and first

of Man Ray and others (and the fact that all the dancers were clad in a similar underwear model-like manner and rarely showed their faces only reinforced this image). But the first dancer does not remain in this position; she continues her curious walk on/along the wall, exiting through the open door upstage left. Soon another dancer emerges from the opposite door and begins to traverse a similar

71

gymnastic journey along the upstage wall, also observed by the downstage figure in repose. And so the pattern continues, with, on the third go round, the downstage dancer walking upstage to take her turn at the wall, and the other two dancers remaining on stage – one observing downstage, the other repeating a version of the wall dance along the floor upstage, and with all three dancers aligning themselves in a vertical centre column whenever the wall dancer reaches a resting point in the middle of her journey. This trio, so compelling in its spatial geometry when the dancers are apart, becomes even more watchable when the dancers swap each other’s bodies for the surface of the wall, coming together in a series of fluidly intertwined configurations that combine the strength and balance and flexibility of gymnastics with the weight-sharing of contact. Every now and then during this sequencing the dancers will hold a shape, usually with one of them perched atop or supported by the other two, at which point the dancer being posed will sweep her hair away from her face and gaze out distractedly and maybe also with a touch of disdain at the audience: the one who is looked at looks back and, unimpressed by what she sees, continues on with the work at hand. Which culminates in one final walk on walls, this time begun horizontally along the stage left studio wall, before ending where we began, back on the upstage wall. This time, however, the dancer doing the walking is supported by the other two: so she can go even higher. And because all three women are working together, we know she will not fall. For the second piece on the program, Peter Bingham’s Engage the Feeling Arms, the blinds had been lowered on the windows, though the slats remained open, which produced a nice constellation of light pinpricks along the upstage wall. The audience was treated to another trio, this one featuring

EDAM

stalwarts Farley Jo-

hansson, Walter Kubanek and Olivia Shaffer. In terms of Bingham’s trademark contact choreography, the piece begins somewhat unusually. All three dancers are in a horizontal line upstage and remain vertical for far longer than we might expect: Johansson and Shaffer are engaged in a vigorous duet, but there is no offering of backs or legs to tumble over or slide down, just a complex intertwining of arms and cupping of heads that put me in mind of ice dancing or tango. Meanwhile Kubanek is off to the side, stage left, improvising a solo, his arms also extending with abandon about his head as he does a series of pirouettes on his feet and knees (the Indian-themed music made it seem at times that all the dancers were multi-limbed Hindu gods). Soon enough Kubanek bumps Johansson and begins his own duet with Shaffer, and then Johannson does the same with Shaffer, the two men part72

nering while Shaffer performs a solo beside them. Eventually the three dancers break out of this pattern, and their line, beginning a run downstage which serves as the initiation of a series of repeated lifts, contact with other parts of their bodies

and, of course, those at once supremely athletic and graceful leaps and tumbles and rolls to/along the floor for which

EDAM

performers are known. It always takes

my breath away to watch dancers trained by Bingham fall: there is a suspension and yet simultaneous giving into gravity that seems to defy the rules of physics, but as satisfyingly there is always such a beautifully soft landing. Such is the case here with these three expert fallers and the image that will stay with me longest from last night’s performance is the sequence (repeated twice) in which each dancer falls successively into the outstretched arms of another who lies prone on the floor. Feeling arms indeed. The final piece, The Way, was choreographed by Shay Kuebler and by this point in the program the stage blacks had been pulled entirely across the windows on the western wall. The lights come up slowly on dancer Nicholas Lydiate, who starts twitching centre stage. Dancer Lexi Vajda soon appears in the upstage right doorway, walks toward Lydiate with purpose, and begins pushing him about the stage. It was great to see the diminutive Vajda be the controlling force at the start of the duet that ensues, which gradually gets more and more physical, and ends up with the two dancers collapsed on the floor upstage. This is the cue for Kuebler to enter, stepping gingerly between the bodies of the other dancers, slowly lowering himself to his knees, and finally initiating a gestural sequence with his arms that the other dancers join in. The unison becomes more and more captivating as it picks up speed, but also because in so doing it begins to break down. Lydiate’s twitches from the top of the piece are here reintroduced as glitches, with first Kuebler and then Vajda and Lydiate splaying one leg jarringly to the side, or else knocking themselves over with a miscued arm. Extremity has always been part of Kuebler’s aesthetic, which draws as much from martial arts as from hip hop and contemporary dance. Nowhere is this more evident in this work than the solo Kuebler gives himself in the middle of the piece: it begins as a pantomime of boxing moves and ends with Kuebler thrashing back and forth violently on the floor. There is a suggestion of self-parody in the “dudeness” of this scene as, at its end, Vajda begins a slow clap, as if to say “Good for you, what next?” But, in fact, rather than ending things of Vajda’s clapping – now joined by Lydiate – picks up speed. Wait, there’s more! The piece ends with this final trio throwing their bodies against the upstage wall, each reverberating slap of skin registering as a wince in my own body. I so appre-

And: Space

there, Kuebler takes the bait, rolling back and forth along the floor as the rhythm

ciate what Kuebler and his dancers can do physically; but because I worry about how much it hurts, I’m just not sure I support the philosophy of doing it. To that end, I left longing for a return to the silent tableau that concluded Chapple’s piece, or the proffered supporting limbs of Bingham’s.

73

I saw another version of Bingham’s Engage the Feeling Arms when it was presented as part of a mixed bill of his work at the 2018 Vancouver International Dance Festival, with the young dance artist Diego Romero taking over Johansson’s part. Romero is only in his mid-twenties but has been dancing in the city for more than two decades. In that time, he has transitioned his training and practice from ballet to contemporary, collaborated with a range of leading choreographers, and helped to found several influential performance collectives. One of these collectives, Boombox, co-established with Katie Lowen and Ileanna Cheladyn, operates out of converted 53-foot semitruck trailer that functions as an accessible – and mobile – rehearsal and presentation space for a range of intrepid dance artists not afraid, pace Burrows, of the “practical limitations” of either space or cash. This also includes someone like Chapple, who has recently opened a collective rehearsal and performance space in the Downtown Eastside called 45W. Indeed, in a city where artists have been known to live out of their cars, it hardly seems surprising that they should make dance spaces out of trucks.

74

CHAPTER 2

Walking and Talking and Laughing with Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg

Fun fact 1: Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg and I moved to Vancouver more or less at the same time in 1991. I was starting graduate school at the University of British Columbia. She was transferring from the theatre program at the University of Calgary to the dance program at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts – where, as I’ve previously mentioned, I now teach. Fun fact 2: I once commissioned a solo from Tara that features me dancing in my underwear while lipsynching to A Flock of Seagulls’ “I Ran.” (More on that process later in this chapter.) Fun fact 3: When it comes to dance and theatre, Tara and I are polyamorous. Perhaps my favourite spectating experience is to watch a performance that seamlessly and intelligently melds text and movement. I also write plays (The Objecthood of Chairs and Long Division) in which I force my actors to dance (I discuss the choreographic collaborations behind these processes at greater length in Chapter 5). Tara creates dances filled with storytelling and talk: sometimes by her alone; at other times by her collaborators. She has also choreographed extensively for the theatre, working with independent Vancouver companies like Radix as well as larger professional and semi-professional ensembles like Bard on the Beach and Theatre Under the Stars. None of these combinations and crossovers seems strange to either of us. It’s just the way we do our performance math.

Long Form Math: Four Arguments for Being Weird1 Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg Making dances with talking, and plays with moving does not actually feel like hybridization to me. It feels perfectly natural, even though I don’t see a lot of other creators working this way. My mentors Denise Clarke (One Yellow Rabbit) and the late Nigel Charnock (co-founder of dv8 Physical Theatre) have been talking and dancing for decades. I get a lot of questions about how I work and what I make. People ask: Is it dance? Is it theatre? Is it comedy? Is it drama? Why do you have to talk? Why do you have to move so much? Why are you so weird? I never understood that I had to pick a team and stick to it. What follows are four arguments to answer these questions. Background: I’ve always been like this. I made jokes in ballet class. I put a little Juliet soliloquy in the recital at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet Summer school. I choreographed my monologues in theatre school and narrated my choreography assignments in university. I like dance without talking when other people do it and theatre without much movement (although theatre could use physical literacy in general – just saying). But when I think I move and when I move I talk. Argument #1: When most people think about dance, they think of athleticism and form (e.g., the ballet, and So You Think You Can Dance). But I don’t think about bodies and dance that way. All movement is dance to me. I try to meet the people I work with, professional dancers or otherwise, where they are. Including myself and my questions. When I work with other artists there’s a lot of talking, a lot of asking them to improvise, a lot of “what’s your favourite song let’s dance to it,” so they can find their own impulses. It’s about finding our emotional connection to our movement. 76

Argument #2: Stories seem to live deep in my body and I can only get to them by moving.

I don’t go away and sit and write. It all happens in the room (the studio) where I’m working, from improvisation, from what is interesting to me in that moment. I dance to songs I like and try to find what (sometimes who) is happening in my body. I talk to myself about the shit that’s on my mind – the irritating “other” moms at my kid’s school (who wears gold stilettos to pick up their kid?) for example. I’m always relating everything I’m doing back to whatever the questions are that keep coming up, about whatever I’m obsessing about at the time (e.g., Why do we all love crime drama? What is faith? Why do 40+ women feel invisible? Why can’t I remember the word for I can’t remember?). With How to Be (my most recent ensemble piece/play/ show), I’d been noticing how we all seem to ask in one way or another, how should I be? How should I speak? How much should I weigh? What should I wear? You know, questions and listicles of answers that come up on our Facebook feeds. We all tell innumerable tales about ourselves and our experiences through our movements, gestures, postures, and physical rhythms and that’s also how I find words and characters and story. Walking and Talking and Laughing with Friedenberg

Argument #3: I trust that what I’m doing, that the way I’m working, is in service of story and character, and the body in “dance” or movement of any kind will say what it needs to say, with or without words. Our bodies betray our words. We might say, “I feel great,” but our chest is collapsed and our fists are held tight. I believe the body is the loudest subtext we can have. Dance for me takes over when words fail to uncover what needs to be communicated or when what’s being said is messy and not straight ahead. Or words take over when the movement needs to be contextualized through language. Most of my training and the messages from funders, etc., told me I had to choose: words or movement, theatre or dance. Words, and in my work often comedic words, open the doors with familiar meaning and references to the language of the body that we instinctually know but have been convinced by our body-phobic culture that we don’t know. I want to invite other people in, and the easiest invitation, for some to understand, seems to be words.

77

Argument #4: Even after being swept away by it all and saying how much they have enjoyed my work, I encounter audience members or other theatre artists unfamiliar with dance, or abstraction of any kind, who want to know what the dance means. I usually just ask them what they think it means, or better yet what they saw and how it made them feel. It doesn’t take long for a person to realize that they usually assign their own meaning to the movement. We are such a language-centric culture that I think we are afraid of anything that defies words to make sense of things. We are uncomfortable with questions that do not have concise answers, or that have mutable answers. We are even more uncomfortable with questions that we will never have an answer to, and this is where the body is a truer experience of what we little humans are grappling with. The body is never certain, it is moving and changing all the time, inside and out, it never lands in “this is it, here it is.” Maybe it moves from “I know this” to “I know this,” but it can’t stop to explain. We suffer when we try to make the body stay put to make sense of it all. You can’t publish the body of work that is dance, you can talk about it like I’m trying to do now but writing it down isn’t it. Maybe this is why dance is sometimes not taken as seriously and is filed under “ephemeral,” “feminine,” “decoration,” or “experimental.”

78

Conclusion: We build from what we are in that moment in time, in that body in space. I’d like to tell you that I think a lot about the idea of the “specialized,” the “hybrid,” the “virtuosic” when I’m thinking of performance and my work in particular. I’d like to tell you that I grapple a lot with the questions: Is it dance? Is it theatre? Or that I argue every day that all movement is dance and every organization of forms moving in space is choreography. But mostly I just go into a room five or six days a week for a few hours and start from improvising and moving around with questions in my head and dance to songs I like and try to find out what’s happening in my body and if it has anything to say. My body always has something to say and my mind usually has something smart to contribute. If not, I do long hand math to recalibrate – it’s true, I do.

Walking and Talking and Laughing with Friedenberg

In celebrating Tara’s right not to choose between performance forms, to in effect remain weird, I nevertheless want to suggest that what she describes as the way for her audience to find an entry point into her work – her funny words – is also what, in some quarters, prevents her from being taken seriously as a dance artist. Ephemeral, feminine, decorous, and experimental dance isn’t also supposed to make you laugh – unless it’s being consciously sent up, usually by sticking a cisgendered man in a tutu.2 As is the case in the world more generally, women in dance are given far less room (quite literally) to be funny. On the one hand, this is an inheritance of Romanticera ballet, which transformed the ballerina into a silent and sexualized object to be moved, the apotheosis of which we see codified in the twentieth century by George Balanchine, who famously stated that “Ballet is Woman.”3 But we see the same principle at work in commercial dance; for example, when classic burlesque morphs into striptease and the nudie shows of the 1950s and ’60s, the comically subversive woman’s voice is silenced in favour of the eroticized and commoditized spectacle of her unclothed body.4 In short, the dancing female body cannot also be bawdy. Especially in her character-driven solo performances Tara pushes back against this stricture time and again. And she does so precisely by playing with and troping on normative conventions of gender. bANGER (2006) represented a significant breakthrough in this regard, and for the permission to inhabit the psyche and physicality of a male character for the first time Tara credits working with Clarke on a project “where the process was great, the product not so much,”5 and also seeing Charnock perform at the 2005 PuSh Festival. Exposing and subverting through comedy the supposed nonperformativity of white masculinity – and, concomitantly, the imperative of white femininity’s hyper-performativity – is something from which Tara has never looked back, and it was her take on a crime-obsessed male teenager in Goggles (2009) that first hooked me on her inimitable aesthetic, which we might call a form of dance-forward feminist bouffon. Certainly Tara, in her trademark linking of highly physical but decidedly awkward and ungraceful movement with unsympathetic and often deliberately annoying characters (she is a superb vocal mimic), recalls Philippe Gaulier’s claim, with respect to both the historical traditions of bouffon and its contemporary reinvention, that “La parodie, c’est une arme de guerre.”6

79

Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg: I’ve always felt since I was very very young, kind of half man. I remember being about eleven or something

and realizing I wasn’t going to get facial hair, and feeling, “Fuck, really? That’s really limiting.”7 It is important to clarify that in developing her characters, Tara employs strategies of verbal and physical mimicry without falling into the trap of mimeticism. Her dance training and movement scores are key in this regard; recall her comments, from above, on abstraction in dance resisting the silver bullet of linguistic interpretation: “We suffer when we try to make the body stay put to make sense of it all.”8 The risk of mimeticism is that in collapsing the body of the performer with that of the role one ends up repeating rather than resisting entrenched representational codes, which as several feminist critics of theatre have pointed out can have troubling consequences with respect to the performance of gender.9 This is something Tara is all too familiar with; at the end of performances of Nick and Juanita: Livin’ in my dreams (2007), in which Tara delivers two movement-based monologues separated by an intermission – the first as a greasily macho and self-aggrandizing cable talk show host, the second as a bubble-headed Latina coquette (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2) – she regularly has audience members come up to her asking why her co-star, the actor playing Nick, didn’t take a bow.10 Interestingly, in all of her other works, we see Tara move in and out of her physical and vocal impersonations of different characters (and genders) before us on stage, effecting a gestic mimicry of a piece with Elin Diamond’s reclaiming, via Bertolt Brecht and Luce Irigaray, of mimesis for feminist performance.11 Sometimes this is accompanied by Tara donning or removing an item of clothing, as when, paradigmatically in bANGER , she puts on army fatigues over her satiny bustier and steps into a pair of combat boots as a way into the psyche and swagger of an alienated male high school metalhead. But just as often Tara will switch between characters simply by pausing and adopting a different pose. That Tara transports herself in and out of these characters through movement is key, for in reuniting the female comic voice with the dancing body she is retrieving a doubled pre-history of burlesque, one sundered as much by the rise of the decorous and resolutely non-verbal ballerina in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as by that of the silently gyrating stripper in the 1950s. In both of these cases, the moving female performer, as a figure of idealized or debased erotic display, cannot 80

Figure 2.1 Opposite and 2.2 Following page Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg in Nick and Juanita: Livin’ in my dreams (2007).

Walking and Talking and Laughing with Friedenberg

talk; she can only be talked about.12 By contrast, in her practice Tara is calling not just on physical comedy set-ups derived from classic vaudeville, but also on earlier traditions of clowning in which embodied truths could be spoken to power. Including at court, and including by women. Thus it is, in sticking with the French cultural and historical intertexts animating the previous chapter, that we find both Amédée Renée, in his Les nièces de Mazarin (1838), and John Doran, in The History of Court Fools (1858), referring to the “folle Capiton” who accompanies Don Juan of Austria to Paris as part of the entourage petitioning Louis XIV to accept as his bride the Spanish Infanta Maria-Theresa. Apparently Capiton became an instant foil to Marie Mancini, niece of Louis’s first minister, Jules Mazarin; Capiton, herself a Spaniard, delighted in goading Mancini, a previous favourite of the king’s, about how she was being passed over as consort.13 Gaulier has a rather more idiosyncratic take on the history of bouffon in France; first linking the tradition to the medieval Fête de l’âne, he then claims, contrary to Renée and Doran, that the “political place” of bouffons in the courts of Europe as persons who could “parlaient de la folie au pouvoir absolu” was in decline as early as 1600.14 And while Gaulier acknowledges that Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896) might definitely be claimed as a signal moment in the reinvention of modern theatrical bouffon, he also notes that the contemporary development of the form as distinct from the physical clowning then being taught by Jacques Lecoq in the early 1970s came as a result of the economic and political restlessness of the students: “Le bouffon est arrivé parce que les étudiants chez Lecoq (où j’enseignais) voulaient avoir des bosses, adoptaient des postures inquiétantes.”15 Distinguishing the bouffon from the clown, Gaulier notes that the former is meaner, more vulgar, someone you would not want to have over to dinner, and whose humour has a more critical edge;16 the bouffon, in this sense, is associated much more with a grotesque and satiric strain of comedy as theorized, for example, by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World.17 Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Gaulier notes that, in his pedagogy, the way into a bouffon character is always through an initial “physical deformation” of the body – a hump on one’s back, no arms or head, a big ass – that then licenses a spirit of parodic play previously absent from the improvisational process.18 Likewise, Tara claims that she finds the distinctively off-beat characters at the centre of her dance-theatre creations by first coming up with a frequently graceless and maladroit physical gesture, pose, or bodily prop, which then marshals that character’s accompanying voice. Thus, in Goggles

83

84

(2009), a brutally unsentimental portrait of a young boy locked in his basement who fantasizes about being a famous crime scene investigator, Tara’s discovery of the title character came about when she donned a pair of swimming goggles over the hoodie she was wearing in studio. The effect of adjusting the goggles made her scrunch up her nose and mouth and hunch her shoulders, which in turn produced Goggles’s annoyingly nasal way of speaking and his tense and defensive posture.19 A fearless physical performer, Tara is not afraid to make herself – and occasionally others – look foolish and unattractive, putting herself over and over again in positions of extreme vulnerability and/or ridiculousness. And while her brand of comedy is not exactly mean, it is playfully insolent and frequently presents as physically menacing, with Tara trading in dark themes, in the macabre, and often using gallows humour and a carnivaleque aesthetic to probe some of our deepest cultural taboos and human fears, including around death. For example, at the centre of Highgate, Tara’s intensely theatrical and mordantly funny take on Victorian funerary culture, is the strange spectacle of a trio of professional female mourners who are linked not just by their testaments but also by their vestments of mourning. Costume designer Alice Mansell (also Friedenberg’s mother) stitched together the sides of the skirts on the long black gowns worn by the widows, leading to many of the wonders of Tara’s choreography as the dancers, furling and unfurling their bodies around one another, bend and twist and contort their bodies into various states of lamentation. This includes a memorable sequence, set to the clockwork chimes of church bells, in which the women, their arms disappearing into invisible slits in the fabric of the skirt, tick-tock their torsos backwards and forwards in space, and also diagonally in the spaces between one another’s bodies, a canon as precise and ritualistic as the hourly ringing of Big Ben. Kinetically, the conceit of a connected trio became a way for Tara to challenge her dancers to work with and against their very different movement vocabularies. Visually and theatrically, it is metonymic of a certain prescribed lock-step social choreography associated with gendered and class-based practices of public mourning in nineteenth-century Britain, with Tara’s research having revealed to her, for example, that the mandated mourning period for widows was accompanied by strictly phased rules of dress and comportment: how much of the body had to be covered and for how long; when one’s veil could be lifted; when fabric trim and jewellery could be added.20 Then, too, there are the additional gothic associations conjured by the women and the different shapes they assume throughout the piece: here a murder of crows; there a creepy set of conjoined triplets

Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg: I always imagine he’s somewhere thinking that was really funny. You’re doing a piece on death. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Deal with this!23 Charnock developed his maverick aesthetic and emerged as the mischievous clown prince of the London dance scene during a period – the 1990s – when the uk was experiencing something of a boom in physical theatre training and performance, often as an explicit reaction against the perceived representational confines of academic dance (be it ballet or postmodern abstraction).24 In this regard, it is worth noting that, at the invitation of the British Arts Council, Gaulier relocated his school from Paris to London in 1991, beginning a decade-long residency there that saw him attract a famous

Walking and Talking and Laughing with Friedenberg

like those we might see on display in early twentieth-century American sideshows. And, indeed, in moving between her own bouffon roles in the piece – as Mrs Graves, a mistress of ceremonies not above robbing from the dead, and Mr Stone, a necrophilic undertaker – Tara recalls aspects of the stereotypical carny, not least in her increasingly aggressive hailing and involving of the audience. Highgate, of which the trio described above was the first public showing, grew out of an invitation from Peter Bingham to “do something different” for his annual choreographic series at edam. It eventually grew into Tara’s first group show. (Jackie Collins, Barb Murray, and Jane Osborne played the tick-tocking mourners at the edam showing in 2009, Alison Denham, Bevin Poole, and Susan Elliott in the show’s full-length premiere at The Cultch in 2013.) As previously mentioned, Highgate was to have been directed by Nigel Charnock, co-founder of dv8 Physical Theatre and a virtuosic solo performer, whose verbosity, anarchic irreverence toward dance technique, and “bent humour spoke to Friedenberg’s own unique, hardto-categorize style.”21 Tara had seen Charnock’s Frank – classic bouffon, in which Charnock rails at his audience, the state of the universe, and the state of contemporary dance, all while demonstrating his superb movement skills – when it played Vancouver as part of the PuSh Festival in 2005. She later invited him to co-teach a workshop on “talking and dancing” in the city in the summer of 2011, at which time Charnock signed on to oversee Highgate. The following year Tara learned Charnock had terminal cancer; just three weeks later he was dead. Summing up the shock, Tara drew on the “twisted humour” she and Charnock shared: “[The show] is about death, and my director dies.”22

85

86

roster of students, including Simon McBurney (artistic director of Complicité theatre company), Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson, and – “his most prized student” – Sasha Baron Cohen.25 Interestingly, an as yet unrealized collaboration that Tara has long wished to undertake with the filmmaker Allison Beda is a Cohen-esque mockumentary project, called “So I Think You Can Dance,” that would see her accost unsuspecting strangers on the street and, presumably against their will, teach them a short sequence of dance steps. A related project, “Art Police,” involves Tara serving as parole officer/warden/sponsor to art world and community peers seeking to take some new risks in/with their practice, but also needing someone like Tara to nag, cajole, and prod them into doing so. That she elicits such actions through a gently mocking combination of verbal shaming and physical humiliation is a further link to the traditions of bouffon – at least as taught by Gaulier, who is legendary for employing a “ludic pedagogy” of playful insult (both verbal and physical) in order to release in his students an inner “badness” that might inspire spontaneous “acts of idiocy.”26 The profaning of the sacred at the heart of so much bouffon – especially as the form has been disseminated through the teachings of Gaulier – is another link between the work of Charnock and Tara. For example, the almost sado-masochistic schism between sexual and religious longing that Charnock explored in Resurrection (1991), Original Sin (1993), and Hell Bent (1994) is also probed by Tara in Porno Death Cult (2014). In this work Tara parodies the eroticism of Catholic devotion, and in particular the pornography of belief surrounding images of the crucifixion, in a way that recalls the scurrilous and grotesque Bosch-like bouffon characters in Gaulier’s Celui-ci n’est pas mon fils (1986), in which Christ is portrayed (by a female bouffon, no less) as “the crackpot son of a raped virgin.”27 For Gaulier, who studied and then taught with Jacques Lecoq before founding his own school, the gradual disappearance of the bouffon (as fool or jester) from the Baroque courts of Europe was as much a legacy of religious persecution (the twin affronts, as he sees it, of the Inquisition and Protestantism) as it was of Enlightenment neoclassicism.28 Based on a 2010 pilgrimage Tara took along the Camino de Santiago in Spain, in which she became fascinated by the overtly erotic depictions of a crucified Christ in so many of the churches along the route, Porno Death Cult explores the porous borders between exaltation and abjection, rapture and torment, when the body is thrown fully into the service of belief: whether that comes in the form of slick, Vegas-style Christian evangelism;

Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg: Justine was really integral with [the] movement score for Porno Death Cult, because she’s got such an amazing eye for my patterns, well for seeing everything as patterns, and then challenging me, or saying just, you know, honour it: honour what your patterns are, what your movement is, the feeling coming out of the scene, allowing it to just flow into you … I just … allowed myself to create some improvisational scores that I repeated and repeated and repeated until they’re pretty much set, but they still live in that land where they keep growing and breathing. And I think too – this is going to sound dorky – but I think that at the age of whatever, however old I was two years ago, 41, I was finally, like, oh, I guess I’m a pretty good dancer. Up until that point I feel like I didn’t … I don’t know, I felt like maybe I wasn’t so strong, so it was like I had to put on … I put on these things, these other things. So, I think with that one, I enjoy dancing in that piece.29

Walking and Talking and Laughing with Friedenberg

new age Yoga maxims; or simply wanting to be filled up, like Tara’s central character Maureen, with something that incarnates, or indeed makes plainly carnal, the experience of faith. Channelling the seductive androgyny of Jared Leto at the 2014 Oscars, Tara arrives on stage in a white suit, her long hair hanging over her eyes, her body twitching and gyrating convulsively as she flits about the stage, trying not to step on the red-carpeted aisle leading from the audience to the upstage altar-cum-iconographic-shrine designed by Mickey Meads (see Figure 2.3). Eventually Tara puts her hands together, as if to pray, and parts her mane of hair, peeking out shyly at us, her expectant congregation. But she cannot immediately speak and so instead repeats a sequence of meek, almost apologetic gestures: grabbing her crotch, for example, as if in shame, or slowly turning her palms toward us in search of the stigmata she would have us understand was really there. Indeed, one of the things I found so compelling about this performance was how Tara, as a talking dancer, made an idea like the mortification of flesh – a fetish at once religious and deeply sexual – into a conceit that could be experienced, verbally, as a source of comic parody and, corporeally and kinaesthetically, as something deeply felt and wholly sincere. The movement vocabulary Tara developed for each of her characters in this piece was distinct and precise, but always the energy felt truly transporting, and I remember thinking when I first saw the work that Tara’s dancing had definitely attained a new level.

87

Figure 2.3 Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg in a publicity still for Porno Death Cult (2014).

88

In creating the work in which she also performs, Tara has for the most part always worked with a theatre director: Sophie Yendole for bANGER , Nick and Juanita, and Goggles; Anita Rochon for Highgate; Marcus Youssef for Porno Death Cult; and John Murphy for I can’t remember the word for I can’t remember (2018). However, it was only with Porno Death Cult that Tara also began working with a movement director/dance dramaturg. Justine A. Chambers had appeared in Highgate and, when not herself performing in Tara’s work (see my discussion of How to Be, below), she has served as a trusted outside eye ever since. In the case of Porno Death Cult, Justine’s eye for patterns also helped to give the work added thematic resonance. For, whether it was through a physically exhausting sequence of kneels, or in her expert demonstration of various iconic yoga poses, Tara also used movement (alongside a steady stream of words) in the piece to suggest how much of belief is merely habit. As Pascal famously said, “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.” Which is, on one

Walking and Talking and Laughing with Friedenberg

level, the lesson that Maureen learns over the course of the show. Having waited in vain for a special visitation from the son of God – a deeply longedfor embodied encounter, à la Madonna in “Like a Prayer,” with that obscure object of desire on the cross – at the end of the show Maureen takes a seat among us in the audience. She then turns to a fellow supplicant in the daily pilgrimage that is life and asks: “How was your week?” This part of the show, like other sequences involving direct interaction with the audience, is necessarily improvised, and Tara, as bouffon, controls until the very end how long and in what manner the comic interplay lasts. However, what is equally important is that this is the first time in the piece that Tara is not moving. Which is also to say that because the physical rhythms of her body are so carefully tied to the vocal rhythms of her characters’ speech throughout the rest of the work, it can sometimes be difficult to note when and where conversational gesture leaves off and a movement phrase begins. Yet, as with Charnock, Tara is a technically proficient and highly precise mover; her fluency across a range of styles, from ballet to ballroom, not only underscores (quite literally) her fleetness of tongue (that old trick of walking and talking), but also allows her to lampoon dance-as-Dance – as when, like Charnock in Frank, she draws our attention to the pose she is holding, or the “pointy thingy” she is doing with her foot. As important an influence as Charnock has been on Tara’s development as a dance artist, it is also crucial to situate her practice, and especially her pointed use of humour to explore questions of gendered embodiment, within a Canadian dance historical context that includes several women dancer-choreographers who might be seen as kindred spirits. Denise Clarke has been acknowledged as such by Tara, and watching Clarke perform her solo show wag at the Firehall Arts Centre in 2014 just six months after Tara performed Porno Death Cult in the same space I was reminded of their affinities as performers. Like Tara, Clarke has a penchant for wresting comedy from some very dark places (in this case, the death of her father), for immersing her audience in the story she is telling, and for drawing our attention to the different movement repertoires she is cycling through on stage, which means in wag breaking down both the beats in a hip hop number and the time signature of Johann Strauss’s The Emperor Waltz. Tara’s facility for creating multiple characters in her solo work also recalls the multi-disciplinary feminist practice of Regina-born and Vancouver-based performance artist Margaret Dragu, who channels different personae – among them Lady Justice, Verb Woman, Art Cinderella, and Nuestra Señora del Pan – in using her own body to address, often through humour and in

89

90

community art settings, topics that include sex, art, power, politics, money, and motherhood. While Dragu is most often thought of as a visual, media, and performance artist, she began her career as a dancer, studying with Alwin Nikolais and Murray Lewis and members of Judson Dance Theater in New York in the early 1970s, and then working in both the experimental and commercial dance scenes (including as a stripper) in Montreal and Toronto. Indeed, her live art actions, whether on the steps of the Ontario Legislature (Cleaning and Loving [It], from 2000), outside Canada’s House of Commons (where she appeared as Art Cinderella in 2012 to protest Bill C-51, the Conservatives’ so-called “Anti-Terror Law”), or in Vancouver performance events like HIVE 2 (Lady Justice Goes Buzz Buzz [2008]) and Live! Vancouver’s International Performance Art Biennale (Verb Woman: dance of forgetting [2009]), draw on the principles of structured improvisation, and she weaves a range of dance techniques into her performances, including burlesque, tap, and flamenco. And while, like Tara, Dragu is committed to dismantling the boundaries between audience and performer, in doing so she is also drawing on years of choreographic training, about which she is both matter-of-fact and cheekily unprecious: “I appear to be very democratic with people, but I have a lot of technique acquired over 45 years. Some of this is publicly acknowledged as technique and some is technique that I have invented.”30 Several of Dragu’s early choreographies (Kresges & Woolyworths and Try Leather, both from 1975) were premiered at Toronto’s 15 Dance Lab, a small studio space on George Street that was run by Miriam and Lawrence Adams, both former National Ballet of Canada dancers. The theatre was one of the first to present experimental dance and independent dance artists in the city, including several who, along with Dragu, eventually made their way to Vancouver. Cornelius Fischer-Credo, who danced in several pieces choreographed by Miriam, was one of them. Another was Jennifer Mascall. As a choreographer, Miriam Adams’s approach to postmodern dance was far from the “analytical” version Sally Banes has suggested characterized the 1970s postmodern dance scene in New York.31 Instead, her works were deliberately absurdist or satirical, and at times highly theatrical – although by no means apolitical.32 Fourteen, presented at the first concert by 15 Dance Lab on 12 June 1973, was an antically physical ode to yoghurt, which had just started to be produced in individually flavoured single-serving cups, and which Miriam celebrated through a poetic recitation of fruits while her dancers leapt and tumbled across the floor.33 Another Nutcracker (1974), “a

Walking and Talking and Laughing with Friedenberg

wacky takeoff on the … Christmas confection,” parodied the world of classical ballet that the Adamses had left behind.34 And in the program for Watch Me Dance, You Bastards (1978), presented at Toronto’s A Space Gallery, Miriam wrote pseudonymous notes “satirizing the authority invested in reviewers by including hilariously inane and pedantic comments about choreography and ballet technique.”35 Miriam was also a pioneer in using early video technologies to explore the possibilities of screen dance. One of her most extraordinary experiments in the medium is the mockumentary Sonovovitch (1975), which lampoons the cbc documentary Baryshnikov (1974), a hastily filmed, frequently mawkish, and crudely stereotypical account of the Russian dancer’s defection to the West in Toronto earlier that year. As Allana Lindgren has perceptively written, Miriam’s film parody, which is focused on the fictitious ballet star, Vladimir Sonovovitch, who also defects to the West, “exposes and ridicules artistic stereotypes and dismantles the reductive image of dancers presented in Baryshnikov,” while also countering “the limited agency usually afforded ballet dancers” through its method of production, with Miriam functioning as writer, director, producer, narrator, choreographer, and even performer (she appears as Helen Gallop, the dance partner of Sonovovitch, played by Lawrence Adams).36 While Tara has also experimented with translating some of her dance-theatre work to digital film, it is of course impossible to argue that anything in her practice takes direct inspiration from Miriam, who with her husband also founded several important dance magazines in Canada, as well as the national Dance Collection Danse archives and its accompanying press.37 Nevertheless, it is crucial to acknowledge that the specific form of contemporary comedic dance that Tara is working in has historical precedents among a group of trailblazing women dance artists in the country. Likewise, Tara’s work is in dialogue with a robust international output of feminist comic bodywork. The synergistic lightning bolt that went off in Tara’s head when she saw Charnock perform Frank in 2005 repeated itself seven years later when she was in the audience at the Edinburgh Fringe for a performance of Silvia Gribaudi’s A Corpo Libero. This slyly subversive and award-winning ode to the female body opens with the artist ruminating in voice-over about the size, style, and cleanliness of the dress she is wearing, and ten minutes later sees said dress lifted up over and onto the artist’s head as she goes on to perform a delightful belly (and breast and tricep and thigh) dance to a highly dramatic opera aria, the jiggly bits of Silvia’s body newly liberated and refusing to stay still. Tara, who was in Edinburgh to perform

91

92

bANGER , and who had not previously met Silvia when she was in Vancouver in 2011 as part of a collaboration with James Gnam and the Montrealbased dance artist Jacques Poulin-Denis that was initiated by The Dance Centre, has said that “Silvia’s solo was perhaps the funniest 20 minutes I’ve ever experienced”: “I wasted no time and asked her if she’d be interested in exploring the idea of collaborating on a project … It didn’t take long for us to decide that we wanted to make a duet together. We are very similar in many ways and also very different. The perfect combination of familiar and challenging. We both love to make ‘funny,’ poignant, feminist, genrebending work and we both have a strong community creation practice that feeds our methods.”38 While it would be wrong to describe Tara and Silvia as exact clones, both create works that combine movement and text and that use comedy grounded in the body to ask questions about the social construction of gender. As feminist bouffons, they are interested in tickling our funny bones while also getting us to think about why, exactly, we’re laughing. On the one hand, it might be risky putting two such similar dancing, talking comedic egos in a rehearsal studio together, like inviting Amy Schumer and Kathy Griffin to duke it out in a boxing ring, and with a go big or go home aesthetic presumably prevailing. In fact, over the course of a four-year collaboration supported by Dance Victoria’s Chrystal Dance Prize and a residency at Vancouver’s Dance Centre, Tara and Silvia were interested in both playing with and undermining these expectations. Indeed, the resulting duet, empty.swimming.pool, which premiered at The Dance Centre in February 2017 in a co-presentation with the Chutzpah! Festival, tropes on questions of female rivalry through a subtly hilarious burlesquing of theatrical razzmatazz conventions, while simultaneously eschewing the commodifying politics of spectacle that frequently attends those conventions, especially for women (see Figure 2.4). One once again detects the keen eye of Chambers in helping to frame this dialectic. Indeed, the piece begins quite soberly, with Silvia and Tara, both dressed in black, emerging in turn from the wings to survey the audience, coyly soliciting our gaze and occasionally playing with a hemline or a hand in a pocket (kinetic echoes from A Corpo and Porno, respectively), but otherwise refusing to “perform” for us. Eventually the duo moves downstage, but even then it takes them forever to do what we’re presumably waiting for: talk. Instead they first engage in a pantomime of raised eyebrows, mouéd lips, and open hand gestures. When, finally, they begin talking their conversation immediately descends into glossolalia as they cycle through the languages

Figure 2.4 Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg and Silvia Gribaudi in a publicity still for empty.swimming.pool (2017).

they both do and don’t really speak. This sequence culminates in a wickedly funny parody of common French words that non-native speakers are wont to pepper their speech with, a string of syncopated “voilàs” and “wows,” accompanied by suitably Gallic shrugs and raised arms. Thereafter Silvia and Tara take turns poking fun at the concept of virtuosity, with the latter partnering the former in a series of arabesques as Barbra Streisand sings “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and Tara demonstrating her impressive flexibility in cycling through a range of yoga poses. Silvia also launches into an operatic soprano during a bit in which she wades into the audience with her eyes closed. That particular moment seemed to come out of nowhere and was an especially visceral reminder that the two performers were not necessarily there to ingratiate themselves to spectators’ mainstream entertainment sensibilities, with a couple of audience members

93

actually walking out on the night I saw the show (something I’ve never seen before at one of Tara’s performances). Likewise, the simple step-touch sequence that serves as the culminating routine of the piece was the exact opposite of Vegas-style, automaton-like sexiness. Having stripped to panties and bras – Tara’s red and sparkly, Silvia’s covered in appliqué flowers – the two performers not only remain nonplussed by the display of their nonshowgirl bodies, but also keep up a barely in-unison snapping of fingers and sashaying of legs as Tara tells a story about being looked through as a mother with her son at the pool. Silvia sympathizes, only to complicate this moment of female bonding by subsequently telling us that she herself doesn’t have kids and then, hitching her torso forward and bending into a squat, indicating that the only thing she really likes to do with the lower half of her body is … to sit down. There is, however, something of a splashier finish to empty.swimming. pool. It begins with our duo warbling “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” together in a spotlight stage right. But Silvia, evidently disturbed by her partner’s lack of pitch, abandons Tara and walks offstage. She returns seconds later with a bottle of water, which she hands to Tara, who promptly takes a grateful swig and then continues to gurgle through another verse of the song. Disgusted, Silvia empties the rest of the water on the stage and again walks toward the wings. Just as Tara gets to the end of her number, reaching into her bosom to spray confetti over herself, Silvia runs on stage, slides through the water like a grand odalisque, and arrives at the feet of Tara with arms upstretched in triumph. Not to be outdone, Tara, having stormed off, makes her own sliding finale, this time on her stomach. Negotiating, within the traditional frames of theatrical reproduction, the terms by which they will be looked at, throughout this work these two consummate artists challenge our image of how they should be and behave on stage – as dancers, theatre artists, women. Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg: It’s ongoing. These mentors and directors and people saying: “Just use your own voice. Do your own thing.” And I’m really scared of that. I get uncomfortable about that … That’s why I hide behind the characters. Even though the characters are me.39 94

The story Tara tells in empty.swimming.pool about taking her son, Jasper, to Kits Beach pool and feeling invisible in front of all the other Lululemonwearing moms is, I would argue, a small but significant moment in the performance, and the evolution of Tara as a dance-artist more generally –

Walking and Talking and Laughing with Friedenberg

not least because she is, for the first time in my recollection of her performance work, speaking in her own voice. Tara has been candid with her collaborators – and in conversation with me – about her unease in exploring this territory on stage, and about how the physical and verbal comedy of the characters she develops feels not just more instinctive compositionally, but also more real in performance. Then, too, it is surely easier to be laughed at if one is consciously playing a clown. Which makes the risks Tara takes in I can’t remember the word for I can’t remember (2018), her most personal work to date, all the more interesting. This is not to say that in this solo piece Tara jettisons her trademark bouffon antics. Indeed, the work begins with her taking this aesthetic to a new, non-human level, with Tara loping on stage on all fours like a chimpanzee. Tara opens her big expressive eyes wide and blinks blankly out at the audience. She scratches herself, beats her breast, and hoots in the air before pausing and executing a short movement phrase with her fingers on the floor, her simian self sliding the tips of her digits out from under their curled knuckles in a rhythmic tempo reminiscent of a trained pianist – or a virtuosic texter (and digital technologies will return as a motif). Eventually Tara-as-chimp climbs into the lap of one front-row spectator and proceeds to pick invisible gnats out of his hair and eat them. Beyond serving as an hilarious set-up, and also demonstrating Tara’s amazing gifts of physical mimicry, it’s not immediately clear how this opening relates to the theme of memory, or to the rest of what follows. For after a short blackout, we are given Tara, now fully bipedal and standing in a square of white light centre stage, asking us, in medias res, “What was I talking about?” She puts this question directly to two different audience members, whom she also proceeds to size up and label (as, for instance, a New York Timesreading, npr-listening hipster), telling them how much she likes their boxes – but not as much as that of a third audience member whom she picks out, whose architecturally minimalist, postmodernly deconstructivist box is the ultimate cat’s meow. This second opening establishes the narrative throughline of the piece. On the one hand, waning memory is linked closely by Tara to our current age of multiple electronic devices, social media, and general information overload. Who can remember anyone’s phone number anymore, she asks, while simultaneously remonstrating with her own cellphone, positioned in its own personalized square of light, not to compete for her attention. Later she will also enact an increasingly slapstick movement sequence based on gestures associated with the tapping and scrolling and swiping of our screen devices. This theme alternates, however, with the

95

96

piece’s other big concern, namely the categorical boxes into which we slot different people, and into which we in turn are slotted (or slot ourselves). As Tara cheekily notes, returning to her square of light following her initial discourse with the audience, we all come out of a box when we’re born (which she demonstrates), and after about thirty-six months of running around and being allowed to remain generally formless, we’re then immediately put back into a box (let’s call it identity), where we’ll remain more or less until it’s time to climb into that other box that gets lowered into the ground when we die. The problem for Tara, however, is that in terms of her own life, there’s a four-year gap in her memory between the ages of three and seven. She wants to know where that box went, and also what’s in it. Or does she? Interestingly, in drawing on her own personal memories for textual material, Tara seems keen to underline their documentary authenticity, including voiceover recordings with both of her parents (and also, very movingly, her child, Jasper). Forgetting, here, becomes associated with trauma, and the black hole of memory that Tara is trying to excavate within the black box of the theatre sends her scurrying more than once to the upstage black wall, where, in perhaps seeking safety and/or escape, her body becomes that much more exposed and vulnerable and surveilled – more than once she recoils physically from the wall as the result of some sort of electrical shock or pulse it seems to emit. On the one hand, Tara seems to be suggesting in this piece that there is the forgetting that happens as a result of benign neglect – that is, because we have ceded the task of remembering to software and big data, whose invisible algorithms are set in motion through what Wendy Chun has called an “(undead) logic of programmability.”40 And then there is the more wilful forgetting we do, the things or events or people we put into boxes and then hide away at the back of our closets or underneath our beds. There’s no suggestion or resolution of which kind of amnesia is more harmful, although (to go back to her opening entrance, which will be reprised) Tara does hint that both are evolutionary processes, that within the larger context of deep, planetary time, what we do or don’t remember from day to day or across the arc of an entire lifetime is really just a drop in a really big and bottomless bucket. And this Tara cannily and metatheatrically demonstrates at the end of the show when, returning to the audience, she seeks our help in recalling what she’s doing here on stage and what has just happened over the course of the previous hour. The fact that her interlocutors have some trouble recalling what they have only just witnessed is an apt metaphor for

Walking and Talking and Laughing with Friedenberg

performance as a kind of anarchival forgetting in real time, although Peggy Phelan’s famous exhortations to critics of performance, including dance, not to seek to capture “the prop of the body” in “its journey from disappearance to representation”41 has been challenged by several scholars, including Judith Hamera, who has argued with respect to dance “that the strategic, ‘theoretical’ representation frame of technique renders its realtime incarnations both immediately readable and archival, that is, repeatable, memorable, and, ultimately, ‘theoretical’ again.”42 Thus it is that, based on what scraps of information she is able to glean from the audience, Tara concludes I can’t remember by attempting to reconstitute the sum of the performance through the physical repetition of its various fragments, confirming Hamera’s point about how the dancing body is able to remember through technical frames that are at once expressly personal and individual and also extraskeletal and transhistorical. Indeed, in thinking about this kind of memory as what I characterized at the beginning of the last chapter as the kinetically transtemporal inheritance of dance technique and pedagogy, it seems important to note, when contextualizing Tara’s work within the larger context of Vancouver-based movement genealogies, that I can’t remember the word for I can’t remember premiered as part of a shared double bill at the Firehall with Chick Snipper’s Unnecessary. The connection between Tara and Chick is long-standing and deeply material. They first met when Tara was a student at sfu and Chick was invited to create a repertory piece for the dance students. When, in 2008, Chick decided to move to Ottawa, she handed over her company, DanStaBat (dsb), to Tara, who reconstituted it as Tara Cheyenne Performance (tcp). Being gifted a provincially incorporated not-for-profit company with registered charitable status gave Tara a tremendous organizational and financial lift just as she was beginning to become known as a performer and choreographer. Since Chick’s return to Vancouver, Tara has continued to seek out her advice as a mentor, and the Firehall double bill was meant both to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of Tara’s company and to acknowledge Chick’s legacy in the fact of its existence, and in the history of contemporary dance in Vancouver more generally. In the end, however, Chick was not able to present the work she thought she would be creating. Big Melt, a planned investigation of the relationships between four generations of women dancers, did not receive its anticipated Canada Council funding, and so with the encouragement of Tara, Firehall artistic director Donna Spencer, and production manager Daelik, Chick conceived Unnecessary. Fittingly, the piece begins as a solo for Anne Cooper, whose own

97

98

storied history as a Vancouver-based interpreter of contemporary dance – especially as a long-time company member of edam – encompasses a wealth of embodied memories. Eventually, however, Unnecessary turns into a conversational duet between Anne and Chick; sitting on chairs downstage, they talk about their generational evolution as artists, the invisibility of older women in our culture, and what it might mean to reclaim space through stillness. I had met Chick a year earlier when we were both invited to a rehearsal of How to Be, Tara’s second group show, and the first work she had created in which she herself would not be performing. It is a project whose development I followed fairly closely, starting with an early showing at Granville Island’s Anderson Street Space as part of Boca del Lupo’s MicroPerformance Series (which also hosted a version of plastic orchid factory’s Digital Folk). Thereafter, Tara twice invited me into the Fraser Street studio of collaborator Kim Stevenson to observe rehearsals and offer feedback on the work: once in advance of its appearance as part of the 2015 Dancing on the Edge Festival; and then just before the work’s official full-length premiere at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in April 2017. Created in collaboration with dance artists Justine Chambers, Susan Elliott, Kate Franklin, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, Kim Stevenson, and theatre artist Marcus Youssef, How to Be constructs from the abundant raw materials of movement and spoken text that are Tara’s stock in trade a series of vignettes that focus on what I will call the “doing of being,” asking what it means when we materialize our aspirational or compensatory or competitive thoughts about who or what we wish to be as physical enactments of struggle or mimicry or synchronicity or incongruity. For Marcus, an actor, director, and playwright, this means dealing with his anxiety about performing as a dancer in this piece, something Tara showcases right at the top of the show. That is, just before the end of the curtain speech, Youssef, nattily attired in suit jacket and tie, descends to the stage from where he has been sitting in the audience. He places a notebook before him on the floor, consults it briefly, and then begins to assume various ballet positions with his feet, eventually ending up in third – and demonstrating a fantastic turn-out in the process. More consultation of the book follows, and then an attempt at an arabesque. Next, we get a bit of tap and step-dancing. And, finally, the big finish: a double pirouette with planted jazz hands. Consult, repeat: just as Youssef starts to win us over with his efforts, the other dancers – also surreptitiously embedded in the audience, and similarly attired in jackets and ties – descend one by one to the stage,

Walking and Talking and Laughing with Friedenberg

with Kim bringing up the rear. Forming a group upstage right, they cycle fluidly and in unison through the steps Marcus has been trying to master, and which he now seeks to match with ever increasing desperation to their rhythms. This sequence culminates with Marcus taking to one of the chairs that has been positioned downstage centre, where he is joined by Susan, who acts as sympathetic analyst (she solicits details about Marcus’s relationship with his father and an older sibling he never knew he had) as the other dancers cluster around them. The psychology of the group is still in play, however, as the other performers variously mimic and mock Marcus behind his back. Whenever he turns around, they pretend to be engaged in some other activity: we hear the tail end of a joke being told by Josh; or else Bevin has launched herself into an energetic round of charades. In both cases, Marcus is clearly positioned as being on the outside of the group and amidst this at once proximate and separate relation of bodies before us we see how the principle of inclusion and exclusion is central to identity formation in our culture. Each of the other performers experiences her or his own moment of separateness within the group, and to the extent that I read this piece as an attempt on Tara’s part to explore the question of dance ontology within a larger spectrum of ways of being in the world, it was fascinating to watch these amazingly talented but also very different movers explore the dialectic of coming together as an ensemble while also holding on to their individual expressiveness. This is a tension for any freelance dance artist performing in someone else’s work, but throw in the fact that in this case the choreographer is known for her highly charismatic solo dance-theatre performances, and one can perhaps see why Tara chose to absent herself from the stage in this case. Instead, the role of comic cut-up is here taken over by Kim, who in a virtuosic spoken word sequence demonstrates her mastery of faux-sincerity in praising the talents of her fellow performers in relation to herself, all the while simultaneously masquerading and revealing in her gestures the violence such comparisons are doing to her own psyche. Kate is physically compelling in a section in which she is literally straining to make herself seen and heard while being forcibly constrained by three of the other dancers. At one point, Justine reads out a list of imperatives to self (“I should moisturize more,” “I should eat less gluten”), her limbs repeatedly buckling and then reconstituting themselves under the weight of all these auxiliary obligations. Bevin makes Michael Bolton’s power ballad “How Can We Be Lovers” utterly her own, despite the opprobrium of the others. And Josh has an hilarious Magic Mike moment in which we witness the uber B-boy give

99

100

way to his inner Beyoncé, swinging his hips, shaking his ass, and vogueing like there’s no tomorrow. There’s also a duet between Kim and Kate that turns (again, quite literally) on the often fine line between affection and aggression, as the two attempt to trade ever more physical kisses and caresses while also tossing out compliments that start to sound like personal indictments. Before the women come to actual blows, however, the other dancers intervene, and the piece concludes with three sets of couples waltzing to Prince’s “Purple Rain.” Marcus watches from the sidelines, the non-dancer yet again excluded from the group. Until, following a brief blackout, we see him centre stage, busting a set of grooves that, to refer back to his opening attempts to follow a choreographic score, suggests that sometimes to be part of a structure you just have to improvise. How to Be, and Tara’s practice more generally, exemplifies one of the ways in which Vancouver operates as a nucleus of dance innovation nationally and internationally, with independent movement and theatre artists regularly collaborating on and in one another’s work, and drawing inspiration across disciplines both aesthetically and in terms of new models for making and presenting work and for sharing resources, including human ones. While there is similar crossover in the dance and theatre (and visual art and music) communities of other cities, Vancouver is distinct in at least two ways. First, one of the most important (and oldest) pre-professional training programs for contemporary dance in the city, the one at Simon Fraser University, where I teach, is part of an interdisciplinary art school that places an emphasis on working with and across different media. It is from this program that Tara herself graduated, and from whence many of the more experimental performance collectives in the city derive, collectives that, as per Tara’s art-making manifesto included at the outset of this chapter, are expressly interested in breaking down categorical silos. One thinks, in this regard, of Hong Kong Exile (comprised of dancer Natalie Tin Yin Gan, theatre artist Milton Lim, and musician Remy Siu); or of The Biting School’s brothers Khakpour (Aryo, the actor who also moves, and Arash, the dancer who also acts); or of Fight with a Stick (whose more-than-human, sitespecific performance choreographies have been devised with a mix of dance and theatre artists); or of a company like Theatre Replacement (t/r), whose co-artistic directors, James Long and Maiko Bae Yamamoto, have collaborated for many years with dance artists Josh Martin and Lisa Gelley, of Company 605, on the staging of pushoff, an annual pitch session of local performing artists’ work for out-of-town presenters that is held every year during the push International Performing Arts Festival. t/r’s Yamamoto

Walking and Talking and Laughing with Friedenberg

also directed and contributed to the movement design of one of 605’s more theatrically immersive dance pieces, The Sensationalists, in which audience members are given the option of roaming among the dancers on stage, or else watching proscenium-style from house seats. At the May 2015 premiere of this work, also at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, my partner, Richard, and I opted for the latter; talking with Tara about this decision in the lobby before the start of the show, she dubbed us Statler and Waldorf, the two crusty critics from The Muppet Show, and imagined us carrying on a running commentary on the piece, or at the very least her own and everyone else’s wardrobe choices. A second important factor to consider when discussing the distinct ways contemporary dance- and theatre-makers in Vancouver have influenced one another has to do with shared necessity. Thinking back to my reflections on dance spaces in the city in the preceding movement interval, it is important to note that the model for the co-located facilities at Left of Main that are tenanted by plastic orchid factory, machinenoisy, and Tara Cheyenne Performance was Progress Lab 1422, a 7,000-square-foot former garment factory on William Street in Vancouver’s Grandview-Woodlands/ Commercial Drive neighbourhood that, following a $500,000 renovation, opened as a rehearsal, production, and administrative hub for a number of independent theatre companies in the city, including Boca del Lupo, Neworld Theatre, Rumble Productions, and the Electric Company Theatre. The premise, one that directly inspired the idea for Left of Main, was pretty straightforward: band together to share resources and rent in order to ensure the stability and sustainability of each partner company’s organizational and artistic goals, while also contributing to the collective capacity of the broader performing arts community through programming partnerships and the affordable rental of space. On this front, the space has very materially helped to seed one of the most internationally recognized dancetheatre collaborations to have emerged from Vancouver, with Jonathon Young and the Electric Company’s partnerships with Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot on the lauded productions of Betroffenheit and Revisor having begun here.43 At the same time, the companies involved in Progress Lab (which includes many who do not physically share the space in terms of their dayto-day operations) were interested in finding a way to come together in order to inspire one another creatively, including through a project based on Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth’s documentary film The Five Obstructions, in which companies challenged one another to remake one of their previous works based on a set of obstacles provided by their peers. A version

101

of this exercise also took place at Left of Main soon after it opened with participating dance artists, and while Tara was not one of them, she did tell me that the experience of watching her peers revisit past work while in the midst of creating How to Be influenced her approach to rethinking the work.44 In the end, I couldn’t attend the official premiere of How to Be, as I was out of town. This was doubly disappointing: not only would I miss seeing all of the performers who had participated in the process on stage together in public for the first time, but Tara had also asked me to serve as a plant in the audience on opening night, someone whom Kim Stevenson would drag on stage during a bit in which, channelling her day job as a dance teacher to small children, she would chide and cajole myself and her fellow performers in a manically improvised floor routine. Intuiting my disappointment, Tara let me have a go at this bit during one last in-studio run-through before opening. This was sweet compensation, especially as my performance drew praise from my fellow outside eye, who was none other than Tara’s mentor, Chick Snipper. Chick said that I fit right into the comic physicality of the sequence. I replied that I had a great teacher in Tara, that it was she who had first let me experience what it means to cut loose – and also be a cut-up – on the dance floor. Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg: I think I thought I was supposed to be a certain kind of dancer or choreographer, and I think I had been doing that in lots of collaborations … But I think with Frame [2004] … I remember the feeling of “Fuck it, I’m just going to do this thing.” And it was, like, well, I don’t know: it could be horrible, but I don’t care … And then once I did [the piece] and it went over really well, I was, like, “Oh, I guess I can get away with doing this, with doing what feels right.”45

102

My own “fuck it” moment came in August 2014. To be sure, the initial impetus was all quite scholarly and academically familiar. My sfu colleague, Dara Culhane, an anthropologist and ethnographer interested in performance as a method for collecting and telling stories, invited me to participate in a fall “Imaginings Project” sponsored by the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography (of which Dara is a founding member and I am an affiliate, although as I suggested in the introduction to this book, my own disciplinary bona fides as an ethnographer are somewhat suspect). The theme of this particular “Imaginings Project” was “Laughing Matters:

Walking and Talking and Laughing with Friedenberg

Humour, Imagination and Political Possibilities.” Twelve of us had been invited “to explore humour as a form of imaginative ethnographic practice” in our respective fields, thinking self-reflexively about how comedy, satire, and parody might offer a different lens through which to envision our social theory and practice, research methodology, fieldwork and its transcription/ translation, and so on. And we were given lots of creative licence in terms of the form through which we took up such questions: a creative text; images; audio or video works. Given that I was then in the midst of conducting interviews and studio observation for the project that became this book, and given that Tara is the funniest dance artist I know, I thought it would be great to collaborate on a short video in which she taught me to dance and talk at the same time. That, in and of itself, would be hilarious, I knew. But there were some larger political issues regarding the gendering of dance and comedy that I was also interested in exploring via a frame narrative in which Tara and I would talk about her practice. As I discussed these and other issues with Tara at our first meeting, I also realized that the project would inevitably become something of an autoethnography, particularly in terms of working through some of the complex feelings (including the very unfunny feeling of shame) that would inevitably accrue around my own body when I explicitly put it on display and made it move to set choreography, no matter how basic the steps might be (and the topic of dancerly self-image is one that Tara herself explores with other female and non-binary movers in The Body Project [2019]). If Tara is the expert informant in terms of her facility in moving and telling a story in a virtuosically side-splitting way (the metaphor seems appropriate), what would it mean for me, as a decidedly non-virtuosic mover (who nevertheless loves dance), to use humour as a means to absorb into my own body some of her training and kinaesthetic knowledge? And how might we think of our ethnographic experiments in the studio contributing to a larger discourse around a comedic pedagogy of the body that could be equally useful in analyses of concert dance and social dance? Without going into too much detail about what we played at in the studio (you can, after all, see the results by watching the completed video46), suffice it to say that I was stunned at what we accomplished over our six sessions together. Tara is such an amazing teacher, quickly intuiting from the initial bits of improv at our very first session that behind my demure exterior there’s a showy diva at heart (the reference to the Rockettes probably tipped my hand). Having thus discovered my body’s core way of moving, and using one of my then favourite tunes, she was able to come up with

103

104

some simple choreography that I felt capable of mastering and that didn’t feel alien or unnatural. Ditto her methods for finding the threads of a narrative: a series of questions about what makes me happy and what I like to complain about very quickly morphed into the start of a comic monologue that again felt unforced because it came from daily life. That the “superiority theory” of comedy47 very much forms the basis of this monologue – a rant about the kinetic politics of sharing space on a crowded bus – says as much about my gender as it does about the bouffon genre of physical theatre in which Tara and I were working. Truth be told, I wasn’t really able to master the art of dancing and talking at the same time. My monologue is delivered largely standing still staring directly into the camera, and the movement score Tara built from our studio research – a fairly simple mix of traffic cop gestures and catwalk preening (see Figure 2.5) – was then intercut in postproduction editing via our third collaborator, camerawoman and research assistant extraordinaire Tara Gallagher Harris. Indeed, dance and talk only really come together virtually in the bit where I lipsynch to A Flock of Seagulls’ “I Ran” while shimmying out of my clothes and then running about in my underwear, a spontaneous decision on my part that now forever lives on the Web. We also did some “on location” shooting on an actual Translink bus that didn’t seem to faze in the least the other riders travelling east along Cordova on the No. 7: I’m sure they’d seen much stranger things before. None of this is, I suppose, all that important. What is important is that I felt comfortable taking a risk, translating my normal talk about dance into a decidedly unfamiliar and precarious dance with talk precisely because I was supported by both my chosen discourse community and a community of movers that, sometimes without even knowing it, has very much chosen me. Dara, representing the former group, immediately understood the value of me making a fool of myself without worry of the intellectual benefits that might accrue as a result. Tara, representing the latter group, and as my expert guide in walking and talking, likewise knew that in terms of kinaesthetic debts incurred one of them was most certainly not going to be mastery of any kind of academic dance technique. Rather, to echo Hamera, she showed me what somatically sustaining techniques of the body I already – and quite literally – had to hand, and how I could use them, in this case, to tell a funny story. That there was another Tara in the room whom I could rely on to edit out and/or humourously showcase my missteps post-production, attests to how much intersubjective support I had in pursuing a project that only a

Figure 2.5 Peter Dickinson and Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg in rehearsal at the Firehall, August 2015.

small coterie of friends and colleagues would see and whose very purposelessness and derivativeness would be a way for me to imagine another way I might move in and through the world. Not surprisingly, then, the biggest takeaway from my collaboration with Tara was the discovery that if I wanted to talk the talk with respect to the contemporary dance in Vancouver that so compelled me, then I would also have to walk the walk. It was one thing for me to reflect critically (and sedentarily) on work that I saw in front of my computer or, at most, to practise a form of muscular and kinaesthetic empathy from my seat in the audience. It was quite another to be inside an actual choreographic process. To Tara’s credit (or, maybe, given what she’s since seen, to her dismay), I was hooked. Shortly after we finished our collaboration on “Bus Dance,” I signed up to be part of the 2015 PuSh Festival staging of Sylvain Émard’s Le Grand Continental, a large-scale, outdoor contemporary line dance that

105

Figure 2.6 The author performing to “I Ran” at Tara Cheyenne Performance’s Lip Sync Battle IV, May 2018.

106

is made up of hundreds of community dancers and that has played festivals around the world since its 2009 premiere at Festival TransAmériques in 2009. And later that summer I subjected myself to the special rigours of Kokoro Dance’s annual Wreck Beach Butoh, the story of which forms the subject of my next chapter. More recently, Tara herself gave me the opportunity to tap into my own embodied techniques of memory when she asked if I would consider re-performing – live this time – a version of my video dance to “I Ran” as part of Lip Synch Battle IV, an annual fundraiser for her company in which she invites assorted members of Vancouver’s dance community to participate in a head-to-head smackdown that is legendary for its over-the-top performances and high-stakes choreography. Fortunately, I was performing out of competition (and fully clothed). I also, if I’m honest, couldn’t remember much of the original choreography, nor did I have time to review it. Nevertheless, that Tara issued the invitation in the first place, and that this signalled on some level that I indeed belonged to this community, was deeply meaningful. It also gave me the confidence I needed to improvise. If I do say so myself, I think I knocked it out of the park (see Figure 2.6).

INTERVAL 3

And: Company The calculus of incorporation and discorporation in the Vancouver dance world, or, what’s in a name …

The Stephen Sondheim allusion in the title to this movement interval is apt given the number of Vancouver dance companies run by couples (plastic orchid factory’s James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, Kokoro’s Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi, Company 605’s Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin, Out Innerspace’s David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen, Dancers of Damelahamid’s Margaret and Andrew Grenier), or even ex-couples (battery opera’s Lee Su-Feh and David McIntosh). Then there are all of the Vancouver dance artists who regularly collaborate with partners who work in other media: Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg and her husband Marc Stewart, a musician and composer; Jennifer Mascall and her husband John Macfarlane, a lighting designer (and also my colleague); Vanessa Goodman and partner Ben Didier, a composer and graphic designer; Justine A. Chambers and partner Josh Hite, a visual artist; Crystal Pite and husband Jay Gower Taylor, a former Ballet bc dancer and now Kidd Pivot’s set designer. No doubt this accords with dancers working in other cities, and with performers working in other disciplines. As in any profession, if you’re an artist working closely with other artists on a daily basis, romantic relationships are bound to form. But in what other ways does one keep company with one’s dance world colleagues? And, perhaps more pertinently, how many bodies does it take to do so, how often do those bodies meet, and who is paying them? I ask these questions because I am interested in thinking through not just the affective constitution of dance companies, but also their practical and material operations. This means, first and foremost, distinguishing between a dance

108

company whose members are salaried and have seasonal, yearly, or ongoing contracts of employment (and the health and other benefits that go with those contracts) and a pick-up company whose members are paid on a project-to-project basis. The former model tends to be most associated with long-established and financially well-endowed classical ballet companies that have adjunct training institutions from which to elevate new members, historic houses in which to perform, and a significant choreographic repertoire from which to program each new season. One thinks, in this regard, of venerated organizations like the Kirov or Bolshoi, the Paris Opéra Ballet, the New York City Ballet, the Royal Ballet of London, and, in Canada, the big three of the National Ballet of Canada, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. These companies also tend to be rigidly structured in their hierarchies, less risk-taking in their programming, overwhelmingly white, and, as has been seen in the wake of the #MeToo movement, rife with misogyny and sexism.1 Of course, there are also many modern and contemporary repertory dance companies in which dancers have been able to forge long and successful (if not always financially remunerative) careers, and which have managed to survive their founders’ departures or passings. In the Canadian context, one thinks especially of Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers and Toronto Dance Theatre (both of which have their own schools), and also Ballets Jazz de Montréal.2 There is no equivalent such company in Vancouver; even regular edam dancers are hired according to availability and resources. Only Ballet bc, about whose contemporary mandate under the artistic directorship of Emily Molnar I will have more to say in the last of this book’s movement intervals, is able to offer most (but, crucially, not all) of its company dancers full-time yearly contracts, which it does primarily through off-season touring. Indeed, even a contemporary dance luminary of the stature of Crystal Pite decided to relocate her company, Kidd Pivot, to Frankfurt for three years (2010–12) so that she could pay her dancers full-time as a result of a financial deal with the city’s Kunsterhaus Mousontorm, which resulted in the creation of both The Tempest Replica and The You Show.3 One can’t imagine the governments of Montreal and Quebec letting something like this happen to Compagnie Marie Chouinard. Yet notwithstanding these exigencies, according to the Societies Registry of British Columbia, there are hundreds of incorporated not-for-profit dance companies in Vancouver. Most of them exist to further the creative expression of their founding artistic directors and/or collaborating partners and, as such, there are plenty of reasons for an independent dance artist to form

And: Company

a company, even if it’s really only a company of one. Chief among these is increased capacity through access to operating, development, capital, community engagement, strategic initiative, presentation, and other sources of municipal, provincial, and federal government funding. These pots of money tend not to be available, or at least not to the same degree, to artists applying for individual project, career development, or touring grants, which often have maximums within yearly funding cycles. Indeed, Amber Funk Barton has stated that the founding of her company, the response., in 2008, when she was in her late twenties, came as a result of her having tapped out the number of individual Canada Council project grants she could apply for consecutively. As she put it, “I figured, how hard could it be. I mean, if Josh Beamish could do it when he was only 17 then I just thought, okay, let’s go for it.”4 Of course, constituting and being answerable to a board of directors, applying for registered charitable status, filing annual financial statements, and reporting to one’s members can take a lot of time away from research and creation in the studio, and for these reasons many Vancouver dance artists (Justine A. Chambers and Deanna Peters, among them) have told me they have no desire to incorporate officially as a company (even if, in Deanna’s case, she operates under the name of Mutable Subject).5 Relatedly, and as noted in the preceding chapter, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg has acknowledged that her company, Tara Cheyenne Performance (tcp), would not have been possible – at least not in the same way or with the same strong structural foundation – had she not been gifted the already incorporated DanStaBat (dst) Performance Society by Chick Snipper in 2007. And, indeed, despite its new name, tcp continues to report officially on its charitable tax returns as dst, which was first founded in 1985.6 The unique example of tcp/dst invites a cross-generational analysis of contemporary dance companies currently operating in Vancouver. On the one hand, for those founder-led companies that were established, like Chick’s, in the 1980s or early 1990s, questions of choreographic legacy and/ or succession necessarily arise as their leaders age and contemplate retirement. For some, such as Karen Jamieson and Judith Marcuse, this has meant actively working with professional archivists to preserve materials related to their long and distinguished careers, and additionally in Jamieson’s case to apply for funds to help reconstruct and rethink past works, particularly those she has made with different Indigenous communities in bc.7 For others, such as the surviving Vancouver-based members of the original edam collective, it has simply meant continuing to make work. As Kokoro’s Barbara Bourget put it to me, “Kokoro will be over when Jay

109

and I are.”8 But does that mean the work disappears with them? How does one keep company with repertoire that has helped to define the dance history of a city if there is no mechanism (a trust) and embodied means (répétiteurs) to do so? I think about these questions in relation to the sudden passing of Lola MacLaughlin, also a founding member of edam, and the (posthumous) subject of one of my early blog posts on the contemporary Vancouver dance scene.

T H U R S D AY, 2 6 M A R C H 2 0 0 9 Whatever Lola Wants Just back from a noon show at The Dance Centre: excerpts from Lola MacLaughlin’s Provincial Essays (2007). Given MacLaughlin’s passing earlier this month after a brave battle with ovarian cancer, the place was understandably packed, with many well-known members of the local dance community in attendance. MacLaughlin was an important force in Vancouver dance. She was the first graduate of the dance program at my university; a co-founder of EDAM Studios in 1982; and, from 1989, founder and artistic director of her own company, Lola Dance. According to critic Kaija Pepper, who led a talkback session between the dancers and rehearsal director Susan Elliott after today’s performance, Lola’s choreography was rooted in a profound attachment to place (one of her best known works is 1998’s Four Solos/Four Cities), and to place in British Columbia in particular. This is certainly evident in Provincial Essays, which unfolds as a series of kinaesthetic inquiries into the dialectical relationship between nature and culture, landscape (in the broadest sense of that word) and the built environment, the pastoral and the sublime. In the abbreviated 45-minute version of the work we saw today (which was also minus one of the five dancers and various bits of tech), we are introduced to signature gestures that will be repeated as part of the dancers’ larger repertoire throughout the piece. While this is happening, performer Ron Stewart informs us of the genesis of each gesture from Lola’s larger menagerie of movement – an elephant walking, a bird hopping, a flower blooming – and of Lola’s initial desire to have a real waterfall as a backdrop to the women dancers’ cumulative display of the gestures. We are asked, instead, to imagine the waterfall, and when in fact one eventually appears as part of the video projections used throughout the piece, it is 110

of course too real, its representational magnificence threatening to overwhelm and obliterate the sight of the dancers rehearsing what are after all some fairly pedestrian steps. It is precisely these kind of witty philosophical juxtapositions – along

with the equally sublime work of an immensely talented group of dancers – that makes Provincial Essays such a pleasure to watch. When, for example, this catalogue of “natural” gestures we have been introduced to at the top of the piece later reappears in an urban techno sequence featuring all of the dancers in full machinic assemblage, and with a paved streetscape as video projection, we understand that there can be no nature outside of culture. Provincial Essays also features complex and demanding solos for each of the dancers, and it was interesting to hear, in the talkback session, Ziyian Kwan and Alison Denham talk about Lola’s method of working one-on-one with each of her dancers, improvising movements with them, carefully naming and noting down each of these movements, asking the dancers to memorize them, and then building a solo around them: retaining those that seem to work, adapting others, and jettisoning what doesn’t fit. In Kwan’s case, Lola apparently asked her to begin by imagining she was dancing inside a box, and this worked so well that in the full, performance version of the piece, an actual box appears on stage. In Alison’s case, she noted that she was not the first dancer to perform her role, and that the challenge for her was to learn a solo that had been created on and for another dancer’s body. Provincial Essays recently toured to Toronto, playing at Harbourfront on March 6th, the very day Lola died. It will be remounted this October in Vancouver at The Cultch. A celebration of Lola’s life will take place at The Dance Centre on Monday, April 6th, at 4:30 pm.

And: Company

To be sure, Lola’s work continues to live on in the bodies of dance artists like Ziyian and Alison, who are both still active in the community. In this regard, I am reminded of the ways in which my colleague, Judith Garay, has begun to explore ideas of choreographic inheritance with former members of her company, Dancers Dancing, many of whom she also taught as a professor in the Dance Program at sfu. For example, following remounts of her work The Fine Line ~ twisted angels in 2014 and 2015, she worked with dancer, scholar, and media artist Shannon Cuykendall to launch an interactive website, A Performer’s Perspective, that used vr technology to capture from company members Vanessa Goodman, Bevin Poole, and Antonio Somero their embodied memories of the work.9 More recently, for a year-end rep concert at sfu’s School for the Contemporary Arts entitled RE she invited former company members, including Vanessa and Bevin, to reimagine and reset favourite past Dancers Dancing works they had performed on sca’s senior undergraduate dancers.

111

112

At the same time, it’s important to note that many dance companies have lifespans that are completely separate from those of their founders. And for reasons, especially among a younger generation of dance artists in Vancouver (many of whom have multiple professional and life gigs on the go at one time), that legitimately have to do with a creative mandate or way of making work having run its course. Thus it is that The Contingency Plan, the collective Vanessa established with fellow sca alums Jane Osborne and Leigha Wald in 2008, officially ceased operations in 2019. With Wald already having left the group in 2012, Vanessa and Jane mutually agreed to end the collaboration. This would allow Vanessa more time to concentrate on her own company, Action at a Distance (about which I will have more to say in Chapter 4), and Jane to transition into full-time Pilates teaching, which is a career that a number of Vancouver movers have taken up following or coincident with running or being a part of different dance companies. To this end, Noam Gagnon feels the most important company he has formed while working as a dance artist in Vancouver for over thirty years is not The Holy Body Tattoo, the iconic (and iconoclastic) group he established with Dana Gingras and Jean-Yves Thériault in 1993, and about whose dissolution fifteen years later he is far from mournful (even after a successful 2016 remount and international tour of their last major work, Monumental, first produced in 2005). Nor is it the company he currently directs, Vision Impure. Rather it is the Beyond Pilates studio that he founded in 2005 as a means of ensuring both physical and financial well-being if and when he decides to wind down his dance career.10 Parallel to winding down a dance company is the idea of scaling up to one. Among the more successful of a younger generation of dance artists who rose to prominence during the period documented in this book, Company 605, and how it grew into that name, provides an interesting example. Originally known as the 605 Collective, the group took its moniker from the apartment number that Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin moved into at the arc (Artist Resource Centre) live/work studios at 1701 Powell Street, on Vancouver’s east side, in September 2006. It was there that the couple began jamming with Shay Kuebler, Sasha Kosak, and Maiko Miyauchi, drawing from members’ respective hip hop training in such a way that the group functioned as a de facto crew. As the group began to professionalize (they incorporated as a society in 2009) and as original members began to branch out with their own projects (with Kuebler forming his own company, Radical System Art, in 2014 and Miyauchi leaving to co-direct ouro Collective

in the same year), Lisa and Josh, who have both spent a number of years dancing for other Vancouver-based companies (Lisa for six years as a member of Aeriosa, the aerial dance group led by Julia Taffe, and Josh on and off for Wen Wei Dance and others), transitioned into co-artistic directors of 605 and as the main choreographers of the work being produced. This changed ethos – from a group of emerging member-artists creating work together and from a shared diy mentality to an organization that now had the support of a management company (New Works until the end of May 2015, Eponymous since that time) and administrative and operational funding, and that was creating original work on a seasonal basis – necessitated a change in name in order to reflect this new phase of professional development. As Martin put it to me, “There were multiple reasons behind the change, and in many ways it was probably overdue, but the reality was that we had been functioning as a ‘company’ for many years beforehand … and we wanted it to be clear that our structure as an arts organization was acting as such. While the nature of how we wanted to work, and the values we have as makers[,] are still very much rooted around a collective collaborative mentality, the connotations around the word ‘collective’ within the Canadian dance landscape also didn’t feel right anymore for the scope of activity we were doing as an organization.”11 The official name change – from 605 Collective to Company 605 – occurred on 1 January 2016. Shortly thereafter the group premiered Vital Few at the Vancouver International Dance Festival.

F R I D AY, 1 8 M A R C H 2 0 1 6 Vital Few Rehearsal at VIDF This is an insane weekend for dance shows: it’s the last weekend of

VIDF ;

Ballet

Program 2 kicks off tonight at the Queen E; Words in Motion, a collaboration

between The Dance Centre and

UBC ’s

Chan Centre, takes place Friday and Satur-

day; and Justine Chambers and James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam are collaborating with mixed media artist Evann Siebens for a showing of The Indexical, Alphabetized, Mediated, Archival Dance-a-thon! at

WAAP

on Saturday. Something

And: Company

BC ’s

had to give, and owing to previous commitments it ended up being VIDF . Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed to be missing the premiere of Company 605’s latest work, Vital Few. However, thanks to the intervention of Ziyian Kwan, whose latest creation for Dumb Instrument Dance, Still Rhyming, will be preceding Vital

113

Few on

VIDF ’s

free Roundhouse Exhibition Hall stage tonight through Saturday, I

was able to get 605 principals Josh Martin and Lisa Gelley to consent to let me watch a run-through of the piece yesterday afternoon. Vital Few is built from some of the work that 605 showed at

VIDF

last year, but

they have expanded the piece quite substantially. There is an amazing amount of dancing jammed into the show’s 75+ minutes, most of it featuring the full company complement of six dancers (Martin, joined by Laura Avery, Hayden Fong, Renée Sigouin, Jessica Wilkie, and Sophia Wolfe; co-director Gelley, newly pregnant, was watching over everything from the tech booth). The piece begins with Avery entering stage left, walking downstage centre and staring out searchingly at the audience; Martin soon joins Avery, embracing her, but in a way that requires a constant shifting of their responses to each other, with Martin actively adjusting Avery’s limbs, moving one arm here, shifting her head there. Not that it felt to me that Martin was treating Avery like a wind-up doll; it was more like he was dissatisfied with the external representation of bodily affect each pose was conveying and that he was in search of something more authentic – because, presumably, more natural. Soon Avery and Martin are joined by the rest of the dancers, who pile on in a group hug, but one that is constantly in motion, with different bodies darting out from under, or else diving back into, the mass of bent torsos, tucked heads and wraparound limbs. It was like the company was playing a completely upright game of Twister. Eventually Avery’s head pops out of this restless bodily mass, her expression as quizzical as when she first entered on stage, her hair none the worse for wear. Two arms belonging to her still enmeshed confrères slice the air, like a conductor, or reach around to scratch the back of the dancer most downstage to the audience (Martin, as I recall). Again, I didn’t really register this as a visual cliché, 605’s version of a many-armed Hindu goddess practicing her mudras. Instead, I saw it as a concrete physical articulation of the company’s method, which is all about how the individual moves with and in response to the group, and which involves a mix of improvisation and set choreography. To this end, when we start to hear the first of the two songs sung by Enrico Caruso that are used in the piece, the dancers begin breaking apart, spitting out duos and trios that approximate the occasional waltz step or a bit of classical partnering, before reforming like an amoeba under a microscope. Eventually, however, the amoeba does unfurl into a chain, and then the chain itself splits apart, with each of the dancers taking turns at some solo freestyling. But it is 605’s version of 114

serial, shared, or transferred movement, their very own hybrid of canon and unison formations, that always captivates me. The way they begin a movement phrase in one body and transport it mid-articulation to another without interrupting the flow,

but also while frequently changing the direction, is something that I experience in my own body as an uncanny bit of mirrored rippling, almost as though we in the audience should be doing the wave in response – except for the fact that in this case, apart from the assembled crew and videographer, I was an audience of one. Maybe as a result of the piece’s opening tableau, I found myself focusing a lot on the dancers’ arms in Vital Few. They do a lot of work here: they hail, they wave, they signal; they are cocked above the eyes when someone looks out, or raised heraldically above the head when someone else wants to pose; they are used to push people out of the way and also offered in support. More than once, as in the jazzy swingtime number where Fong is a standout, they are used to square off space between dancers, or to frame parts of their bodies, a game tinged with shades of threatened violence that leads to a series of increasingly fast and more complex interlocking Lego-like combinations of so many arms akimbo. Not everything worked for me in the show. I thought it was a bit too long and it felt like there were two endings (a note Martin confirmed to me afterwards that they’d received from others). Following a particularly vigorous and rhythmically hypnotic group sequence danced to a loop of what sounded like a record stuck in a groove (shades of Inheritor Album?), the dancers all eventually arrive upstage, freezing one by one in a rectangle of white light. I heard myself audibly exhaling at that point, which suggests to me this would be an appropriate place for a blackout. Instead, the piece continues for another fifteen minutes or so, culminating in the group ripping up the shiny reflective Mylar floor surface taped over the white Marley, and which casts such amazing effects of light upon the upstage screen wall throughout much of the piece. The sheets are piled upstage where before the dancers’ bodies had stood, a shiny aluminum mass that in its lumpen and amorphous shape recalls the fluid and heaving mass of bodies downstage at the top of the show, and that perhaps serves as a metaphor for all of the vital energy the dancers have literally left on the floor. But to bypass interpretation and to settle into the experience of this moment partly because it felt like I had seen it before. I am thinking in particular of DanceHouse’s 2012 presentation of Blush by Gallim Dance (who were just back in town last week as part of Chutzpah!). There a similar instance of “tearing up the dance floor” came as a shock, but the effect still somehow registered as being very much

And: Company

(that was for you Deanna!), this second ending wasn’t as satisfying for me. This is

inside the world of the dance; in the case of Vital Few, by contrast, I couldn’t help thinking I was watching the striking of a stage set. That’s an ending, to be sure, but maybe one that’s a bit too “meta” for a piece that is otherwise so focused on what remains so vital about the pure art of dance.

115

In the end, I would like to believe that what is most vital to the idea of a dance company, however it is formed and however long it lasts, is not so much the business side of its operation – though that obviously cannot be ignored, even for a not-for-profit. Rather, in my observations of and collaborations with the different Vancouver dance companies represented in this book, what seems to be at their core is fellowship, the embodied and affective condition of making and sharing work with others. I certainly registered this impulse in Lisa and Josh allowing me to sit in on the rehearsal for Vital Few. As will become clear in the next chapter, I felt it even more keenly – and in all its fraughtly negotiated complexity – when, over the course of two successive summers, I briefly became a member of Kokoro’s fraternity of dancers.

116

CHAPTER 3

Between Sand and Water Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

While not always consistent in my attendance, since 2015 I have tried to take weekly class with Kokoro Dance’s Barbara Bourget. Most Friday mornings, first at Harbour Dance on Granville Street and now at Kokoro’s kw Studios, adjacent to where I teach in the School for the Contemporary Arts at sfu Woodward’s, I have sweated through ninety minutes of Barbara’s unique curriculum, that is, regular drilling in classical and modern (Limón, Horton, Cunningham) technique and choreographic combinations derived from Kokoro’s post-butoh style. I have also endured Barbara’s oldschool teaching methods: which is to say that she is as exacting in her expectations as she is in reminding us how consistently we fail to meet them. How, on the other side of the age of fifty and with any number of other class options available to me, I have come to subject myself to this abuse and, what’s more, how I have secretly come to enjoy it, is the subject of this chapter. It largely reflects on my participation in two Wreck Beach Butoh processes, the annual community-based dances led by Kokoro every summer on Vancouver’s famous clothing-optional beach. But in contextualizing my field notes on those processes I am likewise seeking to broaden the dance history I am telling in this book, both in framing Barbara’s and life and professional partner Jay Hirabayashi’s pre-Kokoro contributions to that history as founding members of edam, and in using butoh as a form to redirect the transnational flow of dance and cultural influence documented in the first two chapters: from a cross-Atlantic circuit to a trans-Pacific one. The story I am trying to tell actually has its genesis in a separate research project on Vancouver dance. Influenced by the work of my then doctoral

118

student, Alana Gerecke, on the history, politics, and “relational kinaesthetics” of site-based dance in Vancouver,1 in the summer of 2013 I began to document my experience of three different annual showcases of outdoor dance in the city: Dancing on the Edge Festival’s presentation of the Ontariobased series Dusk Dances, staged for the first time in 2013 at crab/Portside Park in the Downtown Eastside (dtes); New Works’ All Over the Map midday program of “global” dance and music on Granville Island; and Kokoro Dance’s eighteenth annual Wreck Beach Butoh (wbb). The starting point for my comparison was Lance Berelowitz’s contention in City of Dreams that public discourse and interaction in Vancouver tends to take place “at the edge,” that is, along the city’s sprawling seawall and on its beaches.2 According to Berelowitz, many of the highly choreographed and commercialized activities and entertainments that take place on the latter are actually designed to neutralize contested discussions and debate about the politics of place.3 I was thus interested in the ways in which the different outdoor dances I had chosen as my case studies were either more or less attentive to the social and environmental contexts of the public spaces in which they were being performed. In other words, was the site just a spectacular but mute backdrop to the human choreography, or did it play an active part in co-producing that choreography? And, regardless of artistic intention, when and to what effect did place assert itself as a sublime disturbance upon the invisible proscenium nevertheless still mediating spectators’ horizons of expectations for the performances?4 In attempting to answer these questions, I not only attended and analyzed each performance, but also conducted interviews with choreographers, performers, and hosts. And I undertook three ethnographic walks between each of the performance sites, overlaying the geography of my movement with a performative narrative of Vancouver’s history of Indigenous displacement, colonial settlement, and economic development. For reasons I will elaborate on at greater length below, I concluded that wbb was the most socially and environmentally aware of the site dances under scrutiny. But while I have no doubt that Barbara would be pleased to hear this, at the time I first met with her and Jay back in 2013 to discuss my project, and to solicit their comments on the evolution of wbb as a sited community-based dance, Barbara was blunt in her assessment of my methods. Waiting – with typical impatience – for Jay to finish saying something, she turned to me and said that talking to them, watching a performance, and investigating the history and topography of the site would only get me so far. To truly understand the reciprocal relationship between dance and landscape in wbb I had to perform the work.

Barbara Bourget: I’ve quit dancing so many times it’s really remarkable I’m still doing it.5 Jay Hirabayashi: I didn’t have any connection to dance when I first came [to Vancouver] … The only thing I had was a wonky knee.6

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

Barbara and Jay met in 1979 as members of the Paula Ross Dance Company, although their routes to her West Broadway studio could not have been more different. Barbara had been dancing since she was a young child; her first ballet teacher was Mara McBirney, a British ex-pat famous for her early training of some of Vancouver’s most illustrious dancers, including Lynn Seymour. Arnold Spohr then accepted a sixteen-year-old Barbara as a scholarship student at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School, where she danced in works by such pioneering American women choreographers as Pauline Koner and Agnes de Mille. From the rwb, and following a brief stint in Banff, Barbara moved on to Les Grands Ballets Canadiens (lgb) in 1969, just missing Judith Marcuse, who had left the company the previous year, but who would later cast Barbara in two works, Playgrounds and We Can Dance, when both women were back in Vancouver. While at lgb, Barbara was primarily a member of the corps, from whence derives her famous antipathy in her classes and her choreography for straight lines. However, artistic director Fernand Nault did cast Barbara as the original Sally Simpson in lgb’s highly successful rock ballet of The Who’s Tommy, and she toured with the work throughout North America from 1970 to 1972. Following two and half seasons with the company, Barbara took her first hiatus from dance, eventually settling back in Vancouver in 1974. As a young mother newly separated from her first husband, Barbara returned to dance when she joined the Mountain Dance Theatre Company (formerly Burnaby Mountain Dance Theatre), under the direction of local legends Mauryne Allan and Freddie Long. But she found the demands of dancing professionally and raising a child on her own too difficult, and so once again stopped performing. A chance phone call from an old friend about taking over a touring role led to her working with Paula Ross and also meeting Jay. Barbara describes both experiences as “life-changing.”7 At the time of their meeting on that 1979 tour, Jay had been a member of Ross’s company for just one year, which is also the same length of time he had been dancing. Having moved to Vancouver from Edmonton in 1973 with his wife, Alix, and their daughter Bodhi in order to pursue an ma degree in Buddhist studies at the University of British Columbia, Jay required surgery on his knee in 1977 as a result of an old skiing injury (suffered at

119

the 1969 Canadian National Downhill Championship races at Whistler, where he was on track to qualify as a member of the 1972 Canadian Winter Olympic team). As part of his rehabilitation, he decided to take dance classes, so he joined an adult class at the studio his five-year-old daughter was attending. The studio was owned by Ross, who, as it turns out, had inherited it from McBirney, with whom she – like Barbara – had also studied. Jay began attending Ross’s classes twice a week, upping that to three times a day after three months as part of a promotion being offered by Ross. After six months, Jay was awarded a scholarship, and after nine he was asked to join the company. According to Jay, Ross preferred working with older dancers, and she was more interested in one’s life experience than in the extensiveness of one’s technical training. It also probably helped that she was married to a Japanese Canadian.8 Jay Hirabayashi: I still think [Paula] is one of the most amazing choreographers and dance people. But she was challenging to work with because she would go after people in a kind of personal way.9

120

In a 1992 article both advocating for and diagnosing the dawn of a “new era” in Vancouver dance, Jay reflects on his time as a member of Ross’s company in the context of that earlier period’s smaller, hothouse environment, and the corresponding competition for resources – both financial and human. While acknowledging the existence of Pacific Ballet Theatre (founded in 1975, and the forerunner of Ballet bc), as well as Mountain Dance Theatre, Prism Dance Theatre (Gisa Cole), and Terminal City Dance (Karen Jamieson, Savannah Walling, and Terry Hunter), Jay states that in terms of modern/contemporary dance in the city the two leading companies were the Paula Ross Dance Company and Anna Wyman Dance Theatre. The former was older and, in Jay’s opinion, was more risk-taking choreographically and politically – with Ross, who was of mixed Indigenous heritage, making an important work, Coming Together (1975), focused on the incarceration of Indigenous men, as well as several other pieces that explored environmentalism and feminism. However, it was Anna Wyman’s company that received the lion’s share of arts funding and audience kudos. Apparently, the resentment and suspicion were mutual, and this affected opportunities for performance: “When I left Paula’s company in 1979, Anna offered me a full scholarship to study in her school but there were some stringent conditions on the offer – I could study with no one else and perform with no other choreographer. I passed on the opportunity. Paula had

Barbara Bourget: We had a night where we didn’t have kids. And we were downtown and we saw this beautiful poster that said

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

been no less possessive or distrustful. There was not a lot of good will in the Vancouver dance community in those days.”10 It was out of this void that edam (Experimental Dance and Music) was born as a collective whose aims were, according to Jay, initially “altruistic”: the seven founding members (Barbara, Jay, Peter Bingham, Peter [Lola] Ryan, Jennifer Mascall, Lola MacLaughlin, and Ahmed Hassan) would share a studio, dance in one another’s work, and compose together in order to save money and be as creative as possible.11 Jay and Barbara had begun renting studio space at the Western Front (to this day, the home of edam) as early as 1980 in order to make their first choreographies as a couple. Most of the other future edam principals were also working out of the Western Front, with several collaborating on Karen Jamieson’s Coming Out of Chaos (1981). Jennifer Mascall was also briefly a Paula Ross dancer. Founding edam seemed like the next logical step, and while the original collective lasted only four short years,12 one cannot overstate its continued impact on Vancouver dance, both aesthetically and pedagogically. In works like Run Raw … and EDAM / MADE – a multidisciplinary durational evening of dance, performance, poetry, music, and video that took over the entire Western Front building – differences in training and compositional practice became not impediments to collaboration across known areas of expertise,13 but rather further incentives to risk-taking and experimentation. The results, while hashed out amidst the often volatile clash of seven exceptionally creative but also extremely headstrong personalities (Barbara and Jay each separately recounted to me stories of four-hour meetings just to decide on what kind of cash box to buy), attracted audiences and, in Jay’s words, “generally demonstrated that independent choreographers could contribute a whole lot towards making dance more interesting in Vancouver.”14 As I noted in the second of this book’s movement intervals, that legacy continues with edam’s annual spring and fall choreographic series, for which Bingham regularly invites local guest choreographers to showcase the beginnings of new work alongside his own continued experiments in contact improvisation.15 As important is the legacy of dance instruction that continues through the classes and workshops offered by the original edam principals who continue to be based in Vancouver: Bingham’s morning contact classes at edam; Jay and Barbara’s classes at kw Studios; and Mascall’s classes and annual movement intensives and somatic labs at The Labyrinth.

121

“Ankoku-Butoh.” There was a company in town performing at the theatre underneath the art gallery … So we went. And it was the most amazing performance.16

122

A coincident aspect of this all too cursory history of edam is that two years before its founding Barbara and Jay attended their first butoh performance: a 1980 production by Hiroko and Koichi Tamano’s Harupin-Ha Dance Company, who were stopping off in Vancouver on their way from Tokyo to Berkeley, which would eventually become the company’s permanent base in 1987. The Tamanos had both studied with and performed for Hijikata Tatsumi, who along with Ohno Kazuo is considered one of the two founders of butoh. While it would be another six years before Kokoro was officially incorporated, the experience of seeing the Tamanos profoundly affected the future choreographic “thrust” and “point of view” of both Barbara and Jay.17 Then, too, there is the fact that the Tamanos are a husband and wife team who co-create, teach, and perform together, a model of professional and personal collaboration that Kokoro both celebrated and deconstructed in The Book of Love (2015–16), the creation of which coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of the company. Set to a dynamic original score by Jeffrey Ryan that is meant to be performed live (by Vancouver’s Standing Wave Ensemble at the piece’s premiere), and featuring surreal costumes by Johnathan Baldrock (including headpieces made of overturned woven baskets), the quartet culminates in two counterpointed generational partnerings. In the first, Jay is affectingly solicitous, repeatedly lifting Barbara, wrapping her body around his face, and doing a slow quarter turn, before setting her back down and then starting the process all over again. Behind the older couple, long-time Kokoro dancers Molly McDermott and Billy Marchenski crouch in low squats, their arms raised to the sky in a hieratic pose, as if in some ritual celebration of faith and fecundity. For both, the piece suggests, are facing pages in the book of love. As Jay and Barbara eventually come together in a series of tight pelvic clinches and spins and fumbling waltz steps, each trusting the other to find the right timing and direction and rhythm of the steps, Molly and Billy encircle each other like animals in heat, occasionally pausing to rear back or preen in an arm stand, and twice crossing to meet – one with tongue extended, one with mouth open to receive said tongue – in their own version of an embrace (see Figure 3.1). It is on just such a strange and compelling imagistic juxtaposition of ma18 and maw that the piece ends. That is, we are presented with both the comforting stillness of the space between and the terrifying unknowingness

of being swallowed up that defines two-becoming-one: in love as in dance. In other words, the piece, with its strong and contrastive imagery, its focus on transformation, and its heightened emotions, is quintessential butoh. Japanese butoh is often cited alongside German Tanztheater and American postmodern dance as one of the most important “new dance” forms to have emerged since the Second World War.19 Given each nation’s different experiences of the war, as well their unequal navigation of postwar economic prosperity and hardship, it is perhaps no surprise that young American choreographers associated with Judson Church should embrace abstraction while those associated with Germany’s Folkwang School and the underground Tokyo arts scene should embrace Expressionism. More directly, the work of butoh masters Hijikata and Ohno shares a transnational artistic genealogy with that of contemporaries like Pina Bausch and Susanne Linke (the latter of whom collaborated with Yoshioka Yumiko on the butoh-inspired SU -i [2006]).20 As Sondra Fraleigh has noted, “both Hijikata and Ohno had significant training in German Expressionist dance, or Neue[r] Tanz,” the latter having studied with Eguchi Takaya, who had

Figure 3.1 Left to right: Molly McDermott, Barbara Bourget, Jay Hirabayashi, and Billy Marchenski in The Book of Love (2015/16).

124

trained with Mary Wigman, and the former with Eguchi’s own student, Ando Mitsuko.21 The German dancer Harald Kreutzberg, who toured Japan in the 1930s, also had a significant influence on Japanese movement aesthetics generally, and Ohno’s practice specifically, with some critics suggesting that butoh’s penchant for shaved heads derives from Kreutzberg’s bald pate.22 Even second-generation Japanese butoh-inspired artists like Eiko and Koma, who danced for Hijikata and studied with Ohno, were prompted to study in Germany with Manja Chmiel, a disciple of Wigman.23 To be sure, many critics have gone on to note how butoh has, in turn, been exported globally, fusing different Japanese aesthetic styles with local performance traditions and somatic practices.24 Nevertheless, it seems important to emphasize not only that the dance form’s approach to time, gesture-based movement, and emotional expression owes much to the specific conventions of Noh drama and Kabuki theatre (as well as the spiritual philosophies of Buddhism), but also that its frequent trading in grotesque and violent imagery and its bodily exploration of states of pain, suffering, and physical extremity has been read as a partial response to a collective national trauma resulting from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.25 More directly in terms of the influence of the war and its aftermath in Japan on butoh’s development, it bears mentioning that Ohno served in the Japanese army and was taken prisoner of war, and that Hijikata was a fierce critic of the postwar American occupation and Japan’s subsequent Western-style economic redevelopment.26 This history is likewise important for thinking trans-Pacifically about the ways in which Jay and Barbara came to incorporate butoh principles and themes into their own choreography, as well as the specific impetus for the actual bureaucratic incorporation of Kokoro as a company. As Jay and Barbara separately explained to me, Kokoro’s approach to butoh evolved through a combination of self-instruction based on their own research (reading books and experimenting in the studio) and workshops with visiting companies, including the Tamanos. In 1995 Jay travelled to Japan to study with Ohno and his son Yoshito. According to Jay, “They were the most difficult classes I ever took. Because [Ohno] gave no instruction … You got no information about what you were doing, only what you were not doing.”27 Barbara followed soon after, and they have trained separately and together with butoh masters including Natsu Nakajima, Goro Namerikawa, Minoru Hideshima, Katsura Kan, su-en, Yumiko Yoshioka, and Akaji Maro, whose Dairakudakan company they have brought to Van-

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

couver many times under the auspices of the Vancouver International Dance Festival, which they founded in 2000 (after its initial incarnation as the 1998 Vancouver International Butoh Festival). Notwithstanding this deep and diverse training, Kokoro’s style is beholden to no particular tradition of butoh, and on one level, as Jay explained, it is easier for him and Barbara to say that their movement is influenced by butoh rather than to call themselves a butoh company per se.28 At the same time, Japanese Canadian and Japanese American history, and specifically the traumatic experience of wartime internment along the Pacific Northwest, is at the heart of the very first piece that Kokoro created as a company. Rage (1986) is an ode to the spirit of resistance embodied by Jay’s father, Gordon Hirabayashi, who in 1942 in Seattle protested the unlawful internment of Japanese Americans by violating curfew regulations and refusing to sign an oath of loyalty. For this he was imprisoned, a sentence that was eventually commuted in 1987 in a landmark legal case that had significant implications for the Japanese American and Japanese Canadian redress movements.29 (The Hirabayashis had settled in Edmonton in 1959, the year that Gordon took up a position in the Sociology Department at the University of Alberta.) At the time of Rage’s composition, Kokoro was just settling into its new offices at 314 Powell Street; coincidentally, in 1941 that was the address to which members of Vancouver’s surrounding Japanese Canadian community were required to report before being transported to holding pens in Hastings Park and then to camps in the bc interior. The phrase “must report to 314 Powell Street” became a refrain in one of the several iterations of Rage,30 which began as a short solo in which Jay struggles to stand up (see Figure 3.2), working against the tension created by latex tubing restraints binding his wrists and ankles, and which eventually evolved into an ensemble piece featuring five dancers (among them a stilt walker and a martial artist) and fourteen taiko drummers. Over the next six years, Jay would adapt the work six more times, including a version for young audiences that in a final 1995 iteration performed by Jay, Barbara, and Ziyian Kwan was renamed The Believer (see Figure 3.3), and that “culminates in Hirabayashi’s tense and angry encounter with a taiko drum. With each angry strike of the drum he gains rhythm and the release of rage, echoing his family’s story as well as the redemption of the redress movement.”31 How to hold and release tension in the body is one of the key lessons I learned in my first Wreck Beach Butoh process. That the choreographic illustration came courtesy of a specific moment from one of the versions of

125

Figure 3.2 Opposite Jay Hirabayashi in Rage (1986).

Rage (which I elaborate upon below) seems absolutely central to my understanding of the reciprocal trans-Pacific lines of aesthetic and historical influence that I am attempting to tease out in this chapter. Jay Hirabayashi: Wreck Beach [Butoh] is the piece I really enjoy performing every year. It’s different every year, and it’s challenging every year in different ways. And it teaches me every year … It’s great training to understand what kind of focus you need to actually do choreography … There’s so much you have to deal with: the uneven footing, the cold water, sometimes it’s raining … trying to negotiate with a group of people and keep your own journey and keep the group journey at the same time. And just because the vista is so huge, you have to take in a whole lot more than you do on a stage.32

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

Figure 3.3 Above Left to right: Ziyian Kwan, Barbara Bourget, and Jay Hirabayashi in a 2004 remount of The Believer (1995/2004).

127

Barbara Bourget: It’s kind of like the chicken and the egg question because we really are collaborators in that true sense where neither one of us would be able to do, I think, what we’ve done without the other person … The creative process is chaotic and desperate, and sometimes good … But then if it’s good, you’re really scared because, “What are you doing?” If this is really enjoyable and I’m having a great time, is this really important? Sometimes you’ve got to be ripping and tearing at things … Our relationship has a depth through dance … I think the collaboration works. But it’s not without fireworks.33

128

Kokoro’s first Wreck Beach Butoh was held in 1995 as an unauthorized, by-invitation-only performance.34 Barbara, Jay, and their fellow performers invited a few friends to witness a choreographic experiment involving sand, surf, and sea. That first experiment has since evolved into a permitted, widely advertised public event held every summer at low tide on the northern “Tower Beach” section of Wreck. Each wbb is built through a similar two-week workshop process consisting of regular morning classes and intensive afternoon rehearsals. Performances are held, rain or shine, on the second weekend. Anyone, regardless of previous dance training, can join in the creation for a one-time fee that enables subsequent yearly participation for the price of an annual Kokoro Dance Society membership. Through this facet of Kokoro’s mandate, Barbara and Jay contribute to accessible dance training in the city, with site-based performance offering a way for many pre-professional participants in the Kokoro workshops to test their readiness to make the leap from studio to stage. Reciprocally, many past and present Kokoro dancers regularly return to perform in wbb, and while Barbara and Jay routinely recycle and adapt favourite bits of site-specific choreography from past wbb performances, they also take advantage of professional dancers’ attendance at the workshops to research movement ideas that might later develop into an indoor, ticketed performance. Community participants are attracted to the process for a variety of reasons: as a test of their physical stamina; as a way to further their dance training; as an enactment of their ecological philosophy. My own reasons were initially research-related. Seeking to bring together theory and practice in my analysis of the specific dynamics of wbb’s performance of place, I took up Barbara’s challenge to experience the work as performer, not just an audience member. That was the impetus in 2015. I returned the following year for more personal reasons: because I wanted to challenge myself to grow

M O N D AY, 2 2 J U N E Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2015: Day 1 Five hours a day, five days a week, for two weeks: what was I thinking!!! I’m certainly stiff this morning, the day after my first workshop and rehearsal for this year’s 20th anniversary production of Kokoro Dance’s Wreck Beach Butoh,37 which will be held this year in the early afternoon on July 4 and 5.

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

as a butoh dancer; because I wished to experience the contrast of performing on Wreck Beach at a completely different time of day and under different environmental conditions; because I wished to honour Barbara and Jay’s efforts as teachers through the loyalty of my return. In what follows I juxtapose excerpts of my field notes from both processes in order to constellate a series of interpolated reflections: on butoh as a movement form; on the microdynamics of the annual crafting of wbb as an important local work of environmental performance; and on Barbara and Jay’s collaborative choreographic practice – which is nothing if not combustible. While I draw on an array of dance studies critics writing on butoh in English to help contextualize different aspects of the wbb workshops as I experienced them, my main model for the form and tone of my prose is Sondra Fraleigh, who in a 2010 book documenting her own lifelong fascination with and study of butoh, mixes critical analysis with more essayistic autobiographical prose. As a further supplement to my discursive accounts of the 2015 and 2016 processes, I also reproduce occasional extracts from Bronwyn Preece’s published poetic responses to the same workshops and performances. Bronwyn is a performance studies scholar, practice-based researcher, and wbb veteran who has used poetic inquiry and performative writing to reflect on her phenomenological experience of the contextual immediacy and site-specificity of the three wbb processes she has been involved in. “Amalgamating elements of the butoh-fu language and imagery, choreographic features and the site itself/myself,” Bronwyn’s poems constitute “a rearranged mnemonic of happenings,” a non-linear reporting that helps to “unchoreograph” some of the analytical fixity contained in the descriptions of the movement in my field notes, or even in the transcribed scores that I include at the end of this chapter.35 In so doing, the poetic fragments included here create “a dance of fresh moments” that for me – and hopefully for readers of this book – makes the relationship between land and body that is at the core of wbb as an event more phenomenally apprehendable.36

129

But I’m not half as stiff as I thought I’d be. And my awkwardness in initially executing much of it notwithstanding, I am very excited by the choreography that we’ve learned from Barbara so far. I actually went over the first section in my head several times last night while trying to sleep and found that I had all of the bits more or less inside me already – which is something I haven’t been able to say about previous processes at such an early stage. The piece Barbara is creating this year is based on the Icarus myth, but as retold in a poem by Mishima. Kokoro always recycles a few favourite bits from previous WBB s.

In giving us (there are twenty folks participating this year, most veterans of

the process, but a few newbies like me) the lay of the land (quite literally) re practicalities around performing on the beach, Barbara and Jay said that we’d be doing some of the Pirate sequence again, as well as the bit called Chef – a splash dance in the water … Two things I learned from yesterday: the importance of visualization and above all slowness in butoh. Both came courtesy of the “10,000 year old butoh walk” that Barbara and Jay had us repeat back and forth across the length of the

EDAM

studio. Bending our knees and leaning slightly forward with our chests open and our heads floating towards the ceiling, we were to feel the floor with each foot shuffled in front of the other. As we did this, Barbara told us to imagine the sun shining on the top of our heads, that we had a third “crystal” eye open and all-seeing in our foreheads, that we were carrying an entire old-growth forest on our shoulders, that an orchid was growing out of our throats, that our heart centres were open and a waterfall was running down our backs, that our belly was a roiling swamp, that fields of wheat were growing on our thighs and farmers were poised on the backs of our calves ready to thresh that wheat, and finally that even as we moved them forward, our feet were rooted to the earth. Afterwards Jay supplemented this imagery by asking us to think of the position our body is in when we do the Grouse Grind: we’re leaning forward for momentum, but with each step up the stairs it’s like we’re being pulled vertically via a rope attached to our heads. Another way to think about the walk was to imagine that one was underwater, traveling upstream against the current of the river. One thing Barbara threatened that I’m dreading: doing the ecstasy jumps on the beach. Especially if she wants 40 of them … Bronwyn Preece: 130

i am the horizon holding the pirated sea : moving against the tide ecstatic.38

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

As Bruce Baird and others have articulated, butoh is a dance form – at least as developed by Hijikata and Ohno – whose instruction is primarily image-based, with dancers using different “mental techniques” to respond to different imaginative prompts (being eaten by insects or shocked by a charge of electricity), morphing in and out of different bodily shapes and affective states, often with accompanying changes in facial expression.39 On one level, this makes its study somewhat more accessible for community performers like myself, who have very little technical dance training. Yet as I discovered in trying and failing to master to Barbara and Jay’s satisfaction hokotai, or the butoh walk (my gaze lacking focus, the pace and purpose of my steps lacking intention), this does not mean that a given sequence of transformations is easy to accomplish – or interesting to watch. Overcoming traditional Western mind/body dualisms, the butoh performer draws upon different word or sense images to inspire a particular dance and “animate its metamorphosis,” building to a state in which she feels her body “being moved” rather than moving mechanically in relation to a set score or ingrained habits.40 The cat/cow back that comes from undulating one’s spine and tucking and untucking one’s pelvis; mad chef hands chopping vegetables to make a soup in the water; standing on one leg and flapping your arms like a bird; and the repertoire of visual signifiers outlined above that are used to perfect the butoh walk: all of these metaphors are key to wbb’s movement vocabulary. But they are also much more than metaphors. Developed over the years by Barbara and Jay in response to the outdoor site, the movement sequences created from this vocabulary (a pitched battle of squawking seagulls [see Figure 3.4], a box-stepping canon of monkeys) encourage a deeper feel for one’s material environment, both in the literal support one is receiving from the space, and also in how one’s movement might reciprocally enrich or comment upon that space. And it is perhaps for this reason that Barbara and Jay engage so freely and so passionately in their own pitched battles regarding their respective choreographic processes and how those processes do or do not fit together: in the workshops, they feel a responsibility to honour the principles of butoh by cultivating each “dancer’s capability for conscious change and empathic embodiment,”41 but in ways that are relational rather than representational, that somatically respond to the other bodies in the group and to the environmental context of the beach – the literal ground beneath our feet.

131

Figure 3.4 The seagull sequence during Wreck Beach Butoh 2015.

T U E S D AY, 2 3 J U N E Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2015: Day 2 Definitely feeling things more today, especially in the shoulders and triceps. No doubt this is due to the long, slow walk across the studio floor that Jay had us do with our arms held above our heads. And then again with them clasped behind us. Oh yeah, and all the chopping at the end of the day in the Chef bit. But at the end of the extended arm walk Jay also taught us a pretty amazing thing. We partnered up and one of us put our right arm over the shoulder of the 132

other, with our hand balled into a fist. While our partners applied weight and pressed their hands down at our elbow joint, we were to resist for as long as we could. We then repeated the same exercise with the palm of our open hand on our partner’s shoulder, and the fingers reaching into space. It was far easier to

resist the second way, the lesson being that the lighter and more lifted our arms are in the air, the easier it will be to resist the pain and pull of gravity and time upon them. More lessons related to discovering how butoh time differs from ordinary time, not least in the treatment of unison movement. As we continue to come together as an ensemble, with Barbara adding to the core Icarus sequence each day, we need to be conscious of each other’s pace without being perfectly in sync. Which doesn’t mean always being ahead of or behind the group, but rather open to and aware of each other in space so that we might alternate and adapt our rhythms accordingly. This will be even more crucial on the beach when there is far more distance between each of us.

W E D N E S D AY, 2 2 J U N E Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 3 More bruises in more places. And in a rainbow hue of colours. It’s surprising, stripping off at home in front of the bathroom mirror, to discover when and where new ones occur and, more to the point, not to be able to remember them being incurred.

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

Pain. On the one hand, Barbara and Jay believe in it. And in dancing through it. This is simply part of the history of their own training, both having received instruction from teachers and institutions where you did what you were told and didn’t complain. If you’re not working hard as part of a Kokoro process, if you’re not a quivering pool of sweat by the end of class or rehearsal, then you’re not working. For some, it’s too much, and as sure as wbb happens every year, there is someone who will sign up for but not complete the process. At the same time, built into the structure of wbb’s workshop development is attention to the shifting registers of what one’s body is feeling – when, why, and for how long. In this way – a very butoh way – pain is not denied, but rather becomes a potential ingredient in moving oneself – and also one’s audience – not just through different physical states, but also through different emotional states.42

The work is physically hard, particularly Jay’s floor rolling sequence, but in the moment you’re concentrating so intently on learning the movement that you’re not consciously registering the pain it’s causing. That comes the next morning, as you try to roll your stiff and tired body out of bed. But, I have to stay, so far I’m surprised at how the old carcass is holding up. The day to day recovery is proving easier than

133

last year and I haven’t pulled anything major yet. I also haven’t had to take any epsom salt baths yet, and I’m hoping to keep it that way. Notwithstanding Barbara’s undeniable claims about their therapeutic value, I just can’t stand sitting in a bathtub for any length of time; I get bored and intensely claustrophobic. I really felt for Molly in rehearsal. When both Jay and Barbara forget their own choreography, which they inevitably do, she is the one who has to remember for them. This usually means demonstrating different sequences more than once in addition to participating as part of the general ensemble. On top of this, at break most of us cluster around her, peppering her with questions about when this move comes, and how exactly to do that one, etc. She handles it all with equanimity and grace and, selfishly, I have to admit that it is a treat to be able to watch such a talented dancer up close in the studio. One thing I haven’t quite wrapped my head around yet is the spatial orientation of the beach vis-à-vis our rehearsal of the movement in the studio. Last year at EDAM

the west wall was always the ocean, and Barbara and Jay both made a point

of emphasizing how the movement we were learning would translate directionally to the Wreck site. However, this year not only are we going back and forth between two different studios at Harbour Dance, but in doing so we are also switching our downstage facings. And with no indication as yet about how all of this gets mapped onto the beach. At least we know we will have a lot more space for our rolling on the sand. And Barbara did let us know that the corkscrew move we do at the end of the canon sequence is what locomotes us into the water. That canon sequence had to be reset as we have apparently lost two members, taking the number of participants down to 12. I discovered last year that this happens; for various reasons people drop out. More often it’s because of the time commitment than the physical rigours of the process. Once again Molly saved us all a lot of time in helping to rethink this particular section.

134

The historical genealogy of butoh is one of apprenticeship and mentorship. While this is true, to some extent, of all dance training, the different styles or methods of butoh are very closely allied with specific teachers and their respective disciples. For example, Hijikata’s legacy is carried on by long-time student Waguri Yukio, and Ohno’s son, Yoshito, has now taken over the direction of the dance studio his father established in Yokohama. As a somatic practice that also incorporates aspects of spiritualism and meditative philosophy (especially as derived from Buddhism), butoh instruction can resemble that of yoga, not least with respect to master teachers becoming gurus to devoted pilgrims who flock to their workshops and are fond of repeating their koan-like dictums. Barbara and Jay and long-time Kokoro

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

dancers Molly McDermott and Billy Marchenski have themselves studied extensively with Dairakudakan artistic director Akaji Maro, and while there is nothing at all mysterious about Barbara’s repeated workshop axioms (“You are only limited by your imagination!” “Do it right the first time!” “Butts, guts, and inner thighs!”), there is a way in which wbb functions as something like a cult. Year after year new participants sign up, and year after year they keep returning. Fortunately, in the two years that I participated in the process also in the room was Molly, who frequently serves both as amanuensis for the development of Barbara and Jay’s choreographic material and as translator for what it actually is that both of them want to see us do. Molly has worked extensively for a range of Vancouver-based choreographers, including Alvin Tolentino, Jennifer Mascall, Deanna Peters, Justine A. Chambers, and Serge Bennathan. Along with Kim Stevenson, Ellen Luchkow, Cort Gerlock, and Roxoliana Prus, she was also part of the collective The Story of Force in Motion, which helped to produce and also contributed to several important collaborative dance productions between 2007 and 2009. However, since her graduation from the Dance Program in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in 2007, Molly has mostly danced for Kokoro. Her identification as “a Kokoro dancer” has, she acknowledges, alienated her somewhat from the rest of the community.43 On the other hand, Barbara and Jay have provided her with a steady stream of challenging and rewarding work, and every Kokoro piece she dances in is elevated because of her presence. It has occasionally vexed me in class, or as part of a wbb process, when Barbara singles Molly out for criticism, especially when the work she is putting in is so obviously exceptional and effortful. This is part of a gendered power dynamic inherited from traditional dance pedagogy that Barbara no doubt internalized early on in her own career and, it is important to acknowledge, that she more or less replicates without apology. Although I’ve been told, including by Molly, that Barbara has gotten better at controlling the drama over the years, and although Molly and I have shared a number of eye rolls at different outbursts, I know from personal experience that some of the criticism must sting (more on this below). At the same time, I’ve also witnessed first-hand the degree to which Molly’s dancing inspires Barbara and Jay choreographically. Much of the 2016 wbb structure developed by Jay was done in collaboration with Molly in his classes. And in 2017 Barbara and Jay choreographed a beautiful solo for Molly, Kai Kairos, that premiered at the Vancouver International Dance Festival and that showcased her unique

135

strengths as a dancer, including an ability to transition seamlessly from shapes connoting grounded strength to ones suggestive of precarious vulnerability. Always such a compellingly expressive and intentional storyteller in her movements, Molly can make the sticking out of her tongue, the cupping of her ear, and the tracing of a hand up the inside of her arm appear at once sensual and strangely sinister. At the end of Kai Kairos, which in its composition suggests the arc of a life’s passage, Molly slowly descends from the stage and moves gracefully but purposefully through the audience; she is aware of and kinaesthetically responsive to our presence, but her eyes are searching out a horizon we cannot see, her gradually receding whitechalked body enacting the migration of souls, each of whose journeys in the afterlife is made singularly and alone.

T H U R S D AY, 2 5 J U N E Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2015: Day 4 Yesterday Jay introduced the concept of ma from Japanese aesthetics, which translates loosely as the gap, space or pause between objects or events. He was talking about this in terms of the time we needed to take between our movements in the bear walk that he had just taught us – not just in terms of slowing those movements down, but more crucially in thinking about the structural relationship between those movements. Thus a bear might lift and lick its paw in a slow, languorous arc, but it will also just as likely flick that arm back down to the ground and swivel its body and head to the left in one quick movement (especially if it senses a threat or smells prey). I was also intrigued by how the class ended yesterday. Every day Barbara has slowly been adding to and building upon the new choreography for the main Icarus section of the piece. I think we have just over 20 minutes of material now. But in addition we have been learning other discrete bits that I gather will be attached to or frame this section, together comprising an hour-long performance. Some of these bits are from past shows: the Chef; Pirates; etc. Some are new: such as the catcow gallumphing that leads into the aforementioned bear walk; or the series of fourteen poses that Jay taught us just before we broke for the evening. The poses are all based on photographic images of classical antiquities and Re136

naissance sculptures, and our challenge was less to mimic each pose exactly (though Jay and two of the workshop participants close to him did spend perhaps more time than was necessary figuring out the positioning of various limbs from the mirrored images) than to find a way to move – or, more properly, dance – be-

tween them. Easier said than done when the poses have one lying on, arising from, and then descending back down to the ground – and not necessarily in that order. Apparently Barbara has used this method before to develop what I guess I would call the butoh equivalent of tableaux vivant (and given the white body paint we’ll be wearing in performance, the analogy makes some sense). Butoh is largely an image-based dance form, in which phrases like “growing wings” and “walking like a bear” are used less to reproduce the form than the spirit of these images in one’s body. So I was struck by the idea of actually seeking out specific bodily images as the basis for group movement. Whatever the theory behind the method, it was quite stunning to watch us all move through the poses together. And Jay’s method for teaching the poses to us in the limited time we had was also quite canny: he actually taught them to us backwards, beginning with the last pose and ending with the first, and having us cycle through them multiple times as we accumulated new ones. Bronwyn Preece: ma bodies : statues covered in seagull shit, full moon bear bait & (baited).44

Fraleigh refers to ma as “the global connective tissue of butoh.”45 In other words, what links the disparate practices and styles of butoh artists in Japan, Europe, India, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere is a perceptual expansiveness and spatial awareness that can hold contradictory images, emotions, and states of being and becoming in dynamic tension. For me, the hardest part of both wbb processes was not the actual execution of the movement (though much of it was complicated and physically challenging); it was freeing my mind from overthinking what was required to execute that movement. In many respects, butoh is a dance form that resists codification. But it is also not pedestrian. Barbara and Jay’s choreography is the opposite of task-based. Beginning and finishing, departing and arriving, even stillness and motion: these were concepts I had to learn to jettison. The space between each was what I needed to strive to move through, and this is something the site itself – with its lack

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

flâneurs

137

of horizon and its ebbing and flowing tide – would teach me better than any drilled exercise in the studio.

F R I D AY, 2 6 J U N E Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2015: Day 5 So it’s the end of the first week and I’m still standing. What’s more, I’ve apparently learned an hour’s worth of choreography. At the end of yesterday’s session Barbara divided us into ten couples and, together with Jay, taught us the duet that will conclude the piece. I was paired with Molly McDermott, a beautiful professional dancer who has danced with Kokoro for close to a decade. Dancing with Molly made me a bit nervous at first, as I was supremely conscious of the mistakes I was making. However, she was terrifically accommodating and made things even easier by letting me trust her dancer’s body and intellect to solve various problems involving weight and support. I have to climb on top of her second position plié at a certain point, and then later I have to carry her upon my back. In the latter case I had to learn to bend lower to the ground without tilting over, while also drawing her right arm over my shoulder as far as her armpit. This meant that she could essentially just slip onto my back and all I needed to do was stand up and then walk upstage, into what was the imaginary sea. Barbara has talked about the need for us, over the course of this process, to become an ensemble. Obviously there’s still work to do, but after the first 25 hours I feel like we’re getting there. Notwithstanding the weekend of epsom salt baths ahead of me, I truly am looking forward to more.

138

One of the things I like most about Kokoro’s dance aesthetic is that it is largely gender-blind. Men and women perform the same moves, and while it can, depending on the composition and configuration of bodies in a given piece, partnering does not automatically devolve into opposite sex couples. This is characteristic of butoh more generally. From the androgyny of its all-white nude bodies to what Catherine Curtin has referred to as “the nonnormative erotics of Hijikata’s work,”46 and from the conscious playing with gender characteristic of Ohno’s feminine stage personae to the cultivation of bodily images that are not just post-gender, but post-human: butoh rejects the restrictive conventions of much Western concert and social dance. The same goes for aging, differently sized, or differently abled bodies: all are welcome as part of the wbb process. All they have to commit to is

the work, and to performing naked. To be sure, the sight of a dozen or so male, female, and non-binary individuals of various ages, backgrounds, and physicalities moving together without clothes in ritual fashion between sand and surf might almost register as a visual cliché of Wreck Beach’s particular site. Yet on the basis of my participation in the 2015 and 2016 iterations of wbb, I am convinced this version of place-based community dance is doing a kind of kinaesthetic and social work that is not typical of most site-based dance in Vancouver. Indeed, what Fraleigh writes of butoh generally, and Ohno’s philosophy more specifically, seems equally apt with respect to the guiding principles of Kokoro’s wbb performances: “People are not socially equal, but they can within their differences build community with fairness. Butoh does this through cultivation of marginalized movement, through its identification with nature, and through paradox, allowing differences to exist and to morph.”47

M O N D AY, 2 7 J U N E Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 6 Week two and but for the stressed IT bands as a result of yesterday’s half-marathon, the body is holding up. I do wish I were getting more sleep; I think, paradoxically, tained restfulness. Then there’s the fact that I keep rehearsing in my brain at night all of the choreography we’ve learned (in between worrying about everything else I have to do this week); Barbara thinks the choreography-as-counting-sheep idea is actually a good thing, as it will embed the movement even more thoroughly into our bodies. But if the rehearsing of it in one’s mind over and over again actually prevents one from ever dozing off, then surely that defeats the purpose. Speaking of the choreography, having learned all of it by the end of week one, Barbara today proceeded to do what she apparently always does (at least judging from last year and from more veteran participants’ testimonials), which is revise it. Most of her edits were minor and involved jettisoning various phrases rather than adding others. However, there was one major new move she gave all of us that had me more than a bit flummoxed for several minutes – a variation on the boxed mon-

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

all of the physical activity makes it more difficult to fall into immediate and sus-

key step that in the third iteration she now wants us to do with alternating raised legs. While Barbara’s demonstration of the move seemed reproducible enough, the count she gave for it struck me as counter-intuitive, and it wasn’t until I figured out that there was essentially one extra step for nothing included in her count that

139

I was able to get how to alternate the raised legs. Not that this accomplishment means that the movement is any more fluid or that I am now an expert. I wish I could commit more intuitively and fully from the get-go to the choreography Barbara and Jay give us, but there is something about my overly analytical nature that tells me I have to get it right before I can actually do it. Of course there is no time or room for second-guessing in performance on the beach. Which is both the beauty and the terror of this process. In the second half of this afternoon’s rehearsal Barbara also let us in on how the first section of her choreography will unfold in two separate circle formations, one contained inside the other. I’m part of the inner circle, with Barbara as leader, which means the choreography as she claims to now have definitively set it will inevitably change yet again on the days of performance. Because Barbara has a habit of spontaneously changing her mind and also, though she’d likely not admit it, simply forgetting some of the phrases that repeat. As Bronwyn whispered to me at one point after I queried the dropping of one move, being in Barbara’s group means you follow Barbara, not what you learned in rehearsal. Today was also eventful because just prior to entering Studio 1 at 1:30 pm one of the students in another class at Harbour Dance dislocated her shoulder. The cries of pain were truly arresting, as were those that accompanied the resetting of the poor girl’s shoulder a half hour later when the paramedics arrived. My throbbing IT bands seem positively benign in comparison. Bronwyn Preece: this is not about achievement: it is dancing my commitment to the moment: transparent. real. honest. impermanent.48 140

As choreographers and also performers in the work, Barbara and Jay have very definite expectations about what each wbb should look like and the specific qualities that individual performers must bring to a given movement,

T U E S D AY, 2 8 J U N E Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 7 Yesterday I was tired. So I was grateful that, after our warm-up, Jay’s morning class was devoted mostly to refining the detail and quality of some of the less physically taxing movement: the cat-cow back and arm waves on our walks to find our partners; our teeter-totter steps; and the arm bumps. But in the afternoon we ran through Jay’s section twice and Barbara’s once, this time with the additional knowledge of our spatial orientation vis-à-vis the beach –

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

no matter how small. They are the leaders, for sure, but they also don’t want us to be mere blind followers. They provide the overall structure for the piece and serve as each other’s outside eye, but the way we move inside it is ultimately our own responsibility. This was one of the hardest things to learn in both processes: to pay attention to what was happening to me physically as a performer in the moment, how I was feeling or inhabiting a set of contrasting images within my butoh body – striving and collapsing in 2015, for example, or inside and outside in 2016 – and how the intuitive merging of these images might organically affect the larger performance. In 2017, I had the chance, as an audience member, to witness an example of this merging when the Toronto dancer Matthew Romantini performed a solo version of the “Crumbling” section of wbb 2015 at the Vancouver International Dance Festival. One of the most compelling things for me about Romantini’s performance was how, in juxtaposing Barbara’s choreographic injunctions to strive upwards toward flight and then collapse back down to the ground, he would contract his body inward in the moments immediately preceding these falls. It seemed to happen bone by bone, vertebra by vertebra. And the landings were always so soft, like he was indeed a bird. That’s what it was meant to look like, I said to myself. But then the uncanny experience I was having in my own body watching Romantini, anticipating his movements even as I was surprised by them, suggested that maybe I had actually accomplished a similar kind of metamorphosis on the beach.

with upstage the ocean, downstage the cliffs, stage left the north shore, and stage right south. We also were instructed on how we will emerge from the water at the beginning of the section to find our assigned places on the sand prior to the beginning of the dragging sequence. But no word yet on how we actually get into the sea to begin with.

141

Finally, we were assigned partners for the seed picking and arm bumping sequences. I was briefly with Molly, which I was very happy about, as this meant when it came to timing and counts (two things I still am not clear on with respect to these two moves), I could just follow her lead. But in the afternoon I was reassigned to Barbara! Talk about pressure – including on my shoulder. She puts a lot of weight and force into what I thought were supposed to be gentle taps … Of course this gorgeous sunshine we’ve been having isn’t supposed to last. We may be lucky for Friday’s undress rehearsal and the first performance on Saturday. But they are predicting rain for Sunday – and cooler temperatures all around. Brrrr!!!

It is something of a paradoxical process rehearsing each wbb in a cramped indoor studio with music when the performance will take place outside in silence. This is, of course, a practical necessity. But one cannot get too attached to safely familiar spatial and temporal markers like downstage and upstage, beats and meter. One must always be imagining oneself elsewhere, in another place, or at the very least in-between different spaces. Which is the very premise of ma, and the metamorphic foundations of butoh movement. And which is greatly facilitated by Kokoro’s new atrium rehearsal and performance space at kw Studios in the Woodward’s complex: with its retractable glass panels that open out onto the complex’s bustling covered courtyard, it does its best to erase divisions between inside and outside, performers and audience. Indeed, one of the pleasures of rehearsing or taking class in that space is that there is often as much transfixing physical activity to look at out in the courtyard as there is to learn in the actual studio.

W E D N E S D AY, 2 9 J U N E Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 8 Today it was all Barbara, and as often happens at this stage in the process nothing we did was right. It lacked energy, it lacked character; it was too fast, it was too slow; we were too much in unison, or not enough. I have learned, by now, that this is Barbara’s way of pushing us, towards the end of the rehearsal period, once we more or less have the choreography in our bodies, not to become complacent and to keep 142

striving to meet or surpass her impossible expectations, despite our exhaustion. But it can still be dispiriting to be told, after the fourth or fifth stop and re-do, that “professional dancers learn to do it right the first time.” Last time I checked most of us in the room wouldn’t self-identify as “professional dancer.” Not that

I’m asking to be cut any slack. Just acknowledging that part of being a feeling body who can interpret complex choreography means that one also has feelings – and they can be hurt. Bronwyn Preece: i am the wheel inside the wheel dancing with my heart on my sleeve and my body on red alert: [revved, anxious]49

T H U R S D AY, 3 0 J U N E Wreck Beach Butoh Boot Camp 2016: Day 9 Yesterday was our last class and rehearsal at Harbour Dance. After a relatively quick warm-up, the morning was again spent refining specific moves, including the rotation of our heads and torsos on the monkey step, and then the leg lifts (or swings, as Barbara would say) on the sixes that follow. Given how long we spent on each

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

By the end of the second week of the wbb workshop, the choreography mostly needs to be set. But the movement can’t ever remain settled. Loopy with exhaustion and the long hours of being cooped up together in a cramped and hot studio, it can be easy to let one’s mind wander, and then have the body follow, the transformations between different sections and individual images becoming muddied or mechanical. Which is why Barbara and Jay take turns watching us. And which is why their notes are so extensive. If we are not sensing and moving through the importance, curiosity, interest, and surprise of the movement, then how can we expect our audience to? Butoh can be slow, it can be confounding. But it should never be boring. And both Barbara and Jay have a very low threshold for that particular affective state.

143

move, I’m guessing we didn’t succeed in perfecting anything to either Jay or Barbara’s satisfaction. After an early lunch we talk-walked the piece through once, and then ran it for the first time without music from start to finish. According to Barbara, we were “terrible.” In fact, I think there was only one big disaster, and that was when the two circles are meant to cross in the first part of her section – which in this case got a bit chaotic and messy. We went back over that bit, and improved the second time around, but it’s likely to be a whole other story on the beach – in part because I’m still a bit unclear of our directional orientation for all the different sections. I also still don’t know for sure how many turns we’re supposed to do at different speeds during the picking-up-a-seed bit and whether “Molly going first with the sixes” means we in her quartet in the canon go at the same time, or wait a bit. I’m hoping I can clarify all of this in the car ride to the beach in two hours … Of course, after all of the brutal criticism, at the end of yesterday’s rehearsal Barbara turned into the sweetheart that she secretly is. She told us that we should take pride in all of the hard work that we’ve put into the process, especially given that the choreography is all new material and, in her words, is a real “Kokoro piece.” Then we formed our car pool groups, confirmed our call time for the beach for this morning’s “undress rehearsal” (8 a.m.!), and what to bring for supplies and gear. It’s just getting light out as I type this and the forecast is for overcast skies and a coolish 16 degrees for when we’re meant to begin the run-through on the beach. At least it looks like the chance of rain has diminished. And we may even have a bit of sun for the performances on Saturday and Sunday. Frankly, right now my only real concern is how cold the water is going to be!

144

Time is what one always needs more of in any artistic process, but this feels even more the case in wbb. On the one hand, setting a new fifty- to seventy-minute site-specific dance on a group of mostly non-professional performers every year is a seemingly ludicrous challenge – especially with the added variable of the weather. This is why, after twenty-five years, Barbara and Jay are not above recycling previous bits of choreography. This also makes things a bit easier for returning performers. But in 2016 wbb was all new material from start to finish, and the movement was complex and intensely taxing, in several places requiring us to keep track of complicated counts even as we channelled a physicality that challenged received dance logics of line, and shape, and direction. To have mastered it, however imperfectly, did feel like an accomplishment. At the very least, what I experienced in my body by the end of our time in the studio felt honest.

F R I D AY, 3 J U LY Wreck Beach Butoh 2015: Undress Rehearsal So, as Barbara had warned, the beach really does change everything. Different surface, different geographic relationships and distances, added natural variables. All of which combines for an experience that is as much about endurance and being able to make adjustments on the fly and maintaining acute spatial awareness as it is about performing the piece with presence and to the best of one’s ability. Not that the latter still isn’t expected of us, as we were reminded after our run-through, which included more than a few hiccups on my part, one semi-disastrous collective mistake at the end, and which according to Barbara lacked energy from start to finish. In her words, it was “too easy.” It didn’t feel easy to me, starting with negotiating on one’s bare feet the rocky forebeach closest to the cliffs, where we stored our gear and set up a quasi-green room. The Tower Beach part of Wreck has always been much rockier than the more visited southern part; however, I don’t remember it being quite like what we encountered yesterday. It’s like some gardener had come in with a truck full of landscaping stones and dumped them all over the beach. When Noah and Molly and I arrived, Jen and Salome were duly clearing as smooth and sandy a pathway as possible through them from our encampment to the water’s edge. Speaking of the water, it was pleasantly warm-ish. But also quite choppy. feet like bowling pins by the waves crashing into us from behind. To say nothing of the energy required to swim against those waves in even getting to that section. Exiting the water was far less difficult, as one just had to let the tide sweep one ashore. As for moving on the wet sand, I found it had plusses and minuses. Falling onto it rather than onto a parquet studio floor (however well sprung) was certainly more pleasant on the joints. However, there was also the tendency to sink into it during certain moves, which played occasional havoc with my balance. Traversing it butoh style, with one’s weight forward and sliding rather than lifting one’s feet, was also a bit challenging, depending on how fast or slow we were going. But doing the cat/cow gallop (a weird menagerie of a metaphor, I know) was certainly easier than on a hard floor. And while one wasn’t able to get as much rebound from the sand in propelling

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

When we did the Mad Chefs bit, we were being buffeted about and swept off our

into the ecstasy jumps, I actually enjoyed the experience of performing them. Embracing the sky really does help. Other things I hadn’t anticipated: the cold from the wind when one first comes out of the water, and how it takes a great deal of will not to shiver uncontrollably

145

while also trying to do the choreography; having to squint into the sun during the last of the statue poses; the labour of applying and taking off the white body paint; feeling so self-conscious in front of what amounted to an accidental audience. Oh yeah, and how tired I felt afterwards. So much so that I decided to forgo the Dancing on the Edge show for which I had tickets last night. But I’m feeling refreshed this morning; it’s another beautiful day and I’m pumped for the first performance.

146

Throughout wbb’s studio rehearsals, Barbara and Jay do their best to prepare their dancers for the experience of moving on the beach. However, I can attest to how much the material site acts upon and changes each performance and, as crucially, to how the site’s residue lingers upon performers’ bodies. As Jay is fond of saying, wbb is never the same twice. Indeed, the only constants are the time of the performance (low tide); the fact that performers always go into the water; and that the group’s movement covers as much of the beach as possible. The site-based contingencies of the beach – wind, slippery rocks and spongy sand, cold water – arguably compound its sublime effects upon the performer, whose experience of time and bodily vulnerability can be measured only in relation to the “awesomeness” of the natural elements. Indeed, there is a way in which the experience of being made to feel small and insignificant in relation to the landscape lends the whole wbb process to a kind of new materialist thinking, in which human dancing bodies form part of a sensory and affective assemblage with their non-human material environment. According to Jane Bennett, “Humanity and nonhumanity have always performed an intricate dance with each other.”50 Performing wbb, this “mingling” – to echo Bennett – becomes impossible to ignore. For example, in order not to get gashed by unseen rocks in the sea, one has to in some sense learn to think like a rock, anticipating where one might be lying beneath the waves, what its shape might be, whether its surface is rough or smooth. What Fraleigh calls the “morphology” of butoh, which is all about thinking “transformationally” about the human body in relation to other living organisms – rocks, plants, and animals – provides one with the tools to think and move in this way.51 Elsewhere, Fraleigh, writing with Tamah Nakamura, has suggested that butoh, with its mudand chalk-covered bodies, and often unfolding in spaces of physical extremity, has a “somatic intimacy with nature” and comprises “a unique type of performed ecological knowledge.”52 At the same time, Australian dancerresearcher Gretel Taylor has cautioned that the conflation of nature’s body with the dancer’s body in butoh-inspired environmental performance has “the potential to erase or undo the (social) experiences of the body in a re-

turn to an idealized ‘purity’ or untainted state,” and that butoh’s emphasis on the abandonment or emptying out of the self, if transferred to the landscape, risks overwriting or neutralizing contested and perhaps competing histories of place.53 Western Enlightenment philosophy’s tendency to separate the world from humans’ perception of that world is challenged by Indigenous theories of “place-thought,” which provides a framework for understanding and being responsive to networked and ethically co-animate interspecies environments that long precedes new materialism’s focus on Deleuzean assemblages and “agential realism,”54 and that in the words of Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee scholar Vanessa Watts “is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extension of these thoughts.”55 If anything, the experience of performing in wbb has taught me to think more complexly about the nexus of different – and often competing – histories and performances of place that are daily being choreographed on Wreck: as, variously, unceded Musqueam territory; as a gay cruising area; as a battleground for nudist traditions and environmental conservation; as an adjunct to the University of British Columbia’s expansionist development of its campus.

Waking up this morning I discovered I still had white paint from our undress rehearsal on various parts of my body: between my toes; on the inside of my arm; between my shoulder blades. I took that as a good sign. And, indeed, today’s performance was very successful, notwithstanding some last minute changes. Barbara reset the opening so that we descend to the water’s edge in our statue group formations, staring out at the sea until she gives the signal to turn to face the cliffs/audience. It does make for a more coherent opening, especially given the fact that the audience had already clustered around us when we were still in our warm-up circle following Jay through various breathing and stretching exercises. I think many just assumed that given we were moving together as an ensemble that the performance must have started; needless to say, it was a bit dis-

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

S AT U R D AY, 4 J U LY Wreck Beach Butoh 2015: First Performance

concerting during the knee bends and stretches to note, when one put one’s head between one’s legs, that among the first glimpses the audience was getting was a full-on shot of one’s ass. A half-hour before the start of the performance, while we were putting on our make-up, it seemed to me that there weren’t all that many people on the beach.

147

However, during the warm-up I was surprised at the crowd that suddenly swelled around us: they seemed to come from out of nowhere, in various states of dress and undress. Once the performance began I was conscious of the audience only as an assembled mass; granted I didn’t have my glasses on and so couldn’t distinguish individual features very well (sorry Tiffany and Bertrand!). Still I think it had less to do with the relative proximity or distance of the spectators (some of whom got very close to us) than with the fact that I had actually found that butoh space-time nexus where body and environment and event became as one – to the point where, at the end of “Crumbling,” emerging out of one move in which I couldn’t see the rest of my group, I realized I was rather too much in the ma-zone of my own pace. Not that, amid all of this, there weren’t the occasional quotidian jolts of reality that brought me back to the piece’s practical mechanics – and the spontaneous adjustment of them: as when, for example, amid Barbara’s barking under her breath at us to get tighter as a group in advance of “Seagulls,” Jay decided to launch our squawking count with the cry for nothing that is usually given by Barbara. If looks could kill … but what could we do but all eventually join in? Then, too, the “Pirates” bit that follows this sequence was altogether different when, upon approaching my first audience member, I suddenly had an out-of-body “emperor’s new clothes” moment, realizing that this person before whom I’m about to thrust forward my pelvis, throw back my head and laugh, knows that I’m naked, but is just going to ignore that detail for now. The same went for the various friends in the audience I spoke to after the show. Given our casual banter about the performance, you’d have thought I’d just stepped off a concert stage fully clothed rather than out of the sea naked and painted white. But then that’s the magic of Wreck Beach Butoh. There is something about the sublimity of the natural setting, which requires as much work (and, arguably, submission) from the audience as it does from us as performers, that makes physiognomical self-consciousness superfluous. Really, as a species we are all so puny amidst this vastness. What else is there to do, then, but dance? Bronwyn Preece: fodder for waves chop-sticks for ocean’s 148

sushi … we are rolled pummeled

tossed sprinkled like roe (out of rows) thrust(ing) into/as audience:56

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

I feel it’s important to note that wbb differs from a lot of other outdoor dance performances in that it unfolds in an almost completely non-presentational style. While this is true of much butoh dance performed on stage, it was striking to me in the first few times I attended the event as an audience member, just how resolutely the proscenium was not in place in this instance. Clearly company members were playing to one another, and to the site, rather than to the audience, who are often required to locomote as much as the dancers to take in the work. Experiencing this from the inside, as a performer in 2015 and 2016, gave me added insight into how the site always mediates the relationship between wbb performers and spectators. This raises an important point about the strategic “place” this particular environmental performance event might historically occupy in Vancouver’s dance-based imaginary, and what additional “mobile intimacies” it might in the process tactically engender. On the one hand, I am referring to the fact that the more than two decades of wbb performances constitute, in their annual workshop development, an incredible exchange of embodied knowledge between Barbara and Jay and performers, a set of “interpersonal micro-practices” that, in Judith Hamera’s words, “enable and sustain friendships in dancing communities.”57 At the same time, these professional and personal exchanges of choreographic intimacy are complemented by the kinaesthetic labour of the audience in watching its performance. By that I mean that part of our experience of a roving site work such as this is that we must move along with it, negotiating in the moment – and in the absence of traditional spectating protocols – not just the distance we maintain from the performers but also our closeness to one another. Gerecke maintains this is one of the most productive and distinctive aspects of site-based dance, namely its capacity to choreograph audiences – and in ways that ideally encourage more complex considerations of our relationships with one another and the spaces we inhabit and move through.58 With or without clothes, on a beach or in the city, that’s an experience worth cultivating.

149

S U N D AY, 3 J U LY Wreck Beach Butoh 2016: Second Performance Bronwyn was right. I was actually awakened by the sound of the wind, which at first I mistook for pouring rain. By the time Dana and I gathered at Molly’s, the sun was shining and it was pleasantly warm – but definitely very breezy. And by the time the three of us plus Irene got to the top of the stairs at Trail 4 we could hear not just the wind, but the crashing waves. Half-way down we saw the whitecaps, which were pretty high and moving fast – so fast that they propelled an adventurous (and presumably well wet-suited) windsurfer back and forth across the horizon multiple times as we stared out at the waters, mouths agape. Meanwhile, a kayaker had apparently had enough, depositing his boat just at the mouth of the pathway on the beach we use to descend toward the water (where it remained throughout our performance – at the very least I hoped he stayed to watch given the visual interruption his vessel caused). One benefit of the powerful surf was that our pathway had been more or less swept clean of rocks; but also laying across it there was now a massive log, washed ashore by the waves, and forming a natural proscenium arch for our performance. We were the first to arrive on the beach and as more and more people gathered there was one question: would we still be going in the water to swim at the beginning? When Barbara and Jay arrived they very generously confirmed that we would not start in the water, simply running instead to where we begin the dragging and rolling sequence at the south end of the beach, crawling to our respective positions once we neared the spot. A sigh of relief went through the ensemble when we heard this news, as to have begun the piece wet and shivery would have been distinctly unpleasant. Instead, having the sun shine on us while we were moving about the sand was actually quite pleasurable, and during Sunday’s performance I felt I could finally let go of the mechanics of the movement and really get into the experience of my body merging with the beach, so much so that I really let things rip during the super-fast rolls back and forth. Likewise, with the teeter-totter step that moves (quite literally) from the end of Jay’s section into the beginning of Barbara’s, I stopped counting and overthinking the steps leading into the leg swing and just went with the momentum generated by my off-axis body – and I think what resulted was perhaps the best I’ve ever done that move. Not that everything was perfect. Just before this, Barbara forgot the eight fast 150

pivoting hand claps between partners following the “picking-up-a-seed-and-puttingit-back-on-the-tree” sequence. I wasn’t going to remind her about this, and so we were way ahead of everyone in motoring down the beach. And our interior circle went in the wrong direction with our rooster walk, which I’m sure caused the outer

circle more than a little confusion as they reoriented themselves for our cross on the backwards crab walk. But I’m convinced the audience, which was a lot bigger than Saturday’s, didn’t notice. We did still go in the water at the end of the piece, but by that time I was ready for some cooling-off, and some help in washing the sand off my body, and just generally being buffeted by the waves. Then it was time for a group picnic and reflective decompressing after two weeks of extremely intense work. Brie and Michael and Yvonne, who were doing WBB

for the first time, all said it was an amazing experience and that, time per-

mitting, they would definitely consider coming back next year. For me, partly as a result of the choreography this year and partly because of the storehouse of embodied and environmental knowledge I had retained from last year, I felt more than ever how truly unique

WBB

is as a work of site-specific dance: because of its

sustained investigation of a singular but ever-changing site; because of the reciprocal material exchange between performers and site embedded into each iteration; and because of how much kinetic awareness (and locomotive energy) it also demands of its audience. Then, too, Barbara and Jay, in their own inimitable tough-love way, give us through this process a lesson in what it means to come together as an ensemble. So, after all the hours of rehearsal, all the stairs descended and climbed, all the white paint applied and (imperfectly) removed, all the sweaty clothes and wet towfore and after shots (see Figures 3.5 and 3.6). Bronwyn Preece: we are the primal weathervanes of the north – west whitecapped wind:

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

els washed and dried (none of which I will miss any time soon), here’s to us in be-

honouring the edges of pounding surf and howling sky, our skin

151

registers this/ [our] ebbing changing flow: curving and carving the cartography of shore: … we trace ‘the’ ephemeral …59

In looking at these photos with the distance of a few years, and also in light of Bronwyn’s concluding poem reflecting on our 2016 process, I am wont to read into the shifting positions of different bodies in the second, our painted faces and changed expressions, even the brightened exposure, confirmation not just of the transformational effects of wbb as a process, but of the “metamorphic signature” of butoh as a form.60 Mostly, however, I am reminded that wbb, at its core, is about kinship – in all its messiness and fraught complexity. There is the kinship one necessarily develops with one’s fellow dancers through shared labour and conversation and food and instruction and exhaustion and the application of white body paint; with Barbara and Jay as uncompromising choreographic parents, but also as repositories of an embodied history of Vancouver dance that, in this case, also connects us trans-Pacifically to an international lineage of butoh practitioners; and with the material environment in all its mutability. In the latter case, the intersection of sand and water – both key, according to Fraleigh, to butoh’s elemental lexicon61 – teaches us that physical vulnerability and impermanence is what we all share: human and non-human actants alike. Those footprints attest to one kind of impression we have made with our dancing, how we have moved as a group across the surface of that beach. But soon they will be erased by the tide. Until we gather again the next year. Or until there is no more beach to dance on. Barbara Bourget: Once the choreography is in your body, it will be there forever. Until then, write it down!62 152

Figure 3.5 Top Before Wreck Beach 2016. Left to right: Yvonne Chew; Peter Dickinson; Keith Lim; Brie-Ana Laboucane; Jay Hirabayashi; Dana Marquis; Bronwyn Preece; Molly McDermott; Irene McDermott; Michael Garfinkel; Tuan Ahn Luu; Henry Wong; with Barbara Bourget kneeling in front. Figure 3.6 Bottom After Wreck Beach 2016. Look, even Barbara is smiling this time!

Choreography: Wreck Beach Butoh 201563 • •

•

•

• •

154

•

descend as group to performance area of beach facing south, assume statue positions in four groups of five (we’re group 3) on Barbara’s “coo,” we begin cycling through the poses in canon (group 3, group 2, group 1, group 4) • lying on right side in sand, arms pointing down by side • rising up on forearms, turning to right, tucking left leg under right • turn and look over right knee, like an odalisque • boy listening to conch shell, with weight on right knee, left leg extended • boy riding turtle • man on knees praying • cherub pointing with right finger, left leg up • laughing woman: left hand to ear; right hand cupping right breast • dancing boy: arms to left side of head • thinking woman: right knee up; left knee back, with arm on head; left arm to right knee • odalisque woman: joy • archer pose: right leg back on demi-pointe; right elbow extended above head; left index finger pointing down • looking in mirror: demi-fifth • man resting on tree looking over left shoulder at end of statue cycle, we extend our hands behind us and walk slowly into sea (don’t drop head!) once waist deep in water, float hands up and then swim out at end of swim, gather in clump (shortest to tallest) for Chef’s splash dance x 3 (slow; fast; faster) • 16 chops (1, then 1,2,3), switch arms • gather vegetables for 16 • throw into pot for 16 • salt and pepper, alternating arms • stir for eight, then tired walk to right • repeat sequence medium speed • repeat sequence fast speed sink into water, with Big Group 1 (small groups 1 and 3) then rising from the water and walking away from Big Group 2 (small groups 2 and 4)

•

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

on Barbara’s “coo,” begin Crumble section • butoh walk for six: left; right; left (raise right arm and turn head left on third step); right; left; right • crumple body for eight counts • fall forward to the ground with right leg extended and foot flexed; hover • descend fully to ground, left leg bent, head to right • rise up immediately • six cat/cow crawl steps (cat with left leg in, cow with right) • fly for one • scan horizon: quick up and out to left • do spiral and extend elbow up (curving back and dropping head backward), and then back to lunge • six more cat/cow steps • fly for two • higher spiral; back down and around and then make boat and spiral/arch with other arm • to standing with left foot forward on demi-pointe • three steps forward on toes (right; left; right) • four steps back (right; left; right; left), with hands crossed over crotch • tongue out as you turn head left to right • turns (arms out-out; in-in; out-out) x 4 • turns (as above) x 6 • shaking with arms to left (holding right under shoulder) • arms back x 6; hold arch and suspend • then fall forward in lunge with right leg forward • bring in left leg; 3 small movements and unfold to standing, with weight on left leg • tick-tock beginning with head and knee bent to right (10 times) • tick-tock 25 times (slow for 10; change direction; speed up for 15) • fall to left, lift left leg, and extend left arm • repeat x 16 • spiral around into second position plié front (cow back); roll head • spiral to back plié (cow back); roll head • spiral to front plié (cow back); roll head • getting out of a box (right/left with feet and matching arms): 9 slow (stepping); 9 medium (small jumps); 9 fast (big jumps) • drop and bounce x 3 (right leg back)

155

• • • • • •

• • • • • • •

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 156

• • •

walk flat on upstage right diagonal for five quarter turn forward with arms back with arms two taps to chest (right hand to chest, right leg extended) repeat sequence 3 times to complete square bend twice at left knee and kick right leg behind; last time do pulling rope 5 times with left leg fold turn around three quick steps and right heel out (arms up) x 2 bend twice at left knee and kick right leg behind three quick steps and right heel out (arms up) x 2 suspend and “fly” turn slowly to right and look over right shoulder look around to right and left and back up and turn around, looking at sky put hand in tight jeans pockets as you move stage right grow wings move stage left like a bird (use your head) move stage right like a bird move stage left like a bird move stage right like a bird move stage left like a bird move to downstage right diagonal move back to stage left move to centre run forward, up on toes and suspend fall to left side roll over with pelvis off ground and arms extended stand walk forward quarter turn stage right and small walk quarter turn upstage and small walk quarter turn stage left and small walk big circle back to same position come forward downstage running backward with arms over head soften into plié with arms tucked into knees come up, breathing slowly, unfurling hands and fingers on exhale

move into second position with right foot (arms tilted in square downstage left) • step back into second position with left foot (arms tilted in square downstage right) • fold in, knees crossed • open and step to left (folding on inside) x 4 • pull from downstage left corner • pull left from right side • step right and pull from left • step to diagonal and touch face with left arm • step forward and touch face with left arm • turn to right, scream, and walk • drop, three quick pulses (right leg back) • turn and trace lips • yielding tendus to right and left 9 times • tick right leg into eagle pose • hand behind back, cow back, and turn to left • criss-cross, stepping back • turn around and bring forward the flower • drop and lift right leg, raising left hand • fold and repeat • step right leg back and look under arm, embracing moon • drop and pulse right leg to floor while waving arms • descend to right knee and then all the way down move into beasts section, starting with cat/cow walk • slow • fast • galloping • when group 2 catches group 1 we find our partners (Molly) and become bears • smell right paw, turning 90 degrees and travelling away four steps • smell left paw, turning 180 degrees and travelling back four steps • smell right paw, turning 90 degrees and travelling away two steps • smell left paw, smell right paw, smell left paw and come together for bites • first to right • second to left • third face-to-face •

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

•

157

• • •

•

• • • • •

158

squats to water as a group roll down into water rising to seagulls: on Barbara’s “coo,” one count for nothing and then 16 seagull caws in unison transition out of group into Pirates sequence: 3 ha-ha-ha’s (west, middle, east) begin running east slow into walk come to stillness when ready, begin ecstasy jumps: 32, 24, 16 at end of ecstasy jumps, find duet partner (Molly) • staring into each other’s eyes in plié • Molly brings hands to side of my ears very slowly • as she gets close to my chin, I start to raise my hands, catch hers and press them to my ears • arch my back and head as she presses down • I then throw her hands away • 360 degree turns away from each other • cupping back of Molly’s neck as she arches back • support her weight as she walks four paces backwards • rotate her head once to right, once to left, and then once all the way around • chair lift Molly and turn 180 degrees • set Molly down • we circle each other (my arms are up) • Molly descends into wide plié • I climb on top of her • she lifts me off • we grab each other’s arms and descend into plié, sitting on floor • do side folds, approaching each other • release and come up, turning in opposite direction from each other on both knees • on knees, we scoot closer to each other • Molly’s arms on my pecs • my arms around her in embrace • I come up onto right knee, looking at sky, with arms lifted • Molly’s head on my knee • we turn around to face each other • I take Molly’s left wrist with my right hand and turn

• •

bend into deep plié with back straight Molly lifts herself onto my back and I walk with her into sea

CHOREOGR A P H Y: W R E C K B E A C H B U T O H 2 0 1 6 JAY’S SECTION • •

• • •

• • • • •

•

• • •

• • • • •

• •

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

•

3 drag-pulls on floor to the right turn body around on floor by stepping right once with lower leg, then once with upper leg, then finally with lower leg again, ending up twisted completely around to the other side, and with pelvis up off the ground reverse the leg steps to get back to original position roll slowly four times upstage repeat drag sequence on left side of the body, facing upstage, and including the 3 steps and return roll back slowly four times downstage roll two times upstage roll two times downstage repeat the two rolls up and down 8 times, gradually picking up speed do the three leg moves to change direction so that you are facing downstage left 3 drag-pulls on floor to the left turn body around on floor by stepping left once with lower leg, then once with upper leg, then finally with lower leg again, ending up twisted completely around to the other side, and with pelvis up off the ground reverse the leg steps to get back to the original position roll four times slowly upstage repeat drag sequence on right side of the body, facing upstage, and including the 3 steps and return roll back slowly four times downstage roll two times upstage roll two times downstage repeat the two rolls up and down 8 times, gradually picking up speed from upstage facing position, do a sitting twist, putting right leg over left and circling body and feet around, laying oneself back down on floor, then doing one roll downstage and raising and thrusting out the pelvis repeat this in opposite direction repeat again downstage, finishing with handstands to the left

159

• • • •

• • • •

•

•

• •

• • • • • •

•

•

•

•

repeat again upstage, finishing with handstands to the right repeat again downstage, finishing with handstands to the left repeat again upstage, finishing with handstands to the right final sitting twist leads to body being lowered gradually to one’s sitz bones, while raising arms in the air arch the back and lower head to the ground extend arms over the head circle arms down to the crotch turn onto your right side and dog paddle to locomote stage right in space arch back to cross-legged sitting position, with arms in wave motion to gradually raise the body to a standing position with one leg crossed over the other, lean in toward your partner across the floor/beach shift the weight and lean the other way (i.e., out) face your partner and do four forward and backwards/arched hand waves then walk forward three steps repeat the four forward and backwards/arched hand waves walk back three steps (with back arched) turn to the side, cross the left leg over the right, and twist around segue into cat/cow walk x 10, moving towards your partner throw the hands for three to one side and then do boneless cloud floaty thingy for five repeat this last movement to opposite side x 3, ending up beside your partner pick up seed and transfer to branch sequence: begin with outside hand and repeat slowly x 8, alternating directions; then do it fast x 8 this leads into the arm bump: 2 sets slow; 2 sets faster; 4 turns without the bump at faster speed; ending with 8 double-time turns this then leads into the tick-tock step and turn sequence, finishing in a clump to transition into Barbara’s choreography …

BARBARA’S SECTION 160

• • •

after Jay’s tick-tock turn steps, we arrive in a cluster downstage on demi-pointe, and with a bent leg and the right arm at a right angle take 3 steps, starting with the left leg

• • • • •

• • • •

•

• • • •

• • •

• • • • • • • • • •

• • • • • •

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance

•

bring left arm to heart centre and sink into a cat back extend left arm to a right angle take 3 steps, starting with right leg right arm to heart centre and sink into cat back repeat above sequence four more times, switching arms each time, for a total of six step sequences after sixth, sink low in the knees, wrapping right foot around left leg 2 slow elbow pulls to right and then 2 slow elbow pulls to left repeat each side sweep right arm to right side: once low, and then once high; repeat on right side sweep left arm to left side: once low, and then once high; repeat on left side repeat above sequence: once on right side; once on left pigeon toes and hanging clothes line from the waist slow rise up into butoh walk end butoh walk with open chest and arched back and right arm extended to the right high in the air small step, opening heart centre, and then closing, to the right repeat to the left open pirouette and hold on demi-pointe, left leg in front repeat pirouette and hold heart centre open-close step to right heart centre open-close step to left open pirouette and hold four to five backwards steps, rolling a barrel and kicking right leg slow crouch and squeeze down to the ground heart centre open-close step to right heart centre open-close step to left open pirouette and hold five backwards steps, rolling a barrel and kicking right leg two small toe touches with right leg and then bigger chicken peck with leg repeat above hold bent right leg and then extend and hold four flat back forward lunges 12 jumps from one leg to the other boneless leg lifts x 2 on right side boneless leg lifts x 2 on the left side

161

• • • • • • •

• • • • • • • • • •

•

• •

• •

• • • •

• • • 162

• • •

repeat above quick cross step to right diagonal fast backwards steps for four repeat cross step to right diagonal slower and wider backwards steps and hold with arms extended back lift right leg twice on third lift turn body around and run in first position, lifting a flower to the opposite diagonal turn around and lower to the right side quick catch steps on the other side rooster to opposite corner push back on your butt with extended right leg x 4 stretch out on right side and hold an imaginary head quick wrap of left leg around right and fall forward drag body on floor x 8 stretch out and hold imaginary head on left side wrap right leg around left and fly unwrap right leg, turn around, extend leg in front, and do pelvic thrust to the sky repeat, changing arms and legs x 5, slowing down each time and holding last suspension for a count of 16 walk/jump around your left hand come up slowly, pushing one arm behind your back, switching arms at the top of the head switch arms behind back while turning x 3 walk back with arms behind back and then drop into back arch with chin on chest repeat above x 6 while moving into position for canon sequence 8 cat/cow small steps to right repeat 8 cat/cow small steps to right do one cat/cow step to right; then to centre; then to left; then to centre; then to right; then to centre; then to left; then back to centre wide V and arms outstretched: hold for 2 counts of 8 start flicking hands: 2 sets x 8 counts open chest to right; then to left; then to right again; then back to left into bird squat for 8 counts monkey step x 16 turn to downstage right corner for 4 monkey steps, then do swoop to right with arms and squiggle up

• • • • • •

• •

• • • •

smaller bird squat for 8 16 monkey steps quarter turns to right x 8 16 more monkey steps to right downstage diagonal 8 more quarter turns to right 8 more monkey steps on downstage right diagonal to get everyone in canon back together spreadeagle V 8 counts of 8, beginning with wrists and moving to shoulders, waist, legs, etc., slowly turning toward front arrive with arms at left side of body kick right leg x 16, slowly raising height; hold on 16th count flick arms and kick x 6 do barber pole move, while moving toward the water and gradually slowing down …

Butoh-ing on the Beach with Kokoro Dance 163

INTERVAL 4

And: Festival Adding up the performances at Dancing on the Edge …

Depending on the exact timing, Wreck Beach Butoh (wbb) frequently overlaps with and is sometimes programmed as part of Vancouver’s annual Dancing on the Edge Festival (dote), which takes place every July. While there are sometimes satellite performances at other venues or, as with wbb, in site-specific locations, most dote events are staged at the Firehall Arts Centre, whose long-time artistic producer, Donna Spencer, has also overseen the festival since its founding in 1988. Kokoro has presented work on the Firehall stage as part of dote since its inception, often while criticizing in the pages of its house newsletter, Kokoro Moon, the festival’s programming and organization, its timing, and even the facilities at the Firehall itself.1 While not doing so in quite as direct or public a manner, many in Vancouver’s dance community, myself included, have also grumbled – with varying degrees of affection and frustration – about the seemingly haphazard way dote is put together and unfolds each year. But dancers and audiences also keep coming back year after year. There is a reason why dote is Canada’s longest-running annual festival of contemporary dance.2 As we saw from the first movement interval, dote is part of a constellation of dedicated dance festivals in the city. These include the Coastal First Nations Dance Festival, founded in 2008 and produced by the Dancers of Damelahamid; the Vancouver International Dance Festival, founded in 2000 (after an initial incarnation in 1998 as the Vancouver International Butoh Festival) and produced by Kokoro’s Jay and Barbara; and the biennial Dance In Vancouver Biennial, founded in 1997 and produced by The

Dance Centre.3 These are joined by other performing arts festivals in the city that also maintain a commitment to showcasing local, national, and international dance, with the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and Chutzpah! The Lisa Nemetz International Jewish Performing Arts Festival, overseen by former dancer Mary Louise Albert, being two of the more prominent. As a result, there are more festivals showcasing dance in Vancouver than in any other city in the country. To be sure, this presentation format is ubiquitous in Vancouver and is reflective of a larger global trend toward the “festivalization” of the performing arts.4 At the same time, the number of dance festivals in Vancouver speaks to a concomitant paucity, when compared to Montreal or Toronto, of subscription-based contemporary dance series in the city, with The Dance Centre and DanceHouse reserving many of their annual slots for national and international touring artists and companies, and with the Firehall and The Cultch presenting only a few dance works each year as part of their otherwise theatre-focused programming. Thus, for local dance artists without the means to self-produce, applying to festivals is often the only viable way to get their work seen. dote has, for more than thirty years, been the go-to festival to do this, especially for emerging artists. Likewise, more established choreographers regularly return to the festival to try out new ideas or excerpts from worksin-progress. Indeed, many of the dances discussed in the main chapters of this book I have first seen on the Firehall stage as part of dote. There are innumerable other festival performances I have documented as part of my blog. Some have felt more finished than others, and some I have definitely liked more than others. But almost all I have appreciated for the way in which they have invited me into a dialogue with the work as it is being worked out.

Local dance wunderkind Josh Beamish, who formed MOVE : the company seven years ago at the age of 17, only to decamp last year for New York, partly as a result of a

And: Festival

T U E S D AY, 1 0 J U LY 2 0 1 2 Josh Beamish: In Fragments

lack of peer-reviewed grant funding from BC agencies, was back in town last night as part of the Dancing on the Edge Festival, presenting fragments from his workin-progress Pierced. The piece, a full-length ballet whose composition has been facilitated by a Jerome Robbins Foundation Award, will eventually bring together dancers from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet (RWB ), Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet,

165

and the New York City Ballet for a premiere in May 2013 at the American Institute of Dance in Washington, DC , where Beamish will begin a term as Artist-in-Residence this September. Talk about external cred! Personally, I’ve always been a bit hot and cold on Beamish’s work. As a dancer there is no quarreling with his amazing technique, and with his apparent facility in any form. Yet I sometimes find his choreography to be overly fussy, designed to show off what he – as featured performer – can do, rather than serving a coherent whole. A case in point was last night’s opening fragment, which was a solo by Beamish. I took the flowered chemise Beamish was wearing (the other male dancers in the evening’s other sections were shirtless) to mean he was playing Cupid, and if so, then the preening poses and the fluttery hand and flexing feet embellishments on otherwise straightforward extensions are perhaps in keeping with the capriciousness of the character. By contrast, the concluding solo, by

RWB

principal soloist

Jo-Ann Sundermeier, was a marvel of pared-down simplicity, an exploration of the proximate spaces of one’s own body (three delicate taps by Sundermeier on the inside of her arm were stunning in their grace) in order to recover an imprint of what has been lost. The duets sandwiched between these solos were also a mixed bag. The first and third – featuring Joshua Green and Delphine Leroux, and Green and Beamish, respectively – both felt like they hadn’t yet fully worked out the relationships of the partners, especially when to bring them together and when to keep them apart (as well as what they should be doing while apart). Some of the reaches and claspings between Green and Leroux also seemed a bit tentative, which was maybe due in part to the fact that their entries into them were still being refined (or maybe because Green’s body was so slick – I’ve never seen a dancer sweat more on stage!). However, the middle pas-de-deux, again featuring Sundermeier and her

RWB

col-

league Harrison James, was terrific, with the dancers rarely apart, and showcasing the expert classical technique of each, not least the flexion in each of their backs. The final image of James lying on the floor, lifting his torso to the ceiling to receive the arrow he knows must come, is definitely a keeper.

166

dote features a mix of local, national, and international artists, usually with two evening shows per night (at 7 and 9 pm) over the length of the festival, which lasts roughly ten days. A few of these slots are reserved for full evening works, often by out-of-town artists. For example, Quebec’s PaulAndré Fortier, a favourite of Spencer’s, has been a frequent guest of the festival in the years I have been attending, and he has never had to share a program. But, in fact, it is the festival’s famous mixed programs that consistently prove most popular with audiences. In my experience, the curation of

these events has less to do with shared through-lines in form or content than with the pragmatics of the pieces’ duration, their technical requirements, and coordinating artists’ schedules – including that of James Proudfoot, the former technical director at the Firehall, and the go-to lighting designer among dance artists in Vancouver. Whatever the case, the numbered Edge programs are a vehicle for a range of shorter, often quirkier pieces or excerpts that might not otherwise or easily find an audience. Inevitably there are surprises, and also disappointments. Sometimes both at once.

M O N D AY, 7 J U LY 2 0 1 4 Edge 1 at DOTE Shit happens. We all know this, but perhaps no one knows it better than a performing arts festival producer. So it was that yesterday afternoon’s audience for the Edge 1 mixed program at this year’s Dancing on the Edge Festival learned from Donna Spencer during her curtain speech that Brazil’s Paulo Lima was unable to make it to Vancouver (for the second time, I believe). However, we also learned that Sarah Chase and Andrea Nann, already on the program with their collaboration a crazy kind of hope, had together gone into the studio just a couple of days before and created a new duet, which they would share with us in place of Lima’s work. A crazy kind of hope, which I first saw at last November’s Dance In Vancouver Biennial, is built around Chase’s trademark overlaying of mathematically precise gestural patterns with lyrical storytelling. In this case Nann’s narrative builds from a funny anecdote about her Uncle Wayne transporting a carp purchased in Chinatown back to Hornby Island (and building a pond for it when he discovered it was still alive) to a moving account of the death of her first child, and how she is able to bring together her dead daughter with the brother she never knew. This is accomplished by Nann interweaving two looping arm phrases – seven gestures perher right arm representing her daughter. Chase has done an amazing amount of research on the brain and the relationship between kinaesthesia and cognition (some of which she shared as part of a plenary panel with Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg that I had the pleasure of moder-

And: Festival

formed with her left arm representing her son, and eleven gestures performed with

ating this past Wednesday as part of the Canadian Society for Dance Studies’ biannual conference at SFU Woodward’s, “Embodied Artful Practices”); her interest in combining complexly countable movement loops with talk stems from the theory that motion affects memory, especially emotional memory, and that people become more eloquent – in their speech and in their bodies – if they tell a story

167

while repeating linked movement patterns. Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated for me yesterday than when Nann – already such a gorgeous and graceful dancer – repeats the arm loop combination described above 99 times while singing “Mr. Tambourine Man.” I could see this piece performed 1,001 times and I’d still be utterly captivated by its magic. Coincidentally, 1,001 is the number at the heart of the duet Epilogue Study – Tribune Bay that Chase and Nann put together as a coda to the Edge 1 program. It begins with Chase explaining that as part of her daily practice on the beach at her home on Hornby Island, she repeats a series of movement patterns. She often starts with seven leg movements (which she demonstrates for us); she’ll then follow with eleven arm movements; and finally she puts both together, repeating each combination thirteen times while moving horizontally across the beach for a total of 1,001 gestures. As she says, this can take upwards of an hour and, depending on whether she’s practicing at low or high tide, the traces she has made in the sand with her legs at the beginning might be washed away when she finishes. Fortunately for us, that inside story into Chase’s creative process is not the finish of this piece. Instead, Chase is joined on stage by Nann, with both dancers repeating separate phrases while moving towards a meeting point centre stage. Once there, they sync up their arm movements in a way that suggests those bodily trompe l’oeils of multi-armed Indian deities. Except there is nothing camp or kitsch about the resulting image. Instead, there is a definite logic and pattern to the repetition of the movement. And part of the joy in watching the work – as with the underlying beauty of mathematics – is discerning the pattern. Also on the Edge 1 program – in fact, leading it off – was Michelle Olson and Raven Spirit Dance’s Northern Journey. I have long been a fan of Olson’s choreography; however, hitherto I have only seen it performed in a work of theatre (most recently as part of Yvette Nolan’s 2009 restaging of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe). In this piece, set upon the very talented dancers Jeanette Kotowich and Brian Solomon, and with music (including live drumming) by Wayne Lavallee, Olson draws on a traditional First Nations caribou story in order to explore not so much the idea of the buried “animal-within” as the becoming “animal-without.” What makes the work so compelling is that Olson eschews depicting any of this in overly mimetic movement; Kotowich and Solomon aren’t “playing” caribou. Instead, Olson explores time-based structures of shape and support and rhythm and breath that suggest ways of being in the world other than – or supplementary to – the 168

purely human. That one of those ways is a form of ambulation that eschews mono-verticality in favour of a more grounded and distributed method of counter-balance is captured in two striking movement images from the piece. In the first, Kotowich and

Solomon, each bent at the hips and dragging themselves along the floor with their arms, shuffle towards each other, offering their legs as ballast and their backs as surfaces from which to move successively to an upright position. Once there, however, they need their arms to support each other, demonstrated most powerfully for me in the tableau of the two dancers leaning their heads on each other’s shoulders, locking their upraised arms, and then propelling each other horizontally across the stage. Any route across the land, Olson seems to be saying, depends on remaining rooted in the land – something we would all do well to remember.

In any given year at dote I will inevitably see two or three pieces by local artists that in some form or another I have previously encountered elsewhere – often, as with Chase and Nann’s a crazy kind of hope, at another Vancouver dance festival. This is not a comment on either the quality or the quantity of exciting new dance performances being produced in the city, although a scan of successive dote line-ups over the years can definitely leave one with the impression that certain artists are better represented than others. Rather, it speaks again to the limited local presentation opportunities available to independent Vancouver dance artists outside of the festival format. As someone who regularly attends events at all the major dance and performing arts festivals in the city, I have never been frustrated by the overlap or the repetition in programming. If the work has not impressed me the first time around, I will not go out of my way to give it a second viewing. But I also take advantage of dote to deepen my engagement with shows that have left an earlier impression.

S AT U R D AY, 1 1 J U LY 2 0 1 5 Edge 6 at Dancing on the Edge

RAW ,

which I first saw […] as part of

EDAM ’s

NEW

fall choreographic series in 2013.

Following a second outing in Edmonton in 2014, we are now getting, at

DOTE

2015, version 3.0. The piece begins with dancer Molly McDermott slouched in a chair downstage

And: Festival

Structured improvisation is the basis for Mutable Subject/Deanna Peters’

right, her head thrown back. She is illuminated from above by a soft spot. Peters stands beside her, in the half-light; her back is turned towards us, a sliver of which we can see courtesy of the suit jacket she is wearing back-to-front. As McDermott begins to twist and contort the lower half of her body in the chair, her toes somehow always in demi-pointe, Peters rests her right hand just above McDermott’s right

169

shoulder, as if seeking to calm or still or comfort her – or maybe just to prevent her movements from getting too out of control (a point to which I will return). At a certain moment the chair begins to move, pulled backwards by an unseen Alexa Mardon, who is crouched behind it. By the time the chair comes to a stop upstage, McDermott’s movements have become a riot of frenetic tics and crooked shapes and the chair starts to take on more ominous associations – as something to which McDermott’s body has been tied or strapped, for example, and from which she is seeking to free herself (in which case that hovering hand of Peters is perhaps not so benevolent after all, and maybe that open slit from the backwards suit jacket starts to look like one we’d see on a standard issue hospital gown). Then, too, as an object that encodes and scripts an entire history of sedentary gendered behaviour, the chair carries associations of decorous bodily comportment (women don’t usually get to manspread) against which McDermott might be rightly rebelling. McDermott does eventually escape the chair’s confines, and after she and Mardon exit the stage, Peters, still with her back to us, turns turntablist, putting on an old 45 and cranking up the volume. There follows a most compelling floor solo, in which Peters moves her body across the stage in a series of sexily languorous poses, exposing the gorgeous curves and silhouette of her back to us as the suit jacket falls about her head, but always keeping her face from us. Indeed, one of the things that is most interesting about the opening of

NEW RAW

is how con-

sciously Peters has herself and her fellow female dancers avoid the (presumptively male) gaze of the audience: Peters dances with her back to us; McDermott, while in the chair, has her head cast upward to the ceiling; and Mardon in the opening sequence is completely invisible behind the chair. A little later on, following an amazingly physical duet between Mardon and McDermott in which the former aggressively “manhandles” (the word seems appropriate in this context) the latter, these three will perform an improvised trio of walking with album covers held in front of their faces. And when the fourth dancer in the group, Elissa Hanson, finally appears she does so by shimmying on stage on all fours, her ass in the air – and defiantly in our noses. Hanson’s delayed appearance is the prelude to the thumping climax of NEW

RAW ,

in which the four dancers move from avoiding the potentially objectifying gaze of the audience to actively soliciting and even owning that gaze – of being quite explicitly in our faces. This begins when Hanson eventually stands upright and turns 170

around, her acknowledgement of us and what we want prompting her to tease us with a catalogue of provocative poses culled from the catwalk and beauty pageants and striptease; a highlight during this sequence is when the flirty little moué Hanson begins to make with her mouth grows bigger and bigger, turning into a gaping

open maw that functions simultaneously as a silent scream at the indignity of our presence before her. Thereafter, as the music gets louder and louder, the women improvise a series of forward and backward movement lines, their accelerations towards and retreats from us operating like a taunt. Yes, here we are dancing in front of you. But that doesn’t mean we are dancing for you. It’s a cheeky dance slap in the face. And it feels amazing.5

And: Festival

One cannot talk about the experience of dote without addressing the space of the Firehall. Built in 1906 as Vancouver’s first fire station and operating as such until the mid-1970s, the building was converted into a performance facility in 1982. Its black box studio theatre seats 136 in a single rake and its 30⬘ x 50⬘ floating stage floor creates an inevitable intimacy between performers and audience. However, there is very limited backstage and wing space, no fly space, only a single dressing room with immediate access to the stage, and the soundproofing between the auditorium and the lobby is almost non-existent, meaning that one is likely to hear as part of an early evening dote performance the voices of patrons gathering for the show to follow. As dote occurs at the height of summer, those patrons often congregate on the Firehall’s justly famous two-tiered courtyard deck, and one of the special aspects of the festival is the way in which this particular space serves as a nightly nexus for the city’s dance community, gathering together artists, audience members, and presenters in a series of overlapping conversations that seem to carry forward not just from one evening to the next, but from one year to the next. That said, one of the things that has consistently dismayed me about the festival is the way in which the Firehall’s courtyard is underutilized as a performance space. Events have occasionally been held here since the start of the festival, with Noam Gagnon’s very first dote performance taking place outdoors.6 More recently, however, this kind of programming has been inconsistent,7 a measure perhaps of the unpredictability of the surrounding Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, many of whose lower-income, under-housed, and racialized residents struggle as a result of poverty, addiction, and mental health issues. Indeed, the 2018 edition of dote was notable for the theft of the copper wiring in the air conditioning unit that serviced the Firehall’s studio theatre, making for some hot and sweaty final performances. In the early years of the festival, the Firehall’s upstairs rehearsal studio was also used for performances, and it is still occasionally used for showings of works-in-progress – as with Starr Muranko’s presentation of a draft of Chapter 21 at dote 2019. It’s a space I know from my time rehearsing there

171

with Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, one of many artists to have been featured at dote and to have been encouraged and promoted by Spencer, who has spent quality time in this particular room. Another is Amber Funk Barton, whose first evening-length work for her company, the response., premiered at the Firehall in 2008 and featured as a key prop the moldy overstuffed couch from the building’s upstairs studio. The performance was the very first Vancouver dance piece I wrote about on my blog, although not very successfully. Ten years later, Barton, who has spoken candidly about the debt she owes to Spencer for taking a risk on her as an untried choreographer (and, coincidentally, Risk was the name of that formative work from 2008),8 returned to the Firehall stage to dance an ode to the festival that has helped nurture her career, along with those of so many other dance artists in the city. This time I had something intelligent to say in response.

S U N D AY, 8 J U LY 2 0 1 8 DOTE 2018: Edge 2 at The Firehall Amber Funk Barton’s For You, For Me is a solo she has composed as a gift to DOTE on the occasion of its 30th anniversary. Amber arrives on the bare and fully illuminated Firehall stage in black shorts and top, and wearing a pair of runners. She looks around the space, taking it in, and then registers how it reverberates in her body kinetically. She reaches a hand out into space, traces a line along the floor, tests her balance by leaning over the sides of her shoes to the left before falling to the ground. Part of the joy of this piece comes from watching Amber remember all that she has done on this stage, and also what she can still do. When she lifts one leg above her head in full extension and then pivots 360 degrees on the other, a smile of “wow” lights up her face and it is instantly contagious. As is how Amber mixes the different movement vocabularies that reside in her body, a pirouette and jeté, or a walking line on demi-pointe, contrasted – sometimes instantly – with a body roll or a bit of floating and flying. Even the way she rearranges her top from front to back through a quick and dextrous shifting of her arms is utterly captivating. Amber performs all of this without music. All we hear is the squeak of her shoes and her breathing, effort here being another of Amber’s gifts to us and this space. Hence her perfect ending. Bending backwards to the floor as the intensely 172

bright lights slowly fade to black, she moves the square she has formed with the thumb and forefinger of one hand from her heart centre to the ground beside her: everything she has, she has left on the floor.

Vancouver dance artists have always been at or on the edge of things: of the presumptive geographical centres of Canadian and global dance innovation; of the limits of sustainable government funding; of the exhaustion of the aesthetics and politics of dance as a form.9 How important, therefore, to have a festival that, despite its own rough edges, continues to allow movers and choreographers in this city, including those analyzed in the next chapter, to teeter bravely along multiple precipices.

And: Festival 173

CHAPTER 4

Like Is as Like Is Not Making (and Unmaking) Correspondences with Ziyian Kwan and Vanessa Goodman

Consider, to begin, the following descriptions of two short works by Vancouver dance artists Ziyian Kwan and Vanessa Goodman: Still Rhyming is Ziyian’s homage to Patti Smith, and especially Smith’s writing in M Train. The work pairs Ziyian with local musician Jo Hirabayashi, the son of Kokoro’s Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi, for whom Ziyian danced for many years. In this particular collaboration Ziyian is asking, among other things, what it means to embody creative influence. How, for example, do you dance a book’s possession of your soul? In Ziyian’s case, this leads to a provocative opening duet with the book as choreographic object. Lying supine on the floor with a hardcover tome covering her face as Hirabayashi picks out a riff on his guitar in the upstage right corner, Ziyian slowly arises from her slumber, her eyes peeking out over the edge of the book. The book begins to slide down Ziyian’s torso, but she is careful not to let it fall to the ground. Indeed, in the movement that follows Ziyian is at pains to keep the book in as close proximity to her body as possible: she passes it through her legs like a basketball; she clutches it under her chin; and, most extraordinarily, she grips the spine between her teeth, jumping up and down so that the white pages fan open and closed, open and closed, like a huge gaping mouth waiting to suck us into its world of mystery and pleasure. Later in the piece, addressing an empty chair draped with a black leather jacket, Ziyian reprises a conversation she actually had with Smith at her husband Rodney’s bookstore when the musician was in

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

town promoting her book. Though we are left to imagine Smith’s words and facial expressions, embedded in Ziyian’s goofy mistake about how to spell her own name we see enacted an interesting comment about whose signature ultimately belongs on a work of art, including one such as this – a collaboration composed as an homage to another creator – or any other that is likewise launched into the world to find an audience. Floating Upstream begins with Vanessa in a crouch in the centre of the stage, her back toward the audience. Hitching each of the long billowy white pant legs of the costume she is wearing up around her thighs, Vanessa slowly bounce-shuffles upstage, like she is wading through a heavy current or a soupy swamp or, even more suggestively, a nimbus of clouds. At the same time, there is a way in which the pants register visually and semiotically as Victorian-era bloomers, a symbol of gendered bodily constraint. To this end, having reached the upstage wall and having turned to face the audience, Vanessa suddenly makes us aware that in her efforts not to let the cuffs of her pants fall, she has literally had to keep her knees together. Either way, the initial isolation of Vanessa’s upper body means that we are able to marvel at the simultaneous flow and precision of her movement, her arms undulating in waves through the layered wash of frequent collaborator Loscil’s original electronic soundscape,1 only to jab suddenly at the air in response to successive musical pulses. Later, having freed up her legs and let loose her pantaloons, Goodman explodes into a rubbery Gaga-esque style of inside-out lines and limbs (the artist has trained with Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva company, as well as with Batsheva alumnus Hofesh Shechter). From this she transitions seamlessly into a version of a robot dance that, when placed in the context of past solo work (I’m thinking especially of Container, which I discuss at more length below), suggests a recurring theme of moving within, as well as busting out of, prescribed conventions and patterns – including those that have been inscribed within skeletal, nervous, and neurophysiological systems. I saw both of these works in September 2016 as part of a shared program at The Dance Centre called Simile. At first the title made me smile. For the subject of as well as their respective approaches to making work could not be more different for Vanessa and Ziyian. This is something the artists expressly thematize in the duet that concluded Simile’s evening of programming. A rumination on the differences – as well as the productive synergies – between each artist’s creative processes, In Vertebrate Dreams sees the dancemakers tapping into their inner animals by donning polar bear (Ziyian) and zebra (Vanessa) masks (see Figure 4.1). Dancing animals will recur later in

175

Figure 4.1 Vanessa Goodman (left) and Ziyian Kwan in In Vertebrate Dreams (2016).

Ziyian Kwan: I had just not graduated from high school, and I decided I wanted to be a dancer. So I put myself on a bus to Penticton and enrolled in a dance summer school with a bunch of seven-year-olds.3

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

this chapter, but for now let me simply reinforce that it is truly uncanny how the donning of a mask can change not only a performer’s physicality on stage but also how spectators are wont to read that physicality. Initially when presented with the tableau of Vanessa standing upstage right and Ziyian sitting downstage left I could not tell who was who (though in retrospect, Ziyian’s furry high heels should have been a clue). Eventually, the dancers’ different movement vocabularies – Ziyian’s luxuriatingly languorous, Goodman’s speedily sharp and staccato – register as identifying markers. However, I found myself most compelled by the moments of stillness on stage, and how traditional theatrical (and, for that matter, anthropocentric) perspectivalism can be upended through a simple act of turning a mask around on one’s head. Here embodied interspecies encounter and contact (as when Vanessa’s zebra cradles Ziyian’s polar bear head in her hands) is very much about new ways of looking at creative exchange and sustainability – in artmaking and worldmaking. And so perhaps it’s not that big of a surprise that these two artists have become frequent collaborators, appearing in and becoming trusted outside eyes on each other’s work. My own reasons for including a discussion of each in a single chapter are twofold. First, I find the unlikeness of Ziyian’s and Vanessa’s dance histories, styles, compositional aesthetics, and subject material exemplary of the diversity of the contemporary Vancouver dance community more generally, which over the years various critics (usually from outside Vancouver) have tried to straightjacket into a single overarching aesthetic (often in terms of how contemporary dance in Vancouver differs from its counterparts in Montreal and Toronto).2 Then, too, there is the unlikely fact that among the artists featured in this book, it is Ziyian and Vanessa who have most frequently and consistently reached out to me to engage in a critical dialogue with their work – be it dramaturgically in the studio, or as a pre- or post-performance interlocutor and commentator. What follows, then, is as much an account of my own education in reading and responding to Ziyian’s and Vanessa’s work as an unpacking of some of the additional contexts (artistic, scholarly, geographical, interpersonal) in and against which it might be situated.

177

Born in Hong Kong, Ziyian immigrated with her family to Vancouver in the 1970s. By her own admission, she came to dance relatively late, attending her first beginner summer dance intensive in Penticton at age seventeen (which made her the oldest dancer in the class). Upon her return to Vancouver, Ziyian enrolled in Main Dance at its original location in the old Arcadian Hall at Main and Sixth, where she studied with Gisa Cole, and where two giants in Vancouver dance, Karen Jamieson and Judith Marcuse, had their offices. Though the Arcadian Hall, a former Odd Fellows Lodge that had become a dance studio and live music venue in the 1980s, burned down in 1993 (the arson attacks and subsequent gentrifying real estate developments in Mount Pleasant date back that far), it literally remains a part of Ziyian’s body via a wood sliver from the studio floor that is permanently lodged in her knee.4 For most of her dance career, Ziyian has defined herself as an interprète,5 and since 1987 she has appeared in close to a hundred works by some of Vancouver’s most important companies and choreographers, including Vancouver Moving Theatre, Kokoro Dance, MascallDance, Lola MacLaughlin, Susan Elliott and Anatomica, Co.erasga/Alvin Tolentino, battery opera, The Contingency Plan, and many more. She has also been very active in commissioning new choreographic works from both local and national dance artists such as Peter Bingham, Barbara Bourget, Susan Elliott, Josh Martin, Benoît Lachambre, John Ottmann, Robin Poitras, David Pressault, Angélique Willkie, and Tedd Robinson. Indeed, so ubiquitous has been Ziyian’s presence on Vancouver dance stages over the past thirty years that she confirmed to me she has appeared on the Firehall stage almost every year since she began dancing professionally, and also that she has performed in most Dancing on the Edge Festivals since its inception.6 It’s hardly surprising, then, that in 2014 The Dance Centre presented her with their Isadora Award for her contributions to dance performance in Vancouver.

178

Ziyian Kwan: Dumb Instrument Dance came into being in 2013. But it didn’t officially become a company until 2015. I think I realized that over time I was initiating as many projects as I was being engaged to dance in: so either commissioning work or beginning my own forays into creating, which actually started with installation pieces. So I thought I should have a platform to initiate things.7 Ironically, at the very moment Ziyian received this award she was in the midst of redefining herself as a performer-choreographer, having launched

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

her company, Dumb Instrument Dance, in 2013 as a platform from which to supplement her repertoire of commissioned works with her own studioand site-based compositional experiments, including with other collaborators from Vancouver’s contemporary dance community. Appropriately, her choreographic debut, the neck to fall, appeared as part of a mixed program at The Dance Centre in June 2013 that also featured a work by Vanessa, the long indoors, in which Ziyian appeared alongside Jane Osborne (a founding member, along with Vanessa and Leigha Wald, of The Contingency Plan). It feels appropriate as well that Ziyian took inspiration for the neck from a part of her own dance history, the piece unfolding as an ode to the Saskatchewan-based dancer and somatic pioneer Amelia Itcush, who died in 2011, and with whom Ziyian studied privately for many years after being introduced to her method in a workshop at MascallDance.8 In the work, Ziyian stumble-staggers onto an all-white stage in a faux-awkward slipstream of “missteps” that I have since come to recognize as her signature kinetic way of quite literally letting herself fall into the choreographic possibilities of moving her own body through space (it also helps that in these instances Ziyian is almost always wearing a pair of heels). That those possibilities are linked to, abetted, and sometimes constrained by a core set of objects and props with which Ziyian interacts is another recurring choreographic principle first established in this work. In the case of the neck to fall, the choreographic objects9 include two cardboard boxes, one small and one large, two sets of chopsticks, a large plastic bag into which Ziyian sinks her head and body, and a furry stool, upon which Ziyian at one point mimes a virtuosic cello solo, an ode to composer Peggy Lee’s musical score. Later Ziyian turns the stool on its side, rolling her body with and over it in a series of lyrically graceful waves that make both body and stool extensionally (and elastically) equivalent. Each object anchors a set of external commands, delivered by the recorded voice of Kana Nemoto, who also studied with Itcush, and who now carries on the legacy of her work. Ziyian struggles to adapt her body to each of Nemoto’s commands, and maybe because of the pace and complexity of the commands, or the clipped and slightly robotic way in which they are delivered, the piece has felt to me each of the three times I’ve seen it (twice in performance and once as part of an invited studio rehearsal) as much a rumination on perceptions of racialized and gendered comportment as it is a tribute to the body-centred exercises of Itcush’s method. Or, to articulate this in terms of the citational framework outlined by Robin Bernstein, the things Ziyian dances with in the neck to fall seem to be “scripting” her behaviour in ways that combine narrative

179

180

and materiality to structure a set of enactments that prompt us to make – and potentially Ziyian to resist – certain inferences about her subjecthood.10 When I first saw the neck to fall, I admit to not knowing what exactly to think. The ideas at play were intriguing, Ziyian’s presence on stage transfixing, and her choice of collaborators – especially in the form of Lee and fellow composer Dylan Vandershyff – sharply intuitive. But I wasn’t entirely sure if the movement structure progressed beyond a series of extended exercises or studies. That assessment changed over subsequent viewings, as I started to see more of Ziyian’s other work, and as we began to have more direct and frequent exchanges about that work. How those exchanges came about, and how I see them reflecting the complex of connections and obligations and responsibilities encapsulated in my own relationship to Vancouver’s dance community, is mostly the subject of the discussion that follows.11 Let me begin that discussion by jumping forward a year, to a bright warm day in October 2014, when I found myself, at Ziyian’s invitation, in the edam studio at the Western Front, where she was rehearsing bite down gently and howL as part of Peter Bingham’s annual fall choreographic series (whose importance as a showcase for established and emerging choreographers I have previously discussed). A series of four linked solos for Ziyian, James Gnam, Barbara Bourget, and, yes, Vanessa Goodman, bite down is a quixotic take on the story of “Goldilocks and The Three Bears” – by way of Nancy Sinatra. What I saw in the studio that October afternoon, and later the next month in performance, unfolded like a dream, with the lights slowly coming up on the four dancers, each hibernating on (or over or beside) a chair placed strategically about the stage. Going counterclockwise around the edam studio, Barbara, as Mama Bear, is tucked into a ball upstage left; Vanessa, as Baby Bear, is bent at the waist upstage right and facing the backstage wall; James, as Papa Bear, is sprawled sexily over his overturned chair stage right; and, centre stage, perched on a stool and with her bare back turned to the audience, is Ziyian, hair of course dyed blonde, and from the waist down clad in a brown bear costume designed by Diane Park (who, as we shall see below, has also collaborated memorably with Vanessa). Ziyian initiates the movement by sliding her hands down the length of her back, first flipping out the stubby bear tale upon which she has been sitting, and then throwing the arms of the costume over her shoulders before slipping into each, tying up at the front, and turning to face us. This sequence further establishes the dreamlike state governing the piece as a whole, a liminal space between sleep and wakefulness in which we are watching Ziyian-asGoldilocks-becoming-bear. It’s a sleight-of-body that, as per my discussion

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

above, gets telegraphed immediately in the deliberately awkward, lumbering gait that Ziyian adopts as she trudges toward and eventually slams into the backstage wall. Needless to say, such a move is likely to rouse fellow slumbering bears, and the piece thereafter unfolds as series of individual riffs on iconic Nancy Sinatra songs. Barbara, in a fur-collared black dress and pillbox hat with veil, momentarily casts off a lifetime (or maybe it’s only a winter’s worth) of regret and rediscovers her bossa nova moves to “As Tears Go By.” James, sporting a toque and aviator sunglasses, is all thrusting pelvis and sexy swagger during “Indian Summer.” And Vanessa, in her herky-jerky twitching and casual abuse of her Teddy Bear to “Bang Bang,” hints at some possible childhood trauma. Indeed, all is not cozy and tender in this family ménage, and when these three dancers do eventually come together in a clinch at the climax of the work, their previously functional solo movement morphs into fractious verbal dysfunction. Throughout, Ziyian is watching expectantly, and occasionally intervening, the dreamer at once fascinated by and seeking to make sense of her own dream. Following the rehearsal showing, Ziyian and I had an extended discussion about the different symbolic and pop culture frames through which one might interpret bite down. However, what I actually want to emphasize here, once again with reference to the work of Judith Hamera, is the “relational infrastructure” of Vancouver dance being mapped via the bodily labour of Ziyian and her collaborators, a social and aesthetic network of mobile intimacy that must be extended to the two other bodies – whom readers will already be familiar with from Chapter 1 – watching along with me on that beautiful October afternoon: James’s wife and plastic orchid factory (pof) co-principal, Natalie LeFebvre Gnam; and dancer Bevin Poole. If, as Hamera persuasively argues in connection to the intersecting dance communities of Los Angeles, dance technique can be situated as part of a larger archive of the social work of bodies in “practices of everyday urban life,” one in which “movement with and around other bodies” at once binds people “together in socialities with strategic ambitions” and produces “modes of reflexivity” that “tactically limit or engender forms of solidarity and subjectivity,”12 where did I, the only non-professional dancer in the room on that particular day, fit into this gathered micro-economy of Vancouver dance? The short answer would be to say that as a result of my previous blog writing about Dumb Instrument and pof – including presentations by each at the most recent Dancing on the Edge Festival (dote) in July 2014 – I had been sought out by Ziyian, and also by James and Natalie a few months

181

earlier (see, again, Chapter 1), as a sympathetic outside eye for studio research into the development of new work. But that would have been both to claim an authority I don’t believe I had yet earned back then in my writing on Vancouver movement aesthetics, and also to reduce to a fixed and perfunctory transactional exchange the fundamental motility of each experience, in the flow both of bodies and of ideas that form part of the larger social and civic contract I want to suggest is being performed in and by these showings. To this end, let’s dance backwards, like Ginger Rogers accompanying Fred Astaire, to the series of embodied encounters with Ziyian that immediately preceded my arrival at edam in October 2014 to catch a glimpse of bite down:

182

1) First there was the chance meeting earlier that month outside my local grocery store in which Ziyian first mentioned the possibility of a studio visit. 2) This was preceded by a hug at the late summer showing of pof’s Digital Folk that I discussed in Chapter 1, and at which Ziyian thanked me for my blog post on a slow awkward, the duet with James that Ziyian had premiered at dote in July (as part of a mixed program that also featured LeFebvre Gnam’s solo Natalie). In the piece Ziyian accessorizes the functionally grey industrial overalls she and James both wear with a pair of bright red spike heels that inspired a reference on my part to Rogers, namely her famous maxim that she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels (see Figure 4.2). Not that a slow awkward is so binaristic in its movement vocabulary, a highly physical tsunami that sees Ziyian and James sharing and catching each other’s weight, and also miming the fight and martial arts choreography of action films (there’s even a High Noon–like whistle in the sound score, and at various moments Ziyian and James cock their hands on their hips like guns). Indeed, when eventually the overalls come off, Ziyian is revealed to be wearing a men’s dress shirt and underwear and James a full-length skirt, a visual conceit that nicely highlights questions of cross-gender embodiment and the mix of masculinity and femininity within us all. Nowhere is this more compellingly staged in the piece than in the moment near the end when Ziyian and James step into the same set of overalls, threading their arms through the sleeves and dancing a slow waltz. 3) Finally, there was the conversation Ziyian and I had as fellow audience members at another 2014 dote show at the Firehall, during which I reminded Ziyian that we had actually danced together once. This took place at the end of Projet in situ’s mounting of their site-based work Do You See What I Mean? at the 2013 PuSh Festival. Do You See What I Mean? remains

one of the most memorable performance experiences of my life. A two-anda-half-hour guided walking tour of Vancouver’s downtown conceived and choreographed by French artists Martin Chaput and Martial Chazallon in partnership with local presenters Urban Crawl and the PuSh Festival, the piece involves blindfolded audience members being led on an outdoor urban excursion by volunteer guides, who together with other stationed volunteers help participants engage in different sensuous encounters with a range of sounds and smells and tastes and objects. In its Vancouver iteration, Do You See What I Mean? culminated at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre, where four local dancers – Delia Brett, Alana Gerecke, Mirae Rosner, and Ziyian – waited to invite, in the words of Gerecke, “audiencing bodies … into a silent dance that reimagines the possibilities of leading, following, and moving together.”13 A work of social choreography that attunes and readjusts participants’ phenomenological and sensory orientations to their proximate physical environments, and to the other bodies moving in and through those environments, it is precisely by foreclosing on the visual sense that the work opened me up to new forms of relational being and support (see below) that continue to move me. That is why I still carry

Figure 4.2 Ziyian Kwan and James Gnam in a slow awkward (2014).

with me what Ziyian whispered into my ear as she took my arm and led me out onto the Roundhouse’s theatre floor to partner her in a duet at once far and close, relational and gravitational: “Now we move differently.”

184

I cite these kinetic geographies – both the series of encounters with Ziyian preceding my invitation to her showing of bite down and the various routes navigated in Do You See What I Mean? – less to bolster my insider bona fides as a member of the Vancouver dance/performance community than to suggest the ways in which paying attention to the mundane social topography of performance – the dailiness of the sites that give rise to it, the labour that goes into it, and the communities it engenders – allows for a different perspective regarding its contributions to civic economies. In such a framework, art and creativity need not be wholly subsumed by the logic of financialization that persists in measuring their public worth solely in terms of a return on (capital) investment. Rather, by accounting for (including counting up) “the artistic skills required to sustain the Life side of the supposed Art/Life binary,” performance emerges in Shannon Jackson’s bold reassessment of public art’s historical anti-institutionality as a system of “‘interpublic coordination,’” one that reminds us that “no one can ever fully go it alone.”14 Consider, in this regard, what else Ziyian may or may not have gotten up to on the day she invited me to the showing of bite down. Maybe the day began with Ziyian attending class: perhaps with Peter Bingham at edam (which would have been most convenient); or perhaps at The Dance Centre, which hosts a rotating series of guest-taught sessions called Working Class sponsored by the artist-run Training Society of Vancouver (on whose board Natalie LeFebvre Gnam serves as president, and about which I will have a bit more to say at the conclusion of the next movement interval). Following rehearsal, it’s possible Ziyian stopped in at a nearby coffee shop to revise a grant application, or to meet up for a chat with a fellow traveller in the not-for-profit arts community of Vancouver. In the evening, assuming she wasn’t back at edam tending bar, or hadn’t volunteered to work the box office at the Roundhouse for another company or festival performance (both of which she regularly does), maybe Ziyian took in a show at the Firehall or The Cultch that evening, before meeting up with her partner, Rodney, for a late dinner. In tracking the social, kinaesthetic, and “inter-public” overlaps that derive from Ziyian’s only somewhat hypothetical daily movements throughout the city, I am not only interested in where our social pathways potentially intersect: at edam, for example; or the coffee shop; or the Roundhouse. I

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

also want to make visible – to show – through these intersections the work of living (for both Ziyian and myself) that goes into making and supporting the work. In this, I am drawing from my own labour as a teacher, a board member of several not-for-profit arts companies, and an invested spectator to affirm Jackson’s assertion in Social Works that in “emphasizing – rather than being embarrassed by – the infrastructural operations of performance” (from research and rehearsal to grant writing and governance to production facilitation and staff management) we discover “a different way to join aesthetic engagement to the social sphere, mapping a shared interest in the confounding of insides and outsides, selves and structures.”15 Certainly in terms of my own support for the performing arts in Vancouver it is impossible for me to separate or keep clearly defined my roles as academic, board member, donor, audience member, and writer. Sometimes, as Jackson suggests, sustaining those various levels of support can feel constraining, as when, for example, after a long day of teaching that is followed by an Inverso board meeting (see the next chapter) I may not want to sit through the performance to which I have been invited, let alone facilitate the talkback to follow. However, as Jackson points out, part of the contract of performance, like that of the social welfare state, is to commit to being inconvenienced by the various claims it and its practitioners make upon you.16 Likewise, to reinvoke Randy Martin’s notion of the shared “derivative logic” that underpins global financial structures and local dance networks – both of which, as previously noted in the introduction to this book, are premised upon notions of “generative risk” and “mutual indebtedness” – we might ask what it means to rematerialize within the “corporal economy” of the body the apparently immaterial movement of finance as it flows inequitably between scarcity and abundance. According to Martin, “sensing dance from the perspective of the derivative, between the fluid ephemerality of networks that vanish without a trace and the static durability of organizations that lurch from crisis to crisis replicating their structures, opens approaches to embodied ensembles that leverage further movement and value.”17 This is not to minimize, as Martin is quick to note, the actual financial precarity that attends the daily lives of most dance artists (among the hardest working and lowest paid of all arts professionals18), nor the additional bureaucratic regulation and abstemious government oversight that often contributes to that precarity. Nor does it mitigate the increasing pressure faced by artists of all stripes to model, as Jen Harvie argues in Fair Play, a creative entrepreneurialism based on productivity and profit.19 At the same time, “Seeing how a derivative logic operates in dance holds the

185

double promise of giving notice to what dance generalizes as social life beyond itself, and what sustainable principles may already be at hand in what otherwise appears as a world in ruins.”20 This is something Ziyian took to heart in her site-specific “dance, protest, busk experiment,” what i am dancing sundays. Begun in the summer of 2010 to draw attention to the latest round of cuts to arts funding in British Columbia, Ziyian – eventually joined by more than fifty fellow dance, visual, and sound artists in Vancouver – occupied through dance on successive Sundays the Mount Pleasant intersection of Main Street and Kingsway to assert that “even though [artists] are marginalized in the economic infrastructure of bc, we insist on thriving.”21 She summarizes the impulse for – and impact of – this spontaneous art action best. Ziyian Kwan, what i am dancing sundays A dance, protest, busk experiment in how the deeply personal is political and conversely, how the political, has personal repercussions in our creative lives.

186

Back in 2010, I was questioning my validity as a professional dancer, one who was facing the cyclical demoralization of being underemployed. Even though in the last 2 decades, I had been one of the most employed dancers in Vancouver, in Summer 2010, I found myself again looking for work that was outside my field. I knew that other professional artists were navigating the same dilemma, made worse by the Campbell government’s funding cuts. This did not auger well for arts and culture in British Columbia. So I decided to do a dance, busk, protest. I decided to do it in the most embarrassing context I could think of: in Mount Pleasant, the neighbourhood where I live, where I am usually anonymous. I decided to do it at Gene Cafe, a popular hub close to my home. I wanted to make a public statement about something that was private: the challenge of maintaining a livelihood as an artist, and my determination to thrive no matter what. By the time I completed the 4th and last edition of my dance busk protest, I was joined by a diverse cross-section of artists. We received a fair amount of media coverage and later in 2010, The Georgia Straight noted in its Year in Review: “Local artists waged an imaginative

campaign – including Ziyian Kwan’s weekly dance performances in August near the corner of Main Street and Kingsway – against Campbell government cuts to culture. This contributed to his low approval rating, which led to his subsequent resignation. Thank you, artists.” … The protest was timely. Jane Danzo, former chair of the British Columbia Arts Council, resigned and sent a letter to Minister Krueger, demonstrating her stance regarding the cuts and diffusion of funds to arts in bc. It was also timely for me, as for any artist, to know that in our struggles and celebrations we were not alone [but,] rather, united. In Summer of 2010, I learned that there is no shame in the challenges that we encounter as we exercise our creative voices. We are but microcosms, jewels of imagination in the environments where we live. So … thanks to all my colleagues [for] letting the world know that art is a place where friends and strangers meet, to make the invisible visible, even and especially in the most uncertain of times.22

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

Following in the vein of Ziyian’s decision to risk embarrassing herself by taking up public space, I want to suggest that we think of the “theatre” of her particular brand of dance-theatre – and that of contemporary dance in Vancouver more generally – as a system of economic, social, and aesthetic relations that must be showy almost in spite of itself: it spends more than it has (which includes Ziyian and other artists discussed in this book waiving fees to reprint images of their work); it is per force exhibitionistic in its appeal for attention from a largely indifferent public; and it is promiscuous in its collaborative affections. In other words, it is the exact opposite of a “Goldilocks economy,” the term coined by financial strategist David Shulman in 1992 to describe an economy that is neither too hot nor too cold, balancing moderate growth with low inflation.23 Indeed, I couldn’t help thinking to myself at a second showing of bite down in November 2014, just before its premiere, what an interesting choice Ziyian had made to decentre Goldilocks as the focus of her piece. Rather, in enacting a deliberately schizoid version of Ziyian-playing-Goldilocks-becoming bear, the choreographeras-character/observer who is at once inside and outside of the work, she becomes the animating force that binds the autonomous parts (Barbara as Mama Bear, James as Papa Bear, Vanessa as Baby Bear) into a whole while also dealing with the chaos of the forest that is always with us – which on this particular day included a misbehaving sound system.

187

I tried to articulate some of this to Ziyian over a drink in the ’hood following that second showing, explaining that in the kinaesthetic relationships being enacted by this quartet of Vancouver dancers who know one another’s movement function and emotional dysfunction so well, I was also witnessing a model of kinship relations that extended beyond the stage, a bear/bare economy of dance as social choreography where the hand that feeds is as likely to be that of the partners who support you as your own. As such, the biting down on that hand must be as physically gentle as the connective howl of recognition to follow is affectively fierce (see Figure 4.3). Because as Jackson notes at the end of Social Works, in a moving discussion of San Francisco dance artist Joe Goode, “to avow support is to expose the conditions of unconditional love.”24 Ziyian Kwan: Passing in and out of each other’s work … it’s the kind of bonding that happens [so] that even if you don’t continue your friendship, or work as colleagues, you still see the very best and the worst and the funniest and the scariest and the most human and the most animal of people.25

188

Coincidentally, it was an exuberant, whimsical, muscular, deconstructive, and ultimately joyous ode to love that was to form the subject of Ziyian’s next major piece. The Mars Hotel, which premiered at the Dancing on the Edge Festival in 2015, is a duet for Ziyian and Vision Impure’s Noam Gagnon. And its genesis was a fitting tribute to Ziyian’s own evolution as a dance artist and choreographer, as well as to the mandate of her company. That is, having spent many years commissioning new work for herself and colleagues from other choreographers, in this instance Ziyian was approached by local writer P.W. Bridgman, a fan of her work, to create a piece as an anniversary present for his wife that would take as its impetus a similarly titled work of flash fiction that Bridgman had previously written. Ziyian helpfully included the text as an insert to the programs for her dance, and reading Bridgman’s prose one discovers that he has condensed a lifetime’s journey toward love into a couple’s romantic and inevitable rendezvous in Paris. Ziyian – additionally collaborating with lighting designer James Proudfoot and the crackerjack pickup band Handmade Blade (cellist Peggy Lee, trumpet player JP Carter, and guitarist Aram Bajakian) – wisely chose not to interpret Bridgman’s words at face value. Instead, she took them as creative licence to tackle head-on some of the more grossly overdetermined truisms and romantic clichés that attach themselves to any love

Figure 4.3 Ziyian Kwan in bite down gently and howL (2014).

190

story. Indeed, that was my one main note to Ziyian when I visited her in the studio as she was rehearsing the piece: go bigger; embrace and enhance the hackneyed; and then flip it all upside down. Among other things, this meant that the performance began with Carter’s entrance from the foyer of the Firehall, pausing to survey the audience with mild disdain, like an aloof lounge singer, before the closed stage curtains that Proudfoot lavishly bathes in a velvety reddish-purple hue. When the curtains finally part, the first thing we see is Noam, lying supine on the floor, his legs and feet poking out from underneath a giant white and partly inflated air ball with the word love in black letters painted on its side. As the band launches into the first of its improvisatory riffs, Ziyian emerges from the wings, glances quizzically at Noam underneath the love ball, like he’s some incongruous version of the Wicked Witch of the East, from The Wizard of Oz, before retrieving an air pump from behind said ball and beginning to play/dance with it in a haphazard, almost mechanical manner. Clearly we are once again in a surreal, dreamlike space, one from which Noam, still underneath the ball, attempts to awaken Ziyian, calling to her by name. When his verbal entreaties won’t work, he gets up and flings the love ball at her. This is the cue for the band to launch into a faster, louder, and altogether more aggressive register, and for Ziyian and Noam to launch themselves physically into a duet that matches the music in its propulsive energy. The dancers march across the stage – Ziyian along a vertical axis, Noam along a horizontal one – narrowly missing each other before flinging their bodies to the floor, doing a series of side-by-side leapfrog jumps, and coming together in a succession of embraces and collisions that literally knock them both off their feet. Love as a delicate waltz of courtship this is not; this is love as competition, as contest – one that, for the moment, sees Noam winning, as this section culminates in him performing a frenzied air guitar solo to Bajakian’s actual accompaniment while Ziyian languishes dazed and confused on the floor against the air ball. Later on in the piece Ziyian and Noam partner each other much more tenderly, the companionate besideness of their bodies – first one, then the other taking the lead or falling back in a charming shuffle-walk pattern, or else both offering their heads and backs as ballast for the transfer of weight – additionally textured by the lush notes of Lee and her bandmates, and in the process offering a portrait of danced intimacy based on another kind of coupling and mutual support. Bracketing these two duets there are also moments when Noam and Ziyian separately address, and make themselves

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

vulnerable before, the audience: Noam first whistles and then sings a bit of Dean Martin’s famous “Birds and Bees” song, strategically changing the gender of one of the words in the second verse; and Ziyian offers a catalogue of responses from friends and intimates based on her appeal for their personal one-word definitions of love. She ends with her husband’s response of “amateur,” which as she tells us first flummoxed her, until Rodney helpfully supplied a dictionary definition that contextualized the word as referring to one who practices an art, and especially a fine art, not for professional or financial reasons, but purely for the love of it – a point to which I will return. In these and the other vignettes that make up the piece, what has stayed with me most powerfully from the three versions I have seen (once in rehearsal, and twice in performance) was how Ziyian consciously set about “queering” the (hetero)normative conventions of romantic love. Sometimes this is overt, as when Ziyian wades into the audience to retrieve Noam’s boyfriend, Ken (see Figure 4.4); the two men share a long and steamy kiss while Ziyian, having put on high heels and stripped to her black panties, leans over seductively at the waist to pick up the coat and dress she had been wearing up until that point. Asymmetries of gender and sexuality are further played up when Ziyian, still topless, is handed an industrial-strength blower by Noam, which she promptly inserts into the flaccid air ball’s opening, pumping it up to maximum inflation in a parody of so many cultural symbols of masculine tumescence. In this, Ziyian’s “exploration of human relationships and embodiments” in The Mars Hotel might be seen to be adopting a version of the “queer feminism” that according to Emily Wilcox, in her reading of the work of choreographer Gu Jiang, “challenges normative conceptions of women, feminine gender, and female sexuality as typically presented in dance works by Chinese choreographers.”26 But really what I mean by Ziyian’s queer take on love in The Mars Hotel is that she is interested in exploring its tropes in a manner that is deliberately askew, one that resists any totalizing grand narrative in favour of a slow accretion of episodes that are consistently off-kilter, that keep us off-balance and throw us off-course. Like that big love ball that she and Gagnon fling across the stage at each other near the end of the piece. Indeed, like love itself. Ziyian even extends this principle to her treatment of Bridgman’s source text, an excerpt of which she reads out only at the very conclusion of the piece, following a final interaction with that retrieved air pump. Thus displaced, and with the air having literally been let out of the dance, the text

191

Figure 4.4 Left to right: Ken Blaschuk, Noam Gagnon, and Ziyian Kwan in The Mars Hotel (2015).

192

becomes one element in the work’s overall score – a score that is unapologetically promiscuous, polymorphous, and perverse – rather than this sacred thing to which the choreographer’s vision must somehow be faithful. This is something I should have kept in mind when Ziyian invited me to lead the post-performance talkback when The Mars Hotel was remounted as part of a double-bill of her work at the Firehall in February 2017. It was paired with a new work, Kwan Yin, in which Ziyian explores the idea of compassion via the heart sutra of the Chinese Buddhist Bodhisattva who gives the piece its title. Testing herself even further in this regard, in Kwan Yin Ziyian decided to work with the person with whom she claims she is most often impatient, constructing a duet for herself and her father. In the audience that night there was a posse of local high school students, who were very engaged and attentive throughout both challenging works of contemporary dance. And while none of the students stayed for the talkback, a concession that Ziyian was asked to make in relation to their presence became the focus of some conversation. To be specific: at the moment in The Mars Hotel when Ziyian, clad only in her black panties and pumps, inserts the industrial-strength inflater into the love ball and lets loose with

so many jet streams of air, Firehall artistic producer Donna Spencer asked Ziyian to cover her breasts in deference to the attending high school students. After much consideration, Ziyian decided to comply, but also posted about the decision on Facebook. The response, she said during the talkback, generated a lot of debate, some of which carried over into our conversation that night, with me leading the indignant charge on Ziyian’s behalf. I was outraged that Ziyian was asked to compromise on an image from the piece that both parodies and subverts any number of gendered stereotypes around sexuality and power while Noam could prance around shirtless through most of the piece. To Ziyian’s credit, however, she refused to characterize the change she made to the work as a simple matter of an artist being censored or having to compromise her feminist principles. Indeed, as she subsequently put it to me in an email message about the matter, there were other, equally important, issues at play. So let me end my discussion of Ziyian’s work by quoting the artist herself:

Vanessa Goodman: I have learned so much from collaborating with James Gnam and Ziyian Kwan. I love that there is such value in different types of embodiment.28 Thinking reciprocally about how else Ziyian’s work might be connected to that of Vanessa, to whom I now turn, aesthetic differences and

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

Ziyian Kwan: This is what I want to share, after performing to a sold out house of 60% high school students. My dilemma about censorship was secondary. The schools were Magee and Templeton – representing the Vancouver East Side and Shaughnessy, two conversely different neighbourhoods in terms of perceived demographics. It was a small sacrifice to alter my costume so that I could share my work with this audience. What a gift to have these people witnessing Noam and Ken kiss, watching my dad dance, listening to the wild and poetic sounds of Handmade Blade. The students held my work in their gaze and felt to me, ageless. Fully present as much as they wanted to be, they infused the performance with energy and the night was magical. What more could I ask? They didn’t stay for the talk back but they stayed to receive the work. They stayed to share the beautiful transparency of their eyes and to see what they saw. This resonates with me and eclipses my questions that were founded in the politics of gender and power. At the end of the day, the reciprocal nature of art is boundless. It is love.27

193

194

choreographic influences are to a certain extent obviated, or at the very least superseded, by each’s genuine love of dance as an art form. This love of what they do extends to their interest in caring for and supplementing their audiences’ engagement with their work, which in turn accounts for the lengths to which each has gone to make publicly accessible a critical discourse around what it is they do. I have helped to foster this discourse: by facilitating post-show talkbacks of the sort described above in connection with Ziyian’s Mars Hotel; or by producing some contextual writing in advance of a work’s premiere, as was the case with Vanessa’s Wells Hill, which I discuss below. For some readers this might immediately disqualify me from an objective and dispassionate assessment of their choreographic practices in this chapter, my earlier intellectual labour on their behalf compromising the value of any subsequent critique in the marketplace of ideas as applied to contemporary dance – especially if, as we shall further see, additional members of one’s affective firmament are involved in helping to produce that critique. Instead, I prefer to credit Ziyian and Vanessa with affording me, in many ways still a “passionate amateur” when it comes to dance criticism, opportunities to hone my own craft, to discover what it is that I love about this community, and to pay that love forward in this book in a way that goes beyond any professional reward that might accrue either to myself or to my artistic subjects. Here I take my cue from theatre scholar Nicholas Ridout, who argues that “passionate amateurs are those who work together for the production of value for one another (for love, that is, rather than money) in ways that refuse – sometimes rather quietly and perhaps even ineffectually – the division of labor that obtains under capitalism as usual.”29 Of course, Vanessa’s own love of dance manifests itself in so many additional ways: in the luminous presence she exudes on stage; in her total dedication to all aspects of the work she choreographs; in her generosity in working with and for her peers; in her ongoing commitment to furthering her training; even in her compulsive spectatorship. Indeed, if there is a member of the community whom I’m most likely to see in the audience at any given dance event – from the latest presentation by Ballet bc or DanceHouse to more intimate shows at edam or Left of Main – it is most likely Vanessa. In embracing all of this and more – including directing her own company and co-founding another – Vanessa is a powder keg of buzzing energy. It’s no accident that my colleague Judith Garay, for whom Vanessa danced for a decade, calls her one of the fastest dancers she’s ever worked with.

Vanessa Goodman: My very first performance with Dancers Dancing I was so nervous I did my solo twice, in double time.30

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

Vanessa moved to Vancouver from Toronto in 2002, enrolling in the dance program in the School for the Contemporary Arts (sca) at Simon Fraser University. She was following a westward route previously traced by her sister, Meghan, also a graduate of sca’s Dance Program, and likewise an active performer and creator in the Vancouver contemporary dance scene, including as a long-time member of the aerial dance company, Aeriosa. Following her own graduation from sfu in 2006, Vanessa joined Garay’s company, Dancers Dancing, touring the province for ten years. She also founded a collective, The Contingency Plan, with fellow sca Dance alums Jane Osborne and Leigha Wald in 2008. Commissioning and producing new work by local choreographers such as Serge Bennathan, Justine A. Chambers, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, James Gnam, and Rob Kitsos, The Contingency Plan also began making its own collaborative performances. In doing so, they maintained a collectivist ethos not simply through their own style of decision-making and way of creating work together, but also by recommitting to the principle of collaboration with each new process, forming a new collective ensemble on a project-by-project basis.31 During its decade of activity, The Contingency Plan also created abundant opportunities for other artists to experiment across disciplines and in different presentation formats. Thus, while Vanessa and Jane decided to end the collective’s operations in 2019, Wald having left the group in 2012, a major legacy of Vanessa and her Contingency Plan colleagues is Interplay, an annual interdisciplinary performance lab they produced and curated from 2011 to 2015 out of the Moberly Arts and Cultural Centre, and that is now overseen by Mutable Subject’s Deanna Peters. Vanessa formed her own company, Action at a Distance, in 2013. It was that same year that she was awarded the Iris Garland Choreographic Prize by The Dance Centre, which led to her first major creation for the company, What Belongs to You. A quintet created with and performed by Lisa Gelley, Josh Martin, Erika Mitsuhashi, Jane Osborne, and Bevin Poole, the piece premiered at The Dance Centre in July 2014 in a co-presentation with that year’s Dancing on the Edge Festival. A sensory exploration of human desire, the work takes as its point of departure American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s postwar theory of human motivation, in which he posited a pyramid-like “hierarchy of needs” ranging from basic physiological and

195

196

life-sustaining requirements like breathing, food, sleep, shelter, and sex, to the demand for safety and security, a sense of social belonging, individual self-esteem, and a sense of purpose and potential.32 What makes the piece so interesting, however, is that Vanessa refuses to choreograph Maslow’s theory as a human-centred drama – as might, for example, be the case in a classic character-driven psychological ballet by Antony Tudor. Instead, the kinetic action is mobilized by the dancers’ motor responses to the hundreds of white balloons that form part of the mise-en-scène. At times the balloons adhere to the dancers’ bodies, at other times they swirl about the stage like molecules taking flight courtesy of giant black fans positioned in the wings, or float wave-like on a raised expanse of plastic sheeting that will eventually enclose itself around the balloons, bagging them up like outsized ping pong balls or giant Styrofoam packing chips (see Figure 4.5). In each instance, what Maslow would term the “self-actualization” of the dancers can only be achieved in relation to the balloons – whether as a spinning desire to be free of them; to step delicately and gracefully between, around, and with them; to throw oneself or lift another through or above them; or to immerse one’s body among them, as when one of the dancers steps inside the plastic bag to wade holographically among the balloons, the orbiting of human and non-human bodies here enacting something like a grounded rematerialization of the music of the spheres. Like Ziyian, Vanessa is fascinated by the choreography of objects, and there is a way in which the “thing-power” ascribed to the balloons in What Belongs to You creates a choreographic assemblage of the human and non-human in which the wily and unpredictable agency of the balloons’ movement materializes and gives dimension to what Jane Bennett would call the “out-side” of all matter. That is, the dancers’ shifting trajectories in relation to the balloons – and one another – makes manifest the concept that, Maslow’s supreme motivated response of “self-transcendence” notwithstanding, no one ever acts alone, that we are always collaborating and interfacing with other bodies and forces.33 Although by 2014 Vanessa had herself been a vital force in Vancouver dance for upwards of eight years, What Belongs to You raised her profile significantly. She was interviewed in The Georgia Straight (and also featured on its cover) in advance of the piece’s premiere, and that magazine’s dance critic, Janet Smith, gave the work a very favourable review.34 Suddenly everyone was talking about “that piece with all the balloons,” and new and bigger presenters started to come calling. In the remainder of this chapter I want to focus on two pieces that Vanessa initiated through Action at a Dis-

Figure 4.5 Josh Martin balancing a bag of balloons on his head in Vanessa Goodman’s What Belongs to You (2014).

Vanessa Goodman: It was Julie-anne Saroyan, from Small Stages, who encouraged me to dance in my own work.35 In Container those investigations are focused on the body as a repository of identity and the cultural past that it inherits. But in making the piece Vanessa was also interested in thinking about literal spatial enclosures and how the body reacts to an experience like incarceration. Thus, for example, in the initial excerpt of the work that I saw as part of the 2015 Dancing on

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

tance in 2015. I have followed successive iterations of each piece with interest, engaging with Vanessa in an ongoing dialogue about their very different subjects and forms, and in the case of the second of the two works, Wells Hill, also being commissioned by Vanessa to write an introductory essay to the work in advance of its full-length premiere. Wells Hill is Vanessa’s largest and most ambitious work to date, an intricate ensemble piece for seven dancers that takes as its point of departure Vanessa’s own material connection to two Canadian icons, Marshall McLuhan and Glenn Gould. But before I elaborate at greater length on that connection, I want first to unpack the solo Container. For even as Vanessa’s choreographic practice has grown in complexity and scale, she has remained committed to using her company as a platform through which to initiate her own individual body-based investigations into questions of identity and self-agency.

197

198

the Edge Festival, Vanessa’s body is mostly confined to a square of white light. Within these confines she twitches robotically, her joints (head, elbows, knees) collapsing inwardly in an almost Pavlovian response to the glitches in the accompanying electronic score by Loscil. But every now and then, Vanessa pushes back against both the pulse of the music and the perimeters of her kinesphere36 by extending into a deep lunge and holding the pose, measuring the limits of the territory she might claim as her own simply by changing the axis and direction of her body. That while doing this she is also wearing nude dance semis and combat boots, her hair pulled back to reveal the shaved sides of her skull, suggests that part of what Vanessa is pushing back against are the very strictures of femininity itself, and in my initial blog response to this version of Container I confess that I referenced both Priss from Blade Runner and Miley Cyrus. It was only when I saw the full version of the piece the following year that I realized Vanessa was also exploring the cultural inheritance of her Jewish identity. This is made clear at the outset when, still semi-naked and wearing her fierce footwear, Vanessa drags her body – legs splayed, arms extended out from her sides – across an arc of upstage white light (now projected horizontally by designer James Proudfoot across the length of the stage) as a somewhat tinny version of the Hebrew folk song “Chiribim Chiribom” battles for our aural attention against Loscil’s wall of industrial white noise, which is steadily increasing in volume. This sonic dissonance is matched by the tension in Vanessa’s body, for while it appears in the stop-and-start thrust of this sequence that she is battling against some outside force that is moving her involuntarily, in those extended arms one can also detect an occasional slight shimmy to the shoulders, a trace smile also perhaps playing across Vanessa’s lips as a kinetic memory of collective social dancing transported diasporically across time and space struggles to take hold of her body. But she doesn’t give herself over to this memory completely, and as the folk song is gradually superseded by Loscil’s original sound composition, the shoulder shimmy becomes more of the twitch I remembered from the excerpt I had seen at dote, a phantom bit of “tradition” that remains written on Vanessa’s body even as she moulds herself into a modern dancing machine. My nod here to Fiddler on the Roof feels appropriate. For in the full version of Container that virtuosic lunge I had so admired from my first glimpse of the piece is embellished with a subsequent staggered contraction of Vanessa’s extended horizontal leg, her torso remaining erect, with her arms clenched into fists behind her until she reaches full vertical. In this bit

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

of acrobatics I can’t help but detect an homage to the famous sideways manspreading knee lunge steps that serve as the climax to the Bottle Dance that Jerome Robbins choreographed as the movement-based apex to Motl and Tzaytl’s wedding celebration. As Alisa Solomon argues in an illuminating article on Robbins’s fieldwork in developing this iconic sequence, the director-choreographer’s adaptation of the wedding rituals of New York Hasidim (as well as the larger cultural and religious heritage of Ashkenazi Jews who had migrated from Eastern Europe) into the signature show-stopping number of a commercial Broadway musical accomplished two things: first, it allowed secular Jewish audiences a means of identifying with a cultural past without having to take on its inherited strictures of law and religion;37 second, “the muscularity of the dancing” presented to non-Jewish audiences an image of Jewish masculinity that was athletic and virile, a “desissifying” move (made by a closeted homosexual who was also at various points in his life a self-hating Jew) that “refuted the common [anti-Semitic] stereotype of the Jewish male as wimpy and weak.”38 In the latter instance, it is additionally worth noting that Robbins’s choreography conformed to the vision of the “muscle Jew” proposed by Zionist Max Nordau, whose theories regarding the cultivation of the body through gymnastics, agricultural labour, and military training would heavily influence kibbutzim life in Palestine pre- and post- the founding of the State of Israel.39 This included the new Israeli “folk” dances that were then being developed and codified on kibbutzim – often by women choreographers, including the legendary Gurit Kadman – with the upright, confidently striding, and prideful choreography of these athletic dances likewise meant to negate, in the words of Gdalit Neuman, “the anti-Semitic image of the slouching shetl Jew.”40 All of this is relevant to a discussion of Vanessa’s Container, which consciously plays with a bodily dialectic of upward striving and slouching collapse, but additionally complicated by the fact that it is an androgynouslooking, though impressively muscled (especially those exposed abdominals!), female body only obliquely marked as Jewish who is performing these moves. For the sequences that follow, which include Vanessa robotically moving forwards and backwards in cross-hatched diagonals of light, seem to explore the tensions embedded in prescribed pathways of embodiment – not least with respect to the intersection of normative and non-normative narratives of gender and culture. This becomes especially important when Vanessa transitions into the second half of the piece with a visual surprise: returning upstage, she kicks off her boots, lets loose her

199

hair, kneels on the floor, and withdraws from underneath a taped-down bit of extra black Marley to her side a folded white cloth (see Figure 4.6). Vanessa places the cloth in front of her and turns it around ceremonially two or three times before unfolding it with careful precision and holding it up to her torso, as if testing to see that it will fit. When, eventually, she slips into the simple shift, Vanessa is instantly recognizable as girlish and feminine. That this transformation coincides with the return of “Chiribim Chiribom,” this time at full volume and sung by The Barry Sisters, glamorous stars of the US Klezmer circuit in the 1950s, helps to reinforce the straightjacket of gendered identity against which Vanessa had seemingly been pushing back in the previous section. Indeed, the lyrics to the song tell of the marriage of a rabbi, the bride’s dowry apparently consisting solely of the gifts of unquestioning devotion to her husband and, of course, motherhood. The symbolism of the white dress, when coupled with Vanessa’s approximation of the Tza’ad Temani, or Yemenite, step that is a foundation of so many Jewish wedding dances, including the Horah – in which, facing forward and often in a circle formation, dancers change the sideways direction of their movement in a sequence of three steps involving the transfer of weight from left to right and back (or vice-versa), and following a quickquick-slow tempo41 – thus registered very clearly to me as the vexed weight of patriarchal Jewish “tradition” that Vanessa is working through – and often against – in this piece. Yet that does not mean that she cannot also take some sensual pleasure in what is contained in, and by, her bodily inheritance as a contemporary Jewish woman. Hence the return of that shoulder shimmy, which during the chorus of “Chiribim Chiribom” turns into a grinningly contagious full-body bounce. As with Ziyian’s playful queering of stereotypes of Asian femininity in The Mars Hotel and other of her works, so in Container does Vanessa work to subvert gendered tropes of Jewish identity even as she delights in intuiting how her body tells her that she belongs to a specific cultural tradition – no matter how schmaltzy some of its markers might be.

200

Vanessa Goodman: When Lisa [Gelley] and I took the Gaga workshop in Tel Aviv, it was clear who was there to learn and who were the Naharin groupies.42 To this end, it is worth concluding my discussion of Container by acknowledging that one of the ways Vanessa has sought to further her own

Figure 4.6 Vanessa Goodman in Container (2016). Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

dance training is by exploring the lineage of contemporary Jewish dance. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, she has taken Batsheva artistic director Ohad Naharin’s Gaga workshop in Tel Aviv, and also studied with Batsheva alumnus Hofesh Shechter in London. Shechter, who takes great risks in his own work, knows when not to mess with tradition. Hired in 2015 as the choreographer for the high-profile Broadway remount of Fiddler directed by Bartlett Sher, Shechter felt free to update and refresh much of Robbins’s choreography. But he knew not to touch the iconic steps of the Bottle Dance. Shechter’s work has been showcased twice in Vancouver by DanceHouse, the presentation platform founded in 2008 by Barb Clausen and Jim Smith, and about which I will have more to say in the last of this book’s movement intervals. Vanessa has talked about how the local premiere of Shechter’s Uprising in 2009 (part of a mixed program along with In your rooms) greatly influenced her own aesthetic.43 We were both in the audience that night, and then again when the choreographer’s barbarians was staged by DanceHouse in 2015.

201

202

That same year, on a rainy evening in February, Vanessa debuted the first iteration of what would eventually become her own DanceHouse premiere. The piece unfolded on the stage of the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre, part of a double bill of dance that was being presented by the Chutzpah! Festival. The main attraction that night was supposed to be Idan Sharabi, the Israeli choreographer who has taken various European companies by storm. But it was Vanessa’s opening work, an excerpt from a workin-progress, that most captivated my partner, Richard, and I that evening, and that launched both of us on a three-year journey of following the work’s transformation, culminating in our own unique family contributions to its eventual full-length opening. And it all started with Richard leaning over to glance at the title of the piece listed in the program – Wells Hill was what we both read – and then announcing to me: “That’s the name of the street where McLuhan first lived in Toronto.” In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan writes that the house is a medium of communication because, just like a road or a telephone, it “shape[s] and rearrange[s] the patterns of human association and community”:44 by, for example, enclosing and subdividing space according to specific group or individual activities; or, depending on its designated purpose, by sanctioning certain kinds of congregation and circumscribing others. In such a way, and for better or worse, a house imprints its form upon our selves, and this surely helps to explain not just why so many of us retain vivid memories of our childhood homes, but also why for some thinkers memory itself is conceived as a house, or palace, filled with multiple adjoining rooms.45 With Wells Hill Vanessa elaborates a personal and expressly embodied connection to these ideas, taking inspiration from McLuhan’s ideas about communication technologies and, especially via his collaborations with Glenn Gould, how media affect the ways we produce and consume art. As Richard informed me on that February night in 2015, the title of the work does indeed take its name from the street in Toronto where McLuhan and his family lived before moving to nearby Wychwood Park, and where he wrote three of his most famous works: The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium Is the Massage. It was also at his Wells Hill address that McLuhan regularly discoursed with his neighbour, Gould, on media, performance, and art. Eleven years after the McLuhans sold this house in 1968, Vanessa’s parents moved into it, and Vanessa and her sisters, Jessica and Meghan, grew up listening to stories of the conversations that took place there between the celebrated media guru and the eccentric piano genius. Coincidentally, before purchasing the Wells Hill house, Vanessa’s

parents lived in the same St Clair Avenue apartment complex as Gould, who would regularly greet baby Jessica in the elevator. One might say, then, that the choreographer was quite literally born to create this work. Vanessa Goodman: At a young age, I was aware that McLuhan had ties to my home, but it wasn’t until much later that I learned about Gould’s connection. The scope of their collective impact on both Canada and the international community is astounding, and it’s fascinating to think about these two great minds having casual discussions in the study. The truth is though that through the ubiquity of their artistic and intellectual output, we are all connected to the art and ideas of these two individuals in some way.46

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

Wells Hill is Vanessa’s largest and most ambitious work to date, an intricate ensemble piece for seven dancers that is accompanied by an equally complex design concept, including a sound score by Gabriel Saloman and Loscil that both incorporates and remediates Gould’s version of The Goldberg Variations; projections by Goodman, Ben Didier, and Milton Lim that in their own hyper-kineticism and immersiveness evoke what McLuhan referred to as the tactility of electronic media; lighting by James Proudfoot that repurposes, in the manner of Dan Flavin’s illuminated environments, that quintessential fixture of 1960s and ’70s commercial décor, the fluorescent tube; and costumes by Diane Park that take to heart McLuhan’s maxim that clothing, as an extended skin, becomes an interface between our bodies and the environments in and through which we move. Between that first Chutzpah! showing and the work’s official November 2017 full-length premiere at Goldcorp Centre for the Arts’ Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre – in a co-presentation between DanceHouse, sfu Woodward’s Cultural Programs, and the School for the Contemporary Arts – Richard and I watched as Vanessa developed and integrated all of these elements in relation to her choreography, presenting additional studies from Wells Hill at Dances for a Small Stage and Dance In Vancouver in 2015, and at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in 2016, and refining the work through a 2017 summer residency at sfu Woodward’s. I blogged about each of these iterations, and as a result Vanessa approached me to contribute a short framing essay that would be published on her company website in advance of the Goldcorp premiere. And when she found out that Richard was an expert on the theories of McLuhan,47 and had published on McLuhan’s collaborations with Gould, she conscripted him into curating a suite of cognate

203

discursive events relating to media and art, and also leading each of the preshow conversations. But before all of that there was the excitement of watching the work take shape, and so permit me, before I examine at greater length the final structure of the piece, to share some of my initial impressions from its successive workshop presentations – and, in so doing, also recognize the many talented performers who contributed to Wells Hill’s creation:

204

1) Chutzpah! Festival (February 2015): To a recording of Gould performing “The Goldberg Variations,” a sextet of incredibly gifted Vancouver dancers (Lara Barclay, Lisa Gelley, James Gnam, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, and Jane Osborne) begin moving in formation stage right, their deconstructed white tuxedo shirts and grey skirts and slacks evoking elite private school uniforms (the costumes are by Deborah Beaulieu), an image reinforced by the evocative floor and overhead florescent lighting design by James Proudfoot. The six dancers, initially tightly grouped and moving their arms synchronously and geometrically to frame their heads and torsos, slowly break apart and fan out across the stage. At this point, Barclay begins weaving in and around them, our focus drawn to her different movement patterns, the amount of space she is covering relative to the others, and, in this instance, the deliberate showcasing of her virtuosity … Following the opening group sequence we get a gorgeous duet between Gnam and Poole; as they finish, they move upstage, making way for the pairing of Gelley and Osborne. As kinetically compelling as the downstage duo is (and these women are truly exceptional movers), our attention is necessarily divided between them and the upstage duo, a reminder that in contemporary dance our awareness and sensory-motor perceptors are being hailed in multiple ways, often simultaneously. So too is it when Martin joins the group a bit later in the piece; he is moving differently than the others, more fluidly, and as he floats in and out between the others’ bodies we cannot help but follow his progress. Then there is the stunningly arresting final tableau: Barclay, having first been grabbed from behind by Gelley, is steered stage left, as one-by-one the other dancers attach themselves to her body (and to one another) from the wings, manipulating her limbs as if she is a marionette (an image with obvious dance-world resonance). However, Gnam remains apart from this group, dancing a solo in counterpoint to the larger group machine. A lot is going on here. On the one hand, Goodman seems to be suggesting that if the dancer’s body is a medium, then it is the choreographer who ultimately works it over. But sometimes even the most disciplined bodies

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

can resist being conscripted for a particular message – hence Gnam dancing alone off to the side. 2) Dances for a Small Stage (April 2015): In Contrapuntus, a short study from her larger work-in-progress, Wells Hill, Vanessa Goodman uses Bach’s “Art of the Fugue” – here transcribed for violin and played live by Meredith Bates – to explore parallel techniques of contrapuntal movement. Dancers Lara Barclay and Bevin Poole begin standing in close proximity, weaving their limbs around each other’s bodies in perfect synchronous response, and only rarely touching. In the same way that in the fugue one voice or instrument will begin a musical phrase and then another voice or instrument will come in to match it, but in a different pitch, so here do we see these matchless dancers, so attuned to each other’s rhythms, initiating, responding to, and subtly changing the directional flow of their paired movement. Literally opening things up in the second half of this short excerpt, Goodman choreographs a variation on her main theme by having Barclay and Poole face off on a diagonal, almost like toreadors, before bringing them together centre stage for more physical and hands-on partnering. In So You Want to Write a Fugue?, Glenn Gould’s own famously witty compositional take on Bach, the musician writes that the only way to write a fugue is to forget all you’ve been told and ignore the rules.48 It’s a maxim Goodman seems to be taking to heart in her own development of this work. And she’s succeeding brilliantly. 3) Dance In Vancouver (November 2015): The movement (in Wells Hill) is as gorgeous as ever, at once languid and sinewy and robustly energetic in a way that is equally responsive to Gould playing Bach and to Gabriel Saloman’s original immersive sound score. It was also interesting to see the piece in the more intimate setting of The Dance Centre (which I gather partly inspired the new costumes designed by Ziyian Kwan) and to witness the individual embodied contributions of new cast members Karissa Barry, Dario Dinuzzi, and Alexa Mardon. 4) Shadbolt Centre for the Arts (March 2016): Following intermission we were shown the second half of Wells Hill, Goodman’s riff on the interface between art and information as theorized by Marshall McLuhan and Glenn Gould. In this part Goodman is working with McLuhan’s notion that all media are fundamentally extensions of human faculties (whether psychical or physical), with electronic media, in particular, being an adjunct to our central nervous system (the quote to this effect, from The Medium Is the Massage, is referenced at the end of this thirty-minute excerpt).49 All of this is brought out quite viscerally in the piece via the immersive lighting

205

and media designs of James Proudfoot and Ben Didier. Fluorescent and neon tubes flash stage left and right and pixelated projections wash over the white Marley floor. According to McLuhan, information overload is a condition of electronic media, and Goodman takes this maxim seriously, keeping all five of her dancers (Lara Barclay, Karissa Barry, Dario Dinuzzi, Alexa Mardon, and Bevin Poole) on stage throughout the piece, and likewise keeping them in constant motion. Moreover, our attention is purposefully divided between the workings of the group, which includes simple patterns of unison movement, more complex partnering sequences, and whole-body chains and collective lifts, and those of different individuals who occasionally break off to improvise on their own in an upstage or downstage corner, often punctuating their movements with signature repeated gestures, including ones directed out to the audience. In Laws of Media Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan wrote that “the artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.”50 In Wells Hill Goodman is showing us, through the medium of dance, just what such a bridging might look like. Richard Cavell: References to motion, movement, speed, acceleration appear on nearly every page of McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and it is inarguable that motion is fundamental to McLuhan’s media theory … [The] scalar differentiation [between the content of a message and the pace of its medial delivery] allows McLuhan to address the fundamental critical problem raised by an increasingly accelerating mediascape: how is one to gain purchase on a phenomenon – speed – which, by its very nature, does not permit distantiation? McLuhan confronts this issue precisely with reference to the shifts in scale that he had previously identified. The critical advantage of speed-up is that it moves away from the visual bias, the hegemony of a single sense, to a multisensory engagement.51

206

What my partner Richard writes of electronic, and now digital, speedup has always been true of the kinetic experience of dance: in the words of McLuhan, “the action and the reaction occur almost at the same time.”52 Which is what makes capturing it in the slow-motion medium of print (as opposed to film or video) such a challenge. Nevertheless, when it came time to write my essay for her show it became important for me to stress that

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

Vanessa’s own starting point as a choreographer was not to seek to explain or illustrate through movement any of McLuhan’s theories, nor how those theories may have influenced Gould’s recording career. Rather, in my understanding of what became the final version of Wells Hill she is interested in using the “homely” fact of her own family’s intersection with each man’s intellectual and artistic legacy as a catalyst to explore the ways in which dance, as an embodied medium, might be seen to be contiguous with rather than discontinuous from some of the more virtual experiences of our digital age. For example, what might it mean to have your dancers develop individual gestures based on favourite smartphone emojis, and then to incorporate these gestures into a non-sequential loop that registers kinetically rather than ideogrammatically? For one thing, it undoes the standard sender–receiver model of communication with which McLuhan long quarrelled. That is, just as emojis may be misinterpreted if the receiver of the message does not understand the way in which the sender is using them, so are they transmitted not as graphical images but as code. Thus, if sender and receiver do not use the same software or operating system for their devices, the receiver’s device may display the same emoji in an entirely different way. By contrast, we experience gesture in Wells Hill, and in much contemporary dance more generally, first and foremost as the energy and force relating to motion, as movement abstracted from any correspondence to fixed or universal meaning (as with a wave hello) – as movement, in other words, that can only be apprehended relationally. So it is with the bravura sequence in Wells Hill in which the emoji gesture bases are elaborated most extensively and complexly. Standing in projected vertical columns of looping text that resemble the pixelated stock market data that scroll across led ticker boards of the sort one might find in Times Square or Canary Wharf, Vanessa’s seven dancers (Lara Barclay, Karissa Barry, Dario Dinuzzi, Bynh Ho, Arash Khakpour, Alexa Mardon, and Bevin Poole) cycle through a bleeding series of hand clasps, head nods, arm grabs, leg lifts, waist and knee bends, back arches, falls to the floor, and directional turns that on their own resist categorical deciphering, but that together resonate as a form of bodily conversation (see Figure 4.7). In the stops and starts that pulse down the line, in their different levels and facings and tempos, and in those rare moments where they sync into a shared pose (including a hand raised in a hail, a gesture that repeats throughout the piece), the dancers are responding to one another in ways that stimulate our own senses. As with the series of texts that connect and simultaneously obviate

207

the physical distance between smartphone users, so here in this danced exploration of the embodied effects of technology it is the medium that truly is the message. Though various quotations from McLuhan and Gould appear on the upstage screen to introduce different sections of the work, conceptually Vanessa has divided Wells Hill into two clear parts, which she sees as corresponding to our pre- and post-Internet ages. Both are marked by the appearance of a talismanic glass icon in the shape of an upside-down pyramid. At the start of the show, as Barclay performs a sinewy and graceful solo to one of Gould’s Goldberg Variations, the curve and extension of her long limbs accentuated by the shimmery translucent shift made for her by costume designer Park, the rest of the ensemble stares blankly at the empty pyramid, which we might in this instance read as a stand-in for a television set. The glass pyramid returns at the start of the second half of the piece, but this time projected into it is a holographic image of McLuhan talking about the effects of media, with the conceit of Vanessa’s dancers (and, to be sure, us in the audience) now staring into rather than at or through the glass container, combined with McLuhan’s quasi-3D animation, signalling

Figure 4.7 Left to right: Alexa Mardon, Arash Khakpour, Bynh Ho, Dario Dinuzzi, and Karissa Barry in Vanessa Goodman’s Wells Hill (2017).

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

the more immersive and interactive media environment heralded by the advent of the Internet. That this shift has both connected us and atomized us in unprecedented ways as social beings is wonderfully brought out in the conclusion to the piece. Structurally we are returned to the beginning with the musical reprise of Gould’s solo piano refrain. This time, however, while five of the dancers sit downstage right, Poole and Ho perform a soft and slow duet that in its fluidity and seeming bonelessness recalls Barclay’s opening solo (and also, it must be said, Vanessa’s early study, Contrapuntus, referenced above). At the same time, the fact that Poole and Ho, dancing side by side and clearly responding to the directional force and energy of each other’s movements, never touch leaves us to question how truly connected to one another we are in today’s wired world. Consider, in this respect, Vanessa’s use of structured improvisation in Wells Hill, in which she repeatedly fills the stage with the noisy multiplicity of seven different bodies moving adjacently, yet also autonomously and asynchronously, instead of opting for the more focalizing visual harmony of geometric group formations and mirrored movement. To be sure, these moments in Wells Hill frequently lead into or out of virtuosic partnering and unison sequences, or else different massed tableaux in which one or more bodies are danced across the stage by the rest of the group, much like a hand attached to a mouse moves a cursor across a computer screen. However, in the same way that the images we process on our various screen media are actually constellations of hundreds of thousands of individual pixels, tiny red, blue, green, and white dots that when combined create the effect of continuous colour, Vanessa’s deliberate dividing, interrupting, and overstimulating of our attention in Wells Hill gets at the heart of dance as a medium, of how the individual dancing body as referent relates to the work as a whole. That is, in answer to W.B. Yeats’s question, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?,”53 Vanessa offers a McLuhanesque spin: the dancer is the dance, and vice versa. Likewise with Gould’s famous recordings of the Goldberg Variations: what we are hearing is neither the piece that Bach’s audiences would have heard, nor the one that Gould himself would have ever performed. What we are hearing has as much to do with the performativity of technology itself as it does with the performance of the actual notes, the splicing together and overlaying of different phrasings of the same musical passage, what Gould called “take-twoness,” contributing in a material way to our listening pleasure. As art has evolved with technology, so have we and our bodies. To this end, one of McLuhan’s concepts that Vanessa is most taken with is that

209

210

media are themselves extensions of our bodies, even becoming part of our nervous systems to the extent that they act upon us as much as we act upon them (her example during one of the pre-show talks that preceded the November 2017 run of the show about our Pavlovian response to the buzzing or dinging of our various devices captures this best). In Wells Hill, Vanessa explores this idea not just through the choreography, but also through the creation of a total media environment that feels uncannily immersive. That is, in watching the piece live in the Wong Theatre – and also, it must be said, subsequently on my computer via a video recording Vanessa shared with me – my own spectating body was stimulated not just by the sight of a twitchily hyper-kinetic Mardon buzzing about the stage like a computer cursor gone rogue as the rest of the group walks robotically this way or that; or by Khakpour and Dinuzzi breaking out of the latter formation to either throw themselves horizontally to the floor or shimmy vertically toward the ceiling; or even by the unexpected surprise of Barry, clad in an illuminated body suit of the sort worn for motion capture or digital character modelling in gaming and computer animation, pulsing and swaying on the other side of the footlights, right in front of the first row of the audience, as we hear in voice-over McLuhan and Gould talking about the agency of the audience and listeners in the electronic age. My senses were also triggered by the throb of the respective sound compositions of Saloman and Loscil; by the pixelated and increasingly accelerated wash of the projections designed by Vanessa in collaboration with Didier and Lim; and by the quite literally stunning lighting design by Proudfoot, which uses the distinctive flash and jump in current that accompanies the turning on and off of flourescent tubes to at once disorient us visually and reorient us kinetically. In other words, despite its traditional proscenium staging, Wells Hill is a piece where the audience definitely feels part of the feedback loop of communication: the output from the stage most definitely affects our individual sensual experience, but the collective processing of that experience is likewise put back into the system of the show. McLuhan’s observation that through such examples of media playback we experience the full interpenetration of space and time (which he first referenced by way of the telegraph and radio,54 and which we now accept as given as a result of Internet and social communication tools like FaceTime and Skype) has arguably always been the case with dance. We see it in the historical repertoire archived in the dancer’s body through her training. And we see it in performance, where the dancing body becomes the interface of

Correspondences with Kwan and Goodman

space and time. Then, too, the dance-as-performed also works on us spatially and temporally, a reminder that in the feedback loop of communication it is the audience that completes the circuit of both the medium and the message. This is something Gould absorbed from his conversations with McLuhan in the house on Wells Hill Avenue, eventually giving up live performance for the perfectibility of the recording studio. But he never forgot who was at the other end of “his master’s voice,” that his records needed to be played and listened to. Likewise, in creating Wells Hill Vanessa recognizes that if, in McLuhan’s words, “Art is anything you can get away with,” it nevertheless demands a response. Which to a certain extent explains the intent behind this chapter: to honour Ziyian’s and Vanessa’s respective invitations, each sincerely offered, to engage in a dialogue about their work. In doing so, I have sought to downplay overt formal or aesthetic comparisons, to resist finding ways in which these dance artists are alike. As the actor, singer, performance artist, and playwright Taylor Mac has stated, in the title to one of the shows he brought to Vancouver before he became super-famous, “Comparison is violence.”55 Yet beyond their own frequent collaborations, if I, as critic, am the primary interface between each choreographer, then I must also acknowledge that by reading the dances discussed in this chapter primarily through the lens of identity, I am imposing a framework of similitude against which both women might justifiably chafe. For Ziyian, as a racialized dancer, any discussion of identity and representational difference risks overdetermining the reception of her work. Likewise, for Vanessa, dwelling overly on the narratives of cultural and familial inheritance that serve as the starting points for Container and Wells Hill threatens to obscure the ways in which her choreography is resolutely non-narrative. Such acknowledgments are not meant to – nor at this point could they – undo any of the preceding analyses. Rather, to borrow from an interjectional use of the word “like” in informal speech that is also pertinent to the content of the next chapter, they merely mark a point of critical disputation – and affective connection – from which anyone, the artists included, might legitimately distance themselves: “Like, who cares what he thinks?”

211

INTERVAL 5

And: Training In which we take the measure of dance instruction in Vancouver …

A significant part of a dancer’s professional identity is formed through training: not just the technique one has studied, but where and with whom. As we saw from the last chapter, Vanessa became a company member of Dancers Dancing as a result of having studied with my colleague Judith Garay at sfu, and Vanessa has honoured that pedagogical legacy by returning to set work on new generations of Judith’s students. Likewise, Ziyian’s first important choreographic composition, the neck to fall, was a work honouring one of her teachers, Amelia Itcush, and she continues to bear the material traces of her training at Main Dance in the 1980s via the wood splinter lodged in her knee. Thinking beyond post-secondary and pre-professional dance programs in Vancouver, while gesturing back to the dancer biographies included as part of my discussion of plastic orchid factory’s _post in Chapter 1, there are also myriad recreational studios scattered throughout the province where so many of the movers discussed in this book took their first dance steps. As Judith Hamera has written of the dance training facility Le Studio in Pasadena, California, amateur and semi-professional schools the world over help to create “vernacular landscapes” of dance practice for countless girls and boys, in which the place-based transmission of technique during adolescence transforms neighbourhood studios into “sites of productive, diverse allegiances.”1 To this end, a 2016 report prepared by the Dancer Transition Resource Centre in conjunction with Hill Strategies Research notes that for more than half of the professional Canadian dancers surveyed, a private dance studio was the most common form of dance education, followed by professional dance schools, specialized training from a mentor, and under-

And: Training

graduate dance studies.2 Likewise, many of the Vancouver dance artists interviewed for the Our Present Dance Histories project discussed in Chapter 6 began the story of their training with an affectionate nod to the suburban studio where they first stood at a barre, or donned their first pair of tap shoes, or learned to keep time to music. Eventually, however, most of these same artists moved on to more intensive training programs. In Vancouver, those options have expanded and contracted to varying degrees since sfu graduated its first cohort of dance majors in 1981 (Lola MacLaughlin among them) and Gisa Cole founded Main Dance in 1984. Notwithstanding the ongoing legacy of professional ballet training provided by Goh Ballet Academy since 1978, many of the younger contemporary dance artists who have made an impact on the local scene during the period covered in this book have graduated from one of the following pre-professional programs: sfu, Arts Umbrella, or Modus Operandi. The programs are distinct and, as such, attract different kinds of cohorts. For example, the dance program at sfu’s School for the Contemporary Arts (sca) is both academically and practically oriented, with students from a range of movement backgrounds taking courses in dance history, dance aesthetics, critical writing in the arts, and various other academic electives alongside regular technique, repertory, and composition classes. Additionally, sca’s interdisciplinary mandate encourages dance students to collaborate with peers in music, theatre, film, and visual arts. Arts Umbrella (au), overseen since 1991 by Artemis Gordon, does have a twoyear post-secondary dance diploma program, which it offers in conjunction with Vancouver Community College, but it is primarily oriented toward fulltime studio training, with full-day classes six days a week. A prerequisite for admission to au is a strong background in ballet, and the school has an official relationship with Ballet bc, with many senior au students serving as apprentices in the company as a pathway to potential full-time employment upon graduation. Established in 2007 by Out Innerspace’s David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen, Modus Operandi is the upstart among these three institutions. Modus came out of David and Tiffany’s own experience transitioning from recreational, studio, and commercial dance environments into professional artistic careers, which in addition to their own choreographic collaborations for Out Innerspace have included dancing around the world for several leading Vancouver companies, chief among them Crystal Pite’s Kidd Pivot. In David’s case, his time at The Source, a semi-professional Vancouver dance studio and company established by Joanne Pesusich in 2000 that has also helped foster the training of local dance artists like Lisa

213

214

Gelley and Josh Martin, Shay Kuebler, Maiko Miyauchi, Josh Beamish, and Heather Dotto,3 served as an especially formative influence, prompting him and Tiffany to set up a flexible four-year program designed around a ninemonth curriculum requiring twenty-five to thirty hours of studio time per week. This allows Modus students to hold down jobs outside of school, and also to seek additional performance opportunities. Despite employing different pedagogies and attracting unique student bodies, all three of these programs are inevitably in competition with one another. Modus has poached from both sfu and au several male students, who may be attracted to the more obvious inclusion of commercial and street dance styles in the curriculum. At the same time, there is also a degree of cross-pollination and collaboration. My colleague Rob Kitsos regularly guest-teaches for Modus, and sfu has loaned its studios to the organization for audition purposes. Also, every August sfu partners with au on the latter’s Summer Dance Intensive, in which world-renowned teachers, choreographers, and répétiteurs are invited to Vancouver to share their expertise with students, aiming to enhance their performance potential. In exchange for once again providing studio space, sfu receives from au several scholarship spots that it can then pass on to its best students. In the fall of 2014, the three training programs came together as part of a unique choreographic workshop facilitated by Crystal Pite, in which she collaborated with students from sfu, au, and Modus in order to build the work that would become Polaris, an award-winning piece set to the music of Thomas Adès that features an ensemble of sixty-four dancers, and that premiered at London’s Sadler’s Wells later that year. That the artistic directors of Modus are themselves frequent collaborators with Pite helps to explain some of the success of their program. As important are the other professional Vancouver dance artists who are regularly invited in as guest teachers, including Wen Wei Wang, Dana Gingras, Serge Bennathan, Noam Gagnon, Justine Chambers, Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin, Shay Kuebler, Paras Terezakis, Natalie LeFebvre Gnam and James Gnam, Amber Funk Barton, and many others. Guest teaching by artists from the community is also a feature of the sfu and au programs, and the process often simultaneously functions as a version of talent scouting. Nevertheless, the extensive professional peer relationships that David and Tiffany have with their invited colleagues means that they can help facilitate connections between their students and artists and companies looking for exciting young dancers on which to set new work. It is no accident that Modus alumni have appeared in creations by all of the artists listed above.

Then, too, the fact that David and Tiffany have their own company, and that building new Out Innerspace repertoire is an implicit and organic aspect of the Modus curriculum, means that one’s matriculation from the program might just coincide with an invitation to help premiere and tour the company’s newest ensemble piece.

T H U R S D AY, 1 3 O C T O B E R 2 0 1 6 Major Motion Picture at The Firehall Out Innerspace’s ambitious new full-length work of dance-theatre, Major Motion Picture, had its official premiere this past January at Dance Victoria. Now Vancouver audiences get to see the piece through this Saturday as it launches the Firehall Arts Centre’s 2016/17 season of dance programming. As their title suggests, Out Innerspace’s David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen have drawn inspiration from film history, with various noir, spaghetti western, and martial arts motifs, among others, referenced in the choreography. Indeed, one of the many pleasures of watching this piece comes from revelling in how the movement, both in more rapid moments of horizontal seriality and in slower and sometimes static group massings out of which different bodies appear (and, just as ominously, into which others disappear), approaches the kinetic equivalent of cinematic montage. The terrific physicality of all the performers – Raymond and Tregarthen, joined by Laura Avery, Ralph Escamillan, Elissa Hanson, Arash Khakpour, and Renée Sigoun (all graduates of OIS ’s pre-professional training program, Modus Operandi) – is a reminder that for film theorists like Gilles Deleuze the “movementimage” of cinema is fundamentally rooted in the gestural vocabulary of dance. To this end, Deleuze references Charlie Chaplin and Fred Astaire,4 and there are arguably homages to both of these men’s film oeuvres in MMP , not least in the funny and romantic closing “duet” that Tregarthen performs with a giant overcoat. ies, whose feet and arms we see moving in striking coordination, but whose collective torso remains headless. This overlord figure seems to preside over some dystopic future in which two different bands of comrades – one group all in black who appear to have mostly been cowed into reactive subservience by the system in

And: Training

However, that overcoat is mostly worn throughout the piece by three other bod-

which they find themselves, the other clad in white patterned onesies and balaclavas, who seem to incarnate a more anarchic impulse toward disrupting and even overthrowing that system – are set against each other. For some reason all of this put me in mind of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, with the headless overcoated figure a version of the sadistic headmaster who grinds the students into meat, and with that

215

film’s aesthetic mix of live action and animation also translating into this work’s unique juxtaposition of super sped-up and almost stop-motion choreography. The work is also filled with multiple moments of the dancers running on stage, doing double takes, occasionally crashing into or grappling with each other, and then dashing back into the wings – which suggested to me those sequences from Saturday morning cartoons when Scooby and Shaggy and Thelma and all the others keep running in and out of doorways and hallways, every now and then meeting up in the middle, but no one really knowing whom they might be chasing or fleeing, and why. There is in fact a wall in this piece. It very prominently fills the downstage space at the top of the show, but is slowly pulled upstage during the spoken word prologue, in which Sigouin recites a mantra of “This is for you” into a stand-up mic stage right. (Now that I think of it, there are shades of Pink Floyd’s “Hey You” lyrics in that opening interpellative direct address, and Sigouin at the mic at the top of the show portends Khakpour’s later heavy breathing solo with an old-style handheld mic later on, all of which brings to mind the Bob Geldof character ranting into a microphone in The Wall …) MMP ’s wall is subsequently transformed into a screen, onto which the piece’s innovative video designs are projected. This includes images of the performers – and also the audience – that are captured live via a light and motion-sensitive and radio frequency transmitting mobile camera hung from the stage left lighting grid. Seeking out different dancers’ bodies crouched and cowering in the wings – including in one eerie moment the figure of Hanson looking at what I took to be a representation of her character’s younger self on a cell phone – the camera is the real controlling mechanism in this hyper-mediated world, suggesting in turn that in our contemporary surveillance culture we may no longer have any real autonomy over any of our movements. For all of these instances of revelation, I was left thinking that MMP never quite gelled into the sum of its parts. There were moments of amazing physical artistry – from the collective arraying of bodies and arms into a scary talking monster (whose image later returns on screen) and a striking shaking solo by Raymond, to high impact partnering and richly organic segues into very satisfying bits of group unison. And yet, taken together, these moments felt inchoate in terms of the larger story being told: are the black and white groups at war with each other, or two different but equally oppressed groups?; is the overcoated overlord figure defeated in the end and, if so, why the playfully romantic dance with Tregarthen that concludes 216

the piece? All of which is to say that while I was definitely aware that some sort of narrative was being constructed in the piece (something I’m all for in contemporary dance-theatre and what generally attracts me to the work of Out Innerspace), I couldn’t figure out how that narrative cohered. I’m not saying that I need meaning

laid out for me or some kind of closure; but I do need an organizational logic. I also crave an emotional investment, which in this case was also lacking. I was definitely awed several times last night, but I can’t say that I was genuinely moved.

And: Training

Following its Vancouver premiere, Major Motion Picture criss-crossed the country as part of an eight-stop fall tour. Plans for a subsequent tour in the fall of 2017 featuring the same cast were, however, thrown into turmoil when all the former Modus dancers except for Sigouin and apprentice Elya Grant abruptly quit the production. This left David and Tiffany scrambling to find replacement dancers for planned visits to the milanoltre Festival in October and stops in Quebec, including at Agora de la Danse in Montreal, in November. I have not been privy to the full details of what, specifically, prompted the dancers’ departures, nor have I attempted to seek those details out. Instead, within the present reflection on training I think it is far more productive to contextualize the episode historically. If, as with my discussion of Vanessa and Ziyian at the start of this interval, a shared legacy of dance training has been the honouring of one’s teachers and mentors in one’s own embodied practice, then a parallel outcome has also been a leaving behind – sometimes wilfully and necessarily, at other times capriciously – of that connection. Think of Merce Cunningham leaving Martha Graham’s company in 1945 to branch out on his own, and subsequently the Judson Church artists learning and then moving on from Cunningham. Or consider how, in Canada, National Ballet School (nbs) students in the late 1960s and ’70s defied Celia Franca’s edict and took class at the fledgling Toronto Dance Theatre (tdt), and then how tdt’s own students rose up against their teachers at the famous Dance in Canada Conference of 1977, in which a younger generation of dance artists confronted the “silver seven” companies (including nbs and tdt) about the disproportionate amount of funding they received from the Canada Council. As Peggy Baker has summarized the event in Nadine Saxton and Katherine Cornell’s oral history of the first thirty years of tdt, “I think partly what happened there (and this can only be part of it), was [that] there were people who had a lot of important experience and background, like Rachel Browne and tdt, but their upstart students who wanted to do something different, were starting companies maybe naively thinking that they were peers, which at the time they wouldn’t have been. A lot of things were said.”5 Again, I don’t wish to speculate on what was said between David and Tiffany and the former Modus students with whom they were now collaborating as peers on Major Motion Picture. In the research, composition,

217

218

and rehearsal processes for dance, as with devised theatre and other performance genres, the lines between taking instruction and participating in co-creation become blurred. At the same time, the standard model of dance apprenticeship for emerging artists just entering the profession is to silently observe, absorb, and adapt to the methods of one’s mentors in the studio. Sigouin, for example, parlayed her work with Out Innerspace into a successful bc Arts Council Early Career Grant that supported an apprenticeship with Crystal Pite, who herself had served as an outside eye on Major Motion Picture. Sigouin has avowed that the shadowing of Pite as she has set work on companies around the world, as well as participating alongside David and Tiffany and other members of Kidd Pivot in the creation and performance of the company’s newest work, Revisor (2019), has been transformative.6 In the end, the paradox of dance training as the transmission and enactment of what is already known versus the discovery and production of something new may have less to do with any individual artistic practice or process than with how we conceive of the term more generally. As Simon Shepherd has noted, “the word ‘training’ only started to become associated with the activity of education in the early to middle sixteenth century,” with its application to theatre, music, and dance training coming even later; prior to that, training was attached principally to the military, “associated not only with transmitting skill and technique but also with creating coherent group entities.”7 To be sure, the drilling of a corps de ballet at some institutions can still resemble, in both the rote repetition and the punishing physical effects, the manoeuvres of an army (which explains why, in Chapter 3, I described my Wreck Beach Butoh process as a boot camp, Barbara Bourget having spent her whole career as a dance maker and teacher at once running from and returning to what she learned as a corps member). But what is missing from this kind of “mandatory or imposed training,” according to Ben Spatz, is any understanding of “the ongoing and dynamic interaction of training and research,” of training as “the development or discovery of new technique: new pathways in materiality, newly recognized patterns and forms in which one might then proceed to train.”8 In the world of contemporary dance, these new pathways are sought out every day. It is why even established dance artists continue to take class on a regular basis, with the peer-to-peer exchange of new movement technique in Vancouver greatly facilitated by the Training Society of Vancouver’s Working Class program. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at The Dance Centre a wide roster of teachers from Vancouver’s dance community,

as well as national and international visiting dance artists, share their technical expertise and research as a way to both sustain and extend the depth of embodied knowledge in the city. Whether one is flying low with Emmalena Fredriksson, leaping high with Shay Kuebler, or focusing on balance with Tedd Robinson, Working Class is a way for Vancouver dance artists, according to Modus’s Associate Director Kate Franklin, “to be in dialogue with [their] peers about the stuff [they are] learning.”9 In this framework, expertise in a given form or technique is not so much flattened out as reciprocally dispersed in an atmosphere that combines competition and care, and that acknowledges the ways in which training sustains research, and vice versa. This is something that Rob Kitsos and Lesley Telford, as independent choreographers who also teach at sfu and au, respectively, understand and enact at an intuitive level, training the next generation of dance artists in the city while also developing new choreographic ideas with these same artists. How some of those ideas came to be applied to my own creative work is the subject of the next chapter.

And: Training 219

CHAPTER 5

Putting Words in Motion with Rob Kitsos and Lesley Telford

While I enjoy and attempt to see as often as possible a wide range of historical and contemporary dance forms in Vancouver, as I have already admitted in my analysis of the work of Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg in Chapter 3, I have a special affinity for a particular brand of dance-theatre that distinguishes itself through its combining of text and movement. This category includes more overtly narrative works of the sort created by Crystal Pite for her company Kidd Pivot, as well as hybrid conceptual pieces in which language and gesture function almost mathematically as complementary and/or contrapuntal scores, as in the work of Hornby Island’s Sarah Chase, whom I briefly discussed in the movement interval on “Festival.” This is perhaps to be expected given my own graduate training in literature and theatre studies. Reciprocally, my tastes have been shaped by my current position as a professor in an interdisciplinary art school (sfu’s School for the Contemporary Arts), which takes for granted the mutual cross-influencing of devising and compositional strategies inherited in equal measure from post-dramatic theatre and postmodern dance (and, contiguously, experimental music, film, and visual art). That the school has helped to seed some of the more interesting local theatre and dance companies working at the crossroads of both disciplines is one happy coincidence of this interdisciplinary ethos. So it is probably not entirely surprising that when, in 2009, I sat down to write my first full-length play I conceived its action as having a parallel movement score. I showed the resulting script, The Objecthood of Chairs, to my sca colleague DD Kugler, a theatre director and dramaturg who has also worked with Vancouver dance artists ranging from Karen Jamieson and

Putting Words in Motion with Kitsos and Telford

Helen Walkley to battery opera’s Lee Su-Feh and David McIntosh. Kugler in turn passed the script on to choreographer and sca Dance professor Rob Kitsos, and much to my amazement we were suddenly making a show, corralling additional faculty and student collaborators – including, as our two performers, a recently graduated actor and dancer who each committed to spending almost a year learning the other’s practice. The first half of this chapter chronicles my collaborations with Rob in this process, contextualizing the choreographic choices he made in response to my script – and the overall direction and design concept for the piece – alongside an analysis of Rob’s own work as an interdisciplinary dance artist especially interested in how the mutual (inter)action of language, gesture, image, and sound can shift perceptual awareness in performance. In the second part of the chapter, I shift to a discussion of the work of Lesley Telford, who contributed the choreography to my second full-length play, Long Division, which is a quasisequel to Chairs, but this time with a cast of seven instead of two, and directed by Pi Theatre’s Richard Wolfe. Like Rob, Lesley enjoys working with text as a score, and her ongoing collaborations with Vancouver-based musician, spoken-word artist, multidisciplinary maker and performer, and sca alum Barbara Adler form part of my examination of Lesley’s compositional aesthetic. In both these reflections I seek to heed the method for creative and critical thinking modelled by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi in their consideration of the work of William Forsythe in Thought in the Act. While much has been written about Forsythe – one of the most important and influential choreographers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and a figure whose genre-defying aesthetic very much hovers over this chapter – I anchor my Forsythian reading of Rob and Lesley’s work in Manning and Massumi’s text because they use their insights on Forsythe’s process to reflect more generally on where “the what-if of movement and the as-if of language” meet in the middle of artistic creation as co-compositional forces.1 As such, in a concluding coda I briefly discuss my own middle ground as writer and mover in a subsequent (and currently ongoing) interdisciplinary collaboration with Rob and sound artist Nancy Tam, in which my involvement shifted from the more familiar roles of in-studio observer/spectatorcritic to those of co-devisor and co-performer, and in which, after a great deal of trial and error and a lot of self-doubt, I very much experienced what Manning and Massumi characterize “as the expression of movement and language coming together”: rhythm.2 The rhythms of this chapter once again limn both the insides and the outsides of my relationship to the material being analyzed, tracing a figure-eight

221

pattern or elliptical orbit in which I am sometimes closer to and sometimes farther away from the work and the artists under discussion. As with my analysis in Chapter 4, the inconsistency or even total lack of “epistemic distance” from my objects of study in this chapter no doubt compromises for some readers the value and rigour of my judgments.3 For other readers, particularly those who study different aspects of embodied technique within academic and other institutional contexts that support practice-as-research as a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry, the documentation of my collaborations with Rob and Lesley might contribute to a growing archive of performance-based investigations into the choreographic and compositional relationships between text and movement.4 I am not interested in resolving this tension. Instead, borrowing a metaphor from Ben Spatz, I would say that my “synchronic,” or more personally situated/invested, readings of the movement scores that Rob and Lesley contributed to my plays is counterpointed by the “diachronic,” or more historically contextual, readings I apply to other of their works, their training and teaching, and as per the Manning and Massumi text on Forsythe, analogous research in the field.5 Thus, like the elliptical orbit of the planets, or like one of Forsythe’s choreographies, there are at least two axes to this chapter, two centres, two points from which to move with, or retreat from, its lines of inquiry. So, too, with dance-theatre as a form. Rob Kitsos: I started dancing … at Bard College in upstate New York. Before that I had done martial arts and some hip hop stuff … but I really started training at Bard … It was an exciting place. And then, you know, I did theatre and dance together; I was a split major. So I was doing Oscar Wilde and, you know, all these other plays at the same time, and then starting to really make my own work.6

222

As we also saw in Chapter 3, with Tara’s semi-manifesto about not wanting to pick between team-Dance and team-Theatre, for many artists who take the body as their primary instrument or medium, creating performances that combine text and movement feels completely natural. Yet both institutionally in terms of training and presentationally in terms of performance programming and spectating, divisions remain between the disciplines. Even in sca it is difficult for students not wanting to spend additional time and money on their education to complete a double major in dance and theatre. And outside of specific interdisciplinary festival contexts (paradigmatically, as with the PuSh Festival in Vancouver), audiences are frequently

Putting Words in Motion with Kitsos and Telford

segmented into discrete constituencies by subscription-based presenters. To be sure, performance studies scholars have increasingly begun to trouble these silos. As Kate Elswit argues in Theatre & Dance, “The artificial divisions between the thing most often called ‘theatre’ and the thing most often called ‘dance’ in both academic and artistic spheres have overshadowed their interdependence.”7 In her introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, Nadine George-Graves has gone so far as to suggest that we bring together both fields of research-creation under the supracategory of “performative embodiment.”8 Coincidentally, I participated over the course of several years (2012 to 2014) in an American Society for Theatre Research (astr) working group called “Between Theatre Studies and Dance Studies” that was co-organized by George-Graves, and at which Elswit was also a participant. The group, which was also loosely affiliated with the Mellon-funded project on “Dance Studies in/as the Humanities” overseen by Northwestern University’s Susan Manning, emerged out of a historic co-meeting of astr and the Congress on Research in Dance held in Seattle in November 2010 at which Rob, Kugler, and I discussed our collaboration on Chairs. Yet while I learned a lot from my American colleagues at each of these sessions, I found they were not much interested in a specifically Canadian perspective on either the conjunctive or disjunctive intersections of dance and theatre. As an interdisciplinary dance artist with a background in theatre who trained in the United States, and who spent time teaching in Hong Kong before taking up his position at sfu in Vancouver in 2004, Rob has a unique transnational perspective on this subject. His genealogy of compositional influences encompasses everything from the improvisation technologies of Forsythe to the Viewpoints method of Ann Bogart and Tina Landau to the process-oriented immersive experiments of K.T. Niehoff, at whose Velocity Dance Center (co-founded with Michelle Miller) in Seattle Rob took class and showed work while studying for his mfa at the University of Washington,9 and whose frequently site-specific projects mix film, fashion, music, visual art, and dance. Himself a musician (he played drums for several years in a rock band in New York) and a keen amateur visual artist who happens to be married to a fashion designer, Rob has likewise created hybrid works that mix movement, text, film and video, music, and design, and that have unfolded on concert stages, in gallery spaces, and as multi-media installations. For Rob, who refuses to define himself solely as a dancer-choreographer, and who like Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg collaborates frequently with theatre artists (both inside and outside of sca),

223

224

the question is never what to call a work-in-progress, but rather how to make it take flight creatively, and who else to have in the room in order to help achieve this goal. In both of these respects, Rob, like so many other artists working at the crossroads of dance, theatre, and design, is following in the hugely influential footsteps not just of Forsythe but also of Pina Bausch.10 Indeed, it was Bausch whom I was mostly thinking of when, on a warm September evening in 2009, I made my way to The Dance Centre to take in Rob’s newest work. Bausch had died suddenly only two months before, and in our preliminary summer meetings to discuss the Chairs collaboration, Rob and Kugler and I had talked about some of our favourite moments from her repertoire, as well as how the news was affecting the mood in rehearsals for Rob’s piece – which, coincidentally, was titled Wake. An ambitious work for eight dancer-performers – including Rob in a dual embodied and virtual role as choreographer/planner and metteur-en-scène – Wake integrates movement, text, video, and live electroacoustic music (by composer Martin Gotfrit) into a satisfying whole. The piece achieves a similar reciprocity in the compositional and aesthetic relationship between individual sequences of choreography (often challengingly abstract, technically complex, and intensely physical) and an overall narrative structure that neither reveals its meaning too willingly nor remains deliberately opaque. In Wake Rob takes as his point of departure French philosopher Michel de Certeau’s essay “Walking the City,” from The Practice of Everyday Life; specifically, Rob uses the “urban ‘text’” that de Certeau claims we all collectively write in our daily flânerie, but that we are simultaneously unable to read,11 to explore both the spaces of connection and the distances between various bodies as they inhabit and interact with the built environment. How do you capture and represent what de Certeau calls “the activity of passers-by,”12 when by its very nature that activity is fleeting, barely glimpsed (at least at ground level), felt only as a trace impression – or, indeed, as an impression that gets daily retraced by pedestrians in cities all over the world? To be sure, the documentation and administrative organization of such networked social choreography have become increasingly virtuosic in our post-9/11 world, what with the ubiquitous cctv cameras, the cordoned-off public spaces, and the phalanxes of armed police that have become permanent features of newly securitized urban centres the world over (and one recalls, in this context, that de Certeau’s essay opens with a panoptical view of the grid of streets of Lower Manhattan from the 110th

Putting Words in Motion with Kitsos and Telford

floor of the World Trade Center13). It is thus no coincidence that Wake opens with Rob Groeneboer’s video capturing Rob K in the guise of some sort of city planner, atop a downtown building, with various plans and blueprints spread out around him (both Groeneboer and Gotfrit would subsequently become core collaborators on Chairs). Coincident with Rob K’s structured improvisation of a movement sequence atop the building on the video, the seven other live performers (Cort Gerlock, Jane Osborne, Roxoliana Prus, Justin Reist, Olivia Shaffer, Kim Stevenson, and Leigha Wald – all graduates of the bfa Program in Dance at sfu) get up from the chairs on which they have been sitting along either wing, and take up recumbent positions on the floor. Eventually the dancers “wake” to the city, and one of the delights of their first unison sequence is how the horizontality of their floor work contrasts with the verticality of the office and residential towers captured in the montage of images in the video. Thereafter, the piece proceeds as a succession of movements choreographed around the dancers’ own embodied relationships with the city, with various colour sequences filmed in and around Gastown that are projected on the screen becoming the basis for a reconfiguration (sometimes wilful, other times willed) of those relationships in solos, duos, trios, and full ensemble sections that are all about the on-stage negotiation of the space between self and other (even if, as de Certeau reminds us, that other is space itself). In this regard, I remember being especially struck by the complex arm work and hand clasps that Rob came up with for three of the women in one compelling sequence, finding a way to mimic in bodily gesture the tangled psychic complexity and constantly shifting terrain of friendship itself. Similarly, in a humourous pas de deux for the two men, they argue elliptically in spoken word about the best route from point A to point B as they materially enact proximity and closeness in their mutual physical striving. Even the very biomechanics of walking are isolated and abstracted in a group sequence in which the inverted double pendulum motion of ambulation and the counter-swinging of arms and legs becomes a means to rethink the “intricate sidewalk ballet” that Jane Jacobs maintains is part of the ordered disorder of any successful city (see Figure 5.1).14 In his role as planner/choreographer, Rob interrupts these proceedings at various points throughout the piece: via black-and-white sequences on the video that feature him furrowing his brow, taking notes, and eventually meeting up in what looks like a corporate boardroom with someone who may be a developer or a government bureaucrat (a perfectly cast Emily Molnar, then

225

Figure 5.1 Left to right: Jane Osborne, Olivia Shaffer, Kim Stevenson, Roxoliana Prus, Justin Reist, Leigha Wald, and Cort Gerlock in Wake (2009), by Rob Kitsos.

226

in the midst of assuming artistic leadership of the imperilled Ballet bc, about which I will have more to say in the next movement interval); and via various live walk-throughs, during which he surveys and takes more notes on the performance the audience is witnessing. Here we see Rob trying to flush out patterns, to make sense of various fragments, to render legible both the city’s various intersections and the dancers’ bodily intertwinings. But the city and the dancers resist easy conscription. When, for example, Rob improvises his own solo late in the show (accompanied on electric guitar by Gotfrit), it seems that he is attempting to reduce what we have hitherto seen of the other dancers’ bodily trajectories to one or two core repeatable phrases. But crucially during this sequence the other dancers studiously avoid Rob, either remaining planted against opposite wing walls, or else, in running back and forth between the walls, going out of their way to avoid contact with Rob and his notebook (a prop he carries with him throughout

On a bare stage six chairs are lined up horizontally from the outside in as follows: two Thonet No. 14 bentwood café chairs; two classic slatback Shaker chairs; and, in the middle, two Arne Jacobsen Series 7 stacker chairs, positioned with their backs to the audience. Two men, casually but smartly dressed, enter from either wing, heads down, walking quickly, crossing downstage in front of the row of chairs, and continuing around to the Series 7s. They sit down, register each other’s presence with a sidelong glance, then turn to face the back wall of the stage. Lights down as a silent film loop begins, ideally of classic Chaplin, Keaton, and other memorable vaudeville routines involving chairs being pulled out from under people or being broken when sat upon, etc. Film loop ends and the men stand up and take their positions behind the two bentwoods, facing the audience (see Figure 5.2).18

Putting Words in Motion with Kitsos and Telford

the piece, and which he dances around during his solo). Likewise, when Rob later attempts to join the other dancers and mimic their movements at the very end of the piece, he finds he is unable to participate fully, perhaps not having paid close enough attention after all, or else not having recorded things properly in his notebook. Here, I am reminded of how dance studies scholar Susan Leigh Foster uses de Certeau’s ruminations on walking as a kind of writing/speaking to think about the specific performance tactics of contact improvisation. Asking how we read the relationship that gets enunciated between the act of dancing and the dance that gets danced in contact, Foster claims that non-narrative and “non-message oriented” movement is not so much anti-theatrical as constitutive of an “alternative theatricality,” one in which the improvised choreographic score is used in place of the script to alter the sense relationship between body and/as text.15 I’d like to think similar thoughts were swirling around my mind when, later that fall, Rob and Kugler and I sat down with our two contracted performers – Justin Reist (who had appeared in Wake) and Victor Mariano – to read through the script of Chairs and to see what possibilities it afforded for movement. Yet while I did include, fairly early on in the play, a stage direction in which I suggested that a pratfall might lead into “a somersault/ push-pull/contact improv-inspired sequence,”16 really I was just hoping that the ideas in the text might generate in Rob some notions about motion, thinking through the dancing body what I had only partly articulated in language on the page, a “movement of thought” that Manning and Massumi refer to as the “motional-notion.”17

227

228

The Objecthood of Chairs tells the story of the relationship between two unnamed men (they are referred to in the script simply as 1 and 2), as filtered through Western culture’s own historical romance with chairs. My long-standing fascination with both the functionality and the beauty of chairs as objects of design, not to mention years spent perfecting the fine art of sedentariness, led me to write a two-hander that trades in conventions of melodrama at the same time as it mixes the lecture mode with other forms of dramatic address. More specifically, I was interested in exploring, in a style that was both performative and pedagogical, how a piece of furniture usually meant to accommodate one person might serve as a metaphor for the accommodations we routinely make – sometimes willingly, sometimes not – when we are part of a couple. Thus, over the course of the play, we receive various “object” lessons in: modernist chair design; Shaker asceticism; the revolution in sociability and sexuality inaugurated by the Thonet café chair; the inherent cruelty of childhood games of musical chairs; and Buddhist sitting practices. The text draws on architectural theory and art history, industrial design and neurophysiology, poetry and pop culture, to think through the relationships and resistances between bodies (and objects) as they move through space, and to reflect on the necessary loss of autonomy that comes with asking for, and offering, unconditional support. As originally written, then, the script already advanced an implicit theory of movement. That is, the six chairs that in effect constituted the main set design were conceived from the beginning as both facilitating and impeding contact between the performers, as well as having their own locomotive and structural agency as material objects that took up stage space and, as crucially, helped to define the parameters of and the directional vectors (including of other bodies and objects) through that space. All of the main collaborators in the performance were in agreement from the start that the chairs had to be moving throughout the piece, and the architectonics of Rob’s choreography included the performers positioning the chairs into any number of horizontal lines, vertical stacks, and diagonal corridors. At the same time, the chairs’ shifting positions became a “gateway” to the performers’ own movement,19 whether as an obstacle to be overcome or as an asset to be leveraged. Here, in crafting different movement phrases on, with, and around the chairs, Rob had to be cognizant not just of the technical capacities of and dynamic relationships between Justin and Vic’s bodies, but also of the material properties of the chairs, their height and weight and shape and strength and tensility determining, much as with a dance partner, what could be done to/with them, and what in turn they could withstand:

Figure 5.2 Left to right: Justin Reist and Victor Mariano in The Objecthood of Chairs (2010).

for example, in terms of bearing weight, or being lifted, thrown, straddled, or leapt over and on. Certainly, in this respect, our collaboration was nothing new as a work of object-oriented dance-theatre, and one thinks specifically of the chair-strewn mise-en-scène of Bausch’s Café Müller as a precedent for what we were trying to accomplish with our own performance. The difference, however, is that in our case both the text and the movement drew explicit attention to the chairs as “actants,” which in the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour is the term used to refer to the source of an action that can be either human or non-human, and that depending on the specific circumstances can take on different ideo-, techno-, or biomorphic figurations.20 Or, to frame this in the terms articulated by Manning and Massumi in their discussion of Forsythe, the chairs as moved, movable,

229

230

and moving objects were co-composing the performance environment, establishing a third “rhythmic milieu,”21 alongside language and gesture/ movement, to which both performers and spectators had to listen and respond. Drawing from Forsythe’s own writing on the subject, the chairs as, “choreographic objects,” are not “substitut[ing] for the body,” but are instead serving as “an alternative site for the understanding of potential instigation and organization of action to reside.” In this way, they ideally “draw an attentive, diverse readership that would eventually understand and, hopefully, champion the innumerable manifestations, old and new, of choreographic thinking.”22 As an example of what I’m getting at here, consider the simple yet highly effective phrase that Rob came up with as the opening of the final extended movement sequence in the play. It precedes a concluding speech by Vic in which his character ruminates on the question posed in the play’s title, namely a chair’s ontology, its “is-ness.” Without at the time having read very deeply in new materialist theory, I nevertheless wanted to make explicit what I have suggested Rob’s physical score had already intuited: that the chairs’ choreographic animacy, in the way they anticipate our need to adjust our bodies to conform to their dimensions (rather than the other way around), imbues them with what Jane Bennett calls “thing-power.”23 To this end, this is where I thought that we would see the chairs “take the lead” in dancing the performers, rather than being danced by them, and in the stage directions I naively suggested some kind of “stage magic” (trick wires, perhaps?) by which we would achieve a live pixilation effect of the sort made famous in Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra’s award-winning film A Chairy Tale (1957). I quickly learned from Kugler that was not going to happen. In the end, however, Rob did something even better, choreographing a simple pattern in which Justin and Vic, sitting at the downstage end of the diagonal line-up of chairs, and leaving one empty chair between them, extend a hand to the chair to their right, pivot down to the floor, swivel around, and then return to a sitting position on the chair beside them (see Figure 5.3). They continue doing this until they reach the upstage end of the diagonal, at which point they repeat the same sequence of movements in retrograde, and then again both ways in double time. The resulting backwards and forwards piston-like movements of their arms and legs had the uncanny effect of making it appear like it was the chairs beneath the performers that were actually moving, much like it can seem that it is the ground hurtling toward one rather than the locomotive speeding away in video of train wheels rolling along jointed railway tracks.

Figure 5.3 Justin Reist and Victor Mariano in The Objecthood of Chairs (2010).

Rob Kitsos: Just to create the space where it’s about creating work and you don’t have to worry about, you know, everything else … Test some ideas and it will all end up being something, right?24 Elsewhere, my scripted notions about motion were actively transformed via Rob’s – and other collaborators’ – rehearsal-based experiments in devising additional creative outcomes embedded but not explicit in the text. To this end, Rob’s focus on partnering in the first half of the piece, both in terms of crafting smaller mirrored gestures and in setting more lyrical duets in between sections of dialogue, helped to clarify an aspect of the play’s form of which I myself was only vaguely aware. Specifically, the script begins with quite short, and sometimes shared lines of dialogue in which the

231

characters complete each other’s sentences or maintain parallel and overlapping trains of thought. So, for example, in the section in which the men recount for us the story of their first meeting and mutual seduction, which takes place in a bar, Rob created a seated “footsie” ballet, with Justin and Vic, perched beside each other on the bentwood chairs, sliding, flexing, pointing, and tapping their feet in rhythmic unison as they enumerated in syncopated beats of counterpointed language various personal details. Punctuating or pausing on certain words, varying the tempo and force of both their vocal delivery and their physical gestures, the performers in this instance were able to enact what Manning and Massumi call a “disjunctive synthesis” of language and movement, in the process creating “a movement of thought” that also moved – and moved across – time,25 the boys’ retrospective telling of their meeting here being bodied forth in the present toward an anticipated future via a bit of under-the-table foot play. In the play, however, the men’s future together is suspended when one of them has an accident, an event that leads to recriminations and an eventual breakup. After this point, the text’s form switches (by design or unconscious instinct it is hard for me to now say) to alternating monologues, which Rob then matched to separate solo movement phrases. In these sections the performers’ different approaches to the material were sometimes more visibly apparent: as when, for example, Vic, the actor, was only doing movement, or when Justin, the dancer, had a longer monologue. By contrast, in the partnering sections these differences didn’t necessarily multiply or get thrown into starker relief, but rather started to complement and supplement each other in an almost dialectical way. By that I mean, Vic’s and Justin’s at times contradictory approaches to text and movement were not resolved, in these moments, by subsuming one under or elevating another over the other; rather, they were maintained as much as possible by Rob and Kugler in aesthetic tension and “disjunctive” contrast, as moments for the audience to ponder and ideally debate. I see this dialectical relationship between text and movement – most pronounced in our piece in those partnering sections when the boys were speaking and moving simultaneously – as a defining feature of the kind of hybrid dance-theatre performance all of us were trying to create. To this end, let me quote the performers themselves on the experience: 232

Justin: Rob and Kugler’s system … I would call it more of a tag team match, in the best possible way. My initial thought was that jumping from text to movement or vice versa would impede or delay my ownership of either, which was true to an extent at the beginning of the

process, when we would often work on unrelated parts. Soon, however, the opposite proved true. It was completely natural to have an accumulation of movement and text sequences developing independently, because the comfort level with each allowed for a certain confidence later on, in combining the two. Furthermore, both Rob and Kugler found ways to inform each other’s choreography and direction respectively. When working text, Rob would often interject with physical considerations and Peter would hash out any pertinent background information … This worked for me; having more eyes on the work meant that it evolved that much quicker. Seldom did I leave rehearsal feeling that an idea was undeveloped, and if so, these moments were usually addressed right away in the next rehearsal. Having both a director and choreographer in the room at the same time made for a rewarding, stimulating process.26

Putting Words in Motion with Kitsos and Telford

Vic: The Objecthood of Chairs was a nine-month process for me, beginning with a reading and movement workshop in December 2009 and culminating with the public presentations in September 2010. The project presented a number of intriguing artistic and personal challenges. I had very little experience working with texts that shifted so abruptly from dialogue into monologue. Furthermore, I was attracted to the language and the necessary balance between capturing its precision and intelligence and conveying its emotional layers and subtextual meanings. From a movement standpoint, I had not “danced” in a few years, and I had allowed those muscles to get a bit rusty, a bit flabby. And in terms of the bigger picture, how would the text and movement coexist, how would they work alongside each other, and with the other storytelling elements and visual media images? The scope and scale of the project was huge, but there was always a lot of trust in the rehearsals and production meetings. That trust in the respective and collective visions of the other artists involved meant I was free, as a performer, to focus on my singular task within the whole. The internal structure(s) and goals of the workshops and rehearsals were usually quite clear and specific, which allowed for a wonderful amount of freedom to play and get lost in the minutiae – knowing that the bigger picture would sort itself out as a result of the imposed and implied structures. This is not to say that it didn’t get personally frustrating or confusing at times, because it certainly did, particularly with respect to the “dance” elements and their integration with the

233

“acting.” For some silly reason I thought and assumed things would go a lot more easily than they did. I had expected my background and previous experience working on other “physical theatre” projects would naturally lend itself to this one. In order to keep my spirits up, I kept telling myself that it’s “like riding a bike … you don’t forget.” My underestimation and overconfidence, however, was getting in the way of that pure act of “riding,” of just doing it rather than thinking about it. To extend the bike analogy a bit further, that famous Einstein quote comes to mind, that in order to keep your balance you need to keep moving. That’s exactly what I needed to do during the workshop and rehearsal process: just keep moving and playing with the dance, keep talking and working with the text. Once I was able to do that, things began to fall into place.27

234

From my own experience working with Rob as a co-devisor and coperformer (which I will discuss at more length at the end of this chapter), I understand what Vic means about the need to keep moving in order not to fall off one’s bike – or barstool. That said, Rob is less interested in the expert technical execution of his movement than in that movement’s integration into a larger interdisciplinary aesthetic (one that often includes film/video, music, props, and often big doses of theatricality). In this way, Rob offers multiple avenues of access to the questions he chooses to explore, and while movement is always central to this exploration, it is never abstracted or marked off for its own sake and is often premised on the explicit juxtaposition of different dance vocabularies. Consider, in this regard, Barego, a work that Rob presented and performed in at the 2011 Dancing on the Edge Festival. Made with the former Ballet bc dancers Leon Feizo-Gas and Alexis Fletcher and sca alum Mark Arboleda, a theatre major who was at the time returning to school to complete a dance degree, Barego is a meditation on the bar as a space where individual subjectivity and private desires (you can read the invisible slash mark in the title) come up against the rituals of public spectacle and collective judgment. Against a widescreen rear projection film loop consisting of a largely continuous pan of the Charles Bar at the sfu Woodward’s complex, and making strategic spatial use of three white barstools (which I took as Rob’s homage to the bar scene in Chairs), the four dancers mine (and at times mime) the subtle choreography so often exhibited in drinking establishments: from the way we perch on or fall off our stools to the complex sequence of hand and head movements involved in doing tequila shots; from

Putting Words in Motion with Kitsos and Telford

the purposeful tango of a would-be seduction to the elegant ballet of blissful inebriation. In solos, duos, and trios, Rob structures his movement around the twin poles of alienation and sociability, display and concealment, that are always operating in the space of the bar. By that I mean that the dancers come together and move apart in patterns that telegraph at once the intoxicating effects of fellow-feeling and the sobering estrangement that comes when that feeling is withheld or not returned (including by the self). These patterns are also at work in the way that Rob plays with foreground and background in Barego, including the incorporation of the film. One’s attention is constantly being divided in a bar – focused near (on one’s drink or potential conquest) and far (the animated conversations at adjacent tables, the sports game being broadcast on the television monitor, and so on). So the fact that our own perceptual awareness as spectators is kept offbalance in Barego by both the visual commotion of stage elements and the proprioceptive co-motion of the dancer-performers likewise feels appropriate. Once again Manning and Massumi, in their discussion of Forsythe, offer a metaphor that feels equally applicable to Rob’s aesthetic. Specifically, they talk about the way that Forsythe asks his dancers to develop “double vision,” splaying their focus by at once “telescoping” their gaze to follow a possible line of movement, and then moving into that line spatially, and “metascoping” their gaze by remaining attuned to how the movement of another might unfold temporally, and then responding to that unfolding’s incipience.28 Arboleda walking a lonely horizontal line upstage while Fletcher and Feizo-Gaz knock back drinks downstage, only to have Arboleda turn abruptly and interrupt the space-time of their inebriation: that’s one memory of double-vision I retain from Barego. The other thing that sticks with me, especially in relation to the focus of this chapter, is the piece’s use of voice-over. Acutely aware that bars are also prime sites of talk, with the confession, the boast, and the seduction all vying for performative supremacy, Rob incorporates audio excerpts from bar scenes in popular films into the work. Rob himself offers up a memorable lip synch of a speech by Shelley “The Machine” Levene, the character Jack Lemmon played in Glengarry Glen Ross. But it was just as exciting to watch the classically trained Fletcher incarnate the dissolute Wanda Wilcox (played by Faye Dunaway) from Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly. Feizo-Gaz/Mickey Rourke’s Henry to Fletcher/Dunaway’s Wanda in that film: “What do you do?” Fletcher/Dunaway/Wanda: “I drink.” The embodied technique of lipsynching has become a defining of feature of Rob’s work, a choreographing of and to the voice that splays focus much like the gestural phrasing that

235

236

often accompanies it. As George Home-Cook has argued in an analysis of Robert Lepage’s epic Lipsynch, the “cut[ting] loose” of the “phenomenal voice” from “its corporeal and subjective origins” can, paradoxically, produce more attentive and “playful” listening-spectating in an audience.29 For Home-Cook, looking “always has a role to play in auditory perception,” especially in the theatre, where the visual embodiment of sound emphasizes not just its temporal movement, but its physical movement.30 Looking at Rob’s or Fletcher’s moving lips while simultaneously hearing the acousmatic amplification of someone else’s voice registers as a miscue or misalignment,31 but one that nevertheless emphasizes the kinetic properties of sound, that it travels through time and space, and from body to body, actively moving us with its force and energy.32 The difficulty of actually creating and effecting such perceptual shifts is something I have also experienced from the other side of the proscenium arch in my collaborations with Rob and Lesley. But for now, and as a way to transition into a discussion of Lesley’s work, let me pause to suggest that dance audiences’ increasing willingness over the past thirty-five years to register such extra- or para-kinetic perceptual shifts as part of an expanded conceptual category of choreography owes much to the deconstructive and reconstructive efforts of Forsythe, who in testing the limits of ballet’s vocabulary and conventions (by, for example, taking positions out of classical alignment, pushing the possibilities of balance, extension, and strength, ignoring traditional gender roles, and using improvisation to come up with new movement) also pointed to additional ways in which dance could innovate as a contemporary art form: through its engagement with music and sound; through lighting, stage, and projection design; and through the incorporation of language and text. Mark Franko, in an illuminating essay exploring Forsythe’s early fractious critical reception by the American dance establishment, notes that his self-reflexive “language games” frequently led reviewers in the United States to deride his work as “content-weak,” or else as “intellectually spectacular” – in other words, as failed narrative theatre rather than as dance that uses language to question an “audience’s tendency to read narrative into movement” but not motility, transit, flow into language.33 More than three decades after these experiments by Forsythe it is almost impossible to conceive of contemporary Western concert dance without accounting for the role of text in its creation and performance. This very much holds for the Vancouver dance community as well, be it the word-heavy dance-theatre experiments of Pite’s Kidd Pivot or, as we shall see in the next

Putting Words in Motion with Kitsos and Telford

movement interval, the contemporary ballet programming of an Emily Molnar. Both Pite and Molnar have a direct connection to Forsythe, having danced for him as members of Ballett Frankfurt. Lesley Telford, who is close to both women, also performed Forsythe’s repertoire while a member of Nederlands Dans Theater. Of more immediate interest to me, however, is the fact that Lesley’s own “intermodal” interest in both the auditory and kinetic properties of language, and how those properties can help to hone and “re-sound” the “sensing perception of dancers and audiences alike,” aligns her work with Forsythe’s focus on “the multisensory nature of perception” in dance.34 I first met Lesley in early spring 2013. I had seen and been very affected by her piece Brittle Failure, which had played the Chutzpah! Festival in February. A collaboration with Japanese scenographer Yoko Seyama, the work opens with hundreds of tiny white paper houses lined up in neat rows on the stage. In terms of size, scale, and uniformity, one is reminded of architectural models for planned communities or, worse, a concentration camp. Dancer Clyde Emmauel Archer emerges from the wings and picks up one of the paper houses, placing it gently in the crook of his elbow, behind his knee, in the small of his back, all the while slowly moving (sometimes standing up, sometimes along the floor) clockwise around Seyama’s fragile installation. He is soon joined by fellow dancers Iratxe Ansa and Miguel Oliviera, who begin an increasingly energetic upstage duet, one that constantly threatens to spill over and upset the tidy rows of houses. Indeed, the couple’s movements seem deliberately counterpointed to Archer’s as soloist: where he moves slowly and deliberately, respecting the architectural integrity of one model house at a time (and later using spoken word to reflect on his own childhood home), they move more quickly and cavalierly, at one point piling up dozens of houses in each other’s arms, an image that succinctly encapsulates our natural acquisitiveness – whether for real estate or for memories. There are several other stunning visual effects created throughout the piece, as when a wash of moving lights cinematically animates the rows of houses, or when, in a coup-de-théâtre, the mat upon which the houses have been neatly aligned is pulled up by two wires, causing the houses to tumble into each other, and creating an instant shantytown that is very quickly swept away (see Figure 5.4). Most captivating, however, are the two duets – between Ansa and Archer, and then between Ansa and Oliviera – that conclude the piece. The first is by far the more physical, the strength of one partner’s fragile hold tested by the counterweight of the other’s oppositely straining body, Ansa and Archer

237

enacting their own “brittle failure,” which as Lesley reminded us in the program notes “is a technical term used to define the conditions under which solid materials fracture under pressure.” Then, in the final duet between Ansa and Oliviera, Lesley seems to be asking under what conditions might those broken pieces be put back together, a final origami abode placed gingerly between one foot of each of the dancers as they slowly pivot around it and also raise it delicately aloft, careful now not to crush what real or imagined space binds them together: “safe as houses.” When I posted a review praising Brittle Failure to my blog, Lesley took notice. But it was only after I’d posted another review about a week later, this one lamenting the ecstatic audience response to what I saw as a technically accomplished but emotionally flat and politically suspect fortieth anniversary program by Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal presented by DanceHouse, that Lesley decided to contact me. Later, over beers in my neighbourhood, Lesley said that she’d been grateful for my kind words about Brittle Failure; but when she read my bjm review she knew mine was a critical point of view that took after her own.

Figure 5.4 Iratxe Ansa in Lesley Telford’s Brittle Failure (2013).

Lesley Telford: Why I started [dancing]: My foot was turned in and I needed medical correction for it. The doctor said, “Either we give you corrective footwear, or try ballet” … And then years later [former Nederlands Dans Theater artistic director Ji í] Kylián said, “Oh my, you have such wonderful turn-in!” … My whole career was based on the frustration that I couldn’t turn out, and then it was rewarded in the end.35

Putting Words in Motion with Kitsos and Telford

At the time of our first meeting in early 2013, Lesley was still based in Madrid. How she got to the Spanish capital begins with ballet lessons at age five in Cloverdale to correct a turned-in foot. From there she went on to study at the Kirkwood Academy and Goh Ballet, before moving to Montreal to train at the École supérieure de danse du Québec. While in Montreal she joined her first company, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, then under the direction of Larry Rhodes. Her first show for the company was Balanchine’s Agon, and very early on she also partnered Louis Robitaille (who, coincidentally, would become the ad of Ballets Jazz de Montréal) in a piece by James Kudelka. At twenty-four Lesley moved to Spain to dance for Nacho Duato at the Spanish National Dance Company; it was there that she first encountered the choreography of Ji í Kylián. Six years later she was a company member at Nederlands Dans Theater, helping to create original works by Kylián, Ohad Naharin, Forsythe, Pite, and others. Lesley danced at ndt for ten years (2000 to 2010), and it was there that she first began to choreograph. During this time, she was also travelling back to Vancouver in the summers, at one point approaching Artemis Gordon at Arts Umbrella about the possibility of teaching for her. Artemis said yes, and that part-time summer gig has turned into a full-time position since Lesley’s return to Vancouver in 2014. Indeed, Arts Umbrella (au), in allowing Lesley to combine her interests in making and teaching, has enabled her to develop work over longer stretches of time, and to have a shared continuity of choreographic information with her collaborators. A case in point is her piece An Instant, which she first developed on the senior students at au; she was later invited by Emily Molnar to re-set the work on the dancers of Ballet bc. That two of the original au dancers in the piece, Emily Chessa and Christoph von Reidemann, had since joined Ballet bc only made that process that much more fluid. Set to the driving, swirling strings of Michael Gordon’s Weather One, and with Wislawa Szyborska’s poem “Could Have” spoken in voice-over, An Instant is an exhilarating, intensely physical exploration of chance as it

239

intersects with time. What does it mean to arrive too early, or too late? To spin off axis, or lean just a bit too far to the side and risk falling? To throw oneself backwards and trust someone is there to catch you? Lesley explores these questions in partnerings built on a logic of abandon and generative risk, on the split-secondness of moving one way instead of another – and the equally accidental anticipating of and/or catching up to such a move. Just when we think Chessa, in leaping to the left or right, is going to plunge to the floor, von Riedemann is there to forestall gravity, and one of the highlights of the piece when I saw it at its Ballet bc premiere in November 2014 was to see how these two dancers – already so familiar with the complex and incredibly fast choreography – moved together in such “uncontrolled” sync, a kind of kinetic superpositioning that is a recurring theme in Lesley’s work, and that I will have more to say about below. In An Instant Lesley also probes these ideas of additive states, unpredictability, and impulse at the muscular level, with Rachel Meyer, in particular, playing with a complex repertoire of gestural patterns throughout. Lesley Telford: It’s the continuity of the conversation, it’s the continuity of the information shared, that gives [the work] depth.36

240

Eager to provide young emerging dance professionals in Vancouver similar opportunities for continuous training and research, and recognizing that there was a structural gap in terms of what was available for younger artists interested in creating and learning new repertoire after graduating from their pre-professional institutions and while they were between projects, Lesley, together with Gordon, established the Performance Research Program (prep) at Arts Umbrella in 2016. A thirty-four-week program for which candidates must audition, prep offers daily morning technique classes, followed by workshop investigations into the development of new work by local choreographers such as Serge Bennathan and Noam Gagnon, as well as Lesley herself. Indeed, the prep class of 2016–17 was fundamental not just in helping Lesley develop the movement score for my play Long Division, but also in the choreography for her own show, Spooky Action at a Distance. Spooky, a collaboration with spoken-word artist Barbara Adler, would in effect serve as the official Vancouver launch of her company, Inverso Dance, newly incorporated as a bc not-for-profit society, and on whose founding board I should note for purposes of full disclosure I agreed to serve. The story of these, and other, entanglements forms the substance of what follows.

Opening projection sequence: the screen gradually fills up with overlapping formulas, equations, numbers, and symbols, a time lapse view of a mathematician’s notebook of theorems that comes to resemble a Cubist collage. PAUL enters and begins a slow walk around the perimeter of the stage, taking in the information on the screen. The other characters enter one by one and begin a movement sequence that leads into … (see Figure 5.5).37 Long Division, my second full-length play, is a multimedia, physical theatre piece about the mathematics of human connection. Travelling to a downtown bar on the occasion of a complicated anniversary, seven characters are caught in a liminal space between algebraic abstraction and hard reality. They are aware of the audience and of one another. But at the start of the play we don’t immediately know why they are meeting up, nor why math seems to be their preferred language of communication. Over the course of successive monologues, we gradually learn how the characters are

Putting Words in Motion with Kitsos and Telford

Figure 5.5 Jay Clift as Reid, and Melissa Oei as Lucy, in Long Division (2016/17).

241

242

connected, with each revealing a piece of the story that will help solve the puzzling equation behind the traumatic event that links them all. Adapting the style of lecture address I had used in Chairs, the monologues attempted to mix the coolly distancing arcana of number theory, geometry, and logic with more emotionally involving personal storytelling. In between each monologue the characters work together to tell additional math lessons pertinent to the larger dramatic structure of the play. These choral sections were composed in a manner akin to stichomythia, with cast members working together to present – and simultaneously also working through – the material in alternating and sometimes overlapping lines. Here especially is where I saw the opportunity for the crafting of different movement phrases: walking patterns; gestural canons; massed tableaux that played with balance and the sharing and/or redistribution of weight. Lesley certainly ran – sometimes quite literally – with these possibilities. But she also taught me how the monologues could likewise be seen as places where, in the terms articulated by Manning and Massumi, “the notional meets the motional,”38 as opportunities to set thought in motion. Lesley’s involvement in the project began when I saw the Fall 2015 Mainstage Dance Show at sca, which was being overseen by Rob. Lesley was one of the guest choreographers and I was blown away by her contribution to the ensemble, especially as her movement vocabulary seemed to work so well alongside Adler’s spoken-word text. When, in early 2016, Richard Wolfe, the artistic director of Pi Theatre, announced that he’d like to produce and direct a full staged version of Long Division rather than just the planned workshop I had anticipated (and already thought was such a gift), I suggested Lesley as a possible choreographer. The pair met, hit it off, and after reading my script and determining that she could shuffle some things in her schedule, Lesley signed on. The process leading up to our first production of the play (there were actually two, which I’ll get to momentarily) began with a week-long workshop of the script in September 2016 at Richmond’s Gateway Theatre, where the play would run later that November. At the end of that week Lesley came in to meet the actors and lead them through a few short improvisational exercises in order to determine their different movement facilities and comfort levels. Nicco Garcia Lorenzo, a Toronto-based actor who was playing Paul, the high school math teacher whose narrative anchors the piece, had made an impression on Richard in a production of Anita Majumdar’s play Same Same But Different (2014), in which he had

Putting Words in Motion with Kitsos and Telford

to master some very tricky Bollywood-style dance moves. Jay Clift (Reid, the father of one of Paul’s students) is tall and physically very strong, but had little experience learning complex choreography. Melissa Oei (Lucy, a waitress and aspiring actress) and Anousha Alamian (Naathim, an imam whose congregation worships in the gym at Paul’s school) both signed on to the project in part because they were attracted to its incorporation of movement. And Jennifer Lines (Jo, the owner of the bar where the characters meet up), Linda Quibell (Grace, Paul’s principal), and Kerry Sandomirsky (Alice, the mother of another of Paul’s students), while all possessed of a certain degree of physical theatre and/or dance training, felt a bit rusty in their skills and nervous about what was expected of them. Notwithstanding this range, Lesley immediately put everyone at ease, not least by virtue of the fact that while extremely rigorous in her practice and her expectations for the execution of her movement, Lesley can also be quite physically goofy in communicating her ideas in the studio. Which is not to say there weren’t challenges and frustrating moments of miscommunication throughout the process. Rather, in seeking to create “a joint rhythmic milieu” in which language and movement might meet “in the middle,” we all had to accede to a co-compositional process in which “knowing and unknowing” played an equal role in “dancing thought around.”39 As part of this stumbling exploration, Richard Wolfe and Lesley and I met in early October, a few weeks before the start of rehearsals, to talk about her ideas for the movement score. We went through the script page by page, with Lesley agreeing that the choral sections, and the different math concepts described therein, seemed to lend themselves organically to group sequences in which different geometric formations and changes in tempo and direction could be used not so much to illustrate what the language was saying as to give it an added shape and volume and velocity. So, for example, in the opening scene, when the characters pose the question of who arrives at Jo’s bar first in the form of a mathematical word problem involving distance, speed, and modes of transportation, Lesley had the actors move across the stage as if on a grid, but one that was completely random. The performers could choose whichever direction to walk in and how many steps to take between fixed points, so long as every subsequent turn they made was 90 degrees and so long as they held their position for both their own line and the line preceding it. The result was an ordered chaos in which the pace of the short, shared dialogue was counterpointed by the start-and-stop rhythm of the movement, and in which those occasional but inevitable moments of almost

243

244

collision produced a kind of kinetic double vision of the sort described by Manning and Massumi in relation to Forsythe’s work, and to which I previously alluded above. That is, when the pathways of two or more performers converged, vectorized for us were both the lines of movement each was moving into spatially and the split-second temporal recalibration, or “match-flow,” of those lines in relation to their partners’ spontaneous decision of which way to turn next. This idea of negotiating simultaneously what Manning and Massumi call “the complexity of the present presenting itself” and “the futurity of how the what-will-come has already left its trace”40 is revisited at the start of the play’s second act, when in the absence of Paul the other characters revisit his opening logic problem, but this time using an anecdote about Schrödinger’s cat (for which Lesley composed a witty sequence of accompanying gestures) to recast the goal of seeing everything at once in the context of quantum mechanics’ idea of shared and separate physical states. The technical term for this is “superposition,” and coincidentally it is also the word Manning and Massumi use to describe the conjunctive disjunction, or rhythmic flashpoint, of how movement and language come together in Forsythe.41 As we shall shortly see, in her own work Lesley combines both senses of the word. In Long Division Lesley also made the monologues a flashpoint for the superpositioning of text and movement, and in ways that helped me to see patterns in the play of which I was not previously aware. For example, in Paul’s monologue, the first of Act One, Lesley came up with a sequence of hand and arm gestures for the other characters, who are positioned in an upstage line. Reminiscent of the arbing signals used to trade commodities on a stock exchange floor, or the signs communicated by a third base coach to a batter in baseball, these gestures unfolded in a staggered canon, each of the upstage performers cycling through them to a specific cue in Paul’s monologue, which was itself partly about naming and enumerating the different degrees of connection between the characters. By the time we reach Naathim’s monologue, the first of Act Two, these connections are more clearly established in the audience’s mind, and reflecting this, as well as the fact that the characters are now actively working together to solve the play’s central mystery, Lesley constructed another series of arm movements, but this time unfolding in unison, and replacing the hard and angular bodily beats that punctuated the first pattern with a score that was softer and rounder, that had more breath, and that flowed outward in a circular formation. There is a similar counterpointing of the movement in the monologues that close each act. At the end of Act 1, Lucy, who is somewhat

Putting Words in Motion with Kitsos and Telford

removed from the central event of the play, and consequently who can see the patterns leading up to it with more clarity, buzzes about the other characters as she constellates both the “just now” and “what-if” lines of connection between their fixed points on the stage. When we get to Alice’s monologue, at the end of Act 2, we discover her centrality to the drama, but also the proximate void in her heart that results. Here Lesley had the other characters, in a series of criss-crossed approaches and retreats, buffet Alice with a succession of light touches and passings-by, the “invisible” force field of their movements reciprocally helping to move her own thought toward that which she would really rather dance away (see Figure 5.6). Just as the language of math becomes a way for the characters to explain what is otherwise unexplainable, to abstract an event that is too painful for them to confront by other means, so does movement in these and other scenes become a way to articulate what the body feels to be true but cannot put into words. The meeting in the middle of language and movement was further doubled in the development and rehearsal processes of Long Division by the prep dancers with whom Lesley was working at Arts Umbrella coincident with the mounting of the play. It just so happened that there were seven members of that first prep cohort, and in testing out some possible movement studies for the play Lesley shared my script with the group and had them each take on a specific character, drawing from the text to improvise and develop individual gesture phrases that might get set in some related form on the corresponding actors in the piece. Eden Solomon (as Paul), Karin Ezaki (as Reid), Brenna Metzmeier (as Jo), Maya Tenzer (as Lucy), Stéphanie Cyr (as Naathim), Caitlynn Danchuk (as Grace), and Katie DeVries (as Alice) were instrumental in developing recurring solo phrases that, in their energy and tempo, facings and levels, muscularity or delicacy, helped to telegraph a range of affects and their consequent material effects depending on an individual character’s specific relationship to the events of the play, and to the other bodies on stage. The prep dancers also worked with Lesley to develop several of the group movement sections in the play, and in an amazing act of generosity helped to transfer much of this physical knowledge into the bodies of the actors, accompanying Lesley to several of our rehearsals in order to help teach the choreographic material to the actors. And in this respect, one of the special delights of the process for me was watching the dancers’ and actors’ mutual admiration for each other’s specific performance skills. Cast members, even after they had been told they had mastered a particular phrase, would routinely ask one or more of

245

Figure 5.6 Nicco Garcia Lorenzo as Paul, and Kerry Sandomirsky as Alice, in Long Division (2016/17).

the dancers to repeat it, as much I suspect so that they could have another (doubled?) vision of the futurity of their own movement moving42 as to perfect their technique. Reciprocally, the dancers would become rapt whenever one of the actors launched into her or his monologue. Stéphanie Cyr: It was a unique lesson in transmitting and translating information from one body to another. I remember searching for nuanced ways of supporting the group when teaching physical material, encouraging their connection to physical sensation, reflexes and awareness of the body in space. I recall finding a practical approach to tapping into the specific nuances of Lesley’s choreography which would make it most relatable to the actors and their personal experiences with movement, drawing parallels between an actor’s sensitivity to their scripted material and a dancer’s ability to work within choreography. I remind myself frequently that there are many ways to be in a body.43 Just how well Lesley and the prep dancers had done their jobs was evident when, four and a half months after the original run of the play at the Gateway in Richmond, we remounted a “refreshed” version of the production at the Annex Theatre in Vancouver. We had a much more compressed rehearsal period this time around, but it was amazing to see how much of the choreography was still in the actors’ bodies, as well as how quickly they adapted to Lesley’s refinements and adjustments of portions of the original movement score, which included a reconceptualizing of how the human pyramid gets built in Reid’s monologue, as well as a complete rethinking of the ending. Then, too, when Lesley couldn’t be in the studio, the actors were keen to discover what possible new movement pathways they could come up with on their own, as when Anousha Alamian, who as the soccer-loving imam, Naathim, opens the second act, decided to improvise a little steptouch footwork and angled passing with a small ball in advance of the other characters’ entrances. Anousha Alamian: Before being an actor, I was a dancer, and that was twenty years ago. Having had the opportunity to work on … Long Division, I was finally able to merge both of my trainings … with the help of Lesley’s choreography … Being able to express an idea or a concept with your body is one of the most beautiful and difficult

247

things to create. With the help of Lesley’s choreography and Peter’s text we were able to tell a very profound and important story.44

248

That Lesley could be with us at all for the second phase of Long Division was pretty remarkable given that in the middle of our rehearsals she was herself preparing to present at The Dance Centre her first full program of dance to be mounted in Canada under the auspices of her company Inverso. Comprised of three shorter works to which Lesley gave the collective title Three Sets/Relating at a Distance, the evening overlapped the Long Division process in a number of ways. Most immediately there was the fact that several of the prep dancers who had been involved in the movement rehearsals for my play were also performing in these local premieres by Lesley. Additionally, there was the fact that all of the pieces that made up Three Sets combined – to greater or lesser degrees – text and movement. IF , an earlier and shorter version of which was developed in 2007 for a Nederlands Dans Theater workshop, is set to a poem by Anne Carson, “Seated Figure with Red Angle,” which we hear in a recorded voice-over by Amos Ben-Tal. My Tongue, Your Ear, from 2011, features its two dancers speaking aloud excerpts from “Tower of Babel,” another Wislava Szymborska poem. And Spooky Action at a Distance, which was receiving its phase one premiere as part of Lesley’s residency at The Dance Centre, is accompanied by an original spoken word score by writer and musician Barbara Adler, who performs the text live. Finally, all three works are concerned with patterns of attraction and repulsion, proximity and distance, cause and effect, with Lesley drawing on particle physics and quantum mechanics rather than mathematics to investigate themes similar to ones I explored in Long Division, including how an event unfolds and reverberates – in other words, moves – across time and space, and how this co-motion produces what Manning and Massumi call a doubled “rhythmic milieu” or “‘acoustic environment,’” where we must listen both for the “as-if” and the “what-if.”45 In IF these impulses manifest as a roundelay of occupations of and displacements from a chair positioned downstage right. As the piece begins, dancer Maya Tenzer is perched on it. Behind her, all the way upstage, is Eden Solomon. Both dancers are lit in such a way that as Solomon advances toward Tenzer in the chair the former’s shadow gradually overtakes and subsumes the latter’s physical presence (the lighting, adapted from an original concept by Jeroen Cool, was by my sca colleague Kyla Gardiner). Meanwhile visible offstage right is Stéphanie Cyr, who begins a horizontal walk across the stage, her

passing in front of the chair cuing Solomon to supplant Tenzer from it. Cyr then begins a solo centre stage, eventually arcing into the upstage vertical pathway of the chair, and with the enactment of her own kinetic claims upon it launching first Solomon and then Tenzer into successive retracings of the circuit she has just completed. In this, IF is like a game of musical chairs that no one can win, because within the feedback loop of Lesley’s choreography we gradually discover that each act of sitting constellates within it both past and future acts of sitting, a sedimentation of time within at once shared and separate physical states that is vividly portrayed at the end of the piece when all three dancers sandwich themselves onto the chair. My Tongue, Your Ear is a duet that casts Tenzer and Graham Kaplan as two halves of a couple. Yet while their cryptic and elliptical patter throughout the piece suggests a pair of lovers whose wires of communication are hopelessly crossed, their matching white shirts and black shorts and socks also put me in mind of a vaudeville double-act or toy marionettes come to life. Such images have a lot to do with the twitchy and floppy movement vocabulary that Lesley employs throughout the piece, with both dancers windmilling their arms and buckling their knees at different moments, and with the tall, lanky and Gumby-like Kaplan repeating a series of rubbery jumps into the air, as if he is being pulled by strings from above. For a while Tenzer and Kaplan seem to be working in concert to support each other, propping each other up by the shoulders, for example, as they begin a precarious walk downstage. By the end of the piece, however, the individual crumbling of their bodies begins to mirror the disjointedness of their speech, their physical proximity to each other in this case failing to buttress their relationship. All of these ideas are explored most fully in the third piece, Spooky Action at a Distance, which I subsequently saw a year later in an April 2018 full-length staging, part of the work’s second phase of development. Spooky Action is based on the quantum theory of particle entanglement, and appropriately the ensuing analysis of the work entangles what I remember of it from both of my viewing experiences. In each iteration the piece began with Adler explaining to us, via cribbed notes from Wikipedia, the basic principles of physical entanglement, how unseen particles, even separated by great distances, are somehow in communication with one another, and how the state of one particle (position, spin, momentum) necessarily affects the state of another. Action and reaction. Or as Adler later sums up the paradox in her first-person monologue: “I happened to people, but they happened back.”

249

250

Lesley’s choreography seeks to physicalize such matters of human interconnectivity, using the time/space properties of dance to show the eventness of all action – that, for example, a movement initiated in one body both ripples outward to be registered by and reacted to by other bodies and contracts inward as a result of that reaction. To this end, at the start of the piece a lone dancer explores – with her eyes closed and her searching arms outstretched – the delimited spatial orbit of her spotlit circle (see Figure 5.7). But even in this suspended state things are happening: to the solo dancer and to us. A turn in one direction produces a different facing. An arm reaching behind her back pulls her first this way, and then that way. In the work’s April 2017 phase one performance, this role was danced by Maya Tenzer. A year later, in the phase two full-length staging of the piece, Ria Girard assumed the part. The two dancers, in addition to being remarkable movers, look uncannily alike, and another entangled consequence of my own doubled vision of Spooky Action is that I cannot separate in my mind Tenzer’s and Girard’s successive performances of Lesley’s choreography, a superpositioning of embodied memories that I represent in what follows via an awkward amalgam of the dancers’ surnames. Tenzer/Girard’s blind exploration of her spatial environment is counterpointed by Adler’s text, in which she talks about believing that it is she who makes the world happen, that she has control over the weather and is able to conjure clouds or sun or fog simply by closing or opening her eyes. But maybe in fact it’s the weather that’s making her adjust her gaze; when Adler mentions turning her face “to accept / the event / at a different angle,” Tenzer/Girard pivots slowly to look at us. In this way, Spooky Action enacts the principle of “co-action” that Manning and Massumi suggest is the middle ground of non-aligned cuing between text and movement in Forsythe’s work.46 We might call this, following from one of Adler’s lines, the time and distance between x and y. Sometimes the dancers seem to be responding to the text, while at other times Adler is clearly taking her cue from the choreography. In neither case, however, are the results reductively descriptive or mimetic; instead they combine in a way that would seem to fulfil Niels Bohr’s theory of complementarity, in which the corresponding, reciprocal, and mutually constitutive properties of wave and particle, or position and momentum, are known to (co)exist but cannot be measured or observed simultaneously. To adapt Manning and Massumi once again, language and movement touch in Spooky Action within a “mobile relational interval,” Figure 5.7 Opposite Ria Girard in Spooky Action (2018), by Lesley Telford.

252

one we cannot see but that we nevertheless feel, a momentary suspension and then reorientation of our body’s perceptions.47 Eventually Tenzer/Girard’s lone dancer is joined on stage by others (Cyr, Solomon, Metzmeier, Caitlynn Danchuk, Katie DeVries, and Bynh Ho in phase 1; Cyr, Solomon, Desi Rekrut, Lucas Wilson-Bilbo, and Ariana Barr in phase 2). Surprised by their sudden appearance, Tenzer/Girard nevertheless discovers that her movements can somehow affect theirs, a ricocheting motif that begins slowly and subtly, with a pivot by Tenzer/Girard from one dancer to the next producing a head bobble here, a buckle at the knees there. Soon, however, Tenzer/Girard’s wizard-like turns become faster and the other dancers are bouncing up and down and boomeranging back and forth like pinballs. To put this into some of the terms employed by Adler, what we are witnessing in Lesley’s choreography is people “happening” to one another: sometimes “more” and sometimes “harder,” especially in the complex partnering sequences that pepper the work; and sometimes simply but with “attentive” purpose, as when the other dancers constellate around Tenzer/Girard, each taking a turn whispering some secret message into her ear, or when Tenzer/Girard later orbits Solomon ever more closely in a gradually accelerating walk centre stage. From here the piece opens up into a succession of danced entanglements, Telford’s arrangement of her bodies in space – via, for example, a simple yet sensorially captivating group pattern of unison breathing, or via more complicated duets – once again making manifest a favourite axiom of Adler’s: “There’s distance, and also time.” In dance, as in quantum physics, both can be stretched. And both can be folded and collapsed into each other, yet another paradox illustrated with an elastic band and a story of the various lives affected by a car crash spoken by Adler as she moves slowly across the stage behind the elastic, with the dancers whizzing back and forth underneath it. As Adler’s text emphasizes just before this sequence, the question of the something that is happening – in the world, in one’s life, in a performance – is not, or not only, an “if” or a “when” question. It’s also, and perhaps most crucially, a “with” question: those seen and unseen forces that are beside one, acting upon one, and responding to one in the happening of that something. In quantum mechanics the term for this state of “withness” is, as I’ve already stated, superposition: that any two or more quantum states can be added together to produce another distinct quantum state. It’s also the term that Manning and Massumi employ to describe the way that Forsythe moves text and speaks dance in a third state of “lingering suspension.”48 Both senses apply equally well to this unique collaboration and to

the process by which both the axes on which it spins continue to morph and transform. Lesley Telford: You wait and see if things take on a life, a form … I really like that idea of a continuous process with certain people. So that it’s not a short-term blip on the radar, but it’s a long-term investment in a shared discovery.49

Putting Words in Motion with Kitsos and Telford

The processes of shared discovery that became The Objecthood of Chairs and Long Division began with pre-existing scripts. While those scripts changed significantly during their respective workshop and rehearsal periods – including as a result of Rob’s and Lesley’s choreographic experiments – text and movement were co-composing each piece in ways that necessarily differ from a completely devised work. In the final section of this chapter I turn to discuss a project that I am still very much in the middle of, a collaboration with Rob and sound artist Nancy Tam that over the course of its various iterations has involved additional support from theatre artist Daniel O’Shea, projection designer Milton Lim, sound engineer Ira Jordison, and, most recently, filmmaker Colin Williscroft. Acknowledging that I have even less critical distance from this work than from Chairs and Long Division, I nevertheless hazard to say that it all the more closely approximates Manning and Massumi’s account of how, in Forsythe’s work, “language opens itself to movement” – and vice versa.50 In the chapter of Thought in the Act from which I have been quoting, Manning and Massumi are describing their experience of sitting in on the Forsythe Company’s rehearsals for a 2011 remounting of an earlier work called Woolf Phrase, which takes its inspiration from the language rhythms in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, and whose specific project, according to Manning and Massumi, is “to make a movement phrase of the movement of Woolf’s phraseology.”51 In the spring of 2018, Rob, Nancy, and I gathered in a studio on the fourth floor of sfu Woodward’s to begin a similar project of rhythmic synthesis, one in which the cadences and meter of different speech patterns, culled from a series of audio interviews, might be explored, supplemented, interrupted, and reframed not just through movement but also through sound/ music and images. As with Manning and Massumi’s claims about Forsythe’s Woolf Phrase, our aim was not so much to find instances of likeness between these different modalities, to match their rhythms seamlessly; rather, we were interested in where they might come together to both spark and indicatively mark “the affective tonality” of a given moment in performance.52

253

254

The origins of Normate I Mien, as we have titled our collaboration, begin with two earlier projects by Rob. Saudade, which is a Portuguese word used to describe a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia, premiered in September 2015. Taking Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner as key sources of inspiration, Rob and his collaborators – including Nancy as sound designer – combined movement, text, sound, light, multimedia projections, and a series of translucent movable screens in order to explore the mutability and the porousness of different states of being and ways of knowing. The screens are especially effective at conveying the different insides and outsides of the various sensory and extra-sensory worlds being conjured in the piece, as well as the permeability of those worlds – as when one of the dancers leans her ear toward one of them to hear what we can see is happening just behind it. While working on Saudade Rob was reading Manning and Massumi’s theorization of “co-compositional environmental awareness” in Thought in the Act. In particular, Rob was taken with how, at the outset of the book, Manning and Massumi discuss autistic writers’ self-descriptions of how they relate to visual and aural environments. These accounts are very similar to how an artist might work in the studio, that is, not as someone who stands out in or apart from her environment, but as someone who is working with that environment to produce a new mode of awareness: “a co-compositional force that does not yet seek to distinguish between human and nonhuman, subject and object, emphasizing instead an immediacy of mutual action, an associated milieu of their emergent relation.”53 Manning and Massumi’s discussion of the spectrum of perception as a “dance of attention” that affirms the “interconnectedness” of different modes of being and becoming thus finds expression in Saudade in patterns of shadow-partnering, with one dancer mimicking from behind and with a slight but perceptible delay the movements of another; in voice-over text that is repeated, manipulated, layered, and stretched in ways that recast linguistic intelligibility as musical resonance; and in projections that in their seeming three-dimensionality create another mobile architecture. The resulting collaged sensorial landscape attunes audiences to different ways of perceiving that fit with the conceptual premises of the two films, in particular their probing of the relationships between what we define as the human, the not-quite-human, and the more-than-human (see Figure 5.8). Death and Flying, which debuted at the Vancouver International Dance Festival in 2017, is relevant to the Normate process for the way in which Rob combined his interest in text and movement with techniques of em-

Figure 5.8 The collaged sensorial landscape of Saudade (2015), by Rob Kitsos.

bodied ethnography. Specifically, the piece takes its cue from interviews Rob conducted with frequent collaborators Jane Osborne and Kim Stevenson about memories of their families, and specifically objects and mementoes from their families that have special meaning for them (both women have lost parents). We hear excerpts from these interviews in voice-over, which are remixed, looped and occasionally distorted as part of the overall score by composer and sound designer Elliot Vaughn, and which the dancers also lipsynch to at different moments. Counterpointing all of this is a choreographic score composed of micro-gestures, most of them performed super-fast: a sequence of barely perceptible arm movements, stutter steps, and sideways jerkings that register as the kinetic equivalent of the glitches

255

256

or unexpected jumps in an old video recording, or of the blur of motion stilled in a photograph. In one sequence, for example, Osborne and Stevenson perform in unison centre stage, but facing at a diagonal from each other, alternately pivoting away from and toward each other as they cycle through a vertical hail, a horizontal reach, a hip bend, a buckle of one knee, a shoulder roll, and so on. It’s a repertoire of movements at once so common, yet here, placed in quasi-canon by virtue of the performers’ different facings, likewise so uniquely individual; as such, it powerfully encapsulated for me how one’s individual genealogy of gestures might, over time, get shared with and distributed to other kinship networks – such as, in this case, one’s dance family (Rob and Jane and Kim have a working relationship that dates back to Wake). Stevenson, in her recorded reflections for Death and Flying, more than once uses the word “resemblance” when talking about her memories of her deceased father (a former rcmp officer). In the specific phraseology of her speech I recall that the word initially struck me as an odd choice. However, in the course of working on Normate with Rob and Nancy, and also bearing in mind that for Manning and Massumi likeness is often less about designating correspondence between things (e.g., speech and movement) than it is about marking an in-the-moment feeling of a feeling (as when, in Manning and Massumi’s example, teenagers say “I just feel, like, sad”),54 upon reflection Stevenson’s word choice now seems an apt way of describing a kinaesthetic process of re-membering or re(as)sembling the materiality of what (or who) has been lost, by which the cherished tics or traits of a loved one become physicalized in one’s own body. The way we make a bed or set a table, the way we lay out a suit to be pressed or line up papers on a desk: if, as many cognitive theorists have suggested, our first and most immediate way of learning and knowing is through sensorimotor observation rather than language,55 then it makes sense that over our lifetimes we will have inherited and physically incorporated a storehouse of kinetic memories from our parents. In Rob’s choreography for Death and Flying, these memories play out as felt pathways to puzzle through and decipher, often beginning with a simple isolation of a single part of the body or a quotidian gesture (such as the laying of hands on an invisible countertop) that then triggers an extended line of movement. Osborne and Stevenson, sometimes individually and sometimes together, follow these lines instinctively but also with halting deliberation, every turn in one direction or step backwards or drop to the floor having reminded me, in watching their performance, of the way

one feels for the light switch in the darkened room of a house to which one has returned after some time away. Feeling in the dark is an apt metaphor to describe the process of discovery and play that has thus far characterized our workshops for Normate I Mien. The jumping-off point for the piece is the social-political lens through which we see ourselves and others. Our central concepts coalesce around the three words that make up our title: (i) Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s notion of the “normate,” the human subject who is marked as authoritatively typical, and whom sociologist Erving Goffman defined as a young, healthy, white, married, heterosexual urban male who is fully employed;56 (ii) the pedestrian self-identification through the pronoun “I”; and (iii) “mien,” or the presentation of individual personality through facial expression, gestures, tone of voice, and language. Recognizing that the normate subject position applies to a very limited number of bodies and behaviours, we are also seeking to explore the ways in which performance can express and validate different individual miens. More specifically, we are working with interview transcripts of individuals ranging in age from ten to sixty-plus, analyzing participants’ conversational talk about concepts of normality and abnormality – and the meta-communicative frames governing that talk57 – in order to come up with different compositional phrases whose overlapping patterns of language, gesture, and sound might complicate preconceptions around the problem of fit between bodies and social categories. How, in other words, might physical behaviours, verbal idiosyncrasies, and expressed thoughts deemed to be atypical in certain contexts become the source of a new kind of perceptual awareness when abstracted and combined into a performance score in which the mutual cross-influencing and co-compositional force of sound and image, speech and movement, produces an independent external rhythm that requires audiences, through their own processes of entrainment,58 to meet that rhythm halfway? Rob Kitsos: When two different aesthetics – it could be dance and theatre, it could be home décor – merge to create something new, that’s my favourite thing.59 To this end, our process began with a sustained period of listening, reviewing the taped interviews for: rhythms and images that could be translated into movement gestures (Rob); patterns of repetition and discourse markers and tonal shifts and pauses that revealed the musicality inherent

257

258

in everyday speech (Nancy); thematic connections and linguistic relays that might help us to build theatrical connections between different sections (me); and moments of structural contrast that might be supplemented through projections (all of us). At first, I thought this would be the extent of my involvement in the project: to provide some initial conceptual input, maybe do a bit of additional writing if necessary, and thereafter mostly work as an outside eye, offering dramaturgical feedback as the piece began to take more concrete shape. But at a certain point Rob said that he wanted me to be in the piece, that is, to collaborate on its development as an equal deviser-performer. I don’t know what possessed me to say yes, especially knowing what it would require of me, not the least of which would be eventually moving and speaking on stage – in front of people. Nevertheless, still very much in the middle of things, I am glad I agreed, and let me conclude this chapter with a short description of one specific phrasal experiment in “moving [our] text, of speaking [our] dance.”60 The section I’m referring to is one to which we have given the name “Paper Bags.” It is focused on a remarkable passage of text in which one of our interview subjects recounts an unusual confluence of non-human movement magic and extra-verbal communication with a deaf co-worker. The rhythms of the speech are particularly fascinating, punctuated by syncopated pauses, repeated words, and various plosive sounds. We thus began by having Rob, on drums, and Nancy, on keyboards, jamming on an accompanying musical refrain, accenting different textual beats and playing with meter and tempo while I recited the text into a microphone alongside a looping voice-over recording of the original. At this stage, we additionally experimented with the voice-over cutting out, with me lipsynching, and with a fugue-like structure in which certain words and phrases were repeated or silences inserted before returning to the top of our score. In these moments we also created a kind of dissonant visual cuing by having some of these words and phrases pop up on, scroll across, and fill up different projections, any sense of their meaning or significance dissolving into the immediacy of their sensual apprehension as one element of a larger co-composed rhythm. For the longest time, movement was not part of this rhythm. And then when it was added, it involved transposing a gestural score that had been created for a completely separate bit of interview text. We reset these gestures to the different cadences of the “Paper Bags” text and then cycled through them in a staggered canon sequence. Nancy started first, while I continued to speak the text, and Rob riffed on his drums. I then followed as Nancy joined Rob musically on keyboards. Rob and I next moved

When the notional meets the motional, it’s not that we no longer understand the words. It’s not even that we don’t ally the words to the movement. It’s that the words, in the mode of the as-if, contort to the movement they activate. It’s that language, when in counterpoint with movement at the limit, tweaks into a rhythm with movement … While we know what is language and what is movement and what is sound … we are no longer certain where expression begins and ends. Notionally, we have “no idea.” Knowing and unknowing co-compose, dancing thought around.61

Putting Words in Motion with Kitsos and Telford

through a counterpointed duet of the gestures to Nancy on solo keyboards. The section concluded with a trio in which the three of us cycled through the gestures one last time, but to the original text for which they were composed. And I haven’t even mentioned the bit with me skipping rope. It was a version of this section that we performed at an initial showing of the piece for invited guests in Vancouver in the summer of 2018. Later that fall, as part of a residency at the SenseLab at Concordia University, which just happens to be overseen by Erin Manning, Rob choreographed a new movement phrase to the “Paper Bags” text, one that involved a tightly punctuated and complicated (at least for me) sequence of unison gestures that we repeated several times, including in retrograde. At the conclusion of our February 2019 residency at Left of Main we adjusted this section even further, loosening it up and turning it into something of a game by having each of us take a turn reciting the text while the others attempted to match their movements to our individually slowed down or sped up speech rhythms. For the video installation of Normate that we are currently planning, we will no doubt experiment with this and other sections even further, using the visual grammar of screen dance, together with the medium’s additional sonic affordances, to explore new modes of co-compositional awareness. Over the course of every iteration of Normate, however, we have striven to create for both performer and spectator a version of what Manning and Massumi call Forsythe’s double vision, in which representational likeness (I’ve seen this before and therefore already know what it means) is suspended in favour of rhythmic disjunction (I’ve felt something similar before but don’t in this instant yet know how to respond). As Manning and Massumi summarize, in a passage that serves as an apt gloss not just on our compositional method in the Normate process, but on what I have been suggesting, more broadly, is the interplay between dance and theatre techniques in the work of Rob and Lesley,

259

Having no idea is something I’m getting increasingly comfortable with in my collaborations with Rob and Nancy on Normate. It’s also a mantra from which I likewise learned to take instruction in the last of my collaborations with Vancouver dance artists that I describe in this book.

260

INTERVAL 6

And: Institutions Calculating the sum of Vancouver’s dance establishment …

Another connection between Rob and Lesley is that they have both contributed to the choreographic repertoire of Ballet bc, perhaps the most recognizable dance institution in the city. In Regression Line, from 2009, Rob put fifteen of the company’s classically trained dancers in sneakers and sent them out onto the cozy stage of The Dance Centre’s Faris Family Studio to enact a Jets and Sharks–style contest of aggressive but highly disciplined movement, all set to a propulsive rock score by Dub Trio. Eight years later, Lesley followed up her first Ballet bc commission, An Instant (which I discussed in the previous chapter), with If I were 2, betting not only that an intimate duet (for dancers Emily Chessa and Brandon Alley) would be able to fill up the cavernous Queen Elizabeth Theatre space and hold an audience’s attention, but also that a live spoken word score by frequent collaborator Barbara Adler would serve as the perfect accompaniment. For enabling both of these choreographic risks we have long-time Ballet bc artistic director Emily Molnar to thank. But whereas Rob’s piece, and the space in which it was performed, came about partly out of necessity, Lesley’s work was included on a celebratory program that featured new commissions from five local choreographers. The distance travelled by Molnar and the Ballet bc company in the years between each premiere thus tells the story of an institution, having lost its organizational way and also perhaps taking both itself and its audience too much for granted, needing to rethink, rebrand, and, above all, refinance its mission. As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, the foundations of Ballet bc were themselves somewhat rocky. By the late 1990s, which is when I

262

started attending their performances, the company was on a much surer footing. This had a great deal to do with the leadership of artistic director John Alleyne and the original choreographic stamp he developed through works such as Three Visible Poems (1994), The Don Juan Variations (1995), Can you believe she actually said (1995), Sex Is My Religion (1996), Boy Wonder (1997), The Goldberg (1998), and The Faerie Queen (2000). However, no arts organization is ever completely immune to the effects of global market forces, so when the 2008 economic downturn coincided with poor single-ticket and subscription sales for Ballet bc’s 2008–09 season, the company’s board of directors abruptly terminated the contracts of all thirty-eight of its dancers and staff, including that of Alleyne, stating that it was seeking protection from creditors because of an accumulated $450,000 debt.1 Narrowly avoiding bankruptcy (thanks in part to a stronger than expected response to the Moscow Classical Ballet’s presentation of The Nutcracker), the board rehired Alleyne for an abbreviated spring 2009 season, before they mutually parted ways later that summer. Molnar, who had studied with Alleyne at the National Ballet School and who had been a Ballet bc company member under his leadership following stints at the National Ballet of Canada and William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt, was appointed Interim Artistic Director in the summer of 2009. She immediately set about restructuring the company’s finances and winning back its audience base, in part by showing a more accessible and community-oriented side of Ballet bc through performances at venues like The Dance Centre and even the Royal Canadian Legion on Commercial Drive, where as part of Julie-anne Saroyan’s popular Dances for a Small Stage series in June 2010 I ate perogies and drank beer as I watched the Ballet bc dancers get down and dirty in a suite of new works by Canadian choreographers Gioconda Barbuto, Edmond Kilpatrick, Farley Johansson, Donald Sales, Cori Caulfield, Lauri Stallings, Margie Gillis, and Cherice Barton. So much for the staid image of a classical ballet company. But then that was never part of Molnar’s conception for a remade Ballet bc when she took over its reins (her position as Artistic Director was made permanent in March 2010). Instead, from the very beginning she stressed that the company would be working in a decidedly contemporary idiom, one that built on the classical training of its dancers but that drew its energy and ethos from an innovative and boundary-pushing repertoire of new works.2 In addition to at least one work per year by Molnar, this repertoire has included important commissions from both national and local choreographers, the latter commitment one that Molnar has maintained and even strengthened

since the beginning of her tenure. As significant has been Molnar’s success in securing challenging and unconventional work from leading international choreographers, including Cayetano Soto, Mehdi Walerski, José Navas, Johan Inger, Jorma Elo, Sharon Eyal, and Ohad Naharin. Making this part of the institutional dna of the company is something Molnar announced emphatically with Ballet bc’s return to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre stage.

M O N D AY, 1 9 A P R I L 2 0 1 0 Ballet BC … … is back New artistic director Emily Molnar certainly assembled a fine program of Vancouver dance premieres to mark her “bold new vision for the future” of the company this past weekend. That vision has less to do with Molnar creating (à la her predecessor, John Alleyne) new full-length story ballets of her own in-house and more to do with seeking out international choreographers to create contemporary works on and for Ballet BC ’s dancers. The recently announced 2010/11 season alone contains seven world premieres and three Vancouver premieres. Bringing the best of international dance to Vancouver, and programming it alongside the wealth of homegrown talent we have in the city, is something I wholeheartedly support. We’re nowhere near the model of London’s Sadler’s Wells, a grand clearing-house for the best groundbreaking local and global dance, but Barb Clausen and Jim Smith’s DanceHouse series (which closes its second season this weekend with Brazil’s Grupo Corpo, and which will launch its third season this fall), together with The Dance Centre, festivals like PuSh and Chutzpah! and the recently completed Vancouver International Dance Festival, and now a rejuvenated Ballet BC ,

are helping to ensure that local audiences also get to see the best the world

Why, for example, has it taken so long for William Forsythe’s Herman Schmerman, the first work on the Ballet

BC

Re/Naissance program, to get here? (Why, for

that matter, have we seen so little Forsythe dance in Vancouver more generally? He’s only perhaps the world’s leading contemporary choreographer …) Created for the New York City Ballet in 1992, Herman Schmerman showcases Forsythe’s trade-

And: Institutions

has to offer.

mark improvisational style at its witty best, deconstructing academic ballet via syncopated rhythms that show the various kinds of slant and wrapped movements and bodily spatial configurations that lie between and, indeed, often lead to more synchronized, vertical, and standardly paired positions. This was especially on view in the concluding pas de deux between Makaila Wallace and Donald Sales, who not

263

only displayed stunning physical communication and chemistry with each other, but were also clearly having a ball. Next up was Israeli-born, Netherlands-based Itzik Galili’s Things I Told Nobody, a more self-consciously theatrical work set to haunting music by Handel, Vivaldi, Mozart, and Satie, whose Gymnopédie No. 1 provides the opportunity for a stunning concluding solo by Wallace. However, it is the piece’s opening, to the largo from Handel’s Xerxes, that has stayed with me the most. The sequence begins with Conor Gnam stage right, curled up on the floor, illuminated by the golden glow of a suspended industrial lamp. Through a succession of low pliés, leg extensions, and general floor work, Gnam eventually sets the rest of the company in motion, hitherto curled up in shadow under their own lamps. The whole thing ends with the dancers turning the suspended lights on the audience, and I could only think that here, in its emotional simplicity, was what Marie Chouinard should have emulated back in March during her bloated premiere of The Golden Mean as part of DanceHouse. The evening concluded with local darling Crystal Pite’s Short Works: 24, two dozen minute-long, largely non-narrative pieces set to pulsating music by Pite’s longtime collaborator, Owen Belton, and featuring the dancers in solos, duos, trios, and larger group formations exploring the kinaesthetic possibilities of pure movement. Goofy, inventive, and filled with all manner of Pite’s impossible-to-imitate sinuous, jittery, almost-boneless limned movements (the company lined-up in a row, caterpillar-like on the floor stage right, moving only their heads and shoulders – and occasionally their bums – while a single female dancer performs a breakneck solo stage left was a sight to behold), it was a perfect way to end, if only because it proved that Ballet BC ’s classically trained dancers are up to the complexity of the boldest of contemporary choreography. Judging by the thunderous applause, so are Vancouver’s audiences. Here’s to Molnar’s brave new vision for the company. I look forward to the next season, and many more to come.

264

There have, of course, been many more seasons, and my partner, Richard, and I have subscribed to all of them. If we haven’t always enjoyed everything we’ve seen, we have appreciated the risks Molnar has been willing to take artistically, including by occasionally tweaking the formula of contemporary mixed programs with full-length updates of classic story ballets (Navas’s Giselle [2012] and Walerski’s Romeo and Juliet [2017] didn’t work for me,3 but the paired Rites [2015], by Molnar and Gustavo Ramirez Sansano, I thought were a great success). There is also no denying the depth of talent and the technical virtuosity of the company’s dancers, and though I have never considered myself a balletomane, I do admit to anticipating the start

And: Institutions

of each new Ballet bc season with a mix of joy and dread as I wait to see who has joined the ranks and which long-time favourites might be departing (Gilbert Small and Livona Ellis, we miss you!). The high degree of dancer turnover during Molnar’s tenure is cause for some misgivings, as it reflects to me (and others in the community) a preference for younger, fresher bodies who can take instruction and work long hours mostly unquestioningly (see below), rather than an honouring of the embodied histories of older company members, who have increasingly been eased out of Ballet bc’s ranks through “artistic residencies,” which seems to mean they are retained in order to perform familiar repertory roles on tour (again, see below). Nevertheless, I confess to having been a dedicated cheerleader for Molnar, one of the few women leading a major ballet company internationally, as she has taken steps, over the past decade, to bring Ballet bc back from the brink and reinstitute its financial and creative sustainability in the dance consciousness of Vancouverites. In April 2010, when the company first returned to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, the balcony seats were closed off – ostensibly to create a more intimate feel, but in reality because they couldn’t be filled. Today the balcony is as crowded as the orchestra sections, and many of its seats are made available to youth patrons at discounted ticket prices thanks to an ongoing sponsorship deal with the clothing retailer Simons. Other season sponsors include or have included financial institutions ranging from the Bank of Montreal to Assante Wealth Management and Wells Fargo, as well as law firms McCarthy Tetrault and Fasken Martineau. Aided by robust annual individual giving campaigns that have boosted Ballet bc’s donor base and solid managerial oversight,4 the company has been able to undertake a variety of new initiatives to extend its institutional reach. This includes touring nationally and internationally (including to London’s Sadler’s Wells), something the company has done every summer since 2015. That same year Molnar was also able to realize a key goal of instituting an affiliate school/training program for the company when she announced a formal relationship with Arts Umbrella, whose graduate dance program has provided Ballet bc with regular cohorts of apprentice and emerging artist dancers, many of whom have gone on to become full company members.5 Institutionally, success begets success. Going to the ballet has once again become an established custom for dance aficionados in Vancouver because over the course of the historical period covered in this book Molnar’s hard work in reinventing her company has transformed what was a grudging obligation into an affirmation of spectators’ own cutting-edge tastes. That

265

266

those tastes have been affirmed by some of the most respected institutions in the international dance community has been a welcome reassurance. To that end, the July 2019 announcement that Molnar would be leaving Ballet bc in the summer of 2020 to assume the artistic leadership of Nederlands Dans Theater,6 where she succeeds Paul Lightfoot at the helm of one of the busiest and most ambitious contemporary dance companies in the world, is perhaps the definitive establishment imprimatur on a capstone period in which Vancouver has found a place on the global dance map. At the same time, as I hope I have made clear throughout this book, for many dance artists in this city – some with movement traditions stretching back millennia – that place has always been secure, and dance in Vancouver will continue to evolve beyond both Molnar’s departure and my documentation of just a small portion of its activity. Of course, a sense of one’s place in the dance firmament does not always bring with it a commensurate or equitable distribution of resources. To state things plainly, some institutions, like Ballet bc, receive a greater share of the funding pie. Indeed the company’s successful reshaping of its organizational and administrative culture, together with its critical and box office accomplishments, resulted in $5,870,065 in combined municipal, provincial, and federal grants between 2013 and 2018.7 That ranks the company third among artistic not-for-profit grant recipients in the city during the same period (behind only the Arts Club Theatre Company and Arts Umbrella’s combined children’s programs), and first among dance-specific organizations. The next closest dance organization is Kidd Pivot Performing Arts Society, which should perhaps come as no surprise given artistic director Crystal Pite’s status as a superstar international choreographer. That she has herself become a dance-world institution whose every new premiere is not to be missed can be measured by the fact that when Kidd Pivot’s Revisor debuted at the Vancouver Playhouse in February 2019 presenters from across the globe flew in to see it. That those same presenters also stuck around to see organized showings by other Vancouver dance artists is equally a measure of the institutional fellowship that Pite and her team routinely extend to the local community. Revisor, as with almost all of Kidd Pivot’s Vancouver premieres since 2010, was staged as part of DanceHouse’s annual season. Founded in 2008 by Barb Clausen and Jim Smith, the presentation series has, in addition to Pite, featured the work of local dance artists Wen Wei Wang (like Pite, also a client of Smith’s Eponymous management company) and Vanessa Goodman (see my discussion of Wells Hill in Chapter 4). Several acclaimed Cana-

dian/Québécois companies have also been showcased, including Compagnie Marie Chouinard (three times), Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal (twice), Louise Lecavalier/Fou Glorieux (twice), La La La Human Steps, Frédérik Gravel, and Toronto Dance Theatre. Mostly, however, the mandate of DanceHouse is to bring exceptional large-scale international contemporary dance to Vancouver audiences. Performances by heavyweight companies like Batsheva Dance, Wayne McGregor/Random Dance, Hofesh Shechter Company, Brazil’s Grupo Corpo, Stephen Petronio Company, Cedar Lake Dance, Akram Khan Company, Dorrance Dance, and momix, among others, have helped cement DanceHouse’s institutional bona fides as a major dance presenter in the city, and also no doubt account for its status as a member of the million-dollar club in terms of secured public funding between 2013 and 2018.8 Regardless, what has kept me renewing my subscription year after year is the opportunity for new discoveries.

S U N D AY, 6 F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 1 Holding Moonbeams Last night we took a break from PuSh to attend the second presentation in this year’s DanceHouse season at the Playhouse. Doug Elkins and Friends’ Fräulein Maria is about as much fun as you’re likely to have at the theatre in this or any other lifetime. It’s also incredibly moving, fiercely intelligent, and wholly sincere as an homage not just to the cultural artifact that inspired it, but to the many dance genres from which it samples. In his pre-show chat, Elkins gave a most engaging – and suitably elliptical – redaction of how he conceived the piece. Having grown up loving The Sound of Music (the movie version with Julie Andrews, not the Broadway version with Mary Proustian attachment to the work, and the memories it evoked, was reawakened while introducing his children to the film. First produced in a small-scale version at Joe’s Pub in New York in 2006, it was an immediate hit, and after securing the permission of the Rodgers and Hammerstein estates (no mean feat, that) the work was expanded to its current 13-performer, 65-minute scope in 2008. It has been

And: Institutions

Martin) and singing along to the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes, Elkins’

touring the United States ever since, with Vancouver its first international stop. The show begins with Michael Preston, the show’s co-director, warming up the audience vocally in his role as an Uncle Max–like impresario, conducting us in a version of “Do-Re-Mi.” Then we hear the voice of Richard Rodgers commenting on audiences’ deep affection for the character of Maria, before the curtain parts and

267

Preston, with the aid of other company members and a few unfurled bolts of green and blue cloth, literally sets about making the hills come alive. Julie Andrews’ bright soprano is the cue for the appearance of our Maria, and this is the occasion for the first of many surprises in the evening: in Elkins’ version there are three Marias, one of them played by a man! Not only does this allow for some creative partnering and group sequences over the course of the show, but it also serves as an interesting comment on the multiple layers of spectatorial identification (some of them cross-gender) at work in the complex of character/role/actor. Nuns in hoodies voguing to “How Do You Solve a Problem?” (led by the wonderful Deborah Lohse, who later gives a spirited turn as the haughty Baroness); a six-foot tall male Liesl in a pink tutu (the classically trained John Sorensen-Jolink) dancing with black B-boy Kurt to “I Am Sixteen”; a capoeira-infused reprise of “Do-Re-Mi”; and a moving pas de deux X 3 for our finally united heroine and Captain Von Trapp: these were just a few of my favourite things from last night. Elkins himself dances two of the stand-out numbers in the show: a duet on a park bench with Preston (menacing red arm band now in place) to “Edelweiss” that involves a tightly choreographed, Godot-style exchange of a fedora, and that also quietly acknowledges the Holocaust; and a hilarious hip-hop solo as Mother Superior to “Climb Every Mountain.” Fräulein Maria is witty and knowing without being overly clever and precious. The work moves beyond mere parody to something far more generous, inviting us to reflect on what about the original movie was so captivating in the first place, and to participate in the joyous act of aligning the human voice at its purest with physical movement at its most gleefully buoyant and euphoric. Don’t get me wrong: the dancers last night were all serious technicians, as adept at step-dancing and salsa as ballet and ballroom. But virtuosity was less the point than a more profound sense of kinaesthetic connection: communicating to us, through their bodies, their pleasure at dancing together – and together for us – on stage. Just as the singing nun works her surrogate magic on the Von Trapps, so are we proprioceptively transported (and I think I mean that quite literally) by Doug Elkins and his friends. Outside on the sidewalk as we hum along to the score and do a little shuffle, we become (if only for a moment) flibbertigibbets, will-o’-the-wisps, clowns.

268

While this book is concerned with documenting the efflorescence of the local dance scene from 2008 to 2018, it is important to note that a growth in the quantity and quality of work by international choreographers and companies seen in Vancouver during the same period – aided in part by organizations like Ballet bc and DanceHouse, and by festivals like PuSh and vidf – has helped to shape the evolution of that scene. And the institution

And: Institutions

that has done the most to bridge the spheres of local and global dance in Vancouver is The Dance Centre, which comes third on the list of most publicly funded dance-based not-for-profits in bc between 2013 and 2018.9 Established in 1986 as a resource centre and presentation platform for the dance profession in Vancouver and bc, its first executive director was none other than Barb Clausen,10 who together with founding board chair Grant Strate spearheaded the initial drive to fundraise for, build, and own a stateof-the-art dance facility in Vancouver that would serve as a hub for the community’s activities.11 Mirna Zagar, executive director of The Dance Centre since 1998, oversaw the official opening of this facility in 2001, which is housed in an Arthur Erickson–designed building at the corner of Davie and Granville streets on a site donated by Scotiabank, which has remained a corporate sponsor. I have probably spent more time in this building than in any other dance venue in Vancouver. Some of that time has been devoted to observing rehearsals or studio showings of works discussed in preceding chapters, or, as per the next chapter, to collaborating on a specific Dance Centre–sponsored project. I have also facilitated numerous talkbacks and critical conversations with audiences, artists, and out-of-town presenters. And there have been innumerable awards presentations, with The Dance Centre being the chief body presiding over performance, choreographic, and career achievement in Vancouver dance. Mostly, however, I have gone to The Dance Centre to take in performances programmed as part of its Global Dance Connections series, which annually showcases a mix of local, bc, Canadian, and international artists. This ritual brings with it a whole series of institutional conventions that are specific to the building, and whose various frustrations I have come to accept as reassuringly familiar: the general admission ticketholder line that snakes down the stairs and back and forth in an unruly U-shaped formation in the lobby to the Faris Family Studio; the person who, standing near the light switch in said line, will inevitably, through some anatomical adjustment, cast the entire room into darkness at one point or another; the auditorium seats that make it seem like you will pitch over backwards every time you lean away to let another patron by; the stomping of feet you often hear from the class or rehearsal taking place in the studio above the Farris. I have put up with these customs over the years – some with greater forbearance than others – because of the singular performance experience that is almost always promised at the end of, or in spite of, them. Many of those experiences have already found their way into this book. Now, in thinking about an appropriate blog post with which to conclude

269

this last movement interval, I find myself despairing at all the amazing work I have had to exclude: from international imports like Jan Martens’s The Dog Days are Over and Sweat Baby Sweat (from 2015 and 2017, respectively, and both contributing to a serious choreographic man crush on my part) to the homegrown offerings of Wen Wei Wang’s Dialogue (2017) and Daina Ashbee’s Pour (2018), both fascinating, albeit radically different, takes on the performance of identity. In the end, I have settled on an account of a piece co-created by battery opera’s Lee Su-Feh. I have made this decision in part because Su-Feh has been such an important mentor to so many dance artists in the city, including Justine Chambers and Alexa Mardon, whom I discuss in the next chapter. I admit that I have also sought to round out my somewhat haphazard representational coverage of the yearly dance scene in Vancouver with a post from 2013. Finally, reproducing my response to this collaboration between Su-Feh and Montreal’s Benoît Lachambre allows me to make my second connection (after a reference in Chapter 4, once again to Vanessa Goodman’s Wells Hill) between contemporary Vancouver dance and the poetry of W.B. Yeats.

M O N D AY, 1 8 F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 3 Widening Gyres and Full Body Scans In the famous opening stanza to W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” we are told: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. I’ve found myself returning to these lines over the past few days as I’ve struggled to articulate here on this blog (not usually a problem for me) my response to Body270

Scan: Sweet Gyre, a piece created by Lee Su-Feh (of battery opera) and Benoît Lachambre (of Par B.Leux), and performed last week as part of The Dance Centre’s Global Dance Connections series. A work that, in the words of its choreographers,

“recyles, re-uses, and re-imagines” elements from an earlier 2008 collaboration for six dancers, here Lee and Lachambre – together with Jesse Zubot, who provides live musical accompaniment – let loose the full panoply of their anarchic creative energies upon the audience. And if, like me, one cannot find a stable formal or thematic centre upon which to pitch one’s interpretation of the piece, that doesn’t mean one won’t continue to turn and turn around in one’s head its spiraling layers. For me those layers are composed of contrasting movements and sounds and scales and textures and colours: •

Lee’s slow, durational, pause-punctuated immersion of her body into the pile

of sleeping bags downstage vs. Lachambre’s jerky skittering of his chair horizontally upstage left to right; •

or, later, Lee, now on the chair dressed in a sleeping bag skirt and vest, slowly

wending her way to the microphone near Zubot in order to coo into it like a bird vs. Lachambre’s manic flitting about the stage saying “I love you,” the sound of aluminum clothes pins jangling in the pockets of his hoodie; •

the double-sided sleeping bags themselves: vibrantly coloured on the outside

when scattered on the floor, or strung together along a rope upstage; but turned inside out and affixed to a succession of step ladders of different heights, they reveal monochromatic portraits of the dancers in the original 2008 piece; •

and, finally, the piece’s closing tableau: blue tarpaulin pulled above the audi-

ence to fashion a synthetic sky, while below us, on stage, artificial turf is rolled out, upon which Lee and Lachambre, in custom-made outfits of oiled laytex, slowly turn and turn and turn. I couldn’t always make sense of what was going on before me, but I always had some sort of sensory reaction to what I was witnessing. I was never less than fully engaged. Which is, after all, what one desires from live performance. As my friend and colleague, DD Kugler, said to me afterwards, we all owe a debt to artists like Lee and Lachambre, who in pushing the limits of what dance and performance is very modest ways. There is no lacking of conviction or passion in these two performers, and if drowning in the alchemical results causes our own aesthetic expectations to fall apart, we are the better for it.

Finding room to experiment and play requires time and money. If at different moments in this interval it has seemed that I have overemphasized the funding that has accrued to these institutions it is because I am wary of a “too big to fail” dance economy that encourages unequal competition

And: Institutions

and can be, allow the rest of us to have room to experiment and play in our own

271

between a few haves and a whole lot of have-nots, and that can also result in overly safe aesthetic choices. Cultural innovation rarely follows a trickledown trajectory. On the other hand, I have contributed to the coffers of Ballet bc, DanceHouse, and The Dance Centre as a monthly donor and season subscriber, and so far I have been more than satisfied with the return on my investment. That, in the case of The Dance Centre, a portion of the resources I have put into it have also managed to flow back to me in the form of an artistic residency with which I was involved is the subject of the final chapter of this book.

272

CHAPTER 6

History Dances Whom? Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Justine A. Chambers and Alexa Mardon

It all started with a dinner that I missed. I’ll let Alexa tell the story. Family Dinner Alexa Mardon1 Nestled in a cluster of trees on the edge of Kits beach and the cusp of Vanier park, the Hadden Park Field House at 1015 Maple Street is the current resident space of Vancouver artist collective Ten Fifteen Maple: Justine A. Chambers, Josh Hite, Rebecca Bayer, Billy Marchenski, and Kristen Roos. The former caretaker residence is a part of the Vancouver Parks Board’s Field House Residency program, launched in 2012, which provides artists/collectives with free studio space in exchange for community arts-based engagement. The Field House acts as the site for the collective’s often participatory research. As the group’s website explains, “Through sound, collective recordings, temporary installations, performances, screenings, workshops, conversations and dinners, the projects will be dedicated to the very means of engagement that happens between people and their particular surroundings.”2 In early June, I’m invited to attend a participatory work by dance artist and Ten Fifteen Maple collective member Justine A. Chambers entitled Family Dinner [see Figures 6.1 and 6.2]. Family Dinner is described as “an immersive and intimate dining performance [where] guests join a very particular family dinner exploring the choreography of dining, etiquette and behavioural codes. Each dinner is at once a rehearsal, performance, embodied recording and a conversation with

274

dinner guests.”3 Though the dinner I attended functioned as a dress rehearsal for the work proper, the performances are typically publicly accessible events, with the group accepting bookings for guests via the collective’s website. On the Tuesday evening I arrived for dinner, the early summer sun had begun to sling low behind dwindling family barbeques. Distant tankers flashed in the light. Once through the chain-link gate and at the door I’m greeted with hugs and warm smiles by what Chambers affectionately calls the “Task Force,” a rotating group of some of Vancouver’s most sought-after dancers and performers; it’s a close group, including many people I’ve learned from, trained with, and admired in the city’s small dance community. It might have been relaxing, a nice moment to catch up with those who’d been out of town or busy, a rare opportunity for so many working artists to be in the same room. But I’d been invited to a performance, and I was suspicious. I immediately started sweating in my ill-chosen long sleeve shirt. In the cramped caretaker’s kitchen, where pasta noodles were sending up steam off the stove and the twelve bodies of guests and performers alike were packed tightly, I gratefully threw back the glass of cold white wine that was placed in my hand as my jacket and bag were whisked away from me. Justine A. Chambers’ work typically deals with the movement language of gesture, and her attention to detail – the slightest angle of the chin, the initiation of a movement from this finger rather than that – is a signature of her practice. Having both danced in Chambers’ work as a student and seen her work performed by herself and by other interpreters, I am aware of her ability to apply the observation of her own and others’ habitual tendencies and to multiply them; to render them into a tight score and show them back to us. This looped replication, familiar yet grotesque, is often unsettling. It was this keenness of observation that I had in mind as I entered into the machinery of the choreography, the “embodied recording.” My awareness was heightened accordingly throughout the evening. We were ushered into the “dining room” by the performers: a large table set tastefully for twelve, small windows overlooking the seawall path, the spectacular sunset threatening. Against the wall opposite the window, a smaller table acted as a buffet, our slow-baked tomatoes, pasta, and salad ready to be dished out by the few performers hovering over it. We were subtly arranged so that – as much as possible – each

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

of the six guests sat between two performers. Justine, standing at the head of the table, asked one of the guests, on the side of the table opposite the buffet, to pass her the empty plate to her right. This seemed to be the formal signifier that the performance had begun. The plate made its way towards the serving table, was heaped with food, and was then passed clockwise between hands, all the way around the table, in an absurd display of hospitable excess, past its original position, to the guest on the left of the first person who originally picked up the plate. The guests laughed, a little knowingly and nervously, and Justine smiled gracefully at us all. When, finally, the last plate had moved through twelve pairs of hands and was set down, performer Tiffany Tregarthen asked, “Does anyone want to say grace?” In the silence that followed, we all observed each other. “Well, bon appétit!” Mårten Spångberg writes about a type of performance that calls for “a shift towards performance as an activity,” the poesis of the alreadythere.4 In an essay titled “Immaterial Performance,” Spångberg asks not what, but when, is the performance? Chambers’ Family Dinner is at once a revelation and an interrogation of the already-there. Rather than a production “without the possibility of essence,” Family Dinner is an experimentation wherein the body acts as imperfect recording device, the playback a magnification, rather than an unfolding of. At Family Dinner, a conversation with a dinner guest is the essence of the everyday, made bizarre by process of distillation. The performance is in fact derived from essence: of habit, of social cues, and the immense histories carried with each of us in our bodies. Once we were settled, eating and chatting, it became apparent that the performers were adhering to a movement score, or a set of instructions previously “choreographed,” though those instructions took some time to make themselves explicit. The lighting in the room began to shift as well; a wall-mounted reading lamp would flick on or off, while the timbre of the overhead lights would softly change. Conversations darted and buzzed between neighbours and the guests joked and remarked on these changes, making our awareness of the performance known. Meanwhile, Chambers held court; she was a charming host with perfect comedic timing. Despite this, the room was charged with an energy similar to the uncomfortable and mysterious experience of having a conversation with somebody who keeps checking their watch. I would ask a question, contribute an anecdote, or listen to a story,

275

276

but my involvement was checked, as if real time were suspended; each person, including the guests, was existing in a mental capacity outside of the room and the conversation itself. In the absence of a watch, the performers checked each other, their plates, Chambers, and, unsettlingly, us. It was hard not to notice the intricate web of signals whizzing across the table. The movement score surfaced in bursts; moments of unison would appear in an elbow on the table, or the perfectly timed thrust of three performers’ torsos backwards into their chairs as they laughed maniacally at another guest’s comment. Trying to carry on a conversation while watching them – and watching them watch each other – was both exhausting and exhilarating. It was akin to being let in on a juicy secret I couldn’t yet grasp the consequence of. When performer Josh Martin, clearly visible at the head of the table opposite Chambers, began making a series of gestures, crossing his hands over his chest and pointing his fingers out like guns, making fists and then opening them, it was almost a relief. Dance! Movement! Here was something I could latch onto. For a moment, I could relax into watching. Aryo Khakpour and David Raymond joined him, and the three men casually continued on the conversations they’d already begun while completing their movement task. Spångberg’s idea of immaterial performance describes a shift towards performance as an activity, an occasion in which performer and audience can merge into one entity, not through conventions of participation but through “charged interactions.” While the guests at this dinner were clearly not privy to the exact choreographic tasks at hand, we sat at the same table, interacting with the performers, cumulatively composing the performance “as activity, shared through multiplicities of relations, rather than performance as representation.”5 After a time it became clear that the performers were lagging in finishing their meals. A perpetually fast eater, I drank the rest of my wine, and then drank my refill. When Tiffany Tregarthen and Alison Denham, both lithe, graceful and articulate women, leaned steeply over their plates in unison and began shoveling the remainder of the food into their mouths, my first instinct was to look away. Instead I watched closely as they both packed away half a plate of food in under ten seconds, smiling and commenting enthusiastically on their meals. Finally, the performers cleared our plates, and the guests were left alone for a moment. We all agreed we were bewildered, enthralled, and a little bit exhausted. Chambers and the performers re-entered with our dessert.

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

“Now I’m going to tell you what happened,” said Chambers. Over the last year, and through a series of research and rehearsal periods both including and excluding “guests,” Chambers and the rest of the Task Force created an overarching movement score, which included such gestures as the hand pointing. Outside of the scored, set movement, dictated by both the lighting cues and a timer system on Chambers’ pocketed phone, to which she gave the group set cues, there was another, more complex and embodied score. From each of the now 100 or so guests that have dined with the Task Force, one gesture, habit, or tic is pulled. Together, the performers practice and perfect this guest’s gesture, adding it to the growing library of possible movements. Not only are those movements memorized and performed, they are the only movements allowed. There is a gesture for drinking your wine, as there is one for leaning on the table, as there is one for turning to the person to your right, as there is for wiping your mouth with your napkin. Each of these everyday and utilitarian movements is done as somebody else who has sat around that table. As Chambers explained, the performers are so deeply locked into the bodies of others, this cumulative body, that they are no longer free to perform any of what they might consider their own gestures or movements. After we would leave that evening, the performers would choose a gesture from each of the six of us, and add it to the blueprint for their dinner the following evening. This relentless perpetuality recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that the network of signs is infinitely circular – that “The statement survives its object, the name survives its owner. Whether it passes into other signs or is kept in reserve for a time, the sign survives both its state of things and its signified; it leaps like an animal or a dead person to regain its place in the chain and invest a new state, a new signified, from which it will in turn extricate itself.”6 In the structure Chambers has built for an “embodied recording,” the personal is de-personalized, the materials for construction of identity are made open-source, and the singular is made communal. In this sense, Family Dinner is truly participatory at a level that performance working under this banner often fails to reach. The body of performer and guest surge forward into the work’s next iteration, yet the relationship between performer and participant is circular. The cumulative physical blueprint is the performers’ only entryway into interaction; the work exists at the precipice between what has been and what is. This immense potential

277

for slippage both completes and ruptures the work’s self-imposed task of recording, opening it up to the possibility of entry, of charged interaction between performer and participant, between then and now. While the identity of each participant becomes subsumed, mysterious and anonymous, it’s important to Chambers that the architecture of the evening not remain a mystery. As we sat, taking our time with dessert and chatting, guests and performers alike asked questions and batted around ideas about what we’d all just now been a part of. At the time I attended the dinner, Chambers had recently gotten word that, along with this season’s Vancouver-based Dancing on the Edge Festival, Family Dinner had been accepted for programming in both Ottawa’s Canada Dance Fest and Montreal’s offta for the 2015 season. The importance of this work being considered “dance” is farreaching. Chambers recalled an anecdote in which a previous dinner guest had been disappointed in the “lack of dance.” This particular guest’s codified expectations of a dance performance were not met at Family Dinner, and this rift allowed for an important interrogation of the medium’s definition. If you were to ask Justine A. Chambers where the dance is, she would invite you, graciously, to look around. Choreography/Direction: Justine A. Chambers in collaboration with the performers. Performers (on the night the writer attended): Justine Chambers, Josh Martin, David Raymond, Tiffany Tregarthen, Aryo Khakpour, Alison Denham. Lighting: James Proudfoot.

278

As Alexa notes in her review of Family Dinner, Justine’s dance practice is largely gesture-based; it also draws on the social choreography of daily life in order to question when and where dance takes place, and when and where (we think) it does not. She is interested in the “unspoken movement expectations” that accompany and frequently help to structure different spaces, built environments, social occasions and rituals, and interpersonal relations.7 And she creates scores that “reframe and rework” these expectations, helping to foreground “the dances that are already there” – often, as in Family Dinner, by conscripting and subtly shifting “the formal arrangements of assembly each [context] invites.”8 For dancers who have appeared in her work or collaborated with her on different processes, Justine’s thinking about what dance might look like and where it might exist can be as philosophically liberating as the execution of her precisely structured, formally

Figure 6.1 Top Alison Denham (far left), Kate Franklin (middle), Tiffany Tregarthen (far right), and guests in Family Dinner (2014), by Justine A. Chambers. Figure 6.2 Bottom Justine A. Chambers and guest in Family Dinner (2014), by Justine A. Chambers.

280

complex, and often durationally accumulative choreographies can be mentally and physically taxing. For producers and presenters who have commissioned and programmed her work, Justine’s refusal to put limits around what the container for her ideas might be – a shared meal in a field house, a score that only exists in published form, an installation, invisible or camouflaged observation, a looped canon of gestures tucked away into a corner of an art gallery, a choreographic walk, a facilitated conversation – can pose challenges to traditional product-oriented and market-driven models for dance spectatorship. And for audience members whom Justine has conscripted – sometimes knowingly, at other times not – into helping her recompose the quotidian and immaterial into the virtuosic and remarkable, her choreographic methods can, as Alexa’s review also notes, be confusing and even alienating. In Family Dinner, an immersive and participatory work, Justine is additionally engaging with recent debates around what Claire Bishop has referred to as “delegated performance,” in which the labour of professional artists is supplemented and/or replaced by that of audience members, who either actively or passively consent to being exploited for the purposes of a more authentic and co-creative experience.9 Bishop, and also Jen Harvie, link the rise of this kind of performance to economic deregulation and the outsourcing of skilled labour in blue-collar industries in the 1990s.10 Some might question the ethics of this kind of social contract, in which the invisible labour of the “amateur” diners at Family Dinner is silently observed, repurposed, and sold back to them by the “expert” Task Force of professional dance artists as the performance they actually paid for, with the spectre of genuine social interaction offered by the premise of a shared meal instead turned into a mediated spectacle.11 Instead, I would suggest, along with Bishop, that what Justine is partly interested in bringing out in works such as this are the Sadean pleasures of exploitation, subordination, and surveillance embedded in performance more generally,12 with her focus on the body as a recording device and the back-and-forth delegation of authorship and authenticity between “performers” and “audience members” underscoring our tendency to fetishistically disavow performance – and especially dance performance – as being inherently exploitative. In this respect, it is important to situate Justine’s practice – as it informs this and other of her works – in the context of a growing body of theory that reads gesture as a technique of human agency. Put simply, the body’s feeling capacity for moving in both rehearsed and improvised ways challenges, according to Carrie Noland, standard constructivist accounts of the kinds of

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

social conditioning that only ever produce disciplined and docile bodies.13 Thinking about gesture as a form of kinaesthetic inquiry that operates with other information-gathering systems to feed back to the body knowledge that allows for both repetition and variation is something dancers understand intuitively through the daily practice of technique. But Justine shows how that inquiry can be extended beyond the rehearsal studio. For her, dance is indeed all around us, and no more so than in the repertoire of gestures we employ in our everyday activities, be those gestures instrumentalist (the reach for a wine glass) or expressionistic (fingers cocked like guns). Thus, as a companion piece to Family Dinner, Justine has also created Family Dinner: The Lexicon. Extracting from the series of dinners that have made up the successive iterations of the former piece an ever-expanding repertoire of gestures, in the latter piece Justine and members of her Task Force have reincorporated those gestures into a stand-alone work that had its premiere at the 2015 Dancing on the Edge Festival. This time I was in the audience to watch Aryo Khakpour, Kate Franklin, Josh Martin, Alison Denham, and Lisa Gelley reframe as extraordinary and indeterminate what for most of us passes as routine and unremarkable: the surprising uses to which cutlery may be put; the different ways that people play with and eat their food; how we sit in our chairs; whether we put our elbows on the table; whether we lean in or sit back when we’re talking to our neighbour. When the lights come up, the performers are all sitting at a long table, each with a plate of food before them (see Figure 6.3). One by one they unfold their napkins, pick up their knives and forks, and taste a bit of their food. In its ritual repetition, the sequence exposes the dialectic of sameness and difference embedded in all repertory acts, including social ones like eating: Khakpour cuts his food with precision; Franklin stabs at hers with force; Martin hoovers his into his mouth, which is about an inch from his plate; Denham keeps turning her plate, taking a bit of each of the different food items in turn; and Gelley just pushes her food around before setting down her fork. From there, the movement gradually builds: a sequence involving the drinking from and filling of water and wine glasses (which neatly combines live sound picked up by two table mics with Nancy Tam’s recorded score); bits of mimed conversation; the wiping of mouths with napkins; a captivating below-the-table section, expertly lit by lighting designer James Proudfoot, that features a lot of manspreading, including from the women. These and other gestures are sometimes performed in unison or in canon, but more often than not they are presented juxtapositionally, part of a complex score that for Justine constitutes an “archive of a shared

281

movement vocabulary.”14 How this archive – as an index of “knowing place, proximity, relationship, and feeling for a moment, in the moment”15 – can be shared across arbitrary spatial divides (such as an invisible proscenium arch) and real temporal distances, and how it can in turn help us to rethink the who, what, where, when, and why of Vancouver dance, is what the rest of this chapter is about. But, first, let me continue the story. As a result of my blog review of Family Dinner: The Lexicon, Justine reached out for a meeting. That we hadn’t sat down before this was somewhat strange. After all, I had been aware of Justine’s presence in and influence on the Vancouver dance community for a number of years: as a performer, a maker, a teacher, a respected outside eye, and, above all, as an important incubator and animator of critical discourse around those aforementioned W questions. Justine A. Chambers: I came to Vancouver in 2006, because Josh [Hite], my partner, came to do his mfa at ubc … When I came here I had retired from dance and art. So I was not dancing and I was not arting. I was a waitress.16 Similarly, it was a mystery as to why Alexa and I had not previously crossed paths, especially since she had completed her undergraduate degree in the English Department at sfu, my home department before I moved my faculty appointment to the School for the Contemporary Arts. Following subsequent dance training at Modus Operandi, Alexa had also begun to appear in new work from a host of local choreographers, including my sca colleague Rob Kitsos. Indeed, at the time of our meeting – early fall 2015 – Alexa had just finished performing in Rob’s Saudade, which I briefly discussed in Chapter 5.

282

Alexa Mardon: I had been living in the uk for a couple of years. I knew I wanted to dance, and I tried to be a commercial dancer there, and I was miserable because I kept getting cast in, like, corporate can-can shows. Because I was too tall to do other stuff and just, like, not good enough at hip hop. And I couldn’t sing, so I couldn’t be in Chicago … So I came back, ostensibly to finish my English degree, to transfer to sfu.17 How the three of us came together to work on what became the Our Present Dance Histories project, the subject of what follows, and the con-

Figure 6.3 Left to right: Josh Martin, Lisa Gelley, Alison Denham, Aryo Khakpour, and Kate Franklin in Family Dinner: The Lexicon (2015), by Justine A. Chambers.

ceptual anchor for the form of this book as a whole, has everything to do with Justine’s energy and intelligence and ability, in Alexa’s words, to see the sedimented layers and networked relationships of dance all around her. More specifically, as part of a two-year (2015–17) artist residency at The Dance Centre, Justine initiated a series of projects aimed at rethinking what we mean when we talk about choreography and dance performance. How, for example, might ongoing dialogue about aesthetics, collaboration, practice, modes of presentation, and institutional training help us gain new insight into the ways in which our bodies are danced in everyday life and how those patterns might be rechoreographed not just in the studio, but through shared conversation (The Talking Thinking Dancing Body series, begun by Lee Su-Feh in 2012, facilitated by Su-Feh and Justine from 2012 to 2015, by Justine and Sadira Rodrigues from 2016 to 2018, and currently by Alexa and Rianne Svelnis)? How can a curated collective walk of our city help to uncamouflage the shadow social choreography that is part of urban dwelling, from the way pedestrians dance around one another in crossing a busy intersection, to a game of pickup basketball in a park, to the labour of the

283

284

often anonymous workers who maintain the various pathways, both material and immaterial, that assist in our navigation of civic space (the “Choreographic Walks” programmed by Justine as part of the Dance In Vancouver 2015 Biennial, and to which Alexa contributed a clapping fugue set in and around Victory Square)? And how can we document the living archive of a community’s shared dance history in a way that both honours the specific embodied memories of the different keepers of that history and allows for creative slippages, multiple unfoldings, and possibly even reperformances of those memories? To answer this last question – which is what seeded Our Present Dance Histories – Justine enlisted the help of Alexa and me: first Alexa, via email, in November 2014; and then me, over dinner almost exactly a year later. In between that time, Justine’s life had gotten extremely busy: as a result of the success of Family Dinner; as a result of other choreographic commissions; and, not least, as the result of the birth of her son (with partner Josh Hite), Max. Nevertheless, the three of us gathered together for the first time in early January 2016, convening in the sixth-floor meeting room of The Dance Centre’s executive offices, which Justine had claimed as her artistin-residence office, and which was to serve as the hub of our activities over the next two years. Our initial conversations were as meandering and crosshatched with digressions as the network of dance-based connections in Vancouver we were ostensibly attempting to map. I recall that we talked as much about Justine’s dance teachers at Ryerson and how she (Justine, that is) once hung upside down for fourteen hours for David Bowie in la as we did about how come Alexa and I had never crossed paths in the English Department at sfu (mostly night classes in Victorian lit and creative writing on Alexa’s part being the answer). But, in retrospect, such gossip sessions, along with those about who in the city has danced on cruise ships and the coincidence of bumping into Jay Hirabayashi’s ex-wife on Vancouver Island, were symptomatic of the affective weave we were seeking to capture in some way in our otherwise documentary discourse of what happened when, where, and with whom – the registering of ordinary events and sedimented memories (a hug in a lobby, a coffee after class at Harbour Dance) that we measure not so much through their historical importance as through their felt intensity. As Justine put it in one of our early meetings, in a typically insightful remark that became one of our guiding maxims, with the Dance Histories project we were seeking to uncover “the residue of what has happened in [Vancouver’s dance] spaces, and how it still sits there.”

Justine A. Chambers: Lynn Sheppard at Arts Umbrella was good friends with my friend Vicki [St-Denys] … who was my jazz teacher at Ryerson, which is where I did my … post-secondary training. And Vicki told Lynn that I was in town and that they should get me to teach. So then Arte [Artemis Gordon] called me and said, “Will you sub for Yannick Matthon?” Because Yannick was always out of town with Crystal [Pite] … And so then I was kind of dancing more.18

Since Diana Taylor published her influential study The Archive and the Repertoire in 2003, performance studies scholars have been debating whether or not the specific ontological conditions of performance – embodiment, eventness, co-presence, the transmission of technique, the practice of memory – are antithetical to their documentation.20 At the same time, scholars have been noting the ways in which what dance studies scholar André Lepecki calls “the will to archive” has become a defining feature of much contemporary performance.21 In Our Present Dance Histories, Justine, Alexa, and I, without ever explicitly articulating it as such, were adopting an approach to the archiving of Vancouver dance that aligns with Gabriella Giannachi’s notion, in Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday, of “the archive as an apparatus.”22 That is, as a system of administration whose institutional rules, knowledge paradigms, and mechanisms of control affect behaviours, actions, and thoughts, archives exist for the most part to produce and manage subjects. But for Giannachi apparatuses are fluid and relational, and thus the spread of “archive fever”23 in contemporary culture, and the performing arts more specifically, is not without a degree of agency. As Giannachi puts it, “we design the archive as the

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

Alexa Mardon: I came back and did this commercial, and Brett Owen was in it. It was choreographed by Kelly Konno … Anyway, I heard Brett and some other people talking about Tiffany [Tregarthen], but I didn’t know who they were talking about. They were doing these gestures and doing all this specific stuff, and talking about how insane it was that they had to, like, do this really specific movement. And I was, “Oh, what is that?” And they were, like, “Oh, we’re in this program called Modus” … And so I went to see the Modus show … And I remember being blown away by Elissa Hanson. I was, like, who is that person? I think that maybe a part of me wants to move like that, and could move like that.19

285

286

apparatus we want to be produced by,” which for us was as much an archive of feelings as it was of dates and scores and old programs.24 From the beginning, then, we all agreed that we were not interested in telling a definitive history of contemporary dance in Vancouver (indeed, the authoritativeness of any such account was of the absolute least concern to all of us). Instead, we saw ourselves opening up a window on how the community had constituted itself – and as much through social and interpersonal relationships as through dance training and technique. In this, we very much took to heart the opening of Judith Hamera’s Dancing Communities, which returns me as well to where I began this book: “Every day, urban communities are danced into being. This is more than a metaphor. It is a testament to the power of performance as a social force, as cultural poesis, as communication infrastructure that makes identity, solidarity and memory shareable.”25 As part of our own project of mapping the layers of kinaesthetic kinship that materially underscore shared dance memory in Vancouver, we proposed to conduct a series of video interviews with as many of the city’s practising dance artists as possible. At our first meeting we made a list of all the names we collectively could think of, and according to my notes, it numbered well over 100. We deliberately included as many younger and emerging artists as possible, as we were also interested in noting the confluence of more recent aesthetic and generational shifts in Vancouver’s dance community, and as our own respective immersions in said community could more or less be traced to the past decade, with Justine moving to the city in 2006, Alexa beginning her studies at Modus four years later, and me starting to document what I was seeing on Vancouver stages around the same time. That said, we always assumed that fissures would open up in any arbitrary timeline we imposed on the project, with questions of aesthetic influence, and dance training, and performance collaboration and mentorship necessarily pointing backwards as much as forwards. Hence the title of our project, Our Present Dance Histories, which deliberately pivots on an oscillation between past and present.26 We envisioned the whole process being rhizomatic rather than linear, with our research ideally producing a constellated web of Vancouver dance-world connections in which, by the end of our interviews, there would be zero degrees of separation between our subjects. In fact, this thinking influenced one of the very early potential outcomes of the project that we talked about at our first meetings: some kind of wall map or three-dimensional installation that would materialize the daisy-

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

chain of temporal, spatial, and interpersonal relationships we were seeking to track. Other things we talked about in terms of what our interviews and related research would produce: a website that would host writing, images, and potentially video related to the project; a series of textual and gestural scores that we would build into a performance that would take place as part of the 2017 Dance In Vancouver Biennial; a collection of objects and ephemera, including costumes from past performances mentioned by our interview subjects, that we would include as part of this performance, and potentially also distribute throughout The Dance Centre building; video and sound installations derived from our interviews that would loop in the main floor and Faris Studio lobbies (including, potentially, the washrooms); a program that would double as a scrapbook of our accumulated documentation, including a “never-ending” review that would be a deconstructed mash-up of my own writings on Vancouver dance, as well as those of other critics; and potentially a souvenir book that would stand as a partial record of our efforts and include excerpted transcriptions of our interviews. As for the interviews themselves, we decided on the following method: where possible, all three of us would interview our subjects together and include ourselves as part of the video documentation, in effect archiving ourselves building our archive. As for the questions we would ask, they would be as informal as possible, the kind of questions, according to my notes, “that will keep folks talking.” We thus settled on a fairly simple who, what, when, where, why format: who you’ve trained with, danced for, danced with, created with; what work you’ve made/been in/have seen that’s especially meaningful or memorable or influential, and also what you see as the future of Vancouver dance; when you arrived in the city and/or started dancing/making work here; where your “dance sites” are in the city, which might include favourite performance or rehearsal spaces, but also other physical or virtual spaces where you talk or think or write about dance; and, finally, why vancouver – as in, why stay here and/or why is it important for you to remain a part of this community? The apparent forensic thrust of these questions actually belies the kinds of narrative we were after and for the most part received. Mostly, we just wanted to engage folks in conversation, seeing where stories overlapped – and diverged. Those interstices – who and what gathers in them – is what we were after.

287

Justine A. Chambers: There was a joke for a while that I was the replacement dancer because I’d replace a bunch of people in work.27

Alexa Mardon: Things started to, like, roll along, because people started to get injured or having babies in the city. And this is my running joke with myself and my friends that, like, this is the what about Alexa.28 Justine sent out our first batch of interview requests in mid-January 2016, and by the end of the month we were on our way. By the start of May we had established a fairly regular routine, and it was at that time that The Dance Centre invited us to contextualize our process on its blog. We chose to do this as a multi-vocal email conversation, the edited textual record of which stands as the best testament to our overall aims with the project, and also what I have hopefully emulated to a certain extent in this book. Justine A. Chambers 2 May to Peter, Alexa Good morning Peter and Alexa, First, I want to officially thank you both for agreeing to collaborate with me on this part pseudo-ethnography, part installation, part publication, part performance, part archiving project. Its possibilities seem endless, and with each interview we do I become more excited (and more overwhelmed) by its potential. I continue to be astounded by the rich stories of our colleagues and the great distances their histories extend. Let’s start with the project’s origins: When and how did you get involved with this project? Over to you. xo jac

288

Alexa Mardon 2 May to Justine, Peter Hi Justine and Peter! Justine, I get excited and overwhelmed by this project every week, too. It is a living, shifting, organism because, of course, it’s made up of people and their pasts, presents, and futures. Which is so wonderful but also scary. So thank you for trusting me to work on something with you when you didn’t know quite what it was. Which brings me to my origin story, so to speak. In November 2014 I was in California …

Peter Dickinson 3 May to Alexa, Justine Hi you two! I’ve been thinking about who I am in relation to this project ever since Justine invited me to be a part of the process. That was back in November of last year, over a lovely dinner of moules et frites at Jules, in Gastown. Although, if I’m to be worth my salt as an archivist of our shared history, I should note that there was an earlier conversation, in July 2015, at Matchstick Coffee on East Georgia, just a month or so before Max’s birth. Justine and I had only just met (which seems crazy), at a showing of Rob Kitsos’s Saudade, in which Alexa was appearing (Rob, my colleague at sfu, would later become our first official interview subject – oh, the circle of life!). At Matchstick, Justine and I talked and talked and talked: about Family Dinner: The Lexicon, which had blown me away at Dancing

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

Vancouver and Vancouver dance were feeling very far away when I got a bit of cell service and checked my email. You’d written to me, saying that you had been thinking about what your friend, and now mine, Marie Claire Forté had said about wanting to “write her own dance history,” and you asked if I might be interested in working on something with you – part performance, part documentation, all research. I read the email many times and had a little cry … I was very happy you’d asked. We started the back and forth of writing a description of the project, for a grant due a few weeks later. I wrote my end of the document at a Starbucks in the San Francisco airport and was so absorbed that we almost missed our flight home. A few months later, we began a shared weekly reading hour in the splay space … and things got busy, Max [Justine’s son] became a part of the picture, and Peter got wrangled in, our project now a complete trifecta with someone whose practice is so truly documenting the shifting shape of our community, of archiving performance and investigating the performing archive … So, my question to you two is the next up on our “questions list” – the who. Who is involved in this project? And/or who are you in relation to the project and its subject matter, its reach? xoxox, looking even more forward to our meeting Friday after writing this …

289

on the Edge; about Vancouver dance aesthetics more generally; about different modes of dance presentation and curation; about dance writing; about the social choreography of the city; and on and on and on. My participation in the Vancouver dance histories project may have been vaguely broached at that time, but it wasn’t until the dinner at Jules in November that the invitation to join Justine and Alexa on this journey became explicit … Who am I in relation to this history we are seeking to document? A fan, a critic, a sometimes talkback facilitator, an occasional outside eye, a friend. In the past decade of attending, observing, and writing about Vancouver dance, I have become more and more immersed in the community. But it had never occurred to me to think that I was a part of that community. Because, of course, I’m not a dancer … All of which is to say that in coming on board this project I had initially made the mistake of thinking I could practice what my colleague in Anthropology at sfu, Dara Culhane, would call old-school ethnography. That is, I would just coolly observe from a distance, and not really participate. I was here to collect and transcribe the stories of Vancouver dance artists; at most, this would involve a bunch of interviews, perhaps some studio observation, maybe a bit of embedded critical writing. However, what [you both] have taught me is that to tell the movement histories of the artists in this city whom I so admire, I would also, eventually, have to tell my own and that – more to the point – both acts of telling could only really be set in motion by accepting the risk of moving differently than I’m used to in this world … [A]s a result of the incredible stories we have so far collected, I am more and more coming round to eschewing the question of whether I can do this, and trying to focus instead on why I would even want to do this – and what might be productively generated as a result. If my movement history has been enriched over the past decade as a result of all of the incredible dance artists in this city – the cherished Whos in my Whoville – then this is my very small gift back to them. Which sort of relates to what, collectively, we might be trying to accomplish with this project. That’s the next question on our list … 290

Justine A. Chambers 3 May to Alexa, Peter Good morning,

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

I must add a few details: I was at 8 days III,29 and Marie Claire (mc) Forté and I were sitting on the beach. We were discussing the documentation we (the entire population of 8 days) do about/for the gathering and how we would work on it. I was blabbing about how few dance publications are written by the artists themselves … how our documentation of 8 days is special and important because there is no one interpreting our thoughts. mc said (and I paraphrase) she wants to be responsible for writing her own dance history. I thought this was courageous … I still do. Alexa, you and I met at Six Acres and sat on the 2nd floor and shared a meal to discuss this behemoth project. I remember feeling somewhat intimidated because I didn’t really know what I was proposing, I just knew I wanted you to be a part of it. Peter, I remember that you were going to Nicli for pizza after we met at Matchstick. The more I read you, the more I wanted you to join this project. This is where the formal invitation came at Jules. That was one of my first outings sans Max – I must’ve been so distracted because I remember my mind kept wandering in accordance with the “let down” sensation I would have in my breasts. Through your writing it has always been clear to me how much you love dance and dancers. This moves me. The Who – not the band. Who is Making? Alexa, Peter, me and quite possibly the entire Vancouver dance community. Who Am I? All of a sudden I hear Les Misérables in my head. I was listening to Freakonomics30 last night. It was an interview with Malcom Gladwell. Mr 10,000 hours. Sometimes I think of him as the Dr Phil of productivity, and I must admit I haven’t read any of his books. Although I was ready to roll my eyes at most of what he said, he made an excellent point. He spoke about how anyone with great skill and some sort of natural talent (back to the 10,000 hours) doesn’t become that talented and skilled person in a vacuum. He rejects the idea of the lone genius. There is sacrifice, support and effort made by a large constellation of people to make that individual thrive. This is what I’m getting at with this project. Our interconnectedness is [a] critical component to our experience, success and position in a community.

291

In effect, I’m saying that my work doesn’t exist without context – which is my community – and I mean community in the largest sense, which includes family, friends, children, baristas, audiences, colleagues, institutions, funding bodies/juries, historical figures, artists from other disciplines, curators, programmers, and on and on. I hypothesize that everyone in this community probably has something to do with what each artist is doing/making/teaching/researching right now. Peter has proposed the What … [G]ood question … [W]hat exactly are we doing? More to come. xo jac

292

Alexa Mardon 3 May to Justine, Peter Hi you two, Ah, the dinner at Six Acres! How could I forget. I had a beet salad with too-sweet candied walnuts … Justine, I think you answered … who is involved in this pretty perfectly – and the image of the constellation is a beautiful one. So who am I in relation to this project? Well … I suppose this project really, really appeals to the part of me that loves to observe, to put together parts of a quietly unfolding pattern, allowing others to click into place as if almost by magic. This is my writerly sense, I suppose, and to apply this eye to a community of people I love, respect, am intimidated and inspired by, at times am frustrated with and am often surprised by was a prospect which ignited both my excitement and discomfort. As an “emerging” artist, I have connectivity to the dance community mostly through my training, my friendships and my professional relationships (the boundaries between which are becoming more joyfully blurred), and am usually only privy to the surfacely visible joinery that binds us. To be able to see further into my communities’ pasts, presents, and futures, can only deepen my understanding around what I am working on, and why. So what are we working on? We are working on collaboration, and Justine’s definition of a new thing forming, not just an amalgamation of each collaborator’s “strengths.” We are working on a sprawling, living installation, a research project with no hypothesis and no conclusion, a sociological experiment in which we are both the scientist

and the subject. Yes, it will also be a performance, but as we know, performance can’t just live in the moment of being performed. It gathers up people and paperwork and love and questions and complexities and leaves behind a trail, a trace for others to happen upon. Which leads me to ask: Where does this project unfold? xox

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

Peter Dickinson 4 May to Alexa, Justine Hello J and A, It’s dull and grey and wet outside this morning, but how nice to wake up to such warm and bright thoughts from the two of you. Starting with that Copernican image of the constellation, which I agree is the perfect metaphor for what we’re doing. Like the community we are documenting, the capaciousness of which Justine describes so well, our project is a mosaic of interacting ideas and forms and events that undergo perpetual transformation in relation to each other, and that can be subdivided into smaller points or tasks or moments in time, but that can never be viewed as separate or autonomous sites of exchange. Which sounds like a pretty good definition of dance itself. I may or may not have told you two that I’m going to be part of a roundtable on dance research in Canada at the University of Calgary at the end of this month, and that as part of my contribution to the discussion I will partly be addressing our project. Here is how I described what we are doing: “Our Present Dance Histories is a multiplatform research investigation being conducted under the auspices of Justine Chambers’ two-year artist residency at The Dance Centre. Part living archive, part dance ethnography, part an exercise in kinaesthetic mapping and performance kinship, the collaboration involves a series of video interviews with several dance artists in order to document the stories of Vancouver dance over the past decade. We are also developing a web-based forum for supplementary writing (both ethnographic and fictional) related to these interviews. And, finally, we expect to create both an installation and a performance based on all of this material.” All well and dryly academic, but that doesn’t really get at the pulsing heartbeat of this “new thing forming,” this “sociological experiment”

293

294

– which, to go back to the idea of the constellation, is for me partly about bending and extending time in relation to what we think of as the eventness of dance. We’ve inherited this notion … that dance is a timeless art form that unfolds magically (and effortlessly!) in the moment on stage. But that idea depends on the willful erasure of all the unseen time and labour that goes into producing the dance: the years of training; the hours of rehearsal; the routine of class and conversation and grant-writing and coffee-drinking and subway-riding and on and on and on. That’s partly what I’ve so revelled in in our conversations with our interview subjects: their general descriptions of what I’ll call “the dailiness of dance” – from what they’re doing in their kitchens, to what goes on backstage, to the unseen disasters (like costume malfunctions or projectile vomiting in the wings) they’re dealing with “in the moment” on stage (I am getting to the where question, I promise). And I feel like when the three of us sit down in the sixth floor air office of The Dance Centre and open our notebooks (in perfect unison, of course) and press record on our various devices, we become part of all of that – that the dance continues in our writing and talking and mapping of it; that in this way we’re stretching time, elastically, backwards and forwards. So, for me, that office that we’ve managed to colonize is a big part of the where of this project’s unfolding, if only as the most regular location of our conversations with our interview subjects and ourselves – and, I have to say, signing in weekly at reception and confidently pushing the sixth floor button in the elevator (going up in that building to the offices and studios to work rather than down to the Faris performance space to watch) has transformed how I view myself in relation not just to that building, but to the Vancouver dance community as a whole … If part of what we’re doing in documenting the stories of our peers is mapping a space of “vicarious intimacy” (a term I borrow from my super smart student, Alana Gerecke), in which we – and others who choose to listen to our retellings – are momentarily transported to edam or the Firehall or the Roundhouse or Harbour Dance or Starbucks (!) and can feel ourselves moving, or being moved by, what we hear is going on in those spaces, then I think we have to agree that where, in this case, is always going to be a confluence of the real and the imagined, the what has happened and the horizon of what is to come.

Because, as so many folks way smarter than me have noted, in performance the stage is always haunted. And if that’s the case, why would we want to raise up its ghosts?

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

Justine A. Chambers 4 May to Peter, Alexa My dear friends, As I sit in my home, with [partner] Josh and Max to my left on the couch, the sun shines bright. Max has just had a tumble (and tears) and is enjoying a bottle in Josh’s arms while holding his foot with his hands. My where and who extends to my family and home. Much of my thinking around this project happens in the middle of the night after the 3am feeding or at 6am while the house is quiet and the men in my life sleep. The where includes stroller walks to and from The Dance Centre, but also those moments that I get out to see dance, speak about dance, facilitate dance and teach dance. Like Alexa said it is sprawling and it is living. why do this project? Perhaps precisely because of what you said Peter – the invisible labour. I am unwilling to erase the work, the time, the practice and the relentless perseverance. Dance artists aren’t magical creatures that emerge fully formed. Heroic perhaps, but not void of effort. I am committed to allowing these artists to represent themselves – and to then use that as a material for the construction of an art work. I am also seduced by the playfulness that comes with working with the slippage between truths. At the beginning of my career I danced for Desrosiers Dance Theatre, and we were a wild (and fashionable) bunch. Someone once said I should write a book about our “adventures” … [P]erhaps this project is a version of that book, but almost 20 years later it feels necessary to include every wild bunch in town and bring their ghosts along for the ride. There is also something about how many of the artists we interview share ghosts. Although I haven’t been interviewed yet, I am having the pleasure of reliving many of the stories brought to the air office by the interviewees. Our memories are almost the same, and it is in this “almost” that I find the most delight. And how do we situate ourselves and this project in the future? With love, jac

295

296

Alexa Mardon 4 May to Justine, Peter Hello both of you, I recently moved my desk to another part of my apartment. From here, I can look up from my screen and see a bit of the North Shore’s deep, layered blues: mostly mountains, the Burrard Inlet underlining them. In this new working place, I can look up from my desk and see a cue to remember that I am living, working, building friendships, dancing, and asking questions in a place whose ghosts are much, much further reaching than the span of my lifetime. As a guest on the traditional, unceded territories of the Sḵwxwú7mesh, Tsleil-waututh, and Musqueam Nations, the unrest and the potentiality of where we live, a framework we’ve all talked about in relation to the where of this project, is a context we’ll always move through and with. I keep going back to that image of the children’s book (Zoom by Istvan Banyai) that Justine mentioned in one of our first meetings, where each picture zooms further out on a scene, revealing more and more of the image. The Dance Histories project feels both like all of the minute to minute details that accumulate to make a world – which the book encompasses in its entirety – and also of a close up, the specific moment we’re researching the detail of the rooster’s feather in a view of Earth from space. This feeling of being a part of something tiny but meaningful nonetheless is moving to me. The whys are continually revealing themselves to me. The focus on the “metadata,” or invisible labour of dance, is a big one for me, too. Other whys: because I want to more fully understand my environment, because I want to be surprised by what I think I know, because I want to investigate what it means to be an artist who values dance and writing as equally important in her practice, because I want to collaborate with two people who intimidate me intellectually … yes, that was a big one going in! The future of this project is really exciting to me. I’m already beginning to feel overwhelmed by the amount of information we’ve accumulated, but I know we are starting to form ways of working through it, talking about it, and translating it between the three of us … I must say, one of my “wheres” is during any performance I’m not enjoying. I do my best choreographing/set designing in those moments, and I

have spent some of them imagining this piece in all its stage-rigged, complex-patterned glory. I’m also excited to see how our personal contexts seep into this work, as we navigate changes in our family lives, work on other projects, and growing friendships with each other. Peter, your shift in relationship to The Dance Centre as a way of seeing yourself is quite striking, and this project feels like a way for me to investigate how I see myself as an artist, as well. And if Max continues to get heartbreakingly cuter at his current rate, that’s something to look forward to, too. xoxo

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

Peter Dickinson 4 May to Alexa, Justine Dear Alexa and Justine, The sun has returned (sort of), which is surely a good sign. Alexa, thank you for reminding us of Justine’s Zoom reference, which I think is another important way of encapsulating the dual synchronic and diachronic nature of this project – how these stories we’re collecting are giving us individual snapshots in time (this momentous performance, that influential period of training, this difficult bit of personal “stuff,” etc.), but that together open up onto, or get montaged into, this wider angle view (sorry if I mixing my visual metaphors). And what stories! … [S]o many of the dancers and choreographers I know in this city are such great talkers! And they have so many fascinating things to say: about dance, yes, but also about life and politics and friendship and the city and just generally, to quote [Tara Cheyenne], “how to be.” And if, as I am increasingly inclined to think, how to be in this world boils down to some version of an embodied practice of technique – in the sense of acquiring a set of skills re how to move with, respond to, and learn from others’ co-habitation of this planet – then surely dancers, who practice their technique on a daily basis, have something to teach us. (There’s a bit of the wisdom of Ben Spatz, Judith Hamera31 and our interview with Lee Su-Feh woven into that last sentence – sorry, the academic in me can’t completely forgo the bibliographic citations!).

297

That’s a big part of the why for me: avowing, after Hamera, that a key part of the infrastructure of this city – any city – is its dance history. For so many cultures – starting with the Coast Salish nations that Alexa rightly cites as forming the literal ground of this project – movement repertoires are not ancillary to the story of a place, they are foundational. Why shouldn’t we apply that same principle to how we are reading the admittedly not unproblematic idea of the “contemporary” in relation to both Vancouver and dance? As for the future of this project … [w]hatever artifacts – a performance, an installation, hours of interview footage, our notebooks and writings and scores, food scraps, maybe even some bruised bones and egos – we leave at the end of this process, I hope they will continue to seed other possible future futures: for us, for others; contestatory, reclamatory; who knows? Because when you arrive at the future, it’s not the future anymore. Just like the present very quickly becomes the past. Time bends, and time binds (see Elizabeth Freeman on the latter topic32). Among the many things this project has so far taught me is that this temporal connection is fundamentally corporeal, and that dancers know that better than anyone. Over to you, Justine, for last words, and see you both tomorrow.

298

Justine A. Chambers 4 May to Peter, Alexa Good morning, As I sit here pumping with one hand and typing with the other (a choreographic feat of its own), I am stuck on a question that Mique’l Dangeli (the other associate artist to The Dance Centre) deposited in my mind when I first met her a few years ago at a reception during a Canadian public arts funders gathering/conference in Vancouver. We had both been invited to speak to a group of federal, provincial and municipal arts officers during their conference sessions. Mique’l spoke to them about First Nations dance practice and I was invited to speak about collaborative practice – sadly, artists were not invited to these meetings. The question she brought forward was: whose dance history? A question that asks that we interrogate definitions of contemporary dance and also what is valued within the milieu. This question carves space for the individual to define their origins, their movement practice and their general context.

In the end, we were somewhat overambitious in what we thought we could accomplish in our two-year time frame, regarding both the number of interviews we anticipated completing and the outcomes those interviews would ideally produce. In terms of the former, the logistics of coordinating our own individual schedules with the availability of our desired interview subjects meant that at a certain point we had to abandon our collective interviewing method in favour of a strategy of dividing and conquering. Even then, we made it only halfway through our list of names, interviewing a total of 53 Vancouver dance artists between January 2016 and September 2017. My anxieties about performing were also for naught, as we didn’t end up making a show from our collected material, at least not in the conventional sense. Again, this partly had to do with our own schedules and other time commitments. Justine was criss-crossing the country with different choreographic commissions and additional presentations of Family Dinner, and when in the spring of 2017 she was selected along with Daina Ashbee and Vanessa Goodman as one of the inaugural participating artists in the Yulanda M. Faris Choreographers Program, her schedule only got busier. Alexa was also busy with multiple projects, including co-organizing the summer 2017 iteration of 8 days VI (which involved dealing with an unanticipated flood of their planned venue on Toronto Island) and rehearsing Vanessa’s Wells Hill (see Chapter 4), which was scheduled to have its

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

When I teach, I often ask that students play dumb … or more eloquently (and borrowed from the Buddhists) arrive with a beginner’s mind or shoshin – enthusiasm, openness and most importantly a lack of preconceptions. If I assume I don’t know, there is room for me to learn something new. It invites fluidity, curiosity, inclusivity and a sense of wonder. The future of this project – yes, it includes the immediacy of pulling all of the material through the mill to create a performance, more writing, an installation and whatever else shows up. I also hope that it allows us and all who encounter the project to feel the kaleidoscopic nature of dance communities – how all of the histories co-exist, merge, diverge, fragment and shift if we continue to shift the lens. Well, the breasts have been pumped, Max is awake and climbing up my legs so that’s my cue to wrap it up. My thanks to you both for the interview. With love, jac

299

full-length world premiere in November 2017, right in the middle of Dance In Vancouver (div). The production of my play Long Division (see Chapter 5), combined with teaching commitments, had me likewise juggling a lot of balls. That said, the three of us did compose a number of rough text- and gesture-based scores and were fully committed to pulling together something more polished and cohesive to stage for div presenters and audiences. In the end, however, we were left no room in the div schedule for such an undertaking, which meant that we had to restrict ourselves to animating the lobby spaces of The Dance Centre. Central to this animation was the installation we commissioned visual artist Natalie Purschwitz to make: a Calder-esque mobile that hung above the staircase leading down to The Dance Centre’s main Faris studio (see Figures 6.4 and 6.5). Natalie’s design of the installation was based on a complex numerical system derived from our interviews. Every interview subject was assigned one of a dozen or so specifically coded playing cards, the size and style of which corresponded both to the number of names they had mentioned in their interview in response to our “who” question, and also the number of times they were mentioned in the interviews of our other subjects. All the different folks identified by our interviewees were also assigned a card, the size and style of which likewise corresponded to the system of cross-referencing Natalie had laid out on a cascading list of Excel spreadsheets. Once all the playing cards had been hung with pink thread from the holes that I had punctured into the particle board Natalie had purchased as the anchor for the mobile, our job was then to connect via fine orange thread our main interlocutors with their various dance-world peers (and vice versa), thereby spatializing the web of relationships that constitutes this community. Needless to say, putting together the installation was finely detailed, often tedious, incredibly time-consuming, and physically taxing work, not unlike the process of learning a complex bit of choreography. And while the limits of our budget and Natalie’s time and labour meant that shortcuts inevitably had to be taken (including jettisoning completely the ping pong balls that Natalie had conceived as representing our interviewees’ shared dance sites), the resulting “dance of attention” elicited by the installation from the different people who walked through The Dance Centre’s doors 300

Figure 6.4 Opposite Our Present Dance Histories lobby installation, The Dance Centre, November 2017–April 2018. Conceived and designed by Natalie Purschwitz.

Figure 6.5 Close-up view of Our Present Dance Histories lobby installation, The Dance Centre, November 2017–April 2018. Conceived and designed by Natalie Purschwitz.

302

between November 2017 and April 2018 aligned with how we were conceiving of the fluidly mobile and relationally distributed “eventness” of our project more generally. Referencing mobile architectures, her own textile installations, and as we have seen from the previous chapter, the choreography of William Forsythe, Erin Manning has written extensively – and often in dialogue with Brian Massumi – about the “dance of attention” that she sees as constitutive of the ways in which bodies and environments co-compose, through “the immediacy of their mutual action,” a perceptual experience of emergent encounter: “A dance of attention is the holding pattern of an immersive, almost unidentifiable set of forces that modulate the event in the immediateness of its coming to expression. Attention not to, but with and toward, in and around. Undecomposably.”33 So it is with the choreography of Natalie’s installation. In leaning over the railing of the main floor lobby to get a better view, or in pausing on the stairs down to the Faris to read the names on successive cards, or in looking up from below to get a better sense of the installation’s volume, we are making a dance, becoming entangled in the intersecting pathways of a community’s embodied history simply by trying to follow the pathway of a single line of thread. Or, as Justine and Alexa and I wrote in our description of the project for The Dance Centre’s website,

Our Present Dance Histories, or, Dance Histories Project, or, Vancouver Dance: an incomplete history of the present – Part 1, is, as of November 2017, a fragmented and decentralized work, housed in The Dance Centre, and in the bodies of the community that moves through, with, around, and against this space. It is a choreography of words and thoughts, a sprawling, living installation, a research project with no governing hypothesis and no anticipated conclusion. Drawing from interviews with a range of Vancouver dance artists, the project consciously investigates the slippage between fact and fiction, the ways in which much of this history is shared, but also remembered differently – in ways that are distinctly emplaced and individually embodied. Recognizing this, we invite you to meet the work, and its various distributed component parts, on your own terms and in your own time, moving through the project and having it move through you.34

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

In addition to accompanying lobby sound and video installations that excerpted, manipulated, reframed, and looped the voices and gestures of our interview subjects, there were two other ways we sought to disperse the performance of Vancouver dance history documented in our project. First, we distributed a series of “turn-down trivia” questions to each of the visiting div presenters. Enlisting the help of the staff of the hotel at which said presenters were staying, these printed-out questions, culled from our interview notes and video data, were placed in envelopes to be left in the rooms of out-of-town guests over the course of the biennial’s five days of events. No answers were provided to the questions, requiring presenters interested in the correct response to consult with one another, or else seek out a local source of knowledge. We also produced some dedicated Our Present Dance Histories “merch” in the form of T-shirts, one for each of our fifty-three interview subjects. Like the jerseys worn by sports teams, the iron-on decals on the backs of the T-shirts combined the name of an interviewed dance artist with a number corresponding to the order in which we interviewed them and the 19-letter acronym for the full title of our project. Decaled on the front was a phrase from each of our interviewees – some funny and throwaway, others pointed or deeply moving – that we sought permission to reproduce (see Figures 6.6, 6.7, and 6.8). We then sent out a Facebook call to various members of the Vancouver dance community, including students at Modus Operandi, to volunteer to wear a T-shirt (not their own) for the duration of div 2017. The proviso for getting a T-shirt was that you also had to learn and agree to repeat, preferably at dedicated div events

303

scheduled for The Dance Centre and elsewhere, a series of gestures culled from the larger repertoire we had again put together from a review of our video interviews. In this way, the bodies of the very community we were documenting became its archival fonds, helping to hold but also to disperse its unique choreography and answering, in an act of co-authorship or cocomposition, the question Justine posed at the start of our project: How might Vancouver dance artists write their own history? Justine A. Chambers: I feel like I have a huge support network here. I feel deeply supported as an artist, and as a person. I have what feel like beautiful friendships. And, to be honest, I wouldn’t have become the choreographer that I am if I hadn’t come here. Or I wouldn’t be making the work that I’m making if we hadn’t come here. I stay because now it’s my home. Like, it’s that simple, and I’ve never actually said that out loud. But, there you go, I said it. It is my home. And I feel super-fucking excited about dance in Vancouver because I think the emerging artists are bad asses. Like, I think they are so good. And I feel really excited by however I can support them with whatever I have.35 Alexa Mardon: It’s the people. It’s the way that people are working, the way that people are trying to work, the way that people are failing to work, and then addressing that failure, and then trying to do something else.36

304

Wishing to extend the multivocality, co-authorship, and distributed relational choreography of the Vancouver dance history represented in the present chapter, and this book as a whole, let me conclude with a list of our interview subjects, the phrases included on their respective T-shirts, and instructions to perform their corresponding gestures. Especially through the sharing of the gestures I am seeking to honour – with the permission of those who first inaugurated them – the embodied techniques of knowing that lie at the heart of any history of dance, as well as a core component of Justine’s choreographic practice. Here we might think of the important precedent offered by Peggy Baker’s Choreographer’s Trust project, in which over a ten-year period she gifted six of her solo dances to twelve other dancers, inviting them “to explore, inhabit, and embody” an influential piece of late twentieth-century Canadian dance history.37 Likewise in terms of her contributions to Vancouver and British Columbia dance history,

Figure 6.6 Top The front of Justine A. Chambers’s OPDHODHPOVDAIHOTP T-shirt. Figure 6.7 Bottom The front and back of Deanna Peters’s and Jane Osborne’s OPDHODHPOVDAIHOTP T-shirts.

Figure 6.8 The OPDHODHPOVDAIHOTP T-shirts laid out at The Dance Centre, ready for distribution to Modus Operandi students.

306

Karen Jamieson has initiated as part of her Legacy Project (an archival, oral history, mentorship, scholarly, and digitization effort aimed at preserving and passing on her repertoire) a series of “Body to Body” investigative processes, in which she works with younger Vancouver dance artists (including Josh Martin, Lisa Gelley, Amber Funk Barton, Meredith Kalaman, Darcy McMurray, James Gnam, Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, and Justine) to re-create and kinetically transcribe some of her “most significant choreographic contributions to the art form.”38 Gesturing back to my earlier citation of Carrie Noland, I am additionally hoping to foreground through the following list those (often unconscious) uses of the body that nevertheless become crucial sources of kinaesthetic feedback, pointing to a subject’s bodily knowing over time, but also to how that knowing might be passed on to other bodies.39 Erin Manning reads such negligible, throwaway, barely perceptible, or what she calls “minor gestures,” as opening up pre-existing systems

1. Rob Kitsos, Independent Dancer-Choreographer and Professor of Dance, School for the Contemporary Arts, sfu Interviewed by Justine, Alexa and Peter at The Dance Centre, 27 January 2016. T-shirt phrase: And I’m like, dude, give me two thousand dollars and I’ll make a fucking dance. Gesture: Elbows on table, right hand holding left bicep, left forearm raised, fingers splayed. Tilt the left wrist once to the left, once to the right,

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

and structures to flux, indeterminacy, and dissonance. Because such gestures aren’t predictable and in most instances cannot be reproduced in exactly the same way, according to Manning they at once are singular to the event at hand and, in their unrecognizable resurfacing through the “spaceof-variation,” can travel across time, edging felt experience into “new modes of existence.”40 This temporal paradox, in which a gesture opens up an interval of critical difference but also presupposes that a version of said gesture might be repeated or answered across another interval, is taken up by Rebecca Schneider in a discussion of the gesture of the hail, or waved hello: “The time opened up by the hail is unfinished and inaugurates or re-inaugurates relation … [It] repeats an infinite number of precedent hellos or anticipates any number of future hellos both forward and backwards.”41 Like a holographic series of waved hellos, the ensuing gestures are likewise meant as a hailing of embodied history that stretches backwards and forwards. In my necessarily inadequate and representationally impoverished attempts to put into language the stories being told by and through the bodies behind these gestures – a memory dismissed or summoned with a graceful wave of a hand or a steady drumming of fingers, even wholly invented movement where video documentation is lacking – I nevertheless feel like I’ve gotten a feel for this history, for how to move with and let myself be moved by its temporal flows and spatial eddies. As I sit before my computer, scrolling through the embodied inventory reproduced below, checking and refining my prose against the corresponding video documentation, I can’t help but rehearse – if only in an attempt to get right – what it is that I am seeing. Meeting the gestures halfway, as it were, I thus extend the time of their performance. To quote again from Schneider: “A response, taking place after a performance event, is already implicated in the call and is already part of the event of articulation that produces, it is possible to argue, a document. The document circulates performatively, itself a response inaugurating other responses, itself a call inaugurating other calls.”42

307

and then flutter the fingers on the left hand quickly, ending with a pointed index finger jabbing the air in front. 2. Vanessa Goodman, Artistic Director and Choreographer, Action at a Distance; Co-Founder, The Contingency Plan Interviewed by Justine, Alexa and Peter at The Dance Centre, 11 February 2016. T-shirt phrase: Not exponential growth, just steady learning. Gesture: [From a still image] Right elbow on table. Right fist to right cheek. Improvise. 3. Alison Denham, Independent Dance Artist Interviewed by Justine and Peter in Peter’s office, sfu Woodward’s, 25 February 2016. T-shirt phrase: It’s hard to talk about your own dance history without being nasty. Gesture: Sitting in an office chair, right leg bent onto seat and leaning against right armrest. Right elbow resting on right quad. Left arm, bent at the elbow, is raised in the air. Two quick forward grabbing motions with both hands. Right wrist stays bent as left pinky goes to left ear. Palms of both hands then open out from the body, then pivot back in, with right hand closing into a fist as left arm extends to grab edge of adjacent table. 4. Delia Brett, Co-Artistic Director, machinenoisy Dance Society Interviewed by Justine, Alexa and Peter at The Dance Centre, 17 March 2016. T-shirt phrase: I wish for independence from the gatekeepers of the dance world. Gesture: Seated forward in chair, arms extended in front of chest, elbows slightly bent. Right wrist bent forward, left wrist straight, with thumb at right angle. Extend right arm at a vertical diagonal into space, splaying fingers and thumb while simultaneously retracting left arm into chest. Bring right arm in to join left, rotating both hands like you are trying to grasp onto something floating before you in the air. 308

5. James Gnam, Artistic Director and Choreographer, plastic orchid factory Interviewed by Justine, Alexa and Peter at The Dance Centre, 24 March 2016.

T-shirt phrase: Moving the exchange past transaction … Gesture: Holding a coffee cup with your right hand. Left forearm at a 45-degree angle from upper body, palm facing up. Rotate forearm and hand clockwise, or inward, three times. Beat. Repeat three times. 6. Lee Su-Feh, Co-Founder and Artistic Director, battery opera Interviewed by Justine, Alexa and Peter at The Dance Centre, 7 April 2016. T-shirt phrase: I don’t actually care about the future of dance; I care about the future of bodies. Gesture: Head tilted slightly to the right, eyes looking up, index and middle fingers of left hand resting lightly on chin. Float the fingers off the chin, press together with thumb and rotate wrist and forearm of left hand four times clockwise as you look first to the right, then to the left, then back to the right, finishing with left index and middle fingers resting below your left ear and left ring finger just below your chin.

8. Deanna Peters, Independent Dance Artist (Mutable Subject) and Producer, Interplay Interviewed by Alexa and Peter at The Dance Centre, 22 April 2016. T-shirt phrase: Oh, I got through that, I didn’t die. Gesture: Arms bent in front of you to form a triangle, fingertips touching. Slice the right hand over the left forearm and then return fingertips to starting position. Release fingertips again by twisting each wrist inward. Turn the wrists out, then back in, then up and down, finishing by floating your arms above you head and then down into your lap.

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

7. Daelik, Co-Artistic Director, machinenoisy Dance Society Interviewed by Justine, Alexa and Peter at The Dance Centre, 11 April 2016. T-shirt phrase: Okay, basically, we made a show with no money. Gesture: Arms extended at right angles from chest, hands parallel, palms facing each other. Bring hands to forehead, slowly peeling fingers down the sides of your face, and then waving arms in the air above your head, beginning with the right. End by dropping hands into your lap.

309

9. Ziyian Kwan, Artistic Director and Choreographer, Dumb Instrument Dance Interviewed by Peter in Peter’s office, sfu Woodward’s, 6 June 2016.

T-shirt phrase: I still have a sliver in my knee from that studio even though it burnt down. Gesture: From folded position in lap, bring both hands to the top of your stomach, left hand over right. Slide hands down the stomach and then float them to the sides just before they reach your lap again. 10. Jennifer Mascall, Artistic Director and Choreographer, MascallDance; Founding Member, edam Interviewed by Alexa on Toronto Island, 23 June 2016. T-shirt phrase: It’s always good to take breaks in dance. Gesture: Left arm folded at the elbow, thumb extended like a hitchhiker. Slowly lift right arm, slicing air horizontally with right hand nine times, arcing fingers incrementally into the distance with each slice. 11. Judith Marcuse, Founder and Artistic Producer, Judith Marcuse Projects; Founder and Co-Director, International Centre of Art for Social Change, sfu Interviewed by Peter at The Dance Centre, 4 August 2016. T-shirt phrase: I always felt this was a place where you could try things. There’s air here. Gesture: With body leaning to the right, sweep left arm across torso, then both arms over your head, then left arm once more across torso, finishing with right thumb and clenched fingers gripping your chin. 12. Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, Artistic Director and Choreographer, Tara Cheyenne Performance Interviewed by Peter in Peter’s office, sfu Woodward’s, 4 August 2016. T-shirt phrase: I’m just gonna do the shit I want to do. Gesture: Left forearm and right elbow resting on arms of a chair. Fingers of left hand pressed lightly together, three fingers on right hand raised in the air. Fingers on both hands retract inward and then pulse out, fingers splaying wide. Repeat twice with right hand only, then flop both hands at the wrist while tilting head to the right. Finish by rotating both hands out and then back down. 310

13. Arash Khakpour, Independent Dance Artist; Co-Founder, The Biting School Dance-Theatre Company; Co-Founder, Pressed Paradise Performance Collective

Interviewed by Justine at her apartment, 28 August 2016. T-shirt phrase: The audience can see you; there’s no hiding. Gesture: Form a fist with right hand. Punch the air in front of you four times in succession. 14. Aryo Khakpour, Independent Dance and Theatre Artist; Co-Founder, The Biting School Dance-Theatre Company Interviewed by Justine at her apartment, 28 August 2016. T-shirt phrase: I would be more comfortable doing porn. Gesture: Place both hands on the table, palms facing each other, thumbs pointing up. Lift hands up and place back down in same position, sliding both hands to the right, and then just the left to the left, ending with that palm facing upward.

16. Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, Artistic Producer, plastic orchid factory Interviewed by Peter in Peter’s office, sfu Woodward’s, 29 August 2016. T-shirt phrase: It feels like we’re kind of creating the now right now. Gesture: Cross both arms in front of chest and then sweep them to the sides like you’re opening curtains, twirling the wrist on the right hand inward at the end. Then raise both hands above your head, pulsing the arms quickly, beginning with the left. 17. Alana Gerecke, Independent Dance Artist and Scholar Interviewed by Peter in the offices of the Institute for Performance Studies, sfu Harbour Centre, 1 September 2016. T-shirt phrase: It made me uncomfortable in a lot of ways that were fun to explore. Gesture: Form a square viewfinder in front of your chest with your thumbs and index fingers. Shift the thumbs apart, and then bring them

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

15. David McIntosh, Co-Founder and Artistic Producer, battery opera Interviewed by Peter at David’s apartment, 29 August 2016. T-shirt phrase: I really wanted to be a garbage man, because you could hang off the back of the truck. Gesture: Right arm folded across chest, left hand covering your eyes. Rub left hand down the face slightly, then up, then down again, pinching the nose. Move the hand up and down the face one last time, ending with fingers covering your mouth.

311

back together, but with the thumb of the right hand slightly above the left. Then rotate the right hand twice in the air before settling both hands back in your lap. 18. Molly McDermott, Independent Dance Artist Interviewed by Alexa at her apartment, 19 September 2016. T-shirt phrase: It’s really hard to see with a record over your face. Gesture: Place both elbows on a table. Cross the right forearm onto the table, gripping left bicep with right hand. Left hand is gripping chin, with head tilted up. Slice the air with left hand in a circular motion, returning it – with index finger pointed – to left side of face. 19. Elissa Hanson, Independent Dance Artist Interviewed by Alexa at her apartment, 20 September 2016. T-shirt phrase: I want to see more of whatever people don’t want to show. Gesture: Elbows bent at 45-degree angle, palms of hands facing upwards. Rotate the hands up and out, so that they are shoulder height, with palms now facing out. Push hands to the sides, then down, gripping fingers into fists, pulling them briefly along an invisible rope before dropping them into your lap. 20. Sophia Wolfe, Independent Dance Artist and Artistic Director of f-o-r-m (Festival of Recorded Movement) Interviewed by Alexa at her apartment, 21 September 2016. T-shirt phrase: She taxied from Y-Yoga to be a cloud in this piece. Gesture: Elbows bent at 90-degree angle, hands forming claws, palms facing outwards. Clench both hands into fists, lifting them above your head, pulsing them in the air once before quickly unclenching and reclenching fists.

312

21. Barbara Bourget, Artistic Director, Kokoro Dance; Co-Producer, Vancouver International Dance Festival; Co-Founder, edam Interviewed by Peter in Peter’s office, sfu Woodward’s, 27 September 2016. T-shirt phrase: It’s how I live in the world. I think all artists share that. Gesture: Move right hand to right side of face, then to forehead, brushing once through hair, before tilting head back and pulsing fingers on right hand in air four times.

22. Jay Hirabayashi, Executive Director, Kokoro Dance and Vancouver International Dance Festival; Co-Founder, edam Interviewed by Peter at Kokoro Dance/vidf offices, 28 September 2016. T-shirt phrase: There are always things yet to be done that need to be done. Gesture: Lift arms and circle hands in air five times, the right hand clockwise, the left counter-clockwise. 23. Bevin Poole, Independent Dance Artist Interviewed by Peter in Peter’s office, sfu Woodward’s, 11 October 2016. T-shirt phrase: When you work with a little bit of heart and a lot more vulnerability, a lot can change. Gesture: Form right hand from a fist into an ok sign, punctuate the air once with it, and then interlace the fingers of both hands.

25. Justine A. Chambers, Independent Dancer-Choreographer Interviewed by Alexa and Peter at The Dance Centre, 14 October 2016. T-shirt phrase: I can only do hip hop in high heels. Gesture: Left arm bent at elbow, forearm and palm facing inward. Bang base of left hand against palm of right hand nine times, throwing both hands in the air and then moving them up and down in counterpoint, as if pulling on a vertical cord. 26. Diego Romero, Independent Dance Artist; Co-Founder, Boom Box; Co-Founder, Pressed Paradise Performance Collective Interviewed by Alexa at her apartment, 15 October 2016. T-shirt phrase: I really like making work here, but I’m not that interested in performing here.

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

24. Amber Funk Barton, Artistic Director and Choreographer, the response. Interviewed by Justine, Alexa and Peter at The Dance Centre, 12 October 2016. T-shirt phrase: You have to keep going, because [if you don’t] then the system wins. Gesture: Hands in air, palms facing each other. Rotate left hand slightly to the right and left hand slightly to the right, so that palms now face up and down respectively at a slight angle. Rotate the hands back to original position and then push both forwards in the air twice.

313

Gesture: With both elbows on table and head buried in arms, slowly straighten to an upright position. 27. Paras Terezakis, Artistic Director and Choreographer, Kinesis Dance Somatheatro Interviewed by Justine and Alexa at The Dance Centre, 18 November 2016. T-shirt phrase: To be honest, I’m old enough, I don’t care. Gesture: Hands clasped in front of chest. Move hands apart, index fingers pointing upwards. Rotate wrists so that palms face upwards, and then bring hands back together. 28. Chick Snipper, Independent Dance Artist; Former Artistic Director, Danstabat Interviewed by Alexa at The Dance Centre, 18 November 2016. T-shirt phrase: Ambition can get in the way of the values of the work. Gesture: [No video] Sitting on the edge of a chair, place both hands underneath your thighs. 29. Karissa Barry, Independent Dance Artist Interviewed by Alexa at her apartment, 19 November 2016. T-shirt phrase: There’s no funding for people to fail. Gesture: Point the index fingers of both hands vertically in the air, with the left slightly higher than the right. Circle the left index finger clockwise and the right counter-clockwise three times, finishing by lifting both hands to the ceiling. 30. Caroline Liffmann, Independent Dance Artist Interviewed by Peter in Peter’s office, sfu Woodward’s, 13 February 2017. T-shirt phrase: It’s really good. I mean insofar as it’s bad. Gesture: Begin with both hands placed parallel to each other, palms facing inward, and thumbs almost touching. Reach the left hand up and then back down, as if placing a salt shaker on the table, and then do the same with the right hand. 314

31. Lesley Telford, Artistic Director and Choreographer, Inverso Dance Interviewed by Peter in Peter’s office, sfu Woodward’s, 14 March 2017. T-shirt phrase: I army-crawled it off the stage in this really elegant dress.

Gesture: Use both hands to tuck your hair behind your ears. Repeat, this time pressing both palms against the sides of your head and then slowly gathering your hair into an imaginary ponytail at the back. 32. Natalie Tin Yin Gan, Co-Founder, Hong Kong Exile Interviewed by Peter in Peter’s office, sfu Woodward’s, 21 March 2017. T-shirt phrase: There’s a lot of our generation of artists who I honestly steal and borrow a lot of energy and spirit and bad-assery from. Gesture: With palm facing inward and thumb pointing up, slide your right hand away from your body, making a slight curve with it in the air before dropping it back down into your lap.

34. Ralph Escamillan, Independent Dance Artist Interviewed by Alexa at her apartment, 28 March 2017. T-shirt phrase: I had to hump a newspaper. Gesture: Begin with heel and fingertips of left hand on table, fingers of right hand holding up head. Bring the right hand down and around and the left up so that they end up framing your face, with the fingers curved slightly, as if you’re clutching a soccer ball. Finish by clasping both hands together. 35. Emmalena Fredriksson, Independent Dance Artist Interviewed by Peter in Peter’s office, sfu Woodward’s, 19 March 2017. T-shirt phrase: A lot of my creative thinking happens in these places of rest. Gesture: With the fingertips of your right hand placed just above your stomach, hover the fingers up and down very slightly, as if you’re scratching at some invisible itch.

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

33. Noam Gagnon, Artistic Director and Choreographer, Vision Impure; Co-Founder, Holy Body Tattoo Interviewed by Justine, Alexa and Peter at The Dance Centre, 23 March 2017. T-shirt phrase: I had to learn to learn. Gesture: Starting with your right hand, repeating with the left, and finishing once more with the right, mime putting the fingers of each hand in your mouth, as if you are gagging on a piece of food you are trying to remove.

315

36. Karen Jamieson, Artistic Director and Choreographer, Karen Jamieson Dance Interviewed by Justine and Alexa at The Dance Centre, 20 April 2017. T-shirt phrase: If I really do feel inadequate and little in relation to the piece, then it’s a good sign. Gesture: Elbows on table, hands placed parallel to each other, palms facing inward. Bring hands together as if cupping the top of a baby’s head, then rotate each away, ending with palms facing up and rubbing the thumbs and fingertips of each together. 37. Josh Martin, Co-Artistic Director, Company 605 Interviewed by Justine at her apartment, 4 May 2017. T-shirt phrase: I hope we’re not slipping into a period where we can only define the work we don’t want to make, as opposed to the work that we do. Gesture: Elbows on table, hands floating in front of mouth. Bring the index and middle fingers of both hands to your closed eyes, rubbing the left eyelid once before removing your fingers and opening that eye, and continuing to rub the right eyelid with the right index finger. 38. Kelly McInnes, Independent Dance Artist; Co-Founder, Pressed Paradise Performance Collective Interviewed by Alexa at her apartment, 8 May 2017. T-shirt phrase: And then I looked and of course all the dancers were like in the ditch, totally covered in mud. Gesture: [No video] Pretend you are sitting at a sewing table. Grab an invisible piece of cloth and run it underneath the pulsing needle. 39. Jane Osborne, Independent Dance Artist; Co-Founder, The Contingency Plan Interviewed by Alexa at her apartment, 10 May 2017. T-shirt phrase: There’s this generosity around “let’s be curious together.” Gesture: Elbows bent, forearms extended to the side at a 45-degree angle, head tilted to the right. Raise the right hand slightly in the air and then cross it over your chest to meet the left, pushing the air with both hands. 316

40. Olivia C. Davies, Artistic Director and Choreographer, O.Dela Arts Interviewed by Alexa at The Dance Centre, 13 May 2017. T-shirt phrase: It was perfect. It was so guerilla. So up my alley.

Gesture: Begin with both hands in the air, both thumbs and index fingers cocked like pistols, the other fingers curled in. Reach fingers of both hands down as if aligning them in qwerty formation on typewriter keys. Zig zag the index and ring fingers of both hands in the air, rotating both hands upward and out. 41. Judith Garay, Artistic Director and Choreographer, Dancers Dancing; Professor of Dance, School for the Contemporary Arts, sfu Interviewed by Peter in Judith’s office at sfu Woodward’s, 19 May 2017. T-shirt phrase: I was a principal in a major company and I was living below the poverty line. Gesture: Forearms resting on chair arms, wrists bent. Lift the right arm in the air and point the index finger. Let drop back down.

43. David Raymond, Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director, Out Innerspace Interviewed by Justine at David’s apartment, 10 June 2017. T-shirt phrase: It’s the thing you want and also the thing you’re terrified of. Gesture: Both hands resting against the sides of your face. Move the fingers of both hands down to the chin, and then up over your mouth, bending the fingers at the knuckles so that they form a kind of grill. 44. Margaret Grenier, Executive and Artistic Director, Dancers of Damelahamid; Director and Producer, Coastal First Nations Dance Festival Interviewed by Justine at The Dance Centre, 19 June 2017. T-shirt phrase: Go where you are loved. Gesture: Hands clasped in front of you. Open hands, palms facing up. Bring hands back together so that fingertips touch. 45. Laura Avery, Independent Dance Artist Interviewed by Alexa in crab Park, 22 June 2017. T-shirt phrase: I know that we’re all looking for alternative ways of doing and making, but it has yet to materialize itself for me.

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

42. Alvin Tolentino, Artistic Director and Choreographer, Co.erasga Interviewed by Justine at The Dance Centre, 9 June 2017. T-shirt phrase: It’s process … that’s where we mark the experience. Gesture: Both hands in lap. Lift the left arm, form a fist and pound the surface in front of you five times, moving right to left.

317

Gesture: Palms pressed together. Rub left palm down length of right as you move your hands to the right. Rub left palm up right and right palm down left as you move your hands to the left. Repeat sequence, moving hands once more to the right and then the left. 46. Anne Cooper, Independent Dance Artist; Company Member, edam Interviewed by Alexa at her apartment, 18 June 2017. T-shirt phrase: Part of continuing is also considering letting go of certain things, and in that letting go you come again upon appreciating things that you might’ve forgotten about. Gesture: Lift right arm, moving it at a right angle out from your upper body, circling the hand and wrist inward once, and finishing by placing hand on right thigh. 47. Lara Barclay, Independent Dance Artist Interviewed by Peter in Peter’s office, sfu Woodward’s, 13 July 2017. T-shirt phrase: My height was always an issue. And if my height ever came up, I was on to the next thing. Gesture: With thumb and index finger of left hand touching the index finger of your right hand, draw the left fingers away horizontally as if pulling an invisible string. Release the string and then bring both palms toward each other and then away, like you are measuring a box around which the string may have been tied. 48. Kim Stevenson, Independent Dance Artist; Owner, The Happening Dance Studio Interviewed by Peter in Peter’s office, sfu Woodward’s, 19 July 2017. T-shirt phrase: What I love about dance, and also what I hate about dance, is that you’re never finished. Gesture: Elbows bent at 45-degree angles, hands gripped like claws just away from your shoulders. Circle the hands up and out twice, closing them into fists to finish.

318

49. Lexi Vajda, Independent Dance Artist Interviewed by Alexa in crab Park, 26 July 2017. T-shirt phrase: It was perfect because the whole show was chaos and then it just manifested itself in the geography of the earth. Gesture: Fingers of left hand resting horizontally on chin. Move the index finger between your lips, lifting the upper lip slightly to show your teeth.

50. Wen Wei Wang, Artistic Director and Choreographer, Wen Wei Dance Interviewed by Peter at Wen Wei’s house, 9 August 2017. T-shirt phrase: I just keep doing what I’ve been doing. I keep pushing myself. Gesture: Left hand perched on left side of face, covering your ear. Lift the hand off the face, holding it in the air, palm facing up. 51. Peter Bingham, Co-Founder, Artistic Director and Choreographer, edam Interviewed by Alexa on Peter’s deck, 10 September 2017. T-shirt phrase: That’s the whole collaborator in me: I don’t care what style you are, what are we doing? Gesture: Begin with fingers interlaced in air just above your chest. Pull the fingers apart as if indicating the size of a caught fish. Bring tips of the fingers back together, fluttering the middle and ring fingers on both hands slightly before drawing the hands apart again.

53. Olivia Shaffer, Independent Dance Artist; Company Member, edam Interviewed by Alexa at her apartment, 15 September 2017. T-shirt phrase: I can feel that there are people who actually genuinely care, and that’s pretty amazing. Gesture: [No video] Stand with your face pressed against a wall. Wait for a tap on the shoulder and then explode backwards into space. Although I have borrowed Olivia’s gesture from a Peter Bingham dance I first saw at edam in 2017 (Convergence), and then again in slightly revised form and with a new name (Pillars) in 2018, I feel that it captures the kinaesthetic impulse that necessarily accompanies the writing of any dance history, a ghostly shoulder nudge or the sound of an approaching footfall sending us hurtling backwards, like Walter Benjamin’s recording angel, into the

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

52. Alexa Mardon, Independent Dance Artist and Writer Interviewed by Justine and Peter at The Dance Centre, 12 September 2017. T-shirt phrase: I want to be involved in the problems of being here. Gesture: Pinky side of right hand resting against the centre of your chest. Rotate your right wrist a quarter turn and graze your fingers across your right collarbone. Lift the hand away, so that the palm faces upward, rotating the wrist three times counter-clockwise.

319

320

future.43 And while Justine and Alexa and I did, as part of our interviews, ask our subjects to relate to us any memorable dance catastrophes they had experienced or witnessed (wardrobe malfunctions, onstage injuries, technical glitches), it would definitely be a mistake to say that the farther I move away from what I have been contemplating in this book the more debris I see.44 At the same time, neither do I wish to give the impression that the period of Vancouver dance I have been documenting is some halcyon era with which everyone in the community is universally in accord.45 Instead, it would be more appropriate to say that my chapters, as well as the movement intervals that come between them, enact a version of Benjamin’s “dialectics at a standstill,” in which specific moments, and the artists at the centre of them, are arrested in time, “blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework” in order to examine its unique engagements with both the present and the past.46 “As a result of this method,” according to Benjamin, “the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled.”47 I think about this in relation to the ancillary performance-based archival endeavours that Justine and Alexa have been involved in since the conclusion of our OPDH collaboration. This includes, in Justine’s case, her participation in two dance reconstruction projects that accompanied gallery shows highlighting aspects of Vancouver’s lost, forgotten, or simply undervalued movement histories. The first, at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2018 (and also involving contributions from Alexa and several of the other dancers mentioned in this book, as well as media artist Evann Siebens and myself) sought to recover and pay homage to the pioneering live art practice of Helen Goodwin, the dancer and choreographer who was a founding member of Vancouver’s Intermedia Society, and whose TheCo Dance Company was the primary animating force of Intermedia’s three-year residency at the Vancouver Art Gallery between 1968 and 1971. The second reconstruction project, at the Contemporary Art Gallery in the spring of 2019, saw Justine and Bynh Ho perform two scores from the 1950s choreographed by legendary Vancouver entertainer Leonard Gibson in a looped single-channel video projection that formed part of Deanna Bowen’s solo exhibition A Harlem Nocturne, a two-pronged meditation on Black artistic lineage in Canada that also revealed to me an important history of black dance in Vancouver, from Katherine Dunham’s visit to the city in 1947 to police raids on Black Vancouver nightclubs through the 1960s and 1970s.48 A month before the opening of Bowen’s show, Alexa launched the publication of a

Gesturing toward Incompleteness with Chambers and Mardon

volume of writings that derived from her role as documentary scribe to the conversations that occurred as part of The Talking Thinking Dancing Body series at The Dance Centre between December 2016 and May 2018. At the end of the book Alexa supplies a gloss on her documentary methods that speaks aptly to my desire to incorporate our OPDH interviewees’ gestures into this book: “As the writer or scribe or documenter of ttdb, I realize that this collection of writing is one tiny facet of the many multiple ways that the Talking Thinking Dancing Body has been documented. The most important document is those of us who have been a part of it, in small and big ways. We are the archive of the last six years of these conversations, and we spill the traces over, into every next moment.”49 In my attempts to redact in writing the gestures isolated from our OPDH video interviews, I have mostly been made aware, to return to the opening of this chapter and Alexa’s review of Family Dinner, of how my own body functions as an “imperfect recording device.” But for everything that has been cancelled out in my attempts to preserve this materialist history, I must remind myself that this present moment in Vancouver dance upon which I place such weight and value can only ever exist as “an enormous abridgment,” and that as Benjamin once again states, this in turn “coincides exactly with the stature which the history of [humankind] has in the universe.”50 And so to address, at its conclusion, one of the many things that has been abridged from the history being told in this book, it bears mentioning that at a certain point in our preparations for the rollout of the dispersed pieces of Our Present Dance Histories at div 2017, Justine emailed me to request a quote to print on my own T-shirt, as well as a gesture from any of our recorded interviews that might be incorporated into the lobby video she was creating. I replied that it didn’t feel right for me to be included in this part of our work, as I hadn’t been formally interviewed about my own dance history – and about which I would have additionally said at the time I had none. I don’t feel that way anymore, and this book serves as a necessarily partial and incomplete, but no less personal, record of that history. Feel free to extract any quotes you wish. As for possible gestures, it is my hope that readers might consider repeating some or all of the ones listed above, and in so doing help to dance the history of this community into the future.

321

Notes

i n t ro du c t i o n 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

8 9

10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

See Windreich, “June Roper,” and also his June Roper. Todd, “No Mean Heritage,” 3. Marcuse, “Dance in British Columbia,” 12. See Pepper, The Dance Teacher. Forzley and Strate, “Ballet British Columbia.” See Wyman, Dance Canada, 128, for a brief discussion of a selection of these companies. For critical responses to the creative vitality of Vancouver dance during this period, see Wyman’s Max Wyman Revealing Dance. Alana Gerecke has in fact written an institutional history of the Dance Program at sfu’s School for the Contemporary Arts; see her “Dance as ‘Lead Card.’” See Pepper, Theatrical Dance in Vancouver. “Survivance” is Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor’s term for “an active sense of [Indigenous] presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry”; see his Manifest Manners, vii. Glass, “The Thin Edge of the Wedge,” 56, 53. See, in this respect, Raibmon, Authentic Indians, esp. 50–74; Shea Murphy, The People Have Never Stopped Dancing, esp. 29–107; and Dangeli, “Dancing Sovereignty,” 9–12. Dangeli, “Dancing Chiax,” 77. Dangeli borrows the idea of “transmotion,” referring to how Indigenous sovereignty is enacted across time and space through oral stories and other performances of identity, from Vizenor; see his Fugitive Poses. Martin, “Of Dance,” 76. Ibid., 76. Martin, “A Precarious Dance,” 69. Ibid., 69. Hamera, Dancing Communities, 72–3. Ibid., xi. Ibid., 17–19. Kwan, Kinesthetic City, 6. Ibid., 1–2. Wilcox, “When Place Matters.”

Notes to pages 8–15 324

23 Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 93. 24 Conquergood, “Of Caravans and Carnivals,” 138. 25 See Conquergood, “Beyond the Text,” 31; and King, “Close/Clown Encounters.” 26 Madison, Critical Ethnography, 71. 27 See Foster, Choreographing Empathy; Reynolds and Reason, eds., Kinesthetic Empathy; McConachie, Engaging Audiences; and Welton, Feeling Theatre. 28 See Welton, Feeling Theatre, 3, 155. 29 Sklar, “Unearthing Kinesthesia,” 42, 43. 30 See, representatively, Dickinson, World Stages, Local Audiences. 31 Lindgren, “‘The Other “D”’ Keynote Address,” 88. 32 On critical ethnography as “the ‘doing’ or the ‘performance’ of critical theory,” see Madison, Critical Ethnography, 15. See also Elliott and Culhane, eds., A Different Kind of Ethnography. 33 Madison, Critical Ethnography, 14. 34 Kwan, Kinesthetic City, 2, 6. 35 On earnestness in dance, and dance studies scholarship, see Thompson, “Sincerely Dancing.” While in this book I don’t pretend to subscribe to Martha Graham’s famous dictum that “The body never lies,” I do believe, along with Thompson, in taking dance artists at their word regarding the intent behind their work. I have thus tried to honour that principle in the chapter analyses that follow. 36 Conquergood, “Rethinking Ethnography,” 187. 37 Fisher, Ballet Matters, 15. 38 Ibid., 19, 9. 39 Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 33. See also Román, Acts of Intervention, xxvi. 40 Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 9. 41 Daly, Critical Gestures, xiii. 42 Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, quoted in Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 179n90. 43 Simon, “Relational Ethnography,” para. 38 and para. 34. 44 DeFrantz, Dancing Revelations, viii. Andrea Harris employs a similar technique of “inter-chapters,” hers focused much more explicitly on close readings of individual dance works, in her recent book Making Ballet American. On the “break” or “cut” that functions as “the space between expression and meaning or between meaning and reference” in Black radical aesthetics, see also Moten, In the Break, 92. 45 Schneider, Theater & History, 1, 6. 46 Foster, “Choreographing History,” 16. Within Canadian dance studies, an excellent example of this form of scholarship, one that likewise combines critical autobiography with historical and theoretical analysis, can be found in Stavros Stavrou Karayanni’s Dancing Fear and Desire, especially the “moments of geographical positioning” and “numinous … kinesthetic experience” he cites in his epilogue (190).

47 48 49 50 51

52

53

57

Notes to pages 15–21

54 55 56

Foster, “Choreographing History,” 10. Martin, “Dance Ethnography,” 322. Tomko, “Considering Causation and Conditions of Possibility,” 173. See Dickinson, “Textual Matters”; and “Narrative Pivots.” The number comes from Dangeli, who for her PhD dissertation, “Dancing Sovereignty” (2015), conducted extensive field research with the following groups who regularly perform in the Greater Vancouver area, even if they are territorially based elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest: Dakhka Khwaan Dancers (Tagish and Tlingit Nations) from Carcross, Yukon; Le La La Dancers (Kwakwa̱ ka̱’wakw), based in Victoria, British Columbia; Tsatsu Stalqayu (Stó:lō, Squamish, Musqueam, Lil’wat, Okanagan and Tsimshian Nations), based on the Musqueam Reserve; Spakwus Slulem (Squamish Nation), based in North Vancouver; Chinook Song Catchers (Nisga’a and Squamish Nations), based in North Vancouver; the Urban Kwakwa̱ ka̱’wakw, based in North Vancouver; the Gwa’wina Dancers (Kwakwa̱ ka̱’wakw Nation), based in Alert Bay, British Columbia; and the Dancers of Damelahamid (Gitxsan and Cree Nations) based in North Vancouver. Additionally, it is important to note that Dangeli uses the term “dance group” to refer specifically “to collectives of First Nations dancers, singers, and drummers whose formation [has been] self-determined,” including before the official lifting of the potlatch ban in 1951. By contrast, Dangeli uses “dance ensemble” to designate companies of Indigenous dancers “brought together in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by outside parties, such as anthropologists, collectors, museum officials, and others, for the purpose of performing and/or living on display at world’s fairs, wild west shows, and other exhibitions” (9). On the importance and absolute necessity of making the time to build such relationships when analyzing Northwest Coast First Nations dance, see again Dangeli, “Dancing Sovereignty,” 40. I borrow the metaphor of branches and pathways from Spatz, What A Body Can Do, 44–8. See Fraleigh, Butoh. See Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, 31–57. Established in 1986 as a resource centre for the dance profession and the public in bc, The Dance Centre (https://www.thedancecentre.ca/), about which I will have more to say in the last of this book’s movement intervals, moved into its current facilities on Davie Street in 2001. In addition to managing this building and devising programs and performance presentations within it, The Dance Centre promotes Vancouver and bc dance to the public and visiting presenters, and provides resources and services for its membership of dance professionals. On re-enactment and the “remains” of performance, see Schneider, Performance Remains.

325

i n t e rva l o n e

Notes to pages 23–30 326

1 Here my phrasing takes its cue from the excellent work of Jacqueline Shea Murphy in The People Have Never Stopped Dancing. 2 Margaret Grenier, interview with Justine A. Chambers, Vancouver, 19 June 2017. 3 Griffin, “Canada’s Only Indigenous Dance Festival.” 4 Made in bc – Dance on Tour (http://www.madeinbc.org/) is a not-for-profit industry association whose mandate is to connect bc dance artists with various communities in the province through presentation opportunities, residencies, and other activities. 5 In 2019 the Coastal First Nations Dance Festival was relocated to the Anvil Centre in New Westminster, British Columbia, owing to renovations to moa’s galleries. 6 Griffin, “Canada’s Only Indigenous Dance Festival.” 7 On Graham’s and Limón’s extensive borrowings from Indigenous dance cultures in the Americas, see Shea Murphy, The People, 148–68 and 169–94. 8 Shea Murphy, “Clearing the Path,” 193. 9 Smith, “Flicker Brings Modern Visual Wonder.” 10 Stephen White, quoted in Arrais, “Vital People.” 11 These terms come from Judith Hamera’s Dancing Communities and Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds, respectively. In the next chapter I elaborate further on their application to contemporary dance in Vancouver. 12 For a detailed analysis of S7aplek’s and Spakwus Slulem’s performances in the public realm, with a particular focus on their collaborations with the Vancouver-based settler dance company Aeriosa, see Dangeli, “Dancing Chiax.” 13 Ibid., 79. 14 Robinson et al., “Rethinking,” 21. Querying “the practice and performance of Indigenous land acknowledgement” as part of a roundtable of Indigenous and settler scholars and artists, Robinson forcefully argues that the repetition of “prescriptive acknowledgement without variance runs counter” to the relational foundations of such a protocol, which necessarily “changes depending on who is in the room, what those specific relationships are historically, and in the present moment, what is going on in the ever-changing natural world and the other-than-human relationships there” (20–1). 15 Putting Johannes Fabian’s notion of the “chronopolitics” of colonialism in dialogue with André Lepecki on the “choreopolitics” of dance, I am additionally reminded that dance performance and spectatorship, like ethnographic fieldwork, is “a form of communicative interation with an Other, one that must be carried out coevally, on the basis of shared intersubjective Time and intersocietal contemporaneity.” See Fabian, Time and the Other, 148; and Lepecki, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics.”

chapter one

Notes to pages 33–47

1 Hamera, Dancing Communities, 72–3 and 64–5. See also Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 84. 2 Hamera, Dancing Communities, 74. 3 This began to change in the late 1990s and especially after the 2000s, as Artemis Gordon gradually built Vancouver’s Arts Umbrella into an internationally recognized dance training institution. Under Gordon’s tenure, Arts Umbrella graduates have secured positions with major national and international companies. Building on a long-established apprenticeship program between the two institutions, in 2015 Arts Umbrella Dance became the official school of Ballet bc. Goh Ballet, the other major pre-professional ballet academy in Vancouver, also received a boost when Chan Hon Goh, former National Ballet of Canada prima ballerina and daughter of Goh Ballet’s founders, Choo Chiat Goh and Lin Yee Goh, returned to the city to assume the institution’s directorship in 2010. 4 Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, interview with Peter Dickinson, Vancouver, 29 August 2016. 5 James Gnam, interview with Justine A. Chambers, Peter Dickinson, and Alexa Mardon, Vancouver, 23 March 2016. 6 Ibid. 7 For a fascinating ethnographic study of how The Nutcracker became a Christmas tradition in North America, including the extent to which “professional dancers will complain about having to do endless performances of the same ballet” every December, see Fisher, Nutcracker Nation, xiv. 8 See my discussion of the links between Brechtian narration and danced demonstration in Bel’s work in “Cédric Andrieux.” 9 LeFebvre Gnam, interview, 29 August 2016. 10 Ibid. 11 Gnam, interview, 23 March 2016. 12 plastic orchid factory, Program note to _post, 26 May 2011. 13 Lescarbot’s masque is often claimed – although not without debate – as the first work of theatre produced in the Americas; see Wasserman, Spectacle of Empire. In the fourth and final appendix of Dance as Text, Mark Franko discusses iconographical representations of “The Amerindian in French Humanist and Burlesque Court Ballets”; see Franko, Dance as Text, Revised edition, 183–8. 14 Franko, Dance as Text, 79. 15 Ibid., 85. 16 Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera, 428. 17 Franko, Dance as Text, 11. 18 Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera, 82. 19 Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, email invitation to author, 20 August 2014. 20 Miller, Playable Bodies, 13.

327

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Notes to pages 48–66 328

Ibid., 2–3, 178. Franko, Dance as Text, 15ff. Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics, 5. Deleuze, The Fold, 124. Miller, Playable Bodies, 3. Ibid., 20. Gnam, interview, 29 August 2016. Ibid. Miller, Playable Bodies, 22. Silver, “Adaptation.” Miller, Playable Bodies, 32, 33. Ibid., 19. Silver, “The Games.” See Whalen, “Play Along.” The Legend of Zelda is a fantasy-based actionadventure and puzzle-solving video game series created by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka for Nintendo. The series revolves around playerprotagonist Link, whose primary job is to rescue Princess Zelda and protect the kingdom of Hyrule from the evil Ganon. Together with the Mario series, it is considered one of the most important video game franchises in history, particularly for the way that both series’ transitions to a 3D interface influenced subsequent design. See, representatively, DeWinter, Shigeru Miyamoto. Miller, Playable Bodies, 27–8. Silver, “Memory.” Murray, Digital Baroque, 5. Ibid., 6, 7. LeFebvre Gnam, interview, 29 August 2016. Silver, “Wild Animals.” Deleuze, The Fold, 8. Freeman, Time Binds, 3. Ibid., 13. i n t e rva l t wo

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Burrows, A Choreographer’s Handbook, 52. Ibid., 51. bc Arts Council, New Foundations, 2. Hill Strategies Research, British Columbian Arts Funding Comparisons, 1. Hill Strategies Research, A Statistical Profile of Artists in Canada in 2016, 26. Ibid., 26. Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation, Rental Market Report, 4–5. Both initiatives received a combination of municipal, provincial, and/or federal government support. 9 Although even a juggernaut like Ballet bc is not above balking at some of The Dance Centre’s more extortionate fees. When the latter attempted to

10

11 12 13 14

raise the monthly rent for the former’s administrative operations in 2016, Ballet bc moved its offices to city-owned space within the Orpheum Theatre, just a few blocks away. The company does, however, still rehearse at The Dance Centre. See “Deborah Hay Workshop,” Vancouver Art in the Sixties. Vancouver’s Intermedia Society was a loose collective of artists, poets, dancers, musicians, and academics who were initially interested in collaborative explorations between art and new technologies. A founding member of Intermedia and an animating force for the performance events it staged at the Vancouver Art Gallery between 1968 and 1971 was the pioneering choreographer and dance artist Helen Goodwin, whose legacy has recently been “reanimated” by a generation of present-day Vancouver dance artists in two projects led by Justine A. Chambers and Evann Siebens at the University of British Columbia’s Belkin Gallery that I will briefly return to at the end of Chapter 6, and that I was involved in documenting as part of a commissioned catalogue essay. See Dickinson, “Archival Gestures.” “Classes,” MascallDance. Ibid. For more on Bingham’s dance training and practice, see Pepper, The Man Next Door Dances. Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, interview with Peter Dickinson, Vancouver, 4 August 2016. c h a p t e r t wo

Notes to pages 66–80

1 Originally published on SpiderWebShowPerformance, 30 May 2017. 2 Paradigmatic in this regard is the overtly slapstick parody of the all-male Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. But even the ironic high-concept whimsy of William Forsythe’s Herman Schmerman – whose Vancouver premiere I briefly discuss in this book’s final movement interval – trades in such sight gags. One thinks as well of Richard Move’s drag take on Martha Graham, though to be fair it should be noted that his mimicry very much oscillates between deliberate satire – as when Move-as-Martha attempts to learn from Yvonne Rainer her famous Trio A – and very sincere homage – as in his re-enactment of the iconic solo Lamentation. 3 See Croce, “Balanchine Said.” 4 See, in this respect, Mansbridge, “The Comic Bodies and Obscene Voices of Burlesque.” 5 Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, interview with Peter Dickinson, Vancouver, 4 August 2016. 6 “Parody is a weapon of war.” Gaulier, “Du Bouffon,” 44. 7 Friedenberg, interview, 4 August 2016. 8 Friedenberg, “Long Form Math.” 9 See, representatively, Case, Feminism and Theatre.

329

Notes to pages 80–97 330

10 Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, interview with Peter Dickinson, Vancouver, 24 September 2014. 11 See Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis. 12 See Foster, “The Ballerina’s Phallic Pointe,” 6–7; and Mansbridge, “The Comic Bodies and Obscene Voices of Burlesque.” 13 See Renée, Les nièces de Mazarin, 255; and Doran, The History of Court Fools, 66. 14 “Who could speak truth to absolute power.” Gaulier, “Du Bouffon,” 44. 15 “Bouffon arrived because the students at Lecoq’s school (where I taught) wanted humps, and to adopt disturbing postures.” Gaulier, “Du Bouffon,” 48. 16 Ibid., 48. 17 See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. 18 Gaulier, “Du Bouffon,” 48. 19 Friedenberg, interview, 24 September 2014. 20 Smith, “Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg.” 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Friedenberg, interview, 4 August 2016. 24 See Claid, Yes! No? Maybe … 25 Kendrick, “A Paidic Aesthetic,” 73. 26 Ibid., 81. 27 Lust, From the Greek Mimes to Marcel Marceau and Beyond, 226. 28 See Gaulier, “Du Bouffon,” 44, 47; and Gaulier, The Tormentor. 29 Friedenberg, interview, 4 August 2016. 30 Dragu, quoted in Ireland, “Margaret Dragu,” 104, 106. 31 Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers, xx–xxii. 32 For a reading of the “political imperative underpinning the activities of the artists associated with 15 Dance Lab,” including the Adamses, Dragu, and Elizabeth Chitty, see Graham, “The New Left Cultural Front.” 33 Fisher, “From Post-Ballet to Post-Modern,” 339. 34 Anderson, “Moving Forward Looking Back,” 347. 35 Lindgren, “Critiquing On-Screen Stereotypes of Dancers,” 453. 36 Ibid., 451. 37 For more on the importance of Miriam and Lawrence Adams to Canadian dance history, see Anderson, “Moving Forward Looking Back”; and Bowring, “Dance Collection Danse.” 38 Friedenberg, “A Canada-Italy Dance-Theatre Collaboration.” 39 Friedenberg, interview, 4 August 2016. 40 Chun, Programmed Visions, xii. 41 Phelan, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Choreographing Writing,” 200, 205. Phelan first articulated “disappearance” as the “ontology of performance” in the concluding chapter of Unmarked, 146–66. For representative critiques of her claim, see Auslander, Liveness; and Schneider, Performing Remains.

42 Hamera, Dancing Communities, 7. 43 Though it is also important to note that Pite contributed original choreography to a 2006 Electric Company production of Kevin Kerr’s Studies in Motion early on in her career; see Dickinson, “Narrative Pivots,” 270. 44 Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, interview with Peter Dickinson, Vancouver, 8 May 2019. 45 Friedenberg, interview, 4 August 2016. 46 See http://imaginativeethnography.org/interventions/laughing-matters/ bus-dance. 47 The superiority theory of humour, as articulated by Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, and other Western philosophers, holds that all comedy is based in part on malice: telling jokes at the expense of others and in order to prop up ourselves. See Lintott, “Superiority in Humor Theory.” i n t e rva l t h r e e

Notes to pages 97–109

1 Perhaps the most public dance-related #MeToo controversy in Canada has concerned Bruce Monk, a teacher and photographer with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet who several former women dancers claim pressured them to pose for half-clothed or nude photos between 1984 and 2015. See Tanner, “Can the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.” 2 Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers was founded in 1964 by Rachel Browne, Toronto Dance Theatre in 1968 by Peter Randazzo, Patricia Beatty, and David Earle, and Ballets Jazz de Montréal in 1972 by Geneviève Salbaing, Eva Von Genscy, and Eddy Toussaint. In this context, one should also mention the innovative example of Le Groupe de la Place Royale, which was established in 1966 in Montreal by Jeanne Renaud, with Peter Boneham serving as assistant artistic director. When Renaud left in 1971, Boneham and Jean-Pierre Perreault became joint directors, moving the company to Ottawa in 1977, where they established a school. In 1988 Boneham transformed Le Groupe into a choreographic lab and international centre for research, which unfortunately ceased operations in 2009. Before doing so, however, Le Groupe provided training, performance, and choreographic opportunities to many dancers currently active in Vancouver, including Noam Gagnon, Josh Martin, and Justine A. Chambers. 3 See Griffin, “Crystal Pite”; and Dickinson, “Narrative Pivots,” 247. 4 Amber Funk Barton, interview with Justine A. Chambers, Peter Dickinson, and Alexa Mardon, Vancouver, 12 October 2016. Joshua Beamish founded Move: the company in 2005. 5 Justine A. Chambers, interview with Peter Dickinson and Alexa Mardon, Vancouver, 14 October 2016; and Deanna Peters, interview with Peter Dickinson and Alexa Mardon, Vancouver, 22 April 2016. 6 Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, interview with Peter Dickinson, Vancouver, 4 August 2016.

331

7 My doctoral student, Carolyne Clare, is working on both projects as part of her dissertation research. In July 2019 she helped organize an event cosponsored by The Dance Centre, Karen Jamieson Dance, and Simon Fraser University devoted to a discussion of archival practices and digital legacy for Vancouver’s dance community. 8 Barbara Bourget, interview with Peter Dickinson, Vancouver, 27 September 2016. 9 See “A Performer’s Perspective.” 10 Noam Gagnon, interview with Justine A. Chambers, Peter Dickinson and Alexa Mardon, 23 March 2017. 11 Josh Martin, email to author, 5 May 2019. chapter three 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Notes to pages 109–21 332

11 12

13

See Gerecke, “Moving Publics.” Berelowitz, Dream City, 128. Ibid., 245. See my “Choreographies of Place,” 90–114. Barbara Bourget, interview with Peter Dickinson, Vancouver, 27 September 2016. Jay Hirabayashi, interview with Peter Dickinson, Vancouver, 28 September 2016. Bourget, interview, 27 September 2016. Hirabayashi, interview, 28 September 2016. Ibid. Hirabayashi, “A New Era for Dance in Vancouver,” 118. For many Vancouver dance artists Jay himself did his share of fomenting ill-will in the community with his scathing reviews and take-no-prisoners op-eds in Kokoro’s self-published newsletter, Kokoro Moon, which published thirteen issues between 1992 and 1994 (all available, along with an unpublished typescript of an issue scheduled for 1995, on Kokoro’s website: http://kokoro.ca/kokoro -moon). Hirabayashi, interview, 28 September 2016. While Barbara and Jay were officially the first to leave, in 1986, Hassan was travelling between Vancouver and Toronto, where he worked with Desrosiers Dance Theatre, almost immediately after edam’s founding. In 1989, Bingham became sole artistic director of edam, with Mascall and MacLaughlin going on to found their namesake companies and Ryan travelling to France before settling in Ottawa. Barbara was the most classically trained; Jennifer and Lola graduated from university dance programs (York and sfu, respectively); Peter and Peter came from contact backgrounds; and Jay by this time had supplemented his training with Ross with ballet classes at the Goh Academy, Graham technique in Toronto, and a bit of contact. Hassan, primarily a percussionist, was sup-

14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22 23 24 25

Notes to pages 121–4

26 27

posed to be the composer for edam, though, in Barbara’s words, “he could certainly move” (interview, 27 September 2016). Hirabayashi, “A New Era,” 119. For more on the history of edam, and especially the legacy of Peter Bingham, see Pepper, The Man. Bourget, interview, 27 September 2016. Ibid. Ma is a Japanese word that translates roughly as “gap” or “the space between.” I will discuss at greater length the importance of this concept for butoh, and Kokoro’s practice more specifically, later in this chapter. See, for example, the preface to the paperback edition of Baness’ Terpsichore in Sneakers, xxviii. Ramsay Burt begins his study of the Judson Dance Theater, which argues that “innovative dance artists on each side of the Atlantic over the past forty years have had more in common with one another than most existing dance literature about them to date has suggested,” by noting the coincidence of Trisha Brown and Pina Bausch and their respective companies getting to know each other over coffee in the hotel at which they were all staying as part of the first Festival International de Nouvelle Danse in Montreal in September 1986; see Burt, Judson Dance Theater, 1–2. However, the celebrated butoh artist Natsu Nakajima was also performing at the festival with her piece Niwa; see Fraleigh, Butoh, 11. Fraleigh, Butoh, 22. On the connection of butoh with early twentieth-century German modern dance, see, as well, Elswit et al., “What We Know,” 126ff. Elswit et al., “What We Know,” 130–2. See Candelario, Flowers Cracking Concrete. See Fraleigh, Butoh, 25–7; and Candelario, “‘Now We Have a Passport.’” See, representatively, Rogals, “Review of Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo,” 267. On the other hand, Sondra Fraleigh and Tamah Nakamura, whose book’s second edition Rogals is reviewing, state that while butoh “is sometimes interpreted as post-atomic spectacle … this would be too simple an explanation for this enigmatic art”; see Fraleigh and Nakamura, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, 1. For his part, Jay has stated to me that he thinks the atomic reading of butoh’s origins “is more of a western theoretical conjecture than one coming from butoh artists. I don’t think Hijikata or Ohno ever directly referenced the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, in fact, it would be a very un-Japanese action to reflect on any humiliating experience in a public way. On the other hand, butoh could also be said to be very un-Japanese in that Ohno’s insistence that butoh is the search for one’s own individual expression belies the Japanese proverb: でるくぎはうたれる (derukugihautareru), or ‘the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, people that stick out too much get punished.’” Email to author, 4 May 2019. Fraleigh, Butoh, 29. Hirabayashi, interview, 28 September 2016.

333

Notes to pages 125–47 334

28 Ibid. 29 See Miki, Redress, 173–4; Pepper, “Championing,” 200–1; and Gordon Hirabayashi’s own memoir, Good Times, Bad Times. In 2012, President Barack Obama presented Gordon Hirabayashi with a posthumous Medal of Freedom for his fight against Japanese American internment. Jay, representing the family, was there along with Barbara to collect it. 30 Hirabayashi, “A New Era,” 120. 31 Mehra, “Kokoro Dance,” 30. For additional readings of Rage and The Believer, see Pepper, “Championing,” 199–208; and Chang, “Asian Canadian Dance,” 92–116. 32 Hirabayashi, interview, 28 September 2016. 33 Bourget, interview, 27 September 2016. 34 Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi, interview with Peter Dickinson, Vancouver, 8 April 2014. 35 Preece, “white-bodied poetry,” 159, 158. 36 Ibid., 161. 37 In fact it was actually the twenty-first edition of wbb, Barbara and Jay having preserved no documentation from their original 1995 performance, and thus having transposed on their website and the official start date for this annual company tradition to the following year. The chronology was amended in the lead-up to the twenty-fifth anniversary of wbb in 2019, a process I once again participated in, and about which I may write in the future. 38 Preece, “white-bodied poetry,” 161. 39 Baird, Hijikata Tatsumi, 7. See, as well, Klein, Ankoko Buto, 32. 40 See Fraleigh and Nakamura, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, 52. Hijikata eventually compiled “sixteen scrapbooks of verbal and visual images for dance” – his butoh-fu – which function as a kind of pictorial dance notation; see Fraleigh and Nakamura, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, 54–7, and Fraleigh, Butoh, 43. 41 Fraleigh, Butoh, 48. 42 Ibid., 50. 43 Molly McDermott, interview with Alexa Mardon, Vancouver, 19 September 2016. 44 Preece, “white-bodied poetry,” 166. 45 Fraleigh, Butoh, 6. 46 Curtin, “Rose-Coloured Dance,” 474. 47 Ibid., 54. 48 Preece, “Wrecking Butoh,” 473. 49 Ibid., 474. 50 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 31. 51 Fraleigh, Butoh, 48. 52 Fraleigh and Nakamura, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, 11. 53 Taylor, “Empty?,” 78. 54 “Agential realism” is Karen Barad’s term for those quantum phenomena that

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

exceed our representations of them; see Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. For an analysis of new materialist and Indigenous theories of nonhuman agency, and why scholars like myself tend to cite the former rather than the latter, see Rosiek, Snyder, and Pratt, “The New Materialisms.” Watts, “Indigenous place-thought,” 21. Preece, “white-bodied poetry,” 174. Hamera, Dancing Communities, 17. See Gerecke, “Moving Publics.” Preece, “Wrecking Butoh,” 479. Fraleigh, Butoh, 16. Ibid., 15–16. Barbara Bourget, Instructions to Wreck Beach Butoh 2015 Participants, Vancouver, 23 June 2015. For permission to reproduce my version of their 2015 and 2016 wbb choreographic scores, and for their patience in teaching them, I am forever grateful to Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi. i n t e rva l f o u r

Notes to pages 147–72

1 See “Dancing on the Edge,” Kokoro Moon 1.4 (1991): 1, 7; 2.4 (1992): 10; and “Reviews,” Kokoro Moon 3.2-4 (1993): 9–10. 2 Montreal’s pioneering Festival International de Nouvelle Danse was founded in 1982 by Chantal Pontbriand, Dena Davida, and Diane Boucher, but it was a biennial and ceased operations in 2003. Ottawa’s Canada Dance Festival, co-presented by the National Arts Centre, predates dote by a year, but it is also a biennial. The Festival of New Dance in St John’s, produced by Neighbourhood Dance Works, is the next closest in longevity, having run every year since 1990. By contrast, Montreal’s Festival Quartiers Danses was only founded in 2000, and Toronto’s Fall for Dance North in 2014. 3 Dance In Vancouver differs from the other festivals not just in the fact that it takes place biennially, but also in terms of its targeted audience, which is mostly presenters from across Canada and around the world who are being pitched tour-ready work via abbreviated mainstage performances and studio presentations. Also, each edition of the festival is overseen by an international guest curator. 4 See, on this topic, Zaiontz, Theatre and Festivals. 5 For an excellent analysis of NEW RAW ’s play with spatial orientation, especially in relation to what he calls the “back-body” of contemporary performance, see Tomkinson, “Get Thee Behind Me.” 6 Gee, “Dancing on the Edge Festival.” 7 Although in 2019 the number of programmed courtyard shows increased dramatically. 8 Amber Funk Barton, interview with Justine A. Chambers, Peter Dickinson, and Alexa Mardon, Vancouver, 12 October 2016.

335

9 Here I am alluding to the title and substance of André Lepecki’s Exhausting Dance. chapter four

Notes to pages 179–85 336

1 Loscil is the professional name of Vancouver-based electronic and ambient composer Scott Morgan. The name is taken from the “looping oscillator” function in Csound. 2 See, for example, the essays by Dena Davida, Paula Citron, and Brian Webb in Outside In/Inside Out: The Vancouver Dance Aesthetic. This pamphlet was published as a supplement to a panel of the same name at the sixth Dance In Vancouver Biennial in 2007. 3 Ziyian Kwan, interview with Peter Dickinson, Vancouver, 6 June 2016. 4 Ibid. 5 This is Ziyian’s preferred term to describe herself as a dance performer in other people’s work, and perhaps stems from her time dancing in Montreal. 6 Kwan, interview, 6 June 2016. 7 Ibid. 8 Ziyian’s studies with Itcush at her studio in Davidson, Saskatchewan, often coincided with visits to Regina to work with New Dance Horizons’ Robin Poitras, who was also a student of Itcush’s. 9 In invoking this term, I must acknowledge the series of installations, films, and ancillary programming that William Forsythe has grouped together as part of his ongoing project of the same name, part of his phenomenological investigation into how “choreographic thought” might “generate autonomous expressions of its principles” beyond an exclusive reliance on the human body. See Forsythe, “Choreographic Objects,” 91. I will return to such questions in relation to Vanessa’s work, below, and even more pertinently in my discussion of my own collaborations with Rob Kitsos in the next chapter. 10 Bernstein, “Dances with Things,” 70, 73. Ziyian takes up this issue of her interpellation as a racialized woman in dance even more materially in her recent work, The Odd Volume, which premiered at Vancouver’s Dancing on the Edge Festival in July 2019. 11 Portions of this discussion have appeared, in different form, as part of my essay “Showing Support.” 12 Hamera, Dancing Communities, 3, 22. 13 Gerecke, “Moving Publics,” 234. 14 Jackson, Social Works, 29, 9. 15 Ibid., 29. 16 Ibid., 42. 17 Martin, “A Precarious Dance,” 75. 18 As previously mentioned in the movement interval on “Space,” according to

19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

37 38 39

Notes to pages 185–99

34 35 36

a 2019 Hill Strategies Research report partly funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, and based largely on 2016 Census information, among nine identified arts occupations, dancers were the lowest earners, with a median individual income of just $15,100. See Hill Strategies Research Inc., A Statistical Profile of Artists in Canada in 2016, 9. See Harvie, Fair Play. Martin, “A Precarious Dance,” 66. Ziyian Kwan, “what I am dancing sundays.” Ibid. As Marc Pilkington has noted, Schulman wrote his strategy paper “The Goldilocks Economy: Keeping the Bears at Bay” in March 1992 while at Salomon Brothers, a Wall Street investment bank. See Pilkington, The Global Financial Crisis, 88. Jackson, Social Works, 247. Kwan, interview, 6 June 2016. Wilcox, “Women Dancing Otherwise,” 68. Ziyian Kwan, email to author, 24 February 2017. Vanessa Goodman, interview with Justine A. Chambers, Peter Dickinson, and Alexa Mardon, Vancouver, 11 February 2016. Ridout, Passionate Amateurs, 15. Goodman, interview, 11 February 2016. See The Contingency Plan, “Mandate,” https://www.contingencyplan collective.com, 6 June 2018. See Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation”; and Motivation and Personality. See Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 1–2. This also resonates with critiques of Maslow’s theory as inherently anthropocentric. See Abulof, “Be Yourself! How Am I Not Myself?” Again, I will return to ideas of the choreographic interface between human and non-human movement in the next chapter. See Smith, “Vanessa Goodman,” and Smith, “What Belongs to You.” Goodman, interview, 11 February 2016. In his theory of space harmony, or “choreutics,” Rudolf von Laban distinguished between general environmental space, such as a room or performance space, and the personal space surrounding individual bodies, which he called one’s “kinesphere,” and which he suggested was always bounded by how far one’s limbs could reach without shifting one’s place. See Laban, Choreutics. Solomon, “Fiddler’s Bottle Dance,” 25. Ibid., 27, 28. Nordau outlined his theories in a 1903 speech called “Jewry of Muscle,” which is collected in the anthology The Jew in the Modern World, 547. For how his theories influenced Israeli folk dance, see Spiegel, Embodying Hebrew Culture. On the history of cultural representations of the Jewish body, see Gilman, The Jew’s Body.

337

40 Neuman, “Dancing Between Old Worlds and New,” 112. 41 For more on the step, and on Yemenite wedding dances more generally, see Staub, “Repertoire,” 55–63. 42 Goodman, interview, 11 February 2016. 43 Ibid. 44 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 127. 45 I am thinking especially of Frances Yates’s famous conceptualization of ancient Greek and Roman mnemonic techniques, as theorized by rhetoricians like Cicero and Quintilian, in The Art of Memory. 46 Vanessa Goodman, email to author, 30 September 2017. 47 See, representatively, Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space and Remediating McLuhan. 48 Gould, So You Want to Write a Fugue? 49 Recall McLuhan’s statement in The Medium Is the Massage that “electric circuitry is an extension of the central nervous system” (40). 50 Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, The Laws of Media, 98. 51 Cavell, Remediating McLuhan, 75. 52 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 4. 53 Yeats, “Among School Children,” 217. 54 See McLuhan, Understanding Media, 246–337. 55 I refer here to Mac’s Comparison Is Violence, or The Ziggy Stardust Meets Tiny Tim Songbook, which the artist brought to Vancouver’s PuSh Festival in February 2012. i n t e rva l f i v e

Notes to pages 199–221 338

1 Hamera, Dancing Communities, 60. 2 Dancer Transition Resource Centre and Hill Strategies Research Inc., “Professional Dance Performers in Canada,” 10. 3 David Raymond, interview with Justine A. Chambers, Vancouver, 10 June 2017. The Source, which operates out of the Harbour Dance studios, is one of many semi-professional dance institutes and companies in the Greater Vancouver Regional District to provide both training and teaching opportunities for local dance artists. Another is Lamondance in North Vancouver. 4 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 6–7. 5 Baker, quoted in Saxton and Cornell, Toronto Dance Theatre, 66. 6 Perkins Deneault, “Renée Sigouin’s Dream Apprenticeship.” 7 Shepherd, “The Institution of Training,” 5–6. 8 Spatz, What a Body Can Do, 121. Emphasis in original. 9 See “Kate Franklin,” https://www.trainingsocietyofvancouver.ca/katefranklin. chapter five 1 Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, 50.

Notes to pages 221–30

2 Ibid., 50. 3 I borrow the term “epistemic distance” from Spatz, What a Body Can Do, 239; emphasis in original. 4 Ibid., 225. 5 Ibid., 236–7. 6 Rob Kitsos, interview with Justine A. Chambers, Peter Dickinson, and Alexa Mardon, Vancouver, 27 January 2016. 7 Elswit, Theatre & Dance, 2. 8 George-Graves, “Magnetic Fields,” 5. 9 Kitsos, interview, 27 January 2016. 10 On the subject of categories and naming, recall that between 1978 and 1986 Bausch subtitled each of her creations ein Stück von Pina Bausch (“A piece by Pina Bausch”). In Theatre & Dance, Elswit notes that Bausch’s particular brand of Tanztheater, tracing its lineage to an earlier prewar era of German Ausdruckstanz, is a term that “is incommensurate as a catchall for the many North American and European performances that draw upon the mutual support of theatre and dance elements in different ways” and that also obscures the ways in which Bausch herself returned to more formalist dance investigations in her later works (5, 10). However, Susan Manning, in an appreciation of Bausch’s legacy, contends that the choreographer “effected a paradigm shift in performance-making in the 1980s,” one that prompted a subsequent generation of artists – including dv8’s Lloyd Newsom and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker – to blur “any recognizable distinction between ‘dance’ and ‘theatre.’” See Manning, “Pina Bausch,” 12. 11 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93. 12 Ibid., 100. 13 Ibid., 91. 14 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 50. 15 Foster, “Walking and Other Choreographic Tactics,” 136, 135. 16 Dickinson, The Objecthood of Chairs, 8. 17 Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, 45. 18 Dickinson, The Objecthood of Chairs, 3. 19 On position versus movement in the universe of William Forsythe, Manning and Massumi state the following: “If the point-field of movement is nonlocalizable, when a dancer seeks to generate a movement it is not enough to get into position. Position is the gateway to movement. But it is not of its order. Position is of the fixed spatial order. Movement’s order is of the always dynamically passing.” See Thought in the Act, 35; my emphasis. 20 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 54–5. 21 Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, 45. 22 Forsythe, “Choreographic Objects,” 92. Arguably, Pina Bausch was exploring a similar kind of extra-bodily or more-than-human choreographic thinking in her collaborations with scenographer Rolf Borzik. As choreographers, Bausch and Forsythe have very different aesthetic and conceptual approaches. But in

339

23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

32

Notes to pages 230–53 340

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

their revolutionary experiments with what dance might be, the hostile reception of their early work in the United States, and their respective transformations of small municipal German ballet companies into internationally recognized dance innovators, the two artists merit greater comparative analysis. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 3. Rob has since explored similar questions of the vital materiality and choreographic animacy of object-oriented performance in Topophilia, a collaboration with our colleague Steven Hill, whose Vancouver-based company Fight with a Stick (which he co-ran until 2019 with Alex Lazaridis Ferguson) is known for its non-human-centred choreography. Rob Kitsos, interview, 27 January 2016. Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, 56. Manning and Massumi adapt the term “disjunctive synthesis” from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; see their Anti-Oedipus, 12–13. Justin Reist, email to author, 10 November 2010. Victor Mariano, email to author, 12 November 2010. Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, 47, 48. Home-Cook, Theatre and Aural Attention, 85. Ibid., 87, 86. On how “cuing” and “aligning” relate to the non-matching or non-syncing of movement to “’known timing’” in Forsythe’s work, see Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, 44. See also Manning, Always More Than One, 99–123. I have made a similar argument in relation to lipsyncing in the work of Crystal Pite; see Dickinson, “Narrative Pivots.” Franko, “Splintered Encounters,” 44–5, 41. Vass-Rhee, “Dancing Music,” 87–8. Lesley Telford, interview with Peter Dickinson, Vancouver, 14 March 2017. Ibid. Dickinson, Long Division, 5. Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, 51. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 46–7. Ibid., 50. See Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, 48. Stéphanie Cyr, email to author, 3 June 2019. Anousha Alamian, email to author, 18 September 2018. Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, 45. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 50. Lesley Telford, interview, 14 March 2017. Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, 31.

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61

Ibid., 31. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 34. See, representatively, Jeannerod, Motor Cognition. See Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 8; and Goffman, Stigma, 128. On the different kinds of discourse markers we frequently employ in conversation to frame events and experiences, see Goffman, Frame Analysis. In neuroscience, entrainment refers to the synchronization of one’s brainwaves to a desired frequency. In biology it refers, more generally, to the synchronization of organisms to an external rhythm, which may or may not be auditory. In Thought in the Act, Manning and Massumi use the term entrainment to discuss how neurotypical individuals single out different perceptual affordances from “the fielding of [their] environment” (7). Rob Kitsos, interview with Nancy Tam, Destelheide, Belgium, 15 July 2016. Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, 50. Ibid., 51. i n t e rva l s i x

Notes to pages 253–66

1 Morrow, “Ballet bc’s Future Up to Creditors.” 2 Lederman, “Ballet bc Reborn.” 3 A far more successful local updating of Giselle, to my mind at least, was Serge Bennathan’s production of Elles, which played the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in March 2012, and which showcased the talents of eight women dancers from Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Montreal with whom Bennathan had previously collaborated. 4 Jay Rankin, formerly the managing director of Toronto Dance Theatre, was appointed the new executive director of Ballet bc in November 2009. He was succeeded by Branislav Henselmann in 2011, who came to the company from New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute, for whom Molnar had created work. After Henselmann left Ballet bc to become managing director of Cultural Services for the City of Vancouver in 2016, John Clark, an American arts administrator with a wealth of fundraising expertise, was appointed Ballet bc’s new ed. 5 An earlier version of an affiliated training institute for Ballet bc was modelled in the 1990s and early 2000s via the company’s Mentor Program and Summer Dance Intensive, among whose participants were local dance artists Alison Denham, Amber Funk Barton, and Karissa Barry. 6 Derdeyn, “Emily Molnar.” 7 For these and other figures cited in this movement interval I wish to thank Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim, who combed through thousands of pages of public documents relating to arts funding in British Columbia as part of their project culturecapital. This collectible card game and tournament-style

341

8 9 10

11

performance uses public funding figures, company budgets, and knowledge of cultural festivities/trends to reflect upon the Canadian and bc performing arts economies in ways that, in the words of the creators, “challenge both the standard critical discourse on artistic values and the non-standard whispers of critique that define our ‘polite’ public discourse.” Total public funds received during this period amounted to $1,087,905. At $1,873,727 in combined grants from municipal, provincial, and federal agencies. Clausen, whom I briefly danced beside as part of the PuSh Festival’s 2015 staging of Sylvain Émard’s community-engaged outdoor spectacle, Le Grand Continental, has been a potent administrative and institutional force in Vancouver’s contemporary dance history. In addition to helping found and initially oversee The Dance Centre, Clausen has also served as a program officer for dance at the Canada Council, founded the dance management and presentation organization New Works in 1998, and co-founded Made in bc – Dance on Tour in 2006 and DanceHouse in 2008, both with Jim Smith. As noted in the first of this book’s movement intervals, the mandate of Made in BC, currently overseen by Jane Gabriels, is to build a culture for dance in British Columbia, mostly by helping facilitate and subvent touring productions throughout the province. Not everyone in the Vancouver dance community initially supported The Dance Centre, either as a producer of dance or as a physical hub for dancerelated activities. See, in this regard, “Kokoro Dumps on Dance Centre Facility.” chapter six

Notes to pages 267–81 342

1 Originally published in Issue Magazine 2.3 (2014): 32–5. 2 See “Ten Fifteen Maple,” https://justineachambers.com/ten-fifteen-maplecollaborative-projects. 3 See “Family Dinner,” https://justineachambers.com/family-dinner-the-lexicon. 4 Spångberg, “Immaterial Performance,” 69. 5 Ibid., 69. 6 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 134. 7 Chambers and Gerecke, “Moving Together,” 37. 8 Ibid., 37. 9 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 219. 10 See Bishop, Artificial Hells, 231; and Harvie, Fair Play, 29. 11 Here I am drawing on Harvie, Fair Play, 42. In her critique of this kind of participatory performance, Harvie is in turn drawing on Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. 12 See Bishop, Artificial Hells, 236. 13 Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 1–3. Noland is responding especially to the influential work of Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish; and Pierre

Notes to pages 282–91

Bourdieu in Outline of a Theory of Practice. 14 Justine A. Chambers, Program Note, Dancing on the Edge Festival, 4 July 2015. 15 Chambers and Gerecke, “Moving Together,” 37. 16 Justine A. Chambers, interview with Peter Dickinson and Alexa Mardon, Vancouver, 14 October 2016. 17 Alexa Mardon, interview with Justine A. Chambers and Peter Dickinson, Vancouver, 12 September 2017. 18 Chambers, interview, 14 October 2016. 19 Mardon, interview, 12 September 2017. 20 See, as part of this critical genealogy, Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire; Schneider, Performing Remains, esp. Chapter 4; Jones and Heathfield, eds., Perform, Repeat, Record; Borggreen, ed., Performing Archives/Archives of Performance; and Spatz, What a Body Can Do. 21 Lepecki, “The Body as Archive,” 28–48. 22 Giannachi, Archive Everything, xvi. 23 See Derrida, Archive Fever. 24 Giannachi, Archive Everything, xvi. On the role of affect in constituting archives, see Cvetkovitch, An Archive of Feelings. 25 Hamera, Dancing Communities, 1. 26 Regarding the word “pivot,” two applications of it have become touchstones, especially in contextualizing my own ongoing dance studies research. The first comes from Vancouver-based choreographer Crystal Pite. She writes: “A pivot … allows for another point of view. It is a turning point, something of crucial importance. It is a repeatable, refinable action that extends our perspective of the possible. The accuracy and focus, in combination with the instinctual, chaotic, and risky nature of improvisation, define both the process and the result”; Pite, quoted in Shaw, Lost and Found, 14. The second use of the word is courtesy of Dwight Conquergood; writing of the institutional shape of Performance Studies at Northwestern University in 1995, he notes: “Another way to express our departmental commitment to a theory-practice dialectic is to say that many of us endeavor, not so much to position as to pivot our work on a turning point among analytical, artistic, and activist perspectives. We believe in the replenishing coarticulation of analytical insights, artistic energies, and activist struggles – approaches to problems that all too often are segregated, polarized, or pitted against one another”; see Conquergood, “Of Caravans and Carnivals,” 139 (my emphasis). 27 Chambers, interview, 14 October 2016. 28 Mardon, interview, 12 September 2017. 29 8 days is an intensive encounter for Canadian choreographers held every summer. “The project situates peer-to-peer exchange as crucial to the continued relevance of the art form; theory and practice, talking and making, doing and reflecting, are understood as interwoven threads of creative development. 8 days takes seriously the importance of time outside the pressures of

343

30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Notes to pages 291–321 344

46 47 48

49 50

production-driven work to create space, to reflect on one’s current practice and to envision – through dialogue, experimentation, and feisty conviviality – new artistic possibilities.” See http://www.publicrecordings.org/8-days. A podcast (http://freakonomics.com/) presided over by Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. See Spatz, What a Body Can Do; and Hamera, Dancing Communities. Freeman, Time Binds. Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, 4. See also Manning, “Choreography as mobile architecture”; and Manning, “The Dance of Attention,” 337–64. Justine A. Chambers, Peter Dickinson, and Alexa Martin. “Our Present Dance Histories, or, Dance Histories Project, or, Vancouver Dance: An Incomplete History of the Present, Part 1,” Dance In Vancouver 2017. Chambers, interview, 14 October 2016. Mardon, interview, 12 September 2017. Peggy Baker, “Introduction.” See “Body to Body.” Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 16, 4. Manning, The Minor Gesture, 2, 7. Schneider, with Lucia Ruprecht, “In Our Hands,” 112. Schneider, “Performance and Documentation,” 78. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Section IX. Ibid. On how communities, in general, and performance communities more specifically, are necessarily co-extensive with their performative exclusions, and how entrepreneurial claims to be speaking “in the name of” this but maybe not that constituency are likewise embedded in structures of capitalism (of which this book and its retail price are not exempt), see Joseph, Against the Romance of Community, vii–xviii. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Section XVII. Ibid. Radial Change: Beginning with the Seventies, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, 22 June–12 August 2018; and Deanna Bowen, A Harlem Nocturne, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 5 April–16 June 2019. Alexa Mardon, The Talking Thinking Dancing Body, n.p. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Section XVIII.

Bibliography

8 days. http://www.publicrecordings.org/8-days. “A Performer’s Perspective.” https://performersperspective.movingstories.ca. Abulof, Uriel. “Be Yourself! How Am I Not Myself?” Society 54, no. 6 (2017): 530–2. Alamian, Anousha. Email to Peter Dickinson. 18 September 2018. Anderson, Carol. “Moving Forward, Looking Back: Lawrence and Miriam Adams and Dance Collection Danse.” In Canadian Dance: Visions and Stories, ed. Selma Landen Odom and Mary Jane Warner, 345–52. Toronto: Dance Collection Danse Press/es, 2004. Arrais, Pedro. “Vital People: Indigenous dance troupe brings First Nation art, history to life.” Victoria Times-Colonist, 28 January 2018. https://www.times colonist.com/islander/vital-people-indigenous-dance-troupe-brings-first-nationart-history-to-life-1.23157091. Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. Baird, Bruce. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Pits. New York: Palgrave, 2012. Baker, Peggy. “Introduction.” The Choreographer’s Trust. Peggy Baker Dance Projects. https://peggybakerdance.com/introduction. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. – Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Banes, Sally. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Barton, Amber Funk. Interview with Justine A. Chambers, Peter Dickinson, and Alexa Mardon. Vancouver, 12 October 2016. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History” [1940]. Trans. Lloyd Spencer. http://www.tasc.ac.uk/depart/media/staff/ls/WBenjamin/CONCEPT2.html. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Berelowitz, Lance. Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2005.

346

Bernstein, Robin. “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race.” Social Text 27, no. 4 (2009): 67–94. Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. New York: Verso, 2012. “Body to Body: A Choreographic Legacy.” Karen Jamieson Dance. https://www. kjdance.ca/now/b2b-2018. Borggreen, Gundhild, ed. Performing Archives/Archives of Performance. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum/University of Copenhagen Press, 2013. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Bourget, Barbara. Instructions to Wreck Beach Butoh 2015 Participants. Vancouver, 23 June 2015. – Interview with Peter Dickinson. Vancouver, 27 September 2016. Bourget, Barbara, and Jay Hirabayashi. Interview with Peter Dickinson, Vancouver, 8 April 2014. Bowen, Deanna. A Harlem Nocturne. Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. 5 April–16 June 2019. Bowring, Amy. “Dance Collection Danse: Canada’s Largest Archive and Research Centre for Theatrical Dance History.” Dance Chronicle 34, no. 2 (2011): 276–89. British Columbia Arts Council. New Foundations: Strategic Plan for the British Columbia Arts Council, 2018–2022. Victoria: Province of British Columbia, 2018. Burrows, Jonathan. A Choreographer’s Handbook. New York: Routledge, 2010. Burt, Ramsay. Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces. New York: Routledge, 2006. Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation. Rental Market Report: Canada Highlights. November 2018. https://assets.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/sf/project/cmhc/pubs andreports/rental-market-reports-canada-provincial-highlights/2018/rentalmarket-reports-canada-64667-2018-a01-en.pdf?rev=1468fa60-5050-4122ab3c-bc45b6da4433. Candelario, Rosemary. Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko and Koma’s Asian/American Choreographies. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2016. – “‘Now we have a passport’: Global and Local Butoh.” In The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, ed. Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, 245–53. New York: Routledge, 2019. Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminism and Theatre. New York: Routledge, 1988. Cavell, Richard. McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. – Remediating McLuhan. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Chambers, Justine A. Interview with Peter Dickinson and Alexa Mardon, Vancouver, 14 October 2016. – Program Note. Dancing on the Edge Festival, Vancouver, 4 July 2015.

Bibliography

Chambers, Justine A., Peter Dickinson, and Alexa Mardon. “Our Present Dance Histories, or, Dance Histories Project, or, Vancouver Dance: An Incomplete History of the Present, Part 1.” Dance In Vancouver 2017. https://www.thedance centre.ca/dance_in_vancouver_2017_events. Chambers, Justine A., and Alana Gerecke. “Moving Together, 22 Ways.” Canadian Theatre Review 176 (2018): 37–40. Chang, Eury Colin. “Asian Canadian Dance: Cross-Cultural Currents in Vancouver’s Kokoro Dance and Co.erasga Dance.” In Contemporary Directions in Asian American Dance, ed. Yutian Wong, 92–116. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. Chun, Wendy. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2011. Claid, Emilyn. Yes! No? Maybe …: Seductive Ambiguity in Dance. London: Routledge, 2006. “Classes.” MascallDance. https://www.mascalldance.ca/classes-1. Conquergood, Dwight. “Beyond the Text: Toward a Performative Cultural Politics.” In The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions, ed. S.J. Dailey, 25–36. Washington, dc: National Communication Association, 1998. – “Of Caravans and Carnivals: Performance Studies in Motion.” TDR : The Drama Review 39, no. 4 (1995): 137–41. – “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics.” Communication Monographs 58 (1991): 179–94. Croce, Arlene. “Balanchine Said.” The New Yorker, 26 January 2009. https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/01/26/balanchine-said. Curtin, Catherine. “Rose-Coloured Dance: The Politics of Cross-Dressing in Hijikata Tatsumi’s Ankoku Butoh.” Contemporary Theatre Review 21, no. 4 (2011): 472–86. Cvetkovitch, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Cyr, Stéphanie. Email to Peter Dickinson, 3 June 2019. Daly, Ann. Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. Dancer Transition Resource Centre and Hill Strategies Research Inc. “Professional dance performers in Canada in 2016: Activities, incomes, health, and career development.” December 2016. http://dtrc.ca/images/uploads/contents/ Dance_performers_profile_DTRC2016_March%20(002)(2).pdf. “Dancing on the Edge.” Kokoro Moon 1, no. 4 (1991): 1, 7; 2, no. 4 (1992): 10. Dangeli, Miqu’el. “Dancing Chiax, Dancing Sovereignty: Performing Protocol in Unceded Territories.” Dance Research Journal 48, no. 1 (2016): 74–90. – “Dancing Sovereignty: Protocol and Politics in Northwest Coast First Nations Dance.” PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2015. “Deborah Hay Workshop.” Vancouver Art in the Sixties. https://vancouverartin thesixties.com/archive/524.

347

348

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle [1967]. Trans. Ken Knabb. London: Rebel Press, 1983. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. DeFrantz, Thomas F. Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. – The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. – A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Derdeyn, Stuart. “Emily Molnar to leave Ballet bc.” Vancouver Sun, 12 July 2019. https://vancouversun.com/entertainment/celebrity/emily-molnar-toleave-ballet-b-c. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. DeWinter, Jennifer. Shigeru Miyamoto: Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre. New York: Routledge, 1997. Dickinson, Peter. “Archival Gestures, or, The Afterlives of Performance in the Work of Helen Goodwin, Evann Siebens, and Justine A. Chambers.” In Beginning with the Seventies, ed. Lorna Brown. Vancouver: ubc Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, forthcoming. – “Cédric Andrieux: With Bel, Benjamin and Brecht in Vancouver.” TDR : The Drama Review 48, no. 3 (2014): 162–9. – “Choreographies of Place: Dancing the Vancouver Sublime from Dusk to Dawn.” In Performance Studies in Canada, ed. Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer, 90–114. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. – Long Division. Unpublished playscript. 2017. – “Narrative Pivots: On the Matter of Text and Movement in Crystal Pite’s Dance-Theatre.” In Narrative in Performance, ed. Barbara Sellers-Young and Jade McCutcheon, 241–82. London: Palgrave, 2018. – The Objecthood of Chairs. Unpublished playscript. 2010. – “Showing Support: Some Reflections on Vancouver’s Dance Economies.” Canadian Theatre Review 162 (2015): 10–15. – “Textual Matters: Making Narrative and Kinesthetic Sense of Crystal Pite’s Dance-Theatre.” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 1 (2014): 61–83. – World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on Performance, Place, and Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010.

Bibliography

Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Doran, John. The History of Court Fools. London: Richard Bentley, 1858. Elliott, Denielle, and Dara Culhane, eds. A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Elswit, Kate. Theatre and Dance. New York: Palgrave, 2018. Elswit, Kate, Miyagawa Mariko, Eiko Otake, and Tara Rodman. “What We Know and What We Want to Know: A Roundtable on Butoh and neuer Tanz.” In The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, ed. Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, 126–36. New York: Routledge, 2019. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Fisher, Jennifer. Ballet Matters: A Cultural Memoir of Dance Dreams and Empowering Realities. Jefferson, nc: McFarland, 2018. – Nutcracker Nation: How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. – “From Post-Ballet to Post-Modern: The 1972 Debut of Toronto’s GroundBreaking 15 Dance Collective.” In Canadian Dance: Visions and Stories, ed. Selma Landen Odom and Mary Jane Warner, 339–44. Toronto: Dance Collection Danse Press/es, 2004. Forsythe, William. “Choreographic Objects.” In William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography: It Starts from Any Point, ed. Steven Spier, 90–2. New York: Routledge, 2011. Forzley, Richard, and Grant Strate. “Ballet British Columbia.” In The Canadian Encyclopedia, May 2011. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ ballet-british-columbia. Foster, Susan Leigh. “The Ballerina’s Phallic Pointe.” In Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture, and Power, ed. Susan Leigh Foster, 1–24. New York: Routledge, 2004. – Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. New York: Routledge, 2011. – “Choreographing History.” In Choreographing History, ed. Susan Leigh Foster, 3–21. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. – “Walking and Other Choreographic Tactics: Danced Inventions of Theatricality and Performativity.” SubStance 31, no. 2–3 (2002): 125–46. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979. Fraleigh, Sondra. Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Fraleigh, Sondra, and Tamah Nakamura. Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. New York: Routledge, 2006. Franklin, Kate. “Kate Franklin.” https://www.trainingsocietyofvancouver.ca/ katefranklin.

349

350

Franko, Mark. Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. – “Splintered Encounters: The Critical Reception to William Forsythe in the United States, 1979–1989.” In William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography: It Starts from Any Point, ed. Steven Spier, 38–50. New York: Routledge, 2011. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Friedenberg, Tara Cheyenne. “A Canada–Italy Dance-Theatre Collaboration.” The Dance Centre Blog. 24 August 2015. https://www.thedancecentre.ca/ artists_in_residence/a_canada_italy_dance_theatre_collaboration. – Interview with Peter Dickinson. Vancouver, 24 September 2014. – Interview with Peter Dickinson. Vancouver, 4 August 2016. – Interview with Peter Dickinson. Vancouver, 8 May 2019. – “Long Form Math: Four Arguments for Being Weird.” SpiderWebShowPerformance, 30 May 2017. https://spiderwebshow.ca/long-form-math. Gagnon, Noam. Interview with Justine A. Chambers, Peter Dickinson, and Alexa Mardon. Vancouver, 23 March 2017. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Gaulier, Philippe. “Du Bouffon: Entretien avec Philippe Gaulier.” With Paul Lefebvre. Jeu 41 (1986): 42–51. – The Tormentor. Paris: Éditions Filmiko, 2007. Gee, Dana. “Dancing on the Edge Festival still light on its feet after three decades.” Vancouver Sun, 4 July 2018. https://vancouversun.com/entertainment/ local-arts/dancing-on-the-edge-festival-still-light-on-its-feet-after-three-decades. George-Graves, Nadine. “Magnetic Fields: Too Dance for Theater, Too Theater for Dance.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, ed. Nadine George-Graves, 1–16. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Gerecke, Alana. “Dance as ‘Lead Card’ in the Development of Simon Fraser University’s Fine and Performing Arts.” In Renegade Bodies: Canadian Dance in the 1970s, ed. Allana C. Lindgren and Kaija Pepper, 141–54. Toronto: Dance Collection Danse Press/es, 2012. – “Moving Publics: Site-Based Dance and Urban Spatial Politics.” PhD diss., Simon Fraser University, 2016. Giannachi, Gabriella. Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday. Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2016. Gilman, Sander. The Jew’s Body. New York: Routledge, 1991. Glass, Aaron. “The Thin Edge of the Wedge: Dancing around the Potlatch Ban, 1921–1951.” In Right to Dance: Dancing for Rights, ed. Naomi M. Jackson, 51–82. Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2004. Gnam, James. Interview with Justine A. Chambers, Peter Dickinson, and Alexa Mardon. Vancouver, 23 March 2016.

Bibliography

Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1974. – Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Goodman, Vanessa. Email to Peter Dickinson. 30 September 2017. – Interview with Justine A. Chambers, Peter Dickinson, and Alexa Mardon. Vancouver, 11 February 2016. Gould, Glenn. So You Want to Write a Fugue? New York: Schirmer, 1964. Graham, Peter. “The New Left Cultural Front: A Lens on Toronto Arts and 15 Dance Lab.” In Renegade Bodies: Canadian Dance in the 1970s, ed. Allana C. Lindgren and Kaija Pepper, 189–211. Toronto: Dance Canada Danse Press/es, 2012. Grenier, Margaret. Interview with Justine A. Chambers. Vancouver, 19 June 2017. Griffin, Kevin. “Canada’s Only Indigenous Dance Festival Celebrates its 10th Year.” Vancouver Sun, 28 February 2017. https://vancouversun.com/entertain ment/local-arts/canadas-only-indigenous-dance-festival-celebrates-its-10th-year. – “Crystal Pite: Back and Forth from Vancouver to Frankfurt.” Vancouver Sun, 3 May 2011. https://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/crystal-pite-back-andforth-from-vancouver-to-frankfurt. Hamera, Judith. Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference, and Connection in the Global City. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Harris, Andrea. Making Ballet American: Modernism before and beyond Balanchine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Harris-Warrick, Rebecca. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Harvie, Jen. Fair Play: Art, Performance, and Neoliberalism. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Hill Strategies Research Inc. British Columbia Arts Funding Comparisons: Analysis of the Revenue Sources of Selected B.C. Arts Organizations and Similar Organizations in Other Provinces. Report prepared for the Alliance for Arts and Culture. December 2015. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ 5266d49be4b0bc5cd29ee8e0/t/56c49d0be321405712151db5/1455725840469/ Alliance2_funding_comparisons.pdf. – A Statistical Profile of Artists in Canada in 2016 (with summary information about cultural workers). sia Report no. 49. March 2019. http://hillstrategies. com/resource/statistical-profile-of-artists-in-canada-in-2016. Hirabayashi, Gordon. Good Times, Bad Times: Idealism Is Realism. Canadian Quaker Pamphlet no. 22. Argenta: Argenta Friends Press, 1985. Hirabayashi, Jay. “A New Era for Dance in Vancouver.” In Vancouver Forum 1: Old Powers, New Forces, ed. Max Wyman, 117–23. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1992. – Email to Peter Dickinson. 4 May 2019. – Interview with Peter Dickinson. Vancouver, 28 September 2016. Home-Cook, George. Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015.

351

352

Ireland, Ann. “Margaret Dragu and the Drama of Performance.” Canadian Art 30, no. 1 (2013): 104–7. Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York: Routledge, 2011. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961. Jeannerod, Marc. Motor Cognition: What Actions Tell the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Jones, Amelia, and Adrian Heathfield, eds. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History. Bristol: Intellect, 2012. Joseph, Miranda. Against the Romance of Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Karayanni, Stavros Stavrou. Dancing Fear and Desire: Race, Sexuality, and Imperial Politics in Middle Eastern Dance. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004. Kendrick, Lynne. “A Paidic Aesthetic: An Analysis of Games in the Ludic Pedagogy of Philippe Gaulier.” Theatre, Dance, and Performance Training 2, no. 1 (2011): 72–85. King, Barnaby. “Close/Clown Encounters with History: From Mimesis to Kinesis in Practice as Research.” Theatre Topics 23, no. 2 (2013): 113–28. Kitsos, Rob. Interview with Justine A. Chambers, Peter Dickinson, and Alexa Mardon. Vancouver, 27 January 2016. – Interview with Nancy Tam. Destelheide, Belgium, 15 July 2016. Klein, Susan Blakely. Ankoko Buto: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness. New York: Cornell University East Asia Papers, 1988. “Kokoro Dumps on Dance Centre Facility.” Kokoro Moon 1, no. 1 (1991): 3–5. Kwan, SanSan. Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kwan, Ziyian. Email to Peter Dickinson. 24 February 2017. – Interview with Peter Dickinson. Vancouver, 6 June 2016. – “what I am dancing sundays.” Dumb Instrument Dance, 28 January 2012. http://dumbinstrumentdance.com/2012/01/28/sundays-2. Laban, Rudolf. Choreutics [1966]. Binstead: Dance Books, 2011. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Lederman, Marsha. “Ballet bc Reborn.” Globe and Mail, 13 April 2010, R1. LeFebvre Gnam, Natalie. Email invitation to Peter Dickinson. 20 August 2014. – Interview with Peter Dickinson. Vancouver, 29 August 2016. Lepecki, André. “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances.” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2010): 28–48. – “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the Task of the Dancer.” TDR : The Drama Review 57, no. 4 (2013): 13–27. – Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Bibliography

Lindgren, Allana C. “Critiquing On-Screen Stereotypes of Dancers: Baryshnikov (1974) and Sonovovitch (1975).” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 30, no. 5 (2013): 449–61. – “‘The Other “D”’ Keynote Address: Disciplinarity and the Future of Dance in Canadian Universities.” Performance Matters 2, no. 2 (2016): 84–94. http:// performancematters-thejournal.com/index.php/pm/article/view/55/81. Lintott, Sheila. “Superiority in Humor Theory.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74, no. 4 (2016): 347–58. Lust, Annette. From the Greek Mimes to Marcel Marceau and Beyond: Mimes, Actors, Pierrots, and Clowns. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2000. Madison, D. Soyini. Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. Thousand Oaks, ca: Sage, 2005. Manning, Erin. Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. – “Choreography as Mobile Architecture.” Performance Paradigm: A Journal of Performance and Contemporary Culture 9 (2013). http://www.performance paradigm.net/index.php/journal/article/view/134/133. – “The Dance of Attention.” Inflexions 6 (January 2013): 337–64. http://www. inflexions.org/n6_manning.pdf. – The Minor Gesture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Manning, Susan. “Pina Bausch: 1940–2009.” TDR : The Drama Review 54, no. 1 (2010): 10–13. Mansbridge, Joanna. “The Comic Bodies and Obscene Voices of Burlesque.” In Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice, ed. Peter Dickinson, Anne Higgins, Paul St. Pierre, Diana Solomon, and Sean Zwagerman, 97–110. Lanham: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. Marcuse, Richard. Dance in British Columbia: A Report on Modern Dance and Ballet. Vancouver: Vancouver Ballet Society, 1979. Mardon, Alexa. “Family Dinner.” Issue Magazine 2, no. 3 (2014): 32–5. – Interview with Justine A. Chambers and Peter Dickinson. Vancouver, 12 September 2017. Mariano, Victor. Email to Peter Dickinson. 10 November 2010. Martin, Josh. Email to Peter Dickinson. 5 May 2019. Martin, Randy. “Dance Ethnography and the Limits of Representation.” In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane C. Desmond, 321–44. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. – “Of Dance, Derivatives, Decolonization, and Kinesthemes.” TkH 21 (2014): 73–8. – “A Precarious Dance, A Derivative Sociality.” TDR : The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 62–77. Maslow, Abraham. Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper, 1954. – “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review 50, no. 4 (1943): 370–96.

353

354

McConachie, Bruce. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave, 2008. McDermott, Molly. Interview with Alexa Mardon. Vancouver, 19 September 2016. McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium Is the Massage. With Quentin Fiore and Jerome Agel. New York: Penguin, 1967. – Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. The Laws of Media. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Mehra, Samantha. “Kokoro Dance: The Body Electric.” Dance Collection Danse 73 (2013): 26–32. Miki, Roy. Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice. Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2005. Miller, Kiri. Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Morrow, Fiona. “Ballet bc’s Future Up to Creditors.” Globe and Mail, 9 January 2009, R3. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Murray, Timothy. Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2004. Neuman, Gdalit. “Dancing between Old Worlds and New: Max Nordau’s New Jew Idea and its Manifestation in Pre-State Israeli Folk Dance.” Performance Matters 2, no. 2 (2016): 110–22. http://performancematters-thejournal.com/ index.php/pm/article/view/57/83. Noland, Carrie. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009. Nordau, Max. “Jewry of Muscle” [1903]. In The Jew in the Modern World, 2nd ed., ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, 547. New York: Oxford, 1995. Pepper, Kaija. “Championing the Individual, Believing in the Dance: Human Rights in the Work of Paula Ross, Jay Hirabayashi, and Judith Marcuse.” In Right to Dance: Dancing for Rights, ed. Naomi M. Jackson, 193–218. Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2004. – The Dance Teacher: A Biography of Kay Armstrong. Toronto: Dance Collection Danse Press/es, 2001. – The Man Next Door Dances: The Art of Peter Bingham. Toronto: Dance Collection Dance Press/es, 2007. – Theatrical Dance in Vancouver: 1880s–1920s. Toronto: Dance Collection Danse Press/es, 2000. Perkins Deneault, Tessa. “Renée Sigouin’s Dream Apprenticeship: On Board with Crystal Pite’s Kidd Pivot.” Dance International, 16 November 2018. http://

Bibliography

danceinternational.org/renee-sigouins-dream-apprenticeship-board-crystal-piteskidd-pivot. Peters, Deanna. Interview with Peter Dickinson and Alexa Mardon. Vancouver, 22 April 2016. Phelan, Peggy. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Choreographing Writing.” In Choreographing History, ed. Susan Leigh Foster, 200–10. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. – Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993. Pilkington, Marc. The Global Financial Crisis and the New Monetary Consensus. New York: Routledge, 2014. plastic orchid factory. Program note to _post. 26 May 2011. http://plasticorchid factory.com/post. Preece, Bronwyn. “white-bodied poetry: beaching the beached.” Dance, Movement, and Spiritualities 2, no. 2 (2015): 159–79. – “Wrecking Butoh: Dancing Poetic Shores.” In The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, ed. Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, 464–80. New York: Routledge, 2019. Radial Change: Beginning with the 70s. Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, 22 June–12 August 2018. Raibmon, Paige. Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the LateNineteenth Century Northwest Coast. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Raymond, David. Interview with Justine A. Chambers. Vancouver, 10 June 2017. Reist, Justin. Email to Peter Dickinson. 12 November 2010. Renée, Amédée. Les nièces de Mazarin: études de moeurs et de caractères au XVIIe siècles [1838], 2nd ed. Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1856. “Reviews.” Kokoro Moon 3, nos. 2–4 (1993): 4, 9–11. Reynolds, Dee, and Matthew Reason, eds. Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices. Bristol: Intellect, 2012. Ridout, Nicholas. Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Robinson, Dylan, Kanonhsyonne Janice C. Hill, Armand Garnet Ruffo, Selena Couture, and Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen. “Rethinking the Practice and Performance of Indigenous Land Acknowledgement.” Canadian Theatre Review 177 (2019): 20–30. Rogals, Alex. “Review of Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, by Sondra Fraleigh and Tamah Nakamura.” Asian Theatre Journal 36, no. 1 (2019): 266–9. Román, David. Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Rosiek, Jerry Lee, Jimmy Snyder, and Scott L. Pratt. “The New Materialisms and Indigenous Theories of Non-Human Agency: Making the Case for Respectful Anti-Colonial Engagement.” Qualitative Inquiry (February 2019). doi:10.1177/ 1077800419830135. Saxton, Nadine, and Katherine Cornell. Toronto Dance Theatre 1968–1998: Stages in a Journey. Toronto: Captus Press, 1998.

355

356

Schneider, Rebecca. “Performance and Documentation: Acting in Ruins and the Question of Duration.” In Points of Convergence: Alternative Views on Performance, eds. Marta Dziewa ska and André Lepecki, 73–85. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2017. – Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge, 2011. – Theater and History. London: Palgrave, 2014. Schneider, Rebecca, with Lucia Ruprecht. “In Our Hands: An Ethics of Gestural Response-ability. Rebecca Schneider in conversation with Lucia Ruprecht.” Performance Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2017): 108–25. http://www.performance philosophy.org/journal/article/view/161/173. Shaw, Nancy. Lost and Found: Kidd Pivot, Dance Documenta, no. 2. Vancouver: Eponymous Productions and Arts Society, 2006. Shea Murphy, Jacqueline. “Clearing the Path: Contemporary Dance, Indigenous Methodologies, and Michelle Olson’s Evening in Paris.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 15, no. 2 (2013): 181–94. – The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Shepherd, Simon. “The Institution of Training.” Performance Research 14, no. 2 (2009): 5–15. Silver, Rachel. “Adaptation.” Blog post, 2 September 2016. http://www.plastic orchidfactory.com/digital-folk-creation-blog/2016/8/15/adaptation-august. – “The Games.” Blog post, 4 September 2016. http://www.plasticorchidfactory. com/digital-folk-creation-blog/2016/8/23/the-games-august. – “Memory.” Blog post, 1 September 2016. http://www.plasticorchidfactory.com/ digital-folk-creation-blog/2016/8/15/memory-july. – “Wild Animals.” Blog post, 12 September 2016. http://www.plasticorchidfac tory.com/digital-folk-creation-blog/2016/8/23/wild-animals-august. Simon, Gail. “Relational Ethnography: Writing and Reading in Research Relationships.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 14, no. 1 (2013): n.p. Sklar, Deirdre. “Unearthing Kinesthesia: Groping among Cross-Cultural Models of the Senses in Performance.” In The Senses in Performance, ed. Sally Banes and André Lepecki, 38–46. New York: Routledge, 2007. Smith, Janet. “Flicker Brings Modern Visual Wonder to Traditional First Nations Dance.” The Georgia Straight, 26 May 2016. https://www.straight.com/arts/ 706491/flicker-brings-modern-visual-wonder-traditional-first-nations-dance. – “Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg Delves into Victorian Funerary Culture with Highgate.” The Georgia Straight, 25 April 2013. http://www.straight.com/arts/ 375011/tara-cheyenne-friedenberg-delves-victorian-funerary-culture-highgate. – “Vanessa Goodman Finds Dance Beauty in Balloons at Dancing on the Edge.” The Georgia Straight, 2 July 2014. https://www.straight.com/arts/676151/ vanessa-goodman-finds-dance-beauty-balloons-dancing-edge. – “What Belongs to You Conjures Thrilling Visual Magic.” The Georgia Straight,

Bibliography

7 July 2014. https://www.straight.com/arts/680731/what-belongs-you-conjuresthrilling-visual-magic. Solomon, Alisa. “Fiddler’s Bottle Dance and the Transformation of ‘Tradition.’” TDR : The Drama Review 55, no. 3 (2011): 21–30. Spångberg, Mårten. “Immaterial Performance.” Performance Research 11, no. 3 (2006): 68–9. Spatz, Ben. What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research. London: Routledge, 2015. Spiegel, Nina. Embodying Hebrew Culture: Aesthetics, Athletics, and Dance in the Jewish Community of Mandate Palestine. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013. Staub, Shalom. “Repertoire, Values, and Social Meaning in the Wedding Dances of a Yemenite Jewish Village in Israel.” Dance Research Journal 17, no. 2 (1985): 55–63. Tanner, Adrienne. “Can the Royal Winnipeg Ballet Get Past Its #MeToo Moment?” Maclean’s, 30 July 2018. https://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/can-the-royalwinnipeg-ballet-get-past-its-metoo-moment. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Taylor, Gretel. “Empty? A Critique of the Notion of ‘Emptiness’ in Butoh and Body Weather Training.” Theatre, Dance, and Performance Training 1, no. 1 (2010): 72–87. Telford, Lesley. Interview with Peter Dickinson. Vancouver, 14 March 2017. The Contingency Plan. “Mandate.” 2018. https://www.contingencyplan collective.com. Thompson, M.J. “Sincerely Dancing: Bill T. Jones’s Sleight-of-Hand.” TDR : The Drama Review 49, no. 2 (2005): 75–86. Todd, Robert. “No Mean Heritage: Dance in Vancouver: Early Days.” Dance in Canada 16 (1978): 2–4. Tomkinson, Matthew J. “Get Thee Behind Me: The Back-Body as a Supporting Figure in Contemporary Performance.” Performance Matters 5, no. 1 (2019): 46–59. http://performancematters-thejournal.com/index.php/pm/article/view/ 181/275. Tomko, Linda J. “Considering Causation and Conditions of Possibility: Practitioners and Patrons of New Dance in Progressive-Era America.” In Rethinking Dance History: Issues and Methodologies, ed. Geraldine Morris and Larraine Nicholas, 173–85. London: Routledge, 2018. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: paj, 1982. Vass-Rhee, Freya. “Dancing Music: The Intermodality of The Forsythe Company.” In William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography: It Starts from Any Point, ed. Steven Spier, 73–89. New York: Routledge, 2011. Vizenor, Gerald. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

357

– Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Wasserman, Jerry. Spectacle of Empire: Marc Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006. Watts, Vanessa. “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 20–34. Welton, Martin. Feeling Theatre. London: Palgrave, 2012. Whalen, Zach. “Play Along: An Approach to Videogame Music.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 4, no. 1 (2014). http:// www.gamestudies.org/0401/whalen. White, Stephen, ed. Outside In/Inside Out: The Vancouver Dance Aesthetic. Vancouver: The Dance Centre, 2007. Wilcox, Emily E. “When Place Matters: Provincializing the ‘Global.’” In Rethinking Dance History: Issues and Methodologies, ed. Geraldine Morris and Larraine Nicholas, 160–72. London: Routledge, 2018. – “Women Dancing Otherwise: The Queer Feminism of Gu Jiani’s Right and Left.” In Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings, ed. Clare Croft, 67–82. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Windreich, Leland. “June Roper.” Dance Chronicle 10, no. 1 (1987): 105–41. – June Roper: Ballet Starmaker. Toronto: Dance Collection Danse Press/es, 1999. Wyman, Max. Dance Canada: An Illustrated History. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1989. – Max Wyman Revealing Dance: Selected Writings, 1970s–2001. Toronto: Dance Collection Danse Press/es, 2001. Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Yeats, W.B. “Among School Children.” In The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, revised 2nd ed., ed. Richard J. Finneran, 215–17. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. Zaiontz, Keren. Theatre and Festivals. London: Palgrave, 2018.

358

Index

8 Days, 291, 299, 343n29 15 Dance Lab, 90–1, 330n32 Action at a Distance, 19, 112, 195, 308 Adams, Miriam, 90–1, 330n32, 330n37 Adler, Barbara, 221, 242, 261; and Lesley Telford’s Spooky Action, 240, 248–9, 250, 252 Alamian, Anousha, on Long Division, 243, 247 Albert, Mary Louise, 34, 165. See also Chutzpah! Festival Allan, Mauryne, 4, 119. See also Mountain Dance Theatre Alleyne, John, 34, 262, 263 Aloi, Santa, 5 Ancer, Rosario, 23 anthropology, and performance studies, 8, 11, 12 Arboleda, Mark, 234–6 archives: of the body, 97, 306; of movement and place, 181, 281–2; and/in performance, 222, 285, 289, 320–1; theories of, 285–6; and Vancouver dance history, 284, 287–8, 293, 304, 332n7 Armstrong, Kay, 4 arts funding: in British Columbia, 65, 186–7, 341–2n7; for dance in Vancouver, 120, 266, 269, 271–2 Arts Umbrella, 42, 65, 285; Lesley Telford’s teaching for, 219, 239, 240, 245; and pre-professional dance training in Vancouver, 5, 213–14, 327n3; relationship with Ballet bc, 265 Ashbee, Daina, 270, 299 Avery, Laura, 114, 215, 317–18 Baker, Peggy, 43, 217, 304 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 7, 33, 83

Balanchine, George, 79, 239 Ballet bc, 10, 16, 69, 107, 194; contemporary repertoire of, 263–4; Emily Molnar’s direction of, 108, 226, 261–8, 272; financial insolvency of, 35, 262; foundations of, 4, 120, 261; John Alleyne’s direction of, 262; and Lesley Telford, 239–40, 261; and plastic orchid factory, 17, 34–6, 38, 42; and Queen Elizabeth Theatre, 113, 261, 263, 265; relationship with Arts Umbrella, 213, 327n3; and Rob Kitsos, 234–6, 261 Ballet Horizons, 4 Ballett Frankfurt, 237, 262 Barclay, Lara, 318; in Vanessa Goodman’s Wells Hill, 204–9 Baroque dance: and colonialism, 39– 40; and its digital remediation, 57, 60; and Gilles Deleuze, 49, 59; Mark Franko on, 44–5, 48; and neobaroque aesthetics, 48, 54, 66; and plastic orchid factory’s _post, 17, 30, 31, 40, 44–5, 47 Barry, Karissa, 314, 341n5; in Vanessa Goodman’s Wells Hill, 205–7, 210 Barton, Amber Funk, 109, 214, 306, 313, 341n5; and Firehall Arts Centre, 172 Batsheva Dance Company, 175, 201, 267 battery opera, 107, 178, 221, 309, 311; collaborations with Benoît Lachambre, 270–1; collaborations with plastic orchid factory, 35, 61 Bausch, Pina, 123, 224, 229, 333n20, 339n10 Beamish, Joshua, 109, 165–6, 214, 331n4 Bel, Jérôme, 35–6, 37, 64, 327n8 Benjamin, Walter, 319–20, 321 Bennathan, Serge, 27, 43, 135, 195, 341n3; teaching, 214, 240

360

Bennett, Jane, 146, 196, 230 Bingham, Peter, 38, 178, 184, 319; and edam choreographic series, 85, 121, 169, 180; and Embrace the Feeling Arms, 72–3, 74; and Western Front dance studio, 67, 69–70. See also edam Bishop, Claire, and delegated performance, 280 Boca del Lupo: and Micro-Performance Series (Granville Island), 49, 98; and Progress Lab 1422, 101 bouffon: Philippe Gaulier on, 83, 85–6; and work of Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, 18, 79, 85, 89, 95, 104 Bourget, Barbara, 18–19, 107, 312; classes at kw Studios, 66, 117; dance training and career, 4, 119–20, 218; discovery of butoh, 122, 124–5; and edam, 109, 121, 122, 332nn12–13; in The Book of Love, 122–3; and Vancouver International Dance Festival, 141, 164; and Wreck Beach Butoh process, 118, 128–9, 130–62, 334n37, 335n62; and Ziyian Kwan, 174, 178, 180–1, 187. See also Kokoro Dance; Vancouver International Dance Festival; Wreck Beach Butoh Brecht, Bertolt, 36, 80, 327n8 Brett, Delia, 60, 70, 183, 308. See also machinenoisy British Columbia Arts Council, 64–5, 187 Browne, Rachel, 217, 331n2 Buddhism, 119, 192, 228, 299; relationship to butoh, 124, 134 Burrows, Jonathan, 64, 74 butoh, 7, 18; aesthetic and cultural foundations of, 122–4; apprenticeship, 134–5; and gender, 138–9; Kokoro Dance’s trans-Pacific adaptations of, 117, 124–5, 152; and ma, 136, 137, 142, 148, 333n18; and the non-human world, 146–7; and overcoming mind-body dualisms, 131, 141; and slowness, 130, 143; Sondra Fraleigh on metamorphotic quality of, 19, 129, 131, 139, 152; and walking, 130–1, 145. See also Hijikata, Tatsumi; Ohno, Kazuo; Wreck Beach Butoh

Canada Dance Festival, 26, 335n2 Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists, 65, 67 Caulfield, Cori, 262 Cavell, Richard, 11, 101, 264; on Marshall McLuhan and Wells Hill process, 202, 203, 206 Chambers, Justine A., 107, 109, 270, 313; choreographic repertoire, 43, 135, 195; collaborations with Evann Siebens, 113, 320; collaborations with Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, 87– 8, 98–9; and Family Dinner, 273–82, 299, 321; gestural practice of, 274, 277, 278, 280–1; and Our Present Dance Histories project, 7, 12, 20, 44, 64, 70, 284–321; residency at The Dance Centre, 283–4; teaching in Vancouver, 214, 285; training of, 284, 285, 331n2 Chapple, Julianne, 71–2, 74 Charnock, Nigel, 76, 79, 85–6, 89, 91. See also dv8 Physical Theatre Chase, Sarah, 167–9, 220 Chessa, Emily, 239–40, 261 Chouinard, Marie, 108, 264, 267 Chutzpah! Festival, 34, 92, 115, 237; and presentation of international dance in Vancouver, 165, 263; and Vanessa Goodman’s Wells Hill, 202–5 Clarke, Denise, 76, 79, 89 Clausen, Barb, 201, 263, 266, 269, 342n10. See also DanceHouse Coastal First Nations Dance Festival, 23–5, 28, 164, 317, 326n5 Co.erasga, 23, 42, 43, 178, 317 Cole, Gisa, 4, 120, 178, 213. See also Main Dance; Prism Dance Theatre Colonization, and dance in Vancouver, 5, 28, 30, 39–40, 118 community: affective and artistic constitution of, in Vancouver dance, 7, 63, 286, 290–4, 300, 303–4; choreographing of, through dance, 7–8; practice of Kokoro Dance, 18, 117– 18, 131, 139; practice of Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, 86, 92, 106; and structures of support, 16, 184–8, 214, 218–19 Company 605, 27, 107, 316; collaborations with Theatre Replacement,

100–1; name change, 112–13; and Vital Few, 113–15 Conquergood, Dwight, 8–9, 11, 343n26 contact improvisation, 38, 227, 332n13; Peter Bingham’s practice of, 70, 72, 121 Contemporary Dancers (Winnipeg), 108, 331n2 Contingency Plan, The, 19, 178, 308, 316; collaborative ethos of, 195; dissolution of, 112 Cooper, Anne, 70, 97–8, 318 Culhane, Dara, 11, 102, 104, 290 Cunningham, Merce, 67, 117, 217 Cyr, Stéphanie: collaboration on Long Division, 245, 247; in work by Lesley Telford, 248, 249, 252

Index

Daelik, 60, 70, 97, 309. See also machinenoisy Daly, Ann, 13 Dance Central (video game), 47, 49 Dance Centre, The, 29, 30, 31, 113; and Ballet bc, 262–3, 328–9n9; and Dance In Vancouver, 23, 164–5, 205, 287; as institutional home of Vancouver dance, 66, 218, 269–72, 325n56, 342nn10–11; and Lola MacLaughlin’s Provincial Essays, 110–11; and Our Present Dance Histories project, 20–1, 283–321; and work by Rob Kitsos, 224, 261; and work by Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, 92; and work by Vanessa Goodman, 175, 195, 205; and work by Ziyian Kwan, 175, 178–9, 184 dance companies: classical vs contemporary, 108; lifespans and legacy, 109–10, 112; and not-for-profit incorporation, 108–9; and the passing on of repertoire, 110, 304, 306; renaming of, 109, 112–13; in Vancouver, 107–16 dance festivals: hierarchies within, 23; as main presentation platform in Vancouver, 16, 51, 164–73, 263 DanceHouse, 115, 165, 194, 201, 342n10; and premiere of Vanessa Goodman’s Wells Hill, 202, 203; and presentation of international dance in Vancouver, 263–8, 272

dance institutions: funding of, in Vancouver, 261–72; hierarchical organization of, 108 Dance In Vancouver Biennial, 21, 23, 164, 167, 335n3; attempts to Indigenize, 27; and Justine A. Chambers’s “Choreographic Walks,” 284; and Our Present Dance Histories, 60, 287, 300, 303, 321; and Vanessa Goodman’s Wells Hill, 203, 205, 300 Dancemakers (Toronto), 10, 42 dance notation, 47, 69, 334n40 Dancers Dancing, 34, 42, 317; Vanessa Goodman as company member of, 111, 195, 212 Dancers of Damelahamid, 23–8, 107, 164, 317, 325n51 Dances for a Small Stage, 197, 203, 205, 262 dance-theatre: as a form, 220, 222, 232; The Objecthood of Chairs as experiment in, 229, 232; scholarship on, 223; Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg and, 17, 76–80, 91, 99, 220, 222; Vancouver’s contributions to, 26, 101, 187, 236–7 Dance Victoria, 92, 215 dance video games: and plastic orchid factory’s Digital Folk, 17, 31, 47–57 Danchuk, Caitlynn, 245, 252 Dancing on the Edge Festival, 23, 68, 118, 146; and Amber Funk Barton’s For You, For Me, 172; and Deanna Peters’s NEW RAW , 169–71; and Firehall stage, 171–2; historical importance and longevity of, 164–5, 335n2; and Josh Beamish’s Pierced, 165–6; and Justine A. Chambers’s Family Dinner, 278, 281; and plastic orchid factory’s Natalie, 37; presentation format, 166–7; and Raven Spirit Dance’s Northern Journey, 168–9; and Rob Kitsos’s Barego, 195; and Sarah Chase’s a crazy kind of hope, 167–8; Vanessa Goodman at, 195, 197–8; Ziyian Kwan at, 178, 181, 182, 188 Dangeli, Mique’l, 23, 298; and Coast Salish dance history, 6, 25–6, 323n12, 325n51 Davies, Olivia C., 316–17 de Certeau, Michel, 224, 225, 227

361

DeFrantz, Thomas, 14–15 Deleuze, Gilles, 49, 59, 215, 277 Denham, Alison, 85, 308; dance training of, 42–3; in Justine A. Chambers’s Family Dinner, 276, 278, 281; in Lola MacLaughlin’s Provincial Essays, 111; in plastic orchid factory’s _post, 39, 44, 45 DeVries, Katie, 245, 252 Didier, Ben, 107, 203, 206, 210 digital media: in the work of plastic orchid factory, 47–59; in the work of Vanessa Goodman, 202–11 Dinuzzi, Dario: collaborations with plastic orchid factory, 48, 49; in Vanessa Goodman’s Wells Hill, 205–7, 210 documentation: and Our Present Dance Histories project, 7, 20, 284–94, 304, 320; Randy Martin on dance history and, 15; Rebecca Schneider on performance and, 307; and the Talking Thinking Dancing Body series, 321 Dolan, Jill, 13 Dragu, Margaret, 89–90, 330n32 Dumb Instrument Dance, 19, 113, 178–9, 309 Dunbar, Desirée, 34 dv8 Physical Theatre, 76, 85, 339n10

362

École supérieure de ballet du Québec (Montreal), 34, 43 economics: of dancing bodies, 6, 35, 185; of dancing in Canada, 65; of dancing in Vancouver, 65–7, 181, 186–8, 271–2; and delegated performance, 280; and fortunes of Ballet bc, 262, 265–6 edam (Experimental Dance and Music): formation and founding members, 18, 38, 66–7, 109–10, 117, 121–2; historical company members, 58, 70, 98, 108, 318, 319; studio space, 70–3, 130, 134, 194, 294; and Ziyian Kwan’s bite down gently and howL, 180–2, 184 Elkins, Doug, Fräulein Maria, 267–8 Elliott, Susan, 70, 85, 98–9, 110, 178 Elswit, Kate, 223, 333n21, 339n10 Émard, Sylvain, 105, 342n10

Eponymous (management company), 27, 113, 266 Erickson, Arthur, 24, 269 Escamillan, Ralph, 215, 315 ethnography: and dance, 8–9, 17, 33, 39; and dance videos, 50, 52; and humour, 102–3; and memoir, 12–13, 14; as method, 11–12, 15; and Our Present Dance Histories, 288, 293; and relationality, 14; and Rob Kitsos’s Death and Flying, 254–5 Faizo-Gas, Leon, 234–6 Ferguson, Alex Lazaridis, 23, 240n23 Festival of New Dance (Newfoundland), 27, 335n2 Firehall Arts Centre, 36, 68, 89, 97, 294; home of Dancing on the Edge Festival, 164, 164, 167, 171–2; and Out Innerspace’s Major Motion Picture, 215–16; and performances by Ziyian Kwan, 178, 182, 184, 190, 192–3 Firkins, Yvonne, 3–4 Fisher, Jennifer: and memoir ethnography, 12–13; on The Nutcracker, 327n7 flamenco, 10, 23, 90 Fletcher, Alexis, 38, 234–6 Forsythe, William, 20, 223, 224, 239; on choreographic objects, 230, 336n9; connection to contemporary Vancouver dance scene, 236–7, 262; early critical reception of, 236; Erin Manning and Brian Massumi on, 221–2, 229–30, 235, 244, 250, 252– 3, 259, 339n19, 340n31; and Herman Schmerman, 263–4, 329n2; and Pina Bausch, 224, 339–40n22 Forté, Marie Claire, 289, 291 Foster, Susan Leigh, 15, 227, 324n27, 330n12 Fraleigh, Sondra: on butoh, 19, 129, 137, 146, 152; on Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, 123, 139, 333n25 Franca, Celia, 218 Franklin, Kate, 98–100, 219, 281 Franko, Mark: and Baroque dance, 44, 45, 48, 327n13; on the early reception of William Forsythe, 236 Fredriksson, Emmalena, 219, 315

Freeman, Elizabeth, 60, 63, 298, 326n11 Friedenberg, Tara Cheyenne, 43, 64, 107, 167, 172, 195, 310; and bANGER , 79, 80, 88, 92; collaboration with Silvia Gribaudi on empty.swimming.pool, 92–4; on dance and theatre, 17, 75–8, 100–1, 220, 223; and feminist bouffon, 18, 79, 86, 92, 95; and Goggles, 79, 83– 4, 88; and Highgate, 71, 84–5, 88; and How to Be, 77, 98–100, 102; and I can’t remember the word for I can’t remember, 88, 95–7; and Nick and Juanita, 80, 88; and the performance of gender, 79–83; and Porno Death Cult, 86–9; works with Peter Dickinson on Bus Dance, 103–5. See also Tara Cheyenne Performance friendship: as a medium for dance, 51, 59, 60, 149, 225; and the Vancouver dance community, 225, 292, 296, 297, 304

Index

Gagnon, Noam, 27, 70, 112, 315, 331n2; collaborations with Ziyian Kwan, 19, 188, 189–92, 193; and Dancing on the Edge Festival, 171; teaching at Modus Operandi, 214; teaching at prep. See also Vision Impure Gan, Natalie Tin Yin, 100, 315 Garay, Judith, 34, 42, 317; revisiting of repertoire, 111; work with Vanessa Goodman, 194, 195, 212. See also Dancers Dancing Gardiner, Kyla, 248 Garland, Iris, 5, 195 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 257 Gaulier, Philippe, and bouffon, 79, 83, 85, 86 Gelley, Lisa, 27, 107; Aeriosa company member, 113; co-founds 605 Collective, 112; in Justine A. Chambers’s Family Dinner, 281; in Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg’s How to Be, 98–9; training and teaching, 213, 214; and Vanessa Goodman, 195, 200, 204. See also Company 605 gender: and the butoh body, 138–9; and the dance-theatre of Tara

Cheyenne Friedenberg, 18, 79–80, 83, 104; and Vanessa Goodman’s Container, 199–200; and the work of Ziyian Kwan, 182, 191–3 George-Graves, Nadine, 223 Gerecke, Alana, 183, 294, 311–12, 323n7; on site-based dance in Vancouver, 118, 149 Gerlock, Cort, 135, 225 gesture: and choreographic practice of Justine A. Chambers, 274–8; and dance-theatre of Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, 83, 89; and language in the work of Rob Kitsos and Lesley Telford, 20, 220–1, 225, 230, 245, 256–7; and Lola MacLaughlin’s Provincial Essays, 110; and Our Present Dance Histories, 20, 300, 307–21; and the temporality of performance, 21, 307; theories of, 280– 1, 306–7; and Vanessa Goodman’s Wells Hill, 207–8; in the work of plastic orchid factory, 36, 50 Gianacchi, Gabriella, 285–6 Gillis, Margie, 262 Gingras, Dana, 112, 214 Girard, Ria, 250, 252 Giselle (ballet), 37–8, 264, 341n3 Glass, Aaron, 5 Gnam, Conor, 38, 264 Gnam, James, 17, 92, 107, 113, 214, 306, 308–9; and ballet training, 31, 33–4, 40–1; collaborations with Vanessa Goodman, 193, 195, 204–5; collaborations with Ziyian Kwan, 19, 180–2; and Digital Folk, 47–59; and I Miss Doing Nothing, 60–3; and James, 35–6; and _post, 38–47. See also plastic orchid factory Goffman, Erving, 257, 341n57 Goh Ballet Academy, 5, 42, 65, 213, 239, 327n3 Goodman, Vanessa, 19, 107, 299, 308; collaborations with Loscil, 175, 198, 203, 210; collaborations with plastic orchid factory, 48, 56, 58, 61–2; collaborations with Ziyian Kwan, 175, 177, 179, 180–1, 193–4, 205; collective member of The Contingency Plan, 19, 112, 195; company member of Dancers Dancing, 111, 194–5,

363

212; and Container, 197–201; and Floating Upstream, 175; founds Action at a Distance, 195; growing up in Toronto home of Marshall McLuhan, 202–3; and Jewish dance, 198–200; studies at Simon Fraser University, 195, 212, 217; training in Gaga, 175, 200–1; and Wells Hill, 194, 197, 202–11, 266, 270; and What Belongs to You, 195–7. See also Action at a Distance; Contingency Plan, The Goodwin, Helen, 4, 320, 329n10 Gordan, Artemis, 5, 213, 239, 285, 327n3. See also Arts Umbrella Gotfrit, Martin, 224, 225, 226 Gould, Glenn: conversations with Marshall McLuhan, 202, 203, 205, 207, 211; recordings of Bach, 204–5; and Vanessa Goodman’s Wells Hill, 197, 208–11 Graham, Martha, 26, 217, 324n35, 326n7, 329n2 Grand Poney (Montreal), 37, 51 Grenier, Margaret, 23–6, 28, 30, 107, 317. See also Coastal First Nations Dance Festival; Dancers of Damelahamid Gribaudi, Sylvia: and A Corpo Libero, 91, 92; and collaboration with Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, 92–4 Groeneboer, Rob, 225 Grupo Corpo, 263, 267 Guattari, Félix, 277

364

Hamera, Judith: on the chronotopes of dance training, 33; on dance and community-making, 7, 8, 149, 286, 298; on dance technique and bodily archives, 97, 104, 181; on the temporal and spatial transmission of dance technique, 33, 212, 326n11 Hanson, Elissa, 69, 70, 215, 285, 312; in Deanna Peters’s NEW RAW , 170–1 Harbour Dance, 65, 117, 284, 294, 338n3; and Wreck Beach Butoh rehearsals, 134, 140, 143 Harris, Ken and Margaret, 23–4, 25 Harris Warrick, Rebecca, 45, 47 Harvie, Jen, 185, 280, 342n11 Hassan, Ahmed, 121, 332nn12–13 Hay, Deborah, 67

Hijikata, Tatsumi: and butoh’s origins, 122–4, 333n25; and butoh technique, 131, 334n40; and erotics of work, 138; legacy of, 134 Hirabayashi, Gordon, 125, 334n29 Hirabayashi, Jay, 18–19, 107, 174, 284, 313; in The Book of Love, 122– 3; discovery of and training in butoh, 122, 124–5, 333n25; and edam, 109, 117, 121, 332nn12–13; inspiration for Rage, 125, 334n29; and kw Studios, 66, 121; as member of Paul Ross Dance Company, 120–1; on Vancouver dance scene, 120, 332n10; and Vancouver International Dance Festival, 164; and Wreck Beach Butoh process, 118 127, 128– 9, 130–62, 334n37, 335n62. See also Kokoro Dance; Vancouver International Dance Festival; Wreck Beach Butoh history: atypical approach to, in this book, 3–8, 11–16; and Coast Salish dance genealogies, 22–30; dance artists as imperfect recording devices for, 284, 286, 289, 291; embodied transmission of, 20–1, 152, 302, 304, 306–7; and intersection of classical dance and colonialism, 39–40; and the transnational lineage of butoh, 18, 117, 123–5; Walter Benjamin on, 319–20, 321 Hite, Josh, 107, 273, 282, 284, 295 Ho, Bynh, 207, 209, 252, 320 Home-Cook, George: on auditory perception in performance, 236 Hong Kong Exile, 100, 315 humour: and dance-theatre of Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, 18, 79, 83–5, 89; and ethnography, 102–3; and performance art of Margaret Dragu, 89–90; satirical use of, in dance works by Miriam Adams, 90–1; superiority theory of, 104, 331n47 Hunter, Terry, 4, 120. See also Terminal City Dance identity: and dance video games, 47, 53; depersonalization of, in Justine A. Chambers’s Family Dinner, 277, 278; performance of, in works by Ziyian Kwan and Vanessa Goodman,

179–80, 197–200, 211; and urban dance communities, 8, 286 Indigenous dance: companies in Greater Vancouver area, 325n51; contemporaneity of, 23–30; history and sovereignty in Coast Salish territories, 5–6 Inverso Dance, 185, 240, 248, 314 Itcush, Amelia, 179, 212, 336n8 Jackson, Shannon, 184, 185, 188 Jamieson, Karen, 4, 120–1, 178, 220, 316; archival legacy of, 109, 306, 332n7. See also Terminal City Dance Japanese Canadian Redress Movement, 125, 334n29 Johansson, Farley, 70, 72, 74, 262 Judson Dance Theater, 67, 90, 123, 217, 333n20 Just Dance (video game), 47, 54

Labyrinth, The (MascallDance), 67–8, 121 Lachambre, Benoît, 178, 270–1 land: acknowledgments, 28–9, 326n14; and Indigenous dance, 24, 169; and Wreck Beach Butoh, 129, 130, 147 Laughlin, Joe, 34 Lee, Peggy, 179–80, 188 Lee, Su-Feh, 107, 221, 297, 309; collaborations with plastic orchid factory, 35, 37; review of BodyScan (with Benoît Lachambre), 270–1; and Talking Thinking Dancing Body series, 283. See also battery opera LeFebvre Gnam, Natalie, 17, 107, 113, 311; contributions to Vancouver dance community, 60, 181–2, 184,

Index

Khakpour, Arash, 70, 100, 215, 310– 11; in Vanessa Goodman’s Wells Hill, 207, 210 Khakpour, Aryo, 100, 311; in Justine A. Chambers’s Family Dinner, 276, 278, 281 Kidd Pivot, 16, 27, 107; collaborations with Out Innerspace, 213, 218; and creation of Revisor, 101, 266; narrative experiments of, 220, 236; relocation to Frankfurt, 108 Kilpatrick, Edmond, 10, 262 kinaesthetic inquiry: and dance kinship, 184, 186, 286, 293; and dance writing, 9, 15; and ethnography, 8–9, 12; and gesture, 281, 306; and Wreck Beach Butoh, 139, 149 Kitsos, Rob, 19–20, 195, 307–8, 336n9; and Ballet bc, 261; and Barego, 234–6; collaboration on Normate I Mien, 253–4, 257–60; collaboration on The Objecthood of Chairs, 221, 227–34; and compositional explorations of rhythm, 221, 257–9; contributions to post-secondary dance training in Vancouver, 214, 219; and Death and Flying, 254–7; hybrid practice and interdisciplinary training of, 222–4, 257; and Saudade, 254, 282, 289; and use of lipsynching, 235–6, 258; and Wake, 224–7

Kokoro Dance, 18–19, 66, 312, 313; company dynamics, 107, 109, 116, 128; and Kokoro Moon newsletter, 164, 332n10, 335n1, 342n11; and Wreck Beach Butoh, 106, 117–63; and Ziyian Kwan, 125, 174, 178 Kotowich, Jeanette, 28, 168 Kubanek, Walter, 58, 70, 72 Kuebler, Shay, 73, 112, 214, 219 Kugler, DD, 19, 271; direction of The Objecthood of Chairs, 220–4, 227, 230, 232–3 Kwan, SanSan, 8, 11–12 Kwan, Ziyian, 19, 50, 111, 113, 309– 10; and bite down gently and howL, 180–1, 184, 187–8; collaborations with Vanessa Goodman, 175, 177, 179, 180–1, 193–4; and dance’s contributions to civic economies, 184–7; and Do You See What I Mean? (Chaput and Chazallon), 183–4; establishment of Dumb Instrument Dance, 178–9; love and/in dance, 191–2, 193–4; and The Mars Hotel, 188–93, 194; and the neck to fall, 179–80, 212; and a slow awkward, 182; and Still Rhyming, 174–5; training and performance career, 178, 212, 217; what i am dancing sundays as social protest, 186–7; work with Kokoro Dance, 125, 174. See also Dumb Instrument Dance kw Studios, 66, 117, 121, 142 Kylián, Jirˇi, 239

365

214, 306; and Digital Folk, 47–59; and endORPHIN , 38; and I Miss Doing Nothing, 60–3; and Natalie, 37–8; and _post, 38–47; training and early career, 33–4, 43–4. See also plastic orchid factory Left of Main, 194, 259; as new colocated dance studio in Vancouver, 65–6, 101–2; plastic orchid factory’s tenanting of, 60–1 Legend of Zelda, The (video game), 50, 54, 328n34 Lepecki, André, 285, 326n15, 336n9 Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal, 108, 238, 239, 267, 331n2 Lescarbot, Marc, and Le Théâtre de Neptune, 39, 327n13 Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, 108; Barbara Bourget dances for, 119; James Gnam and Natalie LeFebvre Gnam meet at, 17, 34–5, 41, 43; Lesley Telford joins, 239 Lewis, Maria, 4 Liffmann, Caroline, 314 Lim, Milton, 100, 203, 210, 253, 341n7 Limón, José, 26, 117, 326n7 Lindgren, Allana C., 91 Louis XIV of France, 31, 44, 45, 47 love: in dance, 122–3, 188–93; in dance criticism, 18–9, 194, 291 Lui, David Y.H., 4

366

Mac, Taylor, 211, 338n55 McBirney, Mara, 4, 119, 120 McDermott, Molly, 169–70, 312; as Kokoro company member, 122–3, 134–6; in Wreck Beach Butoh process, 138, 142, 144, 145, 150, 157–8 Macfarlane, John, 68, 107 machinenoisy, 60, 101, 308, 309 MacLaughlin, Lola, 38, 43, 178, 213; and edam, 121, 332nn12–13; and Provincial Essays, 110–11 McInnes, Kelly, 38 McIntosh, David, 61, 107, 221, 311. See also battery opera McLaren, Norman, 10, 230 McLuhan, Marshall: media theories of, 202, 203, 205, 206; and Vanessa Goodman’s Wells Hill, 197, 207–11

Made in bc–Dance on Tour, 25, 326n4, 342n10 Madison, D. Soyini, 9, 11 Main Dance, 5, 178, 212, 213 Manning, Erin: connection to compositional process of Rob Kitsos, 227, 253–4, 256, 259; and the “dance of attention,” 302; on language and movement, 232, 242, 244, 248, 250; on minor gestures, 306–7; on William Forsythe, 20, 221–2, 229–30, 235, 252–3, 339n19 Manning, Susan, 223, 339n10 mapping: of shared dance memories in Vancouver, 7, 184–5, 286, 293–4 Marchenski, Billy, 122–3, 135, 273 Marcuse, Judith, 109, 119, 178, 310 Mardon, Alexa, 270, 319; in Deanna Peters’s NEW RAW , 140–1; on Justine A. Chambers’s Family Dinner, 273– 8, 280, 321; and Our Present Dance Histories project, 7, 12, 20, 44, 64, 70, 284–321; in Rob Kitsos’s Saudade, 282, 289; and Talking Thinking Dancing Body series, 283, 321; training with Modus Operandi, 282, 285, 286; in Vanessa Goodman’s Wells Hill, 205–6, 207, 210, 299. See also Our Present Dance Histories project Mariano, Victor, in The Objecthood of Chairs, 227, 228, 230–4 Maro, Akaji, 124, 135 Martin, Josh, 27, 107, 178, 306, 316; in Justine A. Chambers’s Family Dinner, 276, 278, 281; in Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg’s How to Be, 98–9; training and teaching, 214, 331n2; in work by Vanessa Goodman, 195, 204. See also Company 605 Martin, Randy: on dance ethnography, 15–16, 17; and derivatives, 185–6; on kinesthemes, 6–7, 22 Mascall, Jennifer, 90, 107, 135; artistic director of MascallDance, 67–8, 178, 310; founding member of edam, 121, 332nn12–13; review of The Outliner, 68–9. See also Labyrinth, The Massumi, Brian, 302; connection to compositional process of Rob Kitsos, 227, 253–4, 256, 259; on language

and movement, 232, 242, 244, 248, 250; on William Forsythe, 20, 221–2, 229–30, 235, 252–3, 339n19 Metzmeyer, Brenna, 245, 252 Meyers, Deborah, 23 Miller, Kiri, on dance games, 47–8, 49, 52, 53 mirroring: in dance video games, 47, 67; in Digital Folk (plastic orchid factory), 50, 53, 54, 58 Miyauchi, Maiko, 112, 214 Moberly Arts and Cultural Centre, 34, 195 Modus Operandi, 5; and Our Present Dance Histories project, 282, 285, 285, 303; and pre-professional dance training in Vancouver, 213–19 Molière: and comédie-ballet, 31, 45 Molnar, Emily, 108, 225, 239; and artistic leadership of Ballet bc, 261–7 Mountain Dance Theatre, 4, 119, 120 Muranko, Starr, 171 Museum of Anthropology (ubc), 23– 5, 30, 326n5 Naharin, Ohad, 175, 200, 201, 239, 263 Nann, Andrea, 167–9 National Arts Centre (Ottawa), 26, 27, 335n2 National Ballet of Canada, 4, 10, 90, 108, 262 National Ballet School (Toronto), 34, 35, 40–1, 217, 262 Navas, José, 263, 264 Nederlands Dans Theater, 237, 239, 248, 266 New Works, 113, 118, 342n10 Noland, Carrie, 280–1, 306, 342–3n13 Nutcracker, The, 35–6, 43, 90, 262; Jennifer Fisher on, 12, 327n7

Pacific Ballet Theatre, 4, 120 Paris Opéra Ballet, 47, 108 Park, Diane, 180, 203 Paxton, Steve, 67, 70 Pepper, Kaija, 5, 110 Peters, Deanna (Mutable Subject), 109, 115, 135, 195, 309; and NEW RAW , 169–71 Phelan, Peggy, 97, 330n41 Pilates, 7, 10, 38, 42, 112 Pite, Crystal, 16, 27, 42, 107, 285; collaborations with Electric Company Theatre, 101, 331n43; dance-theatre creations of, 220, 236, 340n32, 343n26; international repertoire of, 239, 264; and mentoring of younger dancers in Vancouver, 213, 214, 218; and premiere of Revisor, 266; time in Frankfurt, 108, 237. See also Kidd Pivot place: assertions of, in Indigenous dance, 5–6, 28–30; and/in dance history, 7–8, 12; ghosts of, 296; performances of in Wreck Beach Butoh, 128, 139, 142, 146–7, 149; as storied through movement, 29, 281–2, 298; and the transmission of dance technique, 33–4, 39–44, 212; of Vancouver in global contemporary dance scene, 266; and the work of Lola MacLaughlin, 110 plastic orchid factory, 17, 27, 181, 212; and Digital Folk, 31, 47–59; and Left of Main, 60–1, 101; and

Index

Ohno, Kazuo: and butoh’s origins, 122–4, 333n25; and butoh technique, 131, 334n40; Jay Hirabayashi studies with, 124; legacy of, 134; Sondra Fraleigh on, 139; stage personae of, 138 Olson, Michelle, 26, 168–9. See also Raven Spirit Dance Orr, Jean, 4 Osborne, Jane, 85, 316; collective

member of The Contingency Plan, 19, 112, 179, 195; in plastic orchid factory’s Digital Folk, 48, 54; in work by Rob Kitsos, 225, 255–6; in work by Vanessa Goodman, 195, 204. See also Contingency Plan, The Our Present Dance Histories project, 7, 23, 44, 60; artists and gestures, 20, 307–19; as community ethnography, 12, 286; dance spaces and, 64, 70, 213; email reflections on, 288–99; method for interviews, 287; roll-out at Dance In Vancouver 2017, 299–304 Out Innerspace Dance Theatre, 43, 107, 213, 317; and Major Motion Picture, 215–18

367

I Miss Doing Nothing, 60–3; and _post, 31–4, 38–47 Poitras, Robin, 68, 178, 336n8 Poole Lienweber, Bevin, 111, 181, 313; collaborations with plastic orchid factory, 39–44, 48–56; collaborations with Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, 85, 98–9; collaborations with Vanessa Goodman, 195, 204–9 postmodern dance, 8, 90, 123, 220 potlatch, and Indigenous dance in British Columbia, 5, 26, 325n51 Poulin-Denis, Jacques, 37, 92 Preece, Bronwyn, 129, 140, 150, 152; poetic responses to Wreck Beach Butoh, 130, 137, 143, 148–9, 151–2 Prism Dance Theatre, 4, 120 Proudfoot, James (lighting designer): collaborations with Justine A. Chambers, 278, 281; collaborations with plastic orchid factory, 48, 52, 53, 61–2; collaborations with Vanessa Goodman, 198, 203, 204, 206, 210; collaborations with Ziyian Kwan, 188, 190; and Dancing on the Edge Festival, 167 Prus, Roxoliana, 135, 225 Purschwitz, Natalie, 48, 52, 300, 302 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, 100, 105, 222, 338n55, 342n10; and Nigel Charnock’s Frank, 79, 85; and presentation of international dance in Vancouver, 165, 182–3, 263, 267, 268

368

Rainer, Yvonne, 67, 329n2 Raino, Lynda, 34 Ramsay, Vivian, 3–4 Raven Spirit Dance, 26, 27, 66, 168 Raymond, David, 107, 276, 278, 317; establishes Modus Operandi with Tiffany Tregarthen, 5, 213–15; premiere and tour of Major Motion Picture, 216–18; work for Kidd Pivot, 213, 218. See also Modus Operandi; Out Innerspace Dance Theatre Reist, Justin, 225; in The Objecthood of Chairs, 227, 228, 230–3 Rhodes, Lawrence, 34, 239 Robbins, Jerome, 165, 199

Robinson, Dylan, 29, 326n14 Robinson, Tedd, 178, 219 Román, David, 13 Romero, Diego, 56, 70, 74, 313–14 Roper, June, 4, 5 Ross, Paula (Paula Ross Dance Company), 4, 119–20, 121 Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre, 114, 183, 184, 294 Royal Winnipeg Ballet, 76, 106, 119, 165, 331n1 Ryan, Peter (Lola), 70, 121, 332nn12–13 S7aplek (Bob Baker). See Spakwus Slulem Sadler’s Wells, 214, 263, 265 Sales, Donald, 262, 263–4 Saroyan, Julie-anne, 197, 262. See also Dances for a Small Stage Schneider, Rebecca, 15, 307, 325n57, 330n41, 343n20 School for the Contemporary Arts (sfu), 66, 68, 117, 203, 248; dance program of, 4–5, 75, 111–12, 135, 195, 212–14, 225; interdisciplinary ethos of, 220, 222; Rob Kitsos’s teaching for, 219, 221, 282, 289; student dancers in Digital Folk, 51–2 Scott, Cynthia, 10 Seymour, Lynn, 4, 119 Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, 51, 203, 205 Shaffer, Olivia, 70, 72, 225, 319 Shea Murphy, Jacqueline, 26, 326n1, 326n7 Shechter, Hofesh, 175, 201, 267 Siebens, Evann, 113, 320, 329n10 Sigouin, Renée, 69, 114, 216, 217–18 Silver, Rachel: on Digital Folk, 51–3, 54, 56, 58–9 Simon Fraser University, 97, 100, 203, 253; Alexa Mardon’s studies at, 282, 284. See also School for the Contemporary Arts Sklar, Deirdre, 9, 11 Small, Gilbert, 69, 265 Smith, Jim, 27, 201, 263, 266, 342n10. See also DanceHouse; Eponymous Snipper, Chick, 97–8, 102, 109, 314 Solomon, Alisa, 199

Solomon, Eden: collaboration on Long Division, 245; in work by Lesley Telford, 245, 248, 249, 252 space: for dance rehearsal and performance in Vancouver, 59–60, 64– 74, 214; at the Firehall Arts Centre, 171–2; and media theories of Marshall McLuhan, 210–11; superposition of, in work of Rob Kitsos and Lesley Telford, 225, 228, 234–6, 248–52 Spakwus Slulem, 29, 325n51, 326n12 Spånberg, Mårtin, 275, 276 Spatz, Ben, 218, 222, 297, 325n53, 339n3 Spencer, Donna, 97, 193; and leadership of Dancing on the Edge Festival, 164, 166, 167, 172 Stevenson, Kim, 98, 135, 318; in work by Rob Kitsos, 225–6, 255–6; in work by Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, 99–100, 102 story: as dance historical method, 3, 11–16, 20; and the dance-theatre of Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, 77, 89, 94–5, 103–4; and movement in the work of Sarah Chase, 167–8 Strate, Grant, 5, 269

University of British Columbia, 10, 113, 282, 320; and Coastal First Nations Dance Festival, 23, 25; and Wreck Beach Butoh, 119, 147 Vajda, Lexi, 48–50, 58, 73, 318

Index

Talking Thinking Dancing Body series, 283, 321 Tam, Nancy, 61, 254, 281; collaboration on Normate I Mien, 221, 253, 257–60 Tamano, Hiroko and Koichi, 122, 124 Tara Cheyenne Performance, 42, 60, 101, 310; and Lip Synch Battle IV, 106; and reconstitution of DanStaBat, 97, 109 Taylor, Diana, 285 technique: dancers’ practice of, 7, 42, 97, 181, 219, 240, 286, 297; transhistorical transmission of, 33, 39–40, 66, 212, 218, 285 Telford, Lesley, 19–20, 25, 259, 314; and Brittle Failure, 237–8; collaboration on Long Division, 221, 241–8; as company member of Nederlands Dans Theater, 237, 239; connection to William Forsythe, 236–7; contributions to Ballet bc repertoire, 239–

40, 261; and Spooky Action at a Distance, 240, 249–53; teaching for Arts Umbrella, 219, 239, 240; and Three Sets/Relating at a Distance, 248–9; training and dance career, 239. See also Inverso Dance Tenzer, Maya: collaboration on Long Division, 245; in work by Lesley Telford, 248, 249, 250, 252 Terezakis, Paras, 214, 314 Terminal City Dance, 4, 120 time: in butoh, 124, 133, 136, 144, 146; and Indigenous dance in Vancouver, 6, 17, 22–30; slowing down of, in I Miss Doing Nothing, 61–3; stretching of, through performance, 294, 307 Tolentino, Alvin, 23, 135, 178, 317. See also Co.erasga Tomko, Linda, 14–15 Toronto Dance Theatre, 108, 217, 267, 331n2, 341n4 training: ballet, and (auto)biographical narratives of place in _post, 31, 34, 39–45; generational paradoxes of, 217–18; and intergenerational practice of, in Coast Salish dance, 24, 30; post-secondary and pre-professional dance programs in Vancouver, 5, 100, 212–15; and the transmission of technique, 7, 33, 217–18; Wreck Beach Butoh’s contributions to, 127, 128 Training Society of Vancouver (Working Class), 184, 218 Tregarthen, Tiffany, 107, 285; establishes Modus Operandi with David Raymond, 5, 213–15; in Justine A. Chambers’s Family Dinner, 275–8; premiere and tour of Major Motion Picture, 216–18; work for Kidd Pivot, 213, 218. See also Modus Operandi; Out Innerspace Dance Theatre Turner, Victor, 8

369

Vancouver Ballet Society, 4 Vancouver East Cultural Centre (The Cultch), 101, 111, 165, 184; and Dancers of Damelahamid, 26–8; and plastic orchid factory’s Digital Folk, 48–50; and Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, 85, 98 Vancouver International Dance Festival, 18, 23, 66, 74, 312, 313; founding of, 125, 164; and global dance presentation, 263, 268; and premiere of Vital Few (Company 605), 113– 16; and Rob Kitsos’s Death and Flying, 254; and work by Kokoro Dance, 135–6, 141 Vancouver Moving Theatre, 66, 178 Vesak, Norman (Western Dance Theatre), 4 Vision Impure, 27, 112, 188, 315 Wald, Leigha, 19, 112, 179, 195, 225. See also Contingency Plan, The Walerski, Mehdi, 263, 264 Wallace, Makaila, 263–4 Walling, Savannah, 4, 120. See also Terminal City Dance; Vancouver Moving Theatre

370

Wang, Wen Wei, 214, 266, 270, 319; and Wen Wei Dance, 27, 113 Western Front, 69–70, 71, 121, 180 Wilcox, Emily, 8, 191 Wiseman, Morley, 4 Wolfe, Richard, 19, 221, 242, 243 Wolfe, Sophia, 114, 312 Wreck Beach Butoh (Kokoro Dance), 18–19, 106, 164, 218; as communitybased environmental performance, 117–18, 128–9, 149; ethnographic account of process, 129–63 writing: autoethnographic, and plastic orchid factory’s _post, 39–44; and dance history/ethnography, 8, 12–16; and Our Present Dance Histories project, 287–94, 319, 321 Wyman, Anna, 4, 120 Yeats, W.B., 209, 270 Youssef, Marcus, 88, 98–100 Zagar, Mirna, 269 Zagoudakis, Jamie. See Prism Dance Theatre