My Vancouver Dance History: September 12 Artist Salon with Justine A. Chambers

The last of the MVDH artist salons was with the amazing Justine A. Chambers, who together with Alexa Mardon gave me the vision for how to conceive of an overall structure for the book via our collaboration on the Our Present Dance Histories project (which I talk about in chapter 6).

Unfortunately, Alexa was unable to join us as she is in Amsterdam beginning her Master's. A further complication was the air quality in Vancouver on Saturday, with smoke and ash from the forest fires along the Pacific Northwest blanketing the city in an eerie and throat-choking haze. For everyone's safety we decided to forgo an in-person get-together at Morrow, with Justine and I connecting from our homes over Zoom.

Like many in Vancouver, across the country, and around the world, I could listen to Justine talk forever. Suffice to say that in these thirty-five minutes, she puts much about the strange push-pull between radical stillness and urgent assembly that we've been experiencing these past six months into brilliant perspective, including why she is re-embracing all things local. Which is super great news for this community.

While in many ways the book now feels like a document from another time (so much of what I write about has changed!), it is through conversations like these that I'm reassured of the continued and necessary dialogue on Vancouver dance that we're co-composing together.

Added bonus: some priceless Zoom bombing from Justine's son Max.

The file size of the video is once again too large to upload directly to this blog site, so you can access it here.

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Random Thoughts on Performance in the Age of COVID

I hadn't anticipated writing a "performance in the time of COVID" blog post, especially on a site that's supposed to be retired. But this past Sunday afternoon's live-streamed all-request concert by local legend Veda Hille has prompted me to weigh in--if only to work through my own wildly shifting performative responses to some of the effects of this pandemic. As one of the more personal of those effects has been a temporary stymying of my ability (or desire?) to write (beyond the heaps of emails and memos and letters that have proliferated as a result of my administrative position at SFU), at the very least the following will hopefully prove a useful exercise in translating the jumble of my thoughts into slightly more coherent prose (though, no promises).

Like many the world over, I have spent the last ten weeks consuming a lot of online performance. Some of it has been fantastic, as in the case of Theatre Complicité's Encounter, in which the amazing binaural sound design seems especially suited to this headphones-wearing moment of Zoom videoconferencing--where the fixed perspectivalism of visual space has been replaced by the immersive absorption of acoustic space (that last bit of McLuhanism was mostly for Richard, but I defy anyone in a Zoom meeting of more than four to figure out instantly where to look when someone is speaking in Gallery view). But for every transportive experience like Encounter there have been reams of dreary live-streamed staged readings of cancelled productions; no matter how important or laudable the message of these works, they can't really compete with the medium (okay, that's it, I promise, but really there's a qualitative difference--including which is better suited to telling a story--between a podcast and a YouTube tutorial).

Which brings me to Sunday's concert, "Veda Hille Haunts The Cultch." Organized through Dan Mangan and Laura Simpson's Side Door Productions, the event was broadcast live from The Cultch's Historic Theatre via Zoom. Beyond the fact that it was Veda, and that she was at the top of her game in terms of singing and piano playing and storytelling, for me performer-audience intimacy transcended to a certain degree the live-digital divide by making this an all-request concert. You could email Veda your favourite songs from her catalogue, and even the odd cover suggestion, and she would draw titles from a hat (actually a coral-coloured water pitcher that sat atop her grand piano), or else spin a hand-made wheel of fortune on which several additional requested songs had been listed. When Veda picked a song and read out who had requested it (which was often more than one person), the chat box--which was lively throughout--would light up with comments and emojis, and following this thread was as entertaining as watching Veda sing. As exemplary, however, was how Mangan and his production team were able to capture the eventness of the event through their savvy camerawork. Two cameras were trained on Veda, and cut between close-ups of her singing and talking and of her fingers on the keyboard. But there was also another bird's eye view of the venue, and whenever the camera cut to this angle, I got a shivery feeling, both in the sense of momentarily feeling like I was there at the back of the house along with Veda and her crew and also perceiving a pang at the otherwise empty auditorium (and one can only note the material significance of that emptiness for Veda, who would otherwise have been performing to packed houses with a scheduled tour of her knock-out show Little Volcano, which premiered at the PuSh Festival this past January). Then, too, there were those moments--one coming during Veda's beautiful rendition of one of the songs that I had requested (Yaz's "Only You")--when Mangan cut to a montage of the screens of the online audience, which prompted enthusiastic waves and cheering, and very occasionally some displays of frolicsome exhibitionism.

Not that the success of this event has made me a full-fledged devotee of the digital dissemination of live performance. I've spent too much time looking at a screen over the past two months to accede willy-nilly to the many possibilities afforded by live-streaming (including affordability and accessibility). At the same time, I don't want to essentialize or romanticize the special co-presence between performer and spectator that supposedly comes with a live performance event. As much as sheltering in place has taught me that, introvertedly inclined though I be, I actually crave and need the company of others--especially to witness and talk about art--I find the instant nostalgia for "how things were" in theatre and performance to be specious. As many of us know, there were/are a lot of things wrong with standard performance production and presentation models, and the following debate articulated here and here about the "forgotten arts" of assembly and disassembly as they relate to the theatre is instructive about divisions within the broader global community. I am not taking a stand one way or another. These past few months I have gorged on iconic shows I would not otherwise have been able to see (hello Pina Bausch's Palermo, Palermo!), and as an educator I find video documentation of live performance to be incredibly valuable pedagogically (and our students at the School for the Contemporary Arts, seeing their scheduled end-of-semester productions and exhibitions and graduation projects evaporate one after another have adapted to various digital platforms with grace and wit and incredible ingenuity). But I also know that after all of this is over I also want to gather with others and share in all of the embodied rituals--from hugs in a crowded lobby to the sharing of laughter and applause--that come with attending (and tending to) live performance. Another thing I know, however, is that some companies may not have the means post-COVID to issue such an invitation, and so digital modes of production and dissemination might become key to survival. I refuse to make predictions or recommendations. There are too many prognosticators taking up too much space already as a result of this crisis, one that we're still very much in the middle of.

Incidentally, those two links on assembly and disassembly that I mention in the preceding paragraph came to me via an online conversation organized two weeks ago by P. Megan Andrews as part of her residency at The Dance Centre. She asked Justine A. Chambers, Olivia C. Davies, Vanessa Goodman, and Erika Mitsuhashi to talk about the "shift to the digital" in relation to their own practices. The conversation was wide-ranging and lively: how some folks were adapting in terms of projects and teaching and taking class, whether out of necessity or desire; and how others were hitting pause, using the radical stillness and enforced house arrest and new kinds of social choreography that have been imposed on their moving bodies (and the movement of bodies more generally) to ask deeper questions of their practice, their previous ways of making, and where they might want to go/what they might want to do differently in the future. It was all done via Zoom, of course, and following the online choreography of the conversation was as captivating as that conversation's content.

But I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge that after I left said meeting (which seems like such a weird Zoom sign-off, given that I haven't really gone anywhere) I didn't grieve a little. I so miss the company of these smart women and pre-COVID we would ideally at this very moment be celebrating the publication of my book about the Vancouver dance community. It was scheduled to be released last week, and while copies have arrived at my publisher's warehouse (I've seen the photos of the physical copies, as the attached image attests), they have delayed distribution until August. By that time, I fear that what was meant to be a celebration of the vibrancy of the dance community will already read like a period piece. Lockdown came during the middle of VIDF and one by one, dance events in this city have been cancelled. As The Dance Centre and other spaces prepare to open their doors to limited use under enhanced protocols, I worry about the futures of so many of the artists and companies I love. I also lament that the Dance Studies Association Conference that I was organizing with Allana Lindgren and Ahalya Satkunaratnam for this October at SCA, and at which Olivia and Justine were to be featured performers/presenters, has had to be postponed; I was so looking forward to introducing the Vancouver dance community to international dance scholars and artists. At the same time (and to borrow from the theme of the conference, which should be back in 2022), I know this community is so resilient. Just look at Dumb Instrument Dance's Ziyian Kwan, whom I write about in my book, and who in her response to a rise in anti-Asian racism in the city has refused to be cowed, peacefully claiming her and others' just rights to assembly and movement.

So instead of moping about what might have been, here's to looking forward to when we can all gather and dance together again (in hot pink lycra, of course).

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 40

The 2017 edition of Dance in Vancouver officially kicked off yesterday, which also means that our Dance Histories Project is now cumulatively launched into the world. Natalie Purschwitz's installation has been on glorious display for a while now, but to this in the Faris studio lobby we've now added our gesture video and sound installation. Even the turn-down trivia for DiV presenters successfully found its way to Holiday Inn hotel staff. And several t-shirters and gesturers were in evidence in the audience yesterday for the roundtable organized by DiV guest curator Adam Hayward on "Why Shrink the World?"

Ostensibly about the idea of working locally but thinking globally (in one's artistic, curatorial and social practice), the roundtable showcased the work of three New Zealand/Aotearoa artists: Jack Gray (also presenting alongside his Native American collaborator Dakota); Julia Harvie; and Claire O'Neil. I very much enjoyed hearing about all of their practices, but the session ran rather long, and there wasn't really much time for any back and forth with the audience. Still, the session, following upon a studio showing by Olivia C. Davies (one of our Dance Histories interviewees), did importantly emphasize the parallel IndigeDiV focus of this year's biennial--a dance and conversation series organized by Raven Spirit Dance that focuses on Indigenous artistic creation and expression on these unceded Coast Salish Territories.

I didn't stick around for the reception following the roundtable, nor for that evening's performance (Wen Wei Wang's Dialogue, which I previously wrote about here). In fact, I won't be attending any of DiV's mainstage performances this year: a combination of other stuff competing for my attention and also waiting too long to purchase tickets that I'd wrongly assumed might be extended our way complimentarily as a result of our Dance Histories work (which is, after all, featured in the DiV program). Not a big deal, as I've seen and written about most of the work before. But it does mean that I won't witness how DiV presenters and audiences experience and interact with our "lobby animation," as it's officially been called.

Nor, for that matter, will Alexa, who beginning tonight will be busy performing in the world premiere of Vanessa Goodman's Wells Hill (which I look forward to seeing Saturday evening). We'll have to rely on Justine to let us know how things go. Indeed, I look forward to the post-DiV debrief. In the meantime, I think this post more or less concludes the on-line documentation of our work on this project. Hard to believe it's been more than two years since we've been working on this (and closer to three for Alexa and Justine). And, of course, it's not finished, nor will it ever be finished. Figuring out where we go from here will almost surely be part of our debrief conversations.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 39

In addition to commissioning Natalie Purschwitz's amazing installation (now on full glorious display in the lobby of The Dance Centre), one of our more inspired ideas for how we would disperse and animate aspects of the interviews that we collected for our Dance Histories Project during the upcoming Dance in Vancouver biennial was to pull quotes from each of our interviewees and, with their permission, iron them on to T-shirts that also had that their name and interview number on the back, like so:

That's the front of Deanna Peters' T-shirt, and the back of Jane Osborne's, carefully decaled into place at an ironing party that Justine and Alexa and I had at my house last Monday morning. Over the rest of that week, I completed the rest of the 53 total T-shirts (in my earlier summary of the folks we'd interviewed, listed here, I left out Kelly McInnes and Olivia Shaffer, both of whom Alexa interviewed, but whose videos she hadn't been able to upload to our shared Dropbox folder from her phone). Yesterday Alexa and Kate Franklin and I distributed about half of them to the current students of Modus Operandi following their Sunday hip-hop class at The Dance Centre:

For the second half of this part of the project is that we're asking volunteers to wear one of the T-shirts during the week of DiV, and also to learn three shared gestures, and however many additional ones they'd also like to embody--all culled from our video interviews with Vancouver dance artists; whenever they're at The Dance Centre, or wherever else they might be in the city, our T-shirt-wearing volunteers are then invited to either slip these gestures covertly into routine conversations and interactions, or else to deliberately interrupt and/or open up a space through the repetition of the gestures. In this way, the discursive histories we've captured through our interviews will be reembodied and redistributed through this double act of transfer.

The Modus students all seemed eager to participate, and also proved amazingly adept at learning some very complicated gestures. Next Monday we'll have a further T-shirt and gesture distribution session at The Dance Centre with a bunch of dance artists (including several of our interviewees) who are keen to participate. Together with the sound and video installations we're also planning, it will hopefully be a lively complement to the regular DiV programming.

Everything kicks off on November 22nd. You can check out the full schedule here.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 38

If you're at the Dance Centre in the coming weeks, you'll be able to catch sight of the installation that Natalie Purschwitz has conceived for our Dance Histories project taking shape. On Wednesday, with the help of DC technician Daniel O'Shea, we rigged the main supporting platform into place. This was no easy task, as the installation is essentially a very complicated Calderesque mobile that will hang from the ceiling above the stairwell leading down to the main Faris Studio. And because Natalie will need to be able to raise and lower the platform while she is working on the installation, this involved figuring out a very complicated system of rope pulleys. And finding a three-quarter inch drill bit--which proved the most difficult task of all.

Nevertheless, success was eventually achieved, and now the main task is threading the hundreds and hundreds of names that Natalie has attached to different playing cards through the holes that I punctured through the platform. Having spent seven hours yesterday and Wednesday doing so, I can attest to how finicky and time-consuming this work is. Add to this the very real risk of the different bits of dangling threads getting hopelessly tangled as the platform is raised and lowered and just generally moved around, and you can understand how stressful all of this can quickly become. And it doesn't help that we're doing all of this in a tiny corner of the Faris lobby near the bar, and having to work around matinee and evening performances.

Natalie has worked out a very complicated system for how all the different playing cards fit together, which perfectly captures our goal of illustrating how all of these histories overlap and intersect--and which will be represented in the finished installation by the bits of orange coloured thread that horizontally connect the dangling vertical cards. But in an Excel spreadsheet, as a list of names and a numbered count of times mentioned, such a system is one thing. Three-dimensionally it's quite another, and Natalie said that if it sounded like she was talking to us like children in explaining things we shouldn't take offence; she was simply figuring things out herself in the process of articulating them.

I feel bad abandoning Natalie and the rest of the crew just as the work is getting started (Richard and I are off to London and Amsterdam for 10 days); but I'm sure there will still be stuff to do when I get back. And, in truth, it's probably good to have me and my clumsy fingers out of the way during the main and hardest phase of work.

As Justine said yesterday, that work will take as long as is needed to complete. And when it's done, the piece is going to look amazing.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 37

All this week and next Justine and Alexa and I have bracketed off morning studio time to start pulling together the various threads of our Dance Histories project in advance of their unveiling at Dance in Vancouver this November. Actually, the first of those quite literal threads will be visible to Dance Centre patrons later this month--maybe even as early as the end of next week. That would be Natalie Purschwitz's rhizomatic installation based on the interconnected web of names and places we have collected via our interviews with local dance artists. She has a fantastic design concept for how to represent all of the overlapping layers of influence and attachment and bodily and spatial sedimentation--which I won't spoil here. Let's just hope it can be sustained by the actual material supports of the Dance Centre building...

The last piece of data collection necessary for Natalie's work was completed this morning when Justine and I finally interviewed Alexa about her own dance history. Afterwards Alexa said that she now understood why so many of our interview subjects likened the experience to a kind of therapy. Perhaps because this particular interview came at the end of our process, but more likely because Alexa is such a smart and reflective person, for me Alexa's narrative was at once singularly her own and also so consciously and respectfully connected to so many of our previous conversations: not least concerning the idea of developing an ethic care--with respect to our bodies, our collaborators, and our community.

Among other things, I learned that Alexa dates her Vancouver dance history from 2010. That's when she returned to the city from London, where she'd been trying--and in her words failing--to be a commercial dancer. While shooting a television commercial for the SyFy channel choreographed by Kelly Konno, and that featured Josh Beamish, Alexa learned about Modus Operandi. She promptly went to an Out Innerspace show, saw Elissa Hanson do something amazing, and said she wanted in. She did two and a half years of the program, before gravitating toward a cohort of dance artists affiliated with SFU, including Daisy Thompson, Katie DeVries, Emmalena Fredriksson, Erica Mitsuhashi and, eventually, my colleague Rob Kitsos.

In addition to dancing for and with Deanna Peters, Amber Funk Barton, and Vanessa Goodman (whose upcoming Wells Hill will premiere at the end of November, overlapping with Dance in Vancouver, and thus keeping Alexa extremely busy between now and then), Alexa is also an amazing dance writer and critic. Collaborations with Lee Su-Feh on the Migrant Bodies Project and Brynn McNab on An Exact Vertigo at UNIT/PITT Projects are just two instances in which Alexa has demonstrated her amazing choreographic facility with words. At one point in her interview, Alexa talked about an inspirational moment in a workshop in Toronto with Ame Henderson, in which she reported saying "I'm a writer and a dancer and I'm trying to figure out if both of those things are part of my practice." Mercifully for all of us--and especially for Justine and I on this project--Ame's definitive response was "Of course they are!"

In fact just today Alexa was instrumental in contributing to the short blurb that she and Justine and I crafted for what it is we think we're doing at Dance in Vancouver. We've given the various distributed component parts a three-part title: Our Present Dance Histories, or, Dance Histories Project, or, Vancouver Dance: an incomplete history of the present - Part 1. Because, of course, we didn't get to interview everyone we'd ambitiously planned to (on the way out of the Dance Centre today, I bumped into Joe Laughlin, who is somewhat egregiously missing from the hours and hours of our compiled video footage); because history is never finished and always moving; and because, after two years, we're only just getting started.

That said, here's a roughly chronological list of the 51 Vancouver dance artists we've interviewed (sometimes all together, sometimes in pairs, and sometimes individually) as part of this first phase of research:

Rob Kitsos
Vanessa Goodman
Ali Denham
Delia Brett
Daelik
Lee Su-Feh
James Gnam
Deanna Peters
Ziyian Kwan
Judith Marcuse
Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg
Arash Khakpour
Aryo Khakpour
David McIntosh
Chick Snipper
Jennifer Mascall
Natalie LeFebvre Gnam
Alana Gerecke
Molly McDermott
Elissa Hanson
Sophia Wilde
Barbara Bourget
Jay Hirabayashi
Bevin Poole
Amber Funk Barton
Justine A. Chambers
Diego Romero
Paras Terezakis
Karissa Barry
Caroline Liffman
Lesley Telford
Natalie Tin Yin Gan
Noam Gagnon
Ralph Escamillan
Emmalena Fredriksson
Karen Jamieson
Josh Martin
Jane Osborne
Olivia Davies
Judith Garay
Alvin Tolentino
David Raymond
Margaret Grenier
Laura Avery
Anne Cooper
Lara Barclay
Kim Stevenson
Lexi Vajda
Wen Wei Wang
Peter Bingham
Alexa Mardon

Stay tuned for words and gestures from many of these individuals coming to souvenir t-shirted bodies near you this November.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 36

Earlier this afternoon I found myself perched on the beautiful back deck of Wen Wei Wang, interviewing him about his dance history. It began at the age of six in Communist China when, having seen a performance of the revolutionary model opera White Haired Girl, Wang decided he wanted to become a dancer. His parents were less than pleased, but when he later auditioned and was accepted to the army art school in his home province, they relented; becoming a company member and then a soloist of a dance company within a military academy was somehow acceptable. During this time, Wang had already started choreographing, even winning a major televised dance competition in 1987 for a duet, Love Song, that he had co-choreographed and performed with a fellow company member.

Having been accepted into a prestigious choreographic program in Beijing in 1989, Wang left before completing the program in order to attend a summer dance intensive at SFU in 1991. His trip was sponsored by Grant Strate, who would end up becoming Wang's life partner. Almost immediately after completing the SFU residency, Wang was hired by Judith Marcuse. From there he went on to become a company member of Ballet BC, where, but for a brief stint with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal, he remained until 2000. In 2003, he formed his own company, immediately garnering acclaim for highly theatrical works that mixed Western and Asian dance traditions.

Wang's most recent full-length work for his own company, Dialogue, premiered this past May at the Dance Centre (see my review here). It will be remounted as part of this year's Dance in Vancouver biennial, where it will coincide with the unveiling of our own Vancouver Dance Histories project. I feel like we still have so much work to do--and interviews to collect. But slowly things are coming together, and I can't wait to get back into the studio with Justine and Alexa to brainstorm further some of our ideas for making sense (and nonsense) of the tangled web of connections we've been unraveling over the past two years.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 35

Earlier this afternoon Kim Stevenson dropped by my SFU Woodward's office to share with me her Vancouver dance history. Like Molly McDermott and Deanna Peters and others, Kim came to the dance program at SFU via Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton, where she was heavily influenced by the teaching and mentorship of Brian Webb and Heidi Bunting. Arriving at SFU in 2005, Kim immediately connected with the aesthetic of my colleague, Rob Kitsos, and post-graduation she has continued to dance regularly for him--most recently in Death and Flying at the Vancouver International Dance Festival (about which I have blogged in greater detail here).

In addition to apprenticing with and dancing for the likes of Susan Elliott and Barbara Bourget and Serge Bennathan, Kim also joined with Molly, Cort Gerlock, Roxoliana Prus, and Ellen Luchkow to form the collective The Story of Force in Motion, commissioning work from Deanna Peters, Heidi Bunting, Shauna Elton, and also creating their own work. Most recently Tara Cheyenne Friendenberg has been a major influence on the direction of Kim's career. After appearing briefly in an excerpt of Highgate at Dance in Vancouver several years ago, Kim apprenticed with Tara as part of the process for Porno Death Cult. And she has been part of all three versions of How to Be: at the Anderson Street Space on Granville Island; at Dancing on the Edge a couple of years ago; and at the premiere of the full version of the work at the Cultch this past April. While I couldn't see the latter version, I have closely watched the evolution of this piece and I told Kim that her facility with text and movement was just amazing to watch, and also that her humour just slayed me. Interestingly, Kim said that she'd never been more terrified performing before, but that the process had also liberated something in her regarding the combination of text and movement and that there is talk of working with Tara in the future on a solo for Kim.

In the meantime, Kim is busy with running her own dance studio, The Happening, on Fraser Street. As Kim put it to me, she has always enjoyed teaching, and at a certain point decided that if she wanted to remain in Vancouver and have any kind of lifestyle to speak of that she needed to find a supplement to her life as a pick-up professional dancer--and ideally one that didn't involving serving at a restaurant. It's been a huge and at times scary undertaking, but four years in the move seems to be paying off. Kim is just about to expand her space with a second, adjacent studio and has hired Natalie LeFebvre Gnam to teach the students ballet. The goal is to get to a place where Kim can hire more additional instructors and leave the day-to-day operations of the studio to others, while she pursues a parallel performance and choreographic career.

I was immensely happy to hear that, because we need performers as talented and charismatic as Kim to continue to appear on our stages. And we also need her mentoring the next generation of dance bunnies.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 34

Earlier this afternoon I interviewed Lara Barclay for our Vancouver Dance Histories project. I got to know Lara while participating as one of the community dancers on the PuSh Festival presentation of Sylvain Émard's Le Grand Continental, for which she served as rehearsal director. Since that time I have enjoyed watching her perform in work by Jennifer Mascall and Vanessa Goodman, among other local choreographers. And yet while Lara grew up and began her dance training in Port Moody, most of her adolescence was spent studying at the National Ballet School in Toronto, where, as she put it, she was always the tallest girl in the class (and frequently taller than her male partners as well). Following graduation from NBS, Lara won a scholarship to study in Europe, and she ended up in Hamburg, taking class and studying with John Neumeier. Her first company job, however, was in the northern port city of Kiel, Germany, where she danced repertoire that included works by Johann Kresnik and Martin Stiefermann. While in Europe, Lara also took class with Bill Forsythe at Ballett Frankfurt and workshops with Frey Faust and Lloyd Newson. As she put it to me, it was in Europe that she discovered a whole other world of dance--and also that ballet was, quite literally, not ever going to be the right dance fit for her.

Following this initial stint in Germany, Lara moved back to Toronto to take up a position with Toronto Dance Theatre, where she remained for three years, dancing in works by Christopher House and James Kudelka, and also reconnecting with mentor Peggy Baker, who first taught her modern dance at NBS. Dominque Dumais and Kevin O'Day, who were just starting up a new company in Mannheim, lured Lara back to Germany, but it was in 2006--following a soccer-themed gig during the world-cup with Brazilian-based choreographer Deborah Colker--that Lara and her husband made the big move back to Vancouver. This coincided with the birth of Lara's first daughter and a slight shift in focus to teaching (with Monica Proença, Lara is the co-founder of the Lamondance Company, a pre-professional training program in North Vancouver). However, very soon after arriving back in the Vancouver area, Josh Beamish asked Lara to work with Move: the company. And then, in 2012, came a transformative collaboration with Aszure Barton, who invited Lara to be part of the creative process that led to Awaa, a piece about motherhood and masculine-feminine relations that I remember seeing at the Chutzpah! Festival, and in which Lara is the lone female dancer among a cast of six other male dancers. Lara continues to tour the piece in slightly different iterations to this day (including an upcoming stint next month in LA), and she said that working with Barton taught her to discover patience on stage.

Lara ended our interview by saying this is a transformative time in her career. She's recently had surgery on her right foot, which has meant making certain adjustments in her dancing. As she framed things, aging as a dancer means you have to become better at listening to your body, and also choosing work that pertains to what it is that you are still able to do to the best of your abilities, and without fear of injury. Lara is also interested in moving into the area of expressive arts therapy, and she and her family are contemplating a move back to Germany. If and when this happens, I will be sad to have Lara leave the Vancouver dance community. In the immediate future, however, I can look forward to seeing Lara (alongside VDH co-conspirator Alexa Mardon) once again in the full-length premiere this fall of Vanessa Goodman's Wells Hill.

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Battle Your Demons in Dreamspace at the James Black Gallery

Last night at sunset, just as the province was experiencing the twilight and eventual eclipse of Christy Clark's Liberal government, I was gazing up into the open bay windows at the front of the James Black Gallery on East 6th Avenue in Vancouver, luxuriating in the warmth of a gorgeous summer evening and the proximate haze of pot smoke, and thus somatically primed to receive the healing trans-dimensional message of love delivered by the bewitching lounge singer Linda Foxx.

Foxx is the creation of multi-talented performance artist Layla Marcelle Mrozowski, who in collaboration with musician and mixed-media artist Dave Biddle--and accompanied by back-up dancers Justine A. Chambers, Alex Mah, and Andrea Cownden--stageed an hour-long virtual or conceptual concert/house party called Battle Your Demons in Dreamspace. Lipsynching to a clutch of "synthetic" voice-altered songs created and played by Biddle through vocoder technology, Foxx/Mrozowski, sporting a bright orange wig and wearing day-glo blue lipstick, invited us in the most sinuously seductive manner possible to throw off any remaining inhibitions we might have and indulge in the myriad pleasures afforded by an apocalypse that is not just imminent, but that has already arrived.

In a world where the earthquake is here, where fear can be buckled into a car seat and sent on its way, and where caged goats patiently offer up their necks to the impress of our newly sharpened incisors, the only thing we need to do to prepare for the time of love, Ms. Foxx instructs us, is to get in touch with our bodies: feel the earth underneath our feet; breathe in through our noses and out through our mouths; rub our tongues along our teeth (and taste that goat's blood). And, above all, unloosen our hips and groove to the music she is carrying to us via her other-worldly voice.

Maybe it's because I'm currently watching The Leftovers on television, or maybe it's just that in this current socio-political moment nothing seems out of the ordinary any more, but I found Foxx's strangely unsettling message just the narcotic of belief that I needed on this particular evening.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 33

This past week Justine and Alexa and I have been working in the studio at The Dance Centre, developing some preliminary text and gesture scores from the video interviews we have assembled so far. We also visited with Natalie Purschwitz about our planned rhizomatic installation that will take over the stairwell and Faris lobby beginning in September. Our plans for the various components are still evolving, but one thing that has become increasingly clear is how much work we still have to do, not least with respect to completing our outstanding interviews.

And so, on that front, this afternoon I met my colleague Judith Garay at SFU Woodward's to talk about her dance history. It is an incredibly varied and peripatetic one. Judith was actually born in BC (something I didn't know), but moved with her family at a very young age to London (her dad was in the navy). That's where she took her first dance class. Returning to Victoria at age seven, she began taking class once a week in Victoria with Vivian Briggs. Following a move to Halifax, she continued her training, but she only really got serious about things after she enrolled at NASCAD (she was intending to be a fashion and textile designer) and met her first modern and professional dance instructor, Anita Martin. From there, she took a couple of summer intensives at Toronto Dance Theatre, but realizing she needed more structured instruction, she headed off to London to study with London Contemporary Dance Theatre at The Place. It was in London that Judith met her life partner, Anthony Morgan, also a dancer. Following their time in London, the pair decided to return to North America, but whereas Judith wanted to relocate to Toronto, Anthony was keen to try to New York.

Judith agreed to try out the Big Apple for three months, but she ended up staying for sixteen years. That was because very soon after arriving in the city, Judith hooked up with Pearl Lang at the Ailey School. Lang, along with Alfredo Corvino (a former Ballets Russes dancer and a master teacher of ballet at Julliard), became a key mentor. Then, too, there was the fact that soon after arriving in New York Judith joined the Martha Graham Company, quickly becoming a principal dancer there. This was at the height of Graham's fame, with celebrities like Liza Minnelli routinely dropping by the studio, and Halston, Graham's preferred costume designer, giving the dancers rides in his limo. And yet at the same time, Judith said that was living below the poverty line in a roach-infested railroad apartment in a slum, saving up her per diems while on tour in order to help make ends meet.

One of Judith's favourite memories from her time with the Graham company was being asked to reconstruct a three-minute 1926 solo by Graham called Tanagra. They had only some silent film footage to go by and had to guess at which piece of Satie music was being used, but Judith said the six month experience remains an important memory.

It was in January 1992 that Judith returned to BC to take up a guest teaching position at the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU. She stayed on for an extra six weeks over the summer to lead the School's Off-Centre Dance Company on a tour of the province. That experience, Judith said, is what hooked her, and so when Santa Aloi encouraged her to apply for the full-time, tenure-track position that opened up that fall, she did. She has been at SFU ever since, and while Judith admitted that she still has a somewhat vexed relationship with the institutional structures of the academy, she also said that she enjoys teaching, especially with SFU's cohort system, where one is able to watch the evolution of a dancer over the course of four or more years. She also admitted that after being poor for most of her life as a working dancer, having a steady paycheque was something that she came to appreciate.

Of course Judith is perhaps best known in the Vancouver dance community for leading her company Dancers Dancing, which has given many emerging dance artists their first job, and which, during its formative years, regularly toured to all regions of BC. Judith said that bringing dance to communities in BC beyond Vancouver and Victoria became something of her mission--though it was also a mission that essentially required her to work two full-time jobs. This explains why she has backed away from the rigorous touring schedule in the last decade.

But she still has a keen eye for emerging talent, and on that front Judith concluded her interview by saying that as a dance city Vancouver is completely unrecognizable from what it was when she returned in the early 1990s. She admitted that she couldn't keep up with all the talent, but she also said that that was a good thing.

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Next Week at The Cultch: Tara Cheyenne Performance's How to Be

I'm bummed that I am going to miss the full-length version of Tara Cheyenne Performance's How to Be at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre next week. I have been following the development of this work over the past few years (read past posts here, here and here) and was excited to see this latest iteration, not least because it unites on stage all the previous performer-collaborators, including Justine A. Chambers, Susan Elliott, Kate Franklin, Josh Martin, Bevin Poole, Kim Stevenson, and Marcus Youssef.

Thankfully I was able to get a sneak peek of the work earlier today as choreographer and TCP AD Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg invited me to stop by the studio to take in a run-through. In deference to Tara and the performers--and also because the piece is still being refined in sections--I will not divulge what's in store for viewers. But I can say that there will be surprises--including from the costumes!

And also that the Prince section remains.

And, finally, that you would be a fool to miss this show.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 32

Yesterday morning Emmalena Fredriksson stopped by my Woodward's office to tell me about her dance history. That history began in Emmalena's native Sweden, specifically in a small town to the west of Stockholm called Örebro. Later, when Emmalena began a three-year program at the prestigious and demanding Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD) she found herself joined by seven other dancers from Örebro, with other members of their cohort asking them what exactly was in the water there to produce so many talented dancers. Emmalena downplayed the specialness of Örebro, but did state that the recreational dance scene in Sweden is very different than in Canada, with robust community programs in every city that are fully funded by the state, and with her high school additionally having a dance program in which students could major.

That said, Emmalena said that when she graduated from high school there was still only one professional dance academy in Sweden, which was located in the north, and which was mainly geared toward the entertainment industry (e.g. training back-up dancers for musicals and the Eurovision song contest). Emmalena dutifully completed the curriculum--comprised solely of jazz, ballet and Cunningham--at said institution, but craving more rigorous contemporary training she subsequently auditioned for and was accepted by SEAD. There, the training couldn't have been more different, focusing as it did on release-based and somatic techniques alongside lots of floor work. Another thing Emmalena had to get used to was that her instructors changed every six weeks and that she and the other dancers were subjected to regular evaluation, with the threat of being kicked out always hovering above them. Nevertheless, she thrived at SEAD, which fostered her choreographic and composition talents, as well as her love of improvisation. Emmalena also recounted a memory of being in a work choreographed by Susan Rethorst that was performed to an empty auditorium, with the audience gathered in an adjoining studio, the door to which each dancer in the piece would pass through briefly only once. Apparently it caused a minor scandal (it was a ticketed performance open to the public), but Emmalena remembers it as an utterly joyful piece that taught her so much about the concept of presence.

It was in 2013 that Emmalena moved to Vancouver to complete her MFA at Simon Fraser University; she was interested in interdisciplinary practice and also knew a friend of Daisy Thompson, who was then also in the program. Gradually she met and began collaborating with other members of the community, including Alexa Mardon, Lexi Vajda, Renée Sigouin, and Ashley Whitehead. Many of these dancers would perform in Emmalena's MFA graduating project, Dance Work/Work Dance (2015), which was my first introduction to Emmalena's choreographic talents, and which has been performed in various gallery spaces around the city. Composer and fellow SFU alum Alex Mah has also become a frequent collaborator, sharing with Emmalena a love of improvisation and live scoring.

To my question about why she has stayed in Vancouver since completing her MFA Emmalena first sighed, explaining that she was in the throes of applying for permanent residency, a particularly fraught and expensive undertaking. Then she said that since graduating high school in Sweden Vancouver has been the longest place she's every stayed (going on four years now) and that notwithstanding the expense and her concerns about her long-term financial sustainability, she finds the dance scene very exciting and inspiring, with friends invested in each other's practices, and with work that she wants to see and support. As long as those things remain in place, and as long as she can restore her soul by heading to the mountains to hike and ski and snowboard, Emmalena has said she'll continue to call Vancouver home.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 31

Earlier this morning Justine, Alexa and I gathered at The Dance Centre for our first group interview in a while. Our interviewee was Noam Gagnon and even before the conversation had officially begun he'd managed to tell us about two figures in the Canadian dance world whom, somewhat surprisingly, he had slept with. Then, when Alexa explained that we might use some of his gestures from the interview as part of a physical score Noam deliberately began pinching his nipples, rubbing his crotch and grabbing his ass. But it was the far more subtle gesture of Noam rubbing one arm with the hand of another while talking animatedly that I was most drawn to; he repeated it multiple times over the course of our interview and afterwards he explained that it was his gauge for telling the truth. If he could feel goose bumps on his arm then he knew he was being authentic; no bumps meant he was bullshitting. And there was certainly a lot of history for Noam to test his claims against.

As Noam mentioned, he started dancing relatively late, at the age of 19. Following a degree in visual art, which included a lot of performance-based and improvisation work, he appeared in a friend's dance recital and got hooked on movement. With no formal training, and at the time also speaking no English, he subsequently applied to Concordia University's Contemporary Dance Department, which uniquely focuses as much on choreographic process and creation/composition classes as it does on technique. Noam was accepted and there he studied with Elizabeth Langley, Michael Montanaro, Silvy Panet-Raymond, Jo Leslie, Martha Carter, and Andrew Harding, among others. In 1987, following the completion of his dance degree, Noam came west to tree plant; he said the experience was awful, but that it was while on a break in Vancouver between contracts that he saw an ad for auditions at EDAM, which was then still being co-directed (at this point by Peter Bingham, Lola McLaughlin, Jennifer Mascall, and Peter Ryan). Noam was accepted into the company, as was Dana Gingras, his future collaborator-in-crime at The Holy Body Tattoo (HBT). Noam spent two years at EDAM before relocating once again, this time to Ottawa to dance for Peter Boneham at Le groupe de la place royale. (Interesting side fact we learned from Justine: she took classes with Noam at Le groupe as a young high school dancer in Ottawa.)

Part of what attracted Noam to Le groupe was Boneham's desire to have him choreograph in addition to dance. And so alongside appearing in works by Boneham, Louise Bédard, Sylvain Émard, Ginette Laurin, Davida Monk, and Yvonne Coutts, among others, while at Le groupe Noam also came into his own as a choreographer. Already at EDAM he and Gingras were building a unique aesthetic together (to the point that Noam, with chagrin, admitted they were often openly disdainful of the work other choreographers were setting on them). Thus, Noam convinced Boneham to let Gingras be part of his last creation process at Le groupe, which became the piece L'Orage (1991). A year later the duo was back in Vancouver, had secured a 3000-square foot studio space (whose long and narrow L-shape configuration, according to Noam, accounted for the look of a lot of early HBT works), and had founded their company, which until 1999 included the composer Jean-Yves Thériault. For the next 16 years Noam and Gingras poured their bodies and souls into creating now legendary works like Poetry & Apocalypse (1994), our brief eternity (1996), Circa (2000), and Monumental (2005). HBT was known as much for their endless touring and inventive self-promotion as they were for the extreme physicality of the movement and their cross-disciplinary collaborations with music and film. But Noam revealed that he and Gingras were largely flying by the seats of their pants and creating opportunities for themselves the only way they knew how, which was spontaneously and without fear of the consequences (whether it be throwing all their money at a photoshoot and press kit, or maxing out a credit card for ten minutes at On the Boards in Seattle, or pretending to be producers in order to get meetings with European presenters). As Noam recalled that time, it all came from a boundless excitement and, in his words, a "thirst" to make the work, and to see where that work would take them.

Indeed, it took them all around the world, including Glasgow, where Noam recounted the horror of blanking completely on the choreography of our brief eternity during one performance and almost quitting dance as a result; and Sydney, Australia, where he and Susan Elliott both caught a bug on the plane and spent five days throwing up during rehearsal, only to power through their scheduled shows (also of our brief eternity) through sheer strength of will. (Interesting side fact number two: this is our third vomiting story so far in this project.) However, there came a point when Noam tired of life on the road, and where he and Gingras wished to move in different directions. And so in 2006 Noam formed Vision Impure as a platform to create solo work for himself, as well as to collaborate with other artists and choreographers, including the late Nigel Charnock (also a big influence on Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg) and Daniel Léveillé. (Around the same time, having practiced and taught Pilates for thirty years, he also established his Beyond Pilates Studio in the West End, knowing, as he said, there would come a point where he would have to retire from dance, but also wanting to keep himself healthy while still performing.)

Now after 10+ years making more intimate and conceptual-style works, Noam says he finds himself craving the opportunity to create larger-scale works for a bigger stage. But he's also tired of having to explain himself to presenters and granting agencies. As he put it, there remains within him a lot of thirst to explore and discover; but he doesn't have a lot of patience anymore for the institutional bullshit.

And certainly no one in this community is going to fault Noam, after the career he's had, for saying so. I just wish those in a position to do so would answer his call for change.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 30

Yesterday I interviewed Natalie Tin Yin Gan for our Vancouver Dance Histories project. Natalie began recreational Chinese folk dancing at the age of six in Scarborough, Ontario. Just a week before she was to perform in her first public recital, her family moved to Vancouver and to this day Natalie says she cannot remember a single thing about the move. Soon enough, however, she was enrolled in the Cindy Yan Dance Academy at Granville and Broadway, where she studied until she was 14; the traditional costumes that Natalie wore for various performances while studying at this institution just served as an important mnemonic in the collaboration with Eury Chang that Natalie recently participated in as part of a DanceLab residency at The Dance Centre.

In high school Natalie taught herself hip hop, going so far as to start, captain and choreograph for the first hip hop crew at her school. Following additional studio dance training at the Spotlight Academy in Burnaby, Natalie enrolled in the dance program at SFU, where she studied with my colleagues Rob Kitsos, Cheryl Prophet, Marla Eist, Judith Garay. Sessional instructors also included Day Helesic, Megan Walker-Straight, Peter Bingham (who inspired Natalie's love of contact), and Claire French, whose composition class would be instrumental in helping Natalie create her first major work, Hands in His Back. Rob was also key to fostering Natalie's first cross-disciplinary collaborations, and it was while at SFU that Natalie met theatre-maker Milton Lim and musician Remy Siu, with whom she would go on to establish the company Hong Kong Exile (HKE). While at SFU, Natalie also started Art for Impact with Alissa Stanton and Anna Kraulis, which has since become a registered non-profit and which over the past eight years has hosted countless community events and raised serious funds for a number of social causes. According to Natalie, it was helping to run Art for Impact while studying full-time that really honed her producing chops.

Upon graduation, and following a trip to Lebanon (where Natalie taught theatre to Palestinian refugees), Natalie signed up to dance with Modus Operandi for two years. By this time Natalie had already danced for Jennifer Mascall in two separate tours of Homewerk. However, the next major step in her creative progression came in 2013 when Joyce Rosario, then at New Works, put Natalie's name forward for a commission from the Kickstart program of the CanAsian Dance Festival. Natalie received the commission and according to its terms she was assigned a mentor-dramaturg to work with from the community. That person turned out to be battery opera's Lee Su-Feh and Natalie credits her for thoroughly transforming her practice. Out of this collaboration came HKE's acclaimed NINEEIGHT, which has toured festivals across Canada. Other transformative moments in her still very young career that Natalie cited for me included collaborations with La Pocha Nostra and the Le Brothers at the 2015 Vancouver LIVE Biennale; an artist talk for An Exact Vertigo that she gave at UNIT/PITT galleries; and running a workshop at fu-GEN Theatre's 2016 Walk the Walk Festival about commanding space without preparing.

It was at the same festival that Natalie presented a version of her performance installation Chinese Vaginies that went horribly wrong. The piece involves the use of dough to mould into steamed buns in the shape of a certain part of the female anatomy. However Natalie said that the lights on the stage at the Factory Theatre in Toronto were far too hot and that the dough began to cook before the piece was over. At the end of the performance, fu-GEN Artistic Director David Yee was scraping bits of cooked bun off the stage floor with his credit card.

Somehow that tactile mix of food and commerce seems like an apt metaphor for art-making.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 29

Yesterday I interviewed Lesley Telford in my SFU Woodward's office for our Vancouver Dance Histories project. It was a rare free hour for the busy choreographer as she prepares to premiere a new commission for Ballet BC tomorrow at the Queen E, and as she continues the development of a new piece called spooky action at a distance (about particle entanglement) for her company Inverso as part of her current residency at The Dance Centre. The premiere of the latter work at the end of April coincides with the remount of my play Long Division, for which Lesley also did the choreography--and which she has said to me she'd still like to polish and tweak. I don't know how she'll manage being in two places at once, but certainly her inventiveness as a choreographer (as well as her partiality for working with text) is part of the reason I was so keen to collaborate with her.

I first encountered Lesley's work when her Brittle Failure played the Chutzpah! Festival in 2013. At that point she was still based in Madrid (she moved back to Vancouver permanently the following year). How she got to Madrid 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. From there 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 (now AD at Ballets Jazz de Montréal) in a piece by James Kudelka. At 24 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 Jiří Kylián. Six years later she was a company member at Nederlands Dans Theater, helping to create original works by Kylián, Ohad Naharin, William Forsythe, Crystal Pite and others.

It was while at NDT (where she danced from 2000-2010) that Lesley first began to choreograph. During this time she was also traveling 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. Indeed, Arts Umbrella, 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. Similarly, the dancers in the new Performance Research Program that Lesley has started at AU--all of them already working professionally, but also seeking additional post-graduation opportunities for intensive training--are also helping Lesley create the first phase of spooky action at a distance (a glimpse of which I was able to see at an open showing last week at the DC). These same talented performers were also integral to creating and helping to teach to the actors the choreography in Long Division.

It was through that process especially that I was able to see what an inspired teacher-choreographer Lesley is. We're lucky to have her back in the city.

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empty.swimming.pool at The Dance Centre

What must it be like for a solo artist with a significant and quite distinctive body of work that straddles multiple disciplines to discover she has a performance twin? Would one sit slack-jawed thinking someone had stolen your act? Or would you immediately start scheming about how you could work with this person? Happily for Vancouver audiences, in the case of local dance-theatre maven Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg it was the latter. When she first saw Italian artist Silvia Gribaudi on stage at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago in between laughing herself silly she began plotting about how they might collaborate. The result, a duet called empty.swimming.pool, is on at The Dance Centre through this Saturday in a co-presentation with the 2017 Chutzpah! Festival.

While it would be wrong to describe Friedenberg and Gribaudi 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. Essentially they are feminist buffons interested in tickling our funny bones while also getting us to think about why, exactly, we're laughing. Now, 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, Friedenberg and Gribaudi both play with and undermine these expectations, troping in empty.swimming.pool on questions of female rivalry through a subtly hilarious burlesquing of theatrical razzmatazz conventions (I don't think I've ever seen such an over-the-top lighting design by James Proudfoot), while simultaneously eschewing the commodifying politics of spectacle that frequently attends those conventions, especially for women. (One detects something of the dramaturgical hand of outside eye Justine A. Chambers in the framing of this dialectic.)

Indeed, the piece begins quite soberly, with Gribaudi and Friedenberg, 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, but otherwise refusing to "perform" for us. Eventually the duo moves downstage, but even then it takes them forever to do what we're waiting for: talk. Instead they first engage in a pantomime of raised eyebrows, moued lips, and open hand gestures. When, finally, they begin talking their conversation immediately descends into glossolalia as they cycle through the languages they both do and don't really speak. This sequence culminates in a wickedly funny parody of common French words non-native speakers are wont to pepper their speech with, a string of syncopated "voilàs" and "wows," accompanied by suitably Gallic raised arms, all of which sent last night's audience into stitches.

Thereafter Gribaudi and Friendenberg 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 Friedenberg demonstrating her impressive flexibility in cycling through a range of yoga poses. Gribaudi 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. 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--Fridenberg's red and sparkly, Gribaudi's covered in appliqué flowers--the two performers not only remain nonplussed by the display of their non-showgirl bodies, but also keep up a barely in unison snapping of fingers and sashaying of legs as Friendenberg tells a story about being looked through as a mother with her son at the pool. Gribaudi sympathizes, only to complicate this moment of female bonding by subsequently telling us that she herself doesn't have kids and then 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 Gribauldi, evidently disturbed by her partner's lack of pitch, abandons Friedenberg and walks offstage. She returns seconds later with a bottle of water, which she hands to Friedenberg, who promptly takes a grateful swig and then continues to gurgle through another verse of the song. Disgusted, Gribauldi empties the rest of the water on the stage and again walks towards to the wings. Just as Friedenberg gets to the end of her number, reaching into her bosom to spray confetti over herself, Gribauldi runs on stage, sliding through the water like a grand odalisque, and arriving at the feet of Friedenberg with arms upstretched in triumph. Not to be outdone, Friedenberg, having stormed off, makes her own sliding finale, this time on her stomach.

It was the perfect capstone to a slyly subversive performance that was all about these amazingly skilled artists negotiating, within the traditional frames of theatrical reproduction, the terms by which they will be looked at.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 28

Yesterday, after a long hiatus, I finally got back into the swing of solo interviewing for our Dance Histories Project. My subject was the divine Caroline Liffmann, who I always love hanging out with because she makes me laugh so much--and because, in turn, it's such a treat to hear her erupt in giggles.

After participating in an EDAM summer intensive in 1999, Caroline moved to Vancouver in 2000 to study at Main Dance, where she trained with Kathryn Ricketts, Sarah Brewer, Helen Walkley, Lee Su Feh, and benefited from guest instructors and artists-in-residence like Grant Strate, Anthony Morgan, Emily Molnar, Wen Wei Wang, Jennifer Mascall, Kathleen McDonaugh, Susan Elliott, Ron Stewart, Daelik, and Judith Garay, among others. In her graduating year at Main Dance, Caroline apprenticed with battery opera when, as she put it, "Su Feh and David were in their full-on Wushu phase." She said she could barely walk after the first few days of training.

Upon graduating from Main in 2003, Caroline began appearing at EDAM and Dancing on the Edge in work by Susan Elliott and Helen Walkley. She also began creating work with her peers, including Jennifer Clarke, Tanya Podlozniuk, Julia Carr, and her former roommate, Barb Murray, with whom Caroline curated a site-specific mini-dance festival/neighbourhood potluck in the courtyard of her housing co-op in 2004. Caroline said that performing has never been her "favourite thing," though she did recount this hilarious anecdote about appearing in a piece by Delia Brett called He Was Swimming the Other Way, alongside Tanya Podlozniuk, Laura Hicks, and Jennifer McLeish Lewis. The work had a mermaid theme and included an elaborate zip-up costume for Caroline--which, when the piece toured to Victoria, was promptly left behind backstage at The Dance Centre. A frantic phone call was put into Delia's partner, Alex Ferguson, who made it to Victoria's Metro Theatre in time. However, the story doesn't end there. Somehow, just before the quartet was to go on Jennifer McLeish Lewis got locked out of the theatre; eventually she made it back in the building, but because there was no one backstage on headset to communicate with the tech booth, the dancers, who were "fifteen seconds away from being dressed and ready to enter," missed their opening cue. At another performance of the same piece Caroline recalled losing count of a unison move on the floor that she had to perform while facing the upstage wall; at a certain point she calculated it was time to turn to face the audience, whereupon she encountered the perplexed faces of her fellow dancers and just continued to circle back around, eventually getting back into sync. This she promptly demonstrated for me on the floor of my office at SFU Woodward's.

Since 2011 Caroline has collaborated with Lina Fitzner and Lee Hutzulak as Light Box, creating a number of short dance works and performance installations for Dances for a Small Stage, Dancing on the Edge, BC Buds, etc. She is also active in community-based dance, which is how I first met Caroline, when she assisted on Sylvain Ḗmard's Le Grand Continental for the PuSh Festival in 2015. That remains a highlight of my own dance history in Vancouver, and that's largely due to Caroline's grace and good humour throughout the whole process. I remember her giving me a correction, something having to do with my arms. I joked that the arm movements didn't really matter so long as I had the steps right. The look she gave me was priceless. Then she said, as if communicating with a truculent and not terribly bright child, "Peter, we dance with our whole bodies."

Indeed we do, and I thank Caroline for reminding me of that during our time together yesterday.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 27

Yesterday we didn't have an interview subject booked, so Justine volunteered to recount her dance history to Alexa and I. This is something that the three of us are each supposed to do before this project is over. Mine will be very short.

Justine has been in Vancouver exactly a decade, arriving in 2006 with her partner, Josh Hite, who was starting an MFA at UBC. At this point, as Justine noted, she thought she had retired from dance, leaving behind a long career in Toronto without much regret (more on this below), as well as fourteen months in Los Angeles when she danced for two companies/entertainment franchises that seemed the antithesis of her rigorous contemporary training. The first was Diavolo Dance Company, which combined dance, acrobatics and circus arts, and whose death-defying stunts on stage were always preceded by cult-like backstage circle in which company members were required to say "I will die for you" (Justine recounted a terrifying story of a forward leap off a rocking boat that she had to do, but without the normal counter-ballast because one of her fellow members' feet had been crushed by the weight of the boat). The second troupe was called Hot Thing, and involved women in fishnets and short shorts doing the splits and lots of bootie pops at various celebrity clubs around LA.

After all of this, upon arriving in Vancouver Justine was quite content to be waitressing at Rangoli instead of dancing professionally. But eventually, through a connection with one of her former teachers at Ryerson in Toronto (where Justine did her post-secondary dance training), she was invited by Artemis Gordon at Arts Umbrella to sub for some of the classes normally taught by Yannick Matthon, who was at that time very often on the road with Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot. Gordon then invited Justine to join as a full-time faculty member, and also to help her run the school administratively. Justine said that it was an insane amount of work and that the teaching was very hard, but that it made her a better dancer. It was also while at Arts Umbrella that Justine met Emily Molnar, John Alleyne (with whom she collaborated on a section of The Four Seasons), and various of the then company members of Ballet BC--an institutional connection that Justine maintains to this day.

Indeed, one of Justine's first choreographic forays in Vancouver was to remount a section of a duet she had created in Toronto on herself and recently retired Ballet BC rehearsal director Sylvain Senez for the 2009 iteration of 12 Minutes Max (which was curated by Joyce Rosario and Tanya Marquardt). The piece got picked up by Donna Spencer for the Dancing on the Edge Festival, and together with new work that Justine was creating with her partner Josh--notably, Copy, a performance-cum-installation at the Roundhouse that featured, among others, Megan and Vanessa Goodman, Molly McDermott and Laura Avery--Justine suddenly found herself making dances again, albeit in a way (and primarily as a result of her interdisciplinary collaborations with visual artists like Josh and Jen Wei and Brendan Fernandes and Kristina Lee Podevsa) that was fundamentally different in its conceptual focus from what she had previously understood dance to be.

Parallel to this Justine was also teaching, offering a class in contemporary technique at Harbour Dance (then the only such class in the city), and collaborating with Day Helesic to launch what would eventually become Working Class (now overseen by the Training Society of Vancouver and run out of The Dance Centre). And she was dancing in other folks' work, including Jennifer Mascall's White Spider, Company 605's The Inheritor Album, Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg's Highgate, and pieces by Wen Wei Wang, Claire French, Science Friction (Farley Johansson and Shannon Moreno), and others.

It was only after narrating her most recent dance history that Justine circled back to her time in Toronto, which began with her joining Robert Desroisers' eponymous dance theatre company upon graduation from Ryerson. During her years in the company, which toured regularly, she learned that nothing gets easier, you only become a better dancer. She also recounted stories of lost passports in Miami and drunken pool accidents in Bermuda. Interestingly, Justine framed her early career in Toronto in the context of her post-Vancouver returns to the city for the collaborative peer-to-peer choreographic and teaching workshops/explorations/creative exchanges 8 Days and Love In, which she noted have been so instrumental to the dance relationships she has formed in the past decade.

To this end, in answering the "Why Vancouver?" question Justine noted that the collaborators she now has in Toronto (including Jenn Goodwin, Heidi Strauss, Julia Sasso, and others) are a result of what she's done since moving to Vancouver. While initially Justine had absolutely no intention of staying here, she stated that she now has a deep support network, and that she also wouldn't be making the kind of work she's making if she hadn't come to the city. She likewise affirmed that for her the future is exciting and potentially limitless, not least because of a new generation of "badass dancers" for whom ideas of expanded choreographic practices are just a given and who have access to a range of resources that weren't available a decade ago. The key, according to Justine, is just to learn to share those resources and, in so doing, to do less in order to do more.

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Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 26

Yesterday Justine and Alexa and I were finally able to coordinate our schedules to undertake our first group interview since before the summer. Luckily for us our interview subject was Amber Funk Barton, who was so open and generous with us. The recounting of her dance history was like a long love letter to the community: starting with Arts Umbrella's Artemis Gordon, who took Amber under her wing following Amber's graduation from high school (throughout which Amber had been doing Goh Ballet Academy's half-day program), and eventually steering her towards Ballet BC's mentor program.

Following the conclusion of her formal training, Amber was lucky to dance for and receive further guidance from three other icons in the community: Joe Laughlin (where she first met James Gnam and Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg), Judith Marcuse, and Lola McLaughlin. Lola took Amber on her first tour of Europe, an epic transmigration of several major Vancouver dance artists and companies to Croatia coordinated by The Dance Centre's Mirna Zagar. Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras of Holy Body Tattoo, Alvin Erasga, battery opera, Crystal Pite, Joe Laughlin, and others all made the journey. Gingras, in particular, would become a major influence on Amber, inviting her to be part of Heart is an Arena and teaching Amber that dance was as much about embodying ideas and energy as it was about performing the steps correctly.

During this time Amber was also starting to create her own work, beginning with two full-length creations in four months. As Amber said, in retrospect the way she went about launching her choreographic career was naively ambitious. For example, she created her company, the response, in 2008 because she had maxed out her eligibility for individual project funding. But she had an idea for a new piece and so she created a company in order to tap into a different pool of money and make the work happen. The result was Risk, which I well remember seeing at The Firehall, with Amber, the two Joshes (Beamish and Martin), David Raymond, and Heather L. Gray creating kinetic magic in and around a couch (a prop that Amber said they incorporated from the rehearsal studio upstairs at the Firehall). Amber took time to credit Firehall Artistic Producer Donna Spencer for her faith in her work, as well as her immense contributions to the development and promotion of dance in Vancouver more generally. For example, it was Donna who first connected Amber with Shay Kuebler, commissioning what would become Status Quo from them, and facilitating the work's subsequent travel to the Canada Dance Festival. Amber also noted that what she appreciated about Donna was that she was willing to invest in an artist's career over the long haul, recognizing that mistakes made in the short term would eventually pay off in more mature and satisfying work.

In terms of memorable experiences (both good and bad), Amber recounted the time she fainted on stage during rehearsal for Lola's piece while in Croatia. As Amber put it, the rehearsal was very hot, and she was wearing a plastic dress; but she didn't want to say anything, as she feared looking unprofessional. And so she continued to try to perform her steps and she collapsed to the floor. Afterwards Lola apparently worried that Amber might be pregnant. Then there was the story behind the creation of Hero and Heroine, a 30-minute duet that Amber created for herself and Josh Martin in 2010. Showing an excerpt of the work-in-progress at Dance Victoria for a bunch of different presenters changed Amber's perspective on how and why she makes work, and when and with whom she decides to share it. The work was apparently ripped apart, and in a way that reflected more of the presenters' own internal aesthetic battles than the integrity of the piece per se. Still, the experience taught Amber that she had to create work on her own terms, and not in order to please individuals who might be able to help tour that work.

Amber concluded her interview by saying that her decision to forge a career in dance was always simultaneously a decision to have that career here, in Vancouver. She also very wisely said that thinking about the future always involves a process of checking in with where she is at in the present, and that currently she is being sustained by and getting renewed energy from teaching. She noted that being a dance artist is undeniably hard, but that part of her also loves and thrives on the rigour. She also said that as a first world artist with access to resources that other folks in the world don't have (and no matter one's grumbling about how even more of such resources should be made available), she felt it was her responsibility to keep creating: because others elsewhere can't; and also because if you stop then the system wins. It was a very moving conclusion to an incredibly wise and wonderful interview.

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