Winter 2021
Dance Central A Dance Centre Publication
Content A Conversation with Raven Spirit Dance and Angela Conquet Page 2
Redefining the Contemporary between Canada, Peru and India Page 12
Editor's Note Welcome to the first issue of Dance Central in 2021. Scotiabank Dance Centre is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. What a milestone! While we find ourselves still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, we are determined to forge ahead with the biannual Dance in Vancouver (DIV) and Indigenous Dance in Vancouver (IndigeDIV) scheduled to take place this November. To further our commitment to represent Black, Indigenous, People Of Colour (BIPOC) voices in the dance community of British Columbia, this Winter 2021 issue features dialogues of Raven Spirit Dance and TomoeArts with their international collaborators respectively.
Collaborations
A Conversation with Raven Spirit Dance and Angela Conquet Angela Conquet (AC) from Melbourne, Australia has been appointed the guest curator for Dance in Vancouver (DIV) this year. A dance curator with 20 years of experience in Europe and Australia, she will be working closely with Raven Spirit Dance Society with Starr Muranko (SM) and Michelle Olson (MO) as part of IndigeDIV. I had the joy of speaking to them to kickstart the first issue of Dance Central in 2021 with an offering of space to engage in conversations around Indigenous Dance.
What are ways of engaging dance in our sociopolitical context? How can we talk about dance in a language that transcends our colonial past? Can we move beyond decolonizing and decentering by focusing on our common love for dance? Can we not carry on from there, where we all feel connected to one another, through dance? My new year resolution is to build upon The Dance Centre's work at providing unique opportunities for cross-cultural understanding of dance across BC and beyond. We have to be vigilant not to fall into the trap of racial segregation in the name of diversity and inclusion. Lest we forget, our eternal pursuit for artistic excellence in dance. As always, we thank all the artists who have agreed to contribute and we welcome new writing and project ideas at any time, in order to continue to make Dance Central a more vital link to the community. Please send material by e-mail to editor@thedancecentre.ca. We look forward to many more conversations!
Shanny Rann, Editor
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D a n c e r : Ta s h a F a y e E v a n s ( I n d i g e D I V ) © E r i k Z e n n s t r o m
SR: Starr, can you tell me about IndigeDIV? SM: It started as a play on words before it became official. This will be our third IndigeDIV since Raven Spirit produced it in partnership with The Dance Centre in 2017. It has always been our main focus to create a space for conversations around Indigeneity, more specifically around Indigenous process and sharing of work. We felt that in the past, not only through Dance in Vancouver but other platforms as well, that there was not enough context given to presenters or to audience members on what they were seeing or how artists’ works were being shared. So we wanted to create an environment that supported the Indigenous artists’ voice and work. This has translated into a sharing of new works by Indigenous artists whom we curated and programmed. We specifically chose new works or excerpts of them and offered that place in between the dance studio and the performance. It is not necessarily a full-length, polished piece with all the production elements on a main stage, but that in-between-space where artists can try on different ideas. We also purposefully give artists funding support or tech time support to try out lights and sound or bring in a mentor. The idea is such that they have more than just an hour of tech time to get something up and ready for a show. We have been noticing, particularly for Indigenous artists, when they are sharing their work at festivals, they do not get a lot of tech time, so they rush to put something on. Let us give them time and space. Key to IndigeDIV has been the conversation circles that happen before and after the showing, where we put out ideas or provocations to a panel of guests artists. In the past, we had Indigenous artists and non-Indigenous presenters who have been strong allies, talk about what worked and what did not around the work before the presenters come and see the works-in-progress. The last two DIVs we intentionally had an Indigenous keynote speaker to give it a larger context of the location and space. This year, we are stepping into a more active role in terms of being a part of the conversations earlier on in the process, such as now being engaged with Angela as the international curator. I will be the Indigenous curator this year, which we have not had before. This is something that we see happening in the future as well. We are looking to bring DIV into the Indigenous circles, and vice versa. One of the issues that came up during our initial conversation with the Dance Centre several years ago was how Indigenous dance tends to be separate from the mainstream programming, but Dance Central Winter 2021
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Collaborations thankfully that has changed over the years. It is a part of the larger conversations that are happening. All of the heavy lifting and hard work is not just the responsibility of the Indigenous artists. Sometimes we just want to go and show our work. We do not want to be the one who also has to teach all the cultural stuff. We talk about protocol and share that responsibility collectively in the arts world; we can do our part. The other thing to share is that we are the producers and we are curating the program for the Indigenous arts. We are drawing on all of our different contacts and resources. Michelle's home community is Tr'ondëk Hwëchin in the Yukon; my mom's home community is Moose Cree First Nation up in Northern Ontario. We are both tier two in Vancouver. We make sure that our traditional welcomes are done by elders or cultural leaders here that are from the host nations. In 2019, we had our keynote speaker, Sierra Tasi Baker, from Squamish. We see ourselves as connectors as opposed to having all the answers. That is a short history of IndigeDIV that has brought us to now. I would say it is quite a different expansion we are stepping into in terms of the role that Raven Spirit will play in this Dance in Vancouver. SR: Angela, I know it might be a little early on but would you like to share how you are planning to engage with Raven Spirit as the curator for Dance in Vancouver this year?
Australia and Canada AC: I feel lucky that I now live in Australia, because I think there are many similarities in between Canada and Australia. I completely agree with Starr that it is not the responsibility of the Indigenous artists to educate us and to invite us to find out about protocols, dramaturgies or the importance of self-determined initiatives. It is our work to 4
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do, presenters living in settler contexts such as Australia and Canada. I think this work is beyond urgent. White people are often in places of power, running organizations or being curators; it is a position of power insofar as we make choices of what audiences will get to see. In our processes, we often perpetuate or we are complicit of systems that are embedded in our own methodologies of thinking or acting because we work within systems that are very white, oppressive and Eurocentric. Whether we do it consciously or sometimes unconsciously, we should have absolutely no excuse for not being aware and for not paying attention to how things should be different. In the last few years, I have been very inspired in my work by my relationships with Indigenous colleagues and artists and I realized how much we should be preoccupied with not so much how we stand (i.e. choreographically and aesthetically) in contemporary dance, but where we stand. I wonder if this is a question that is perhaps more central here [in Vancouver/ Canada]? The fact that most settler dancers in Australia do not ponder much on that we actually have our feet dancing or walking on stolen land, is problematic. As such, I see it as a perpetuation of white blindness and institutionalized racism, which is very prevalent in Australia. I am extremely delighted to be working from the beginning with Raven Spirit, with Starr and Michelle, because I cannot see any other way, but one of collaboration. For me, the challenge-and I take it as a very creative challenge-is to see how we can cocreate that space where Indigenous methodologies, and worldviews are central to the full program. Whether it is by co-conceiving together different ways of talking to artists, debating or entering into a conversation about a specific work, I'm interested in bringing an awareness that we open up ourselves to understanding differently our relationship to time and use Indigenous dramaturgies with their emphasis on horizontality, intersectionality, commonality and cross pollination as a way of resisting our transactional ways of dealing with
"All of the heavy lifting and hard work is not just the responsibility of the Indigenous artists. Sometimes we just want to go and show our work. We do not want to be the one who also has to teach all the cultural stuff. We talk about protocol and share that responsibility collectively in the arts world; we can do our part." art making. I am very concerned now that we are in these pandemic times where, yet again our body and its precarity or vulnerability has been exposed. We are discovering that we are not the everpowerful creatures that build this beautiful, neoliberalist economy where everything is solid but actually that we are all fragile. Indigenous peoples have been dealing with this instability for quite a long time. Now, it is really the opportunity to pause and reset the potential dramaturgies for future societal mind shifting, which would benefit us greatly if they were inspired by Indigenous knowledges. I also think that we are in a moment in time where the quality of our imagination will define what the future will be. Who does this work of imagination? It is the artist, of course. Yvonne Rainer says, “The mind is a muscle”. Well, I think imagination if it is not a muscle, it is a practice. How do we collectively use these present times as an emancipatory terrain to really change how we operate, deeply, profoundly? Because it is not working. Our society is not working.
Our dance ecologies are not working. Look at what bodies get shown and why! Look at what our relationships with the artists have become! We are all marketeers in a way, we do not listen, we do not understand. We are pushing the artists to work and operate within systems that are crushing them, instead of supporting them. Michelle says it beautifully in her article, “Heart of the Telling" (Olson, 2017): "Nothing occurs if it is not witnessed. How can we collectively provoke change?" This is what I want to do. I am more interested in building the environment that allows us to ponder and use the artists’ invitation and specific works to delve deeper into this. I cannot see this happening without centering this whole program on Indigenous artists’ thinking. SR: To pick up on what Starr was mentioning earlier about how IndigeDIV was almost like a separate entity apart from the DIV. Angela, do you see the possibility of bringing them together? Dance Central Winter 2021 5
Dance Central The Dance Centre Scotiabank Dance Centre Level 6, 677 Davie Street Vancouver BC V6B 2G6 T 604.606.6400 F 604.606.6401 info@thedancecentre.ca www.thedancecentre.ca Dance Central is published quarterly by The Dance Centre for its members and for the dance community. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent Dance Central or The Dance Centre. The editor reserves the right to edit for clarity or length, or to meet house requirements. Editor, Art Director & Layout Shanny Rann Copy Editor Claire French Contributors to this issue: Angela Conquet, Starr Muranko, Michelle Olson, Colleen Lanki, Pamela Santana, Kavya Iyer Photo credits Front Cover: Erik Zennstrom, dancer Tasha Faye Evans in IndigeDIV 2019 Back Cover: Erik Zennstrom, dancer Jessica McMann in IndigeDIV 2019 Dance Centre Board Members: Chair Sheila G. Evani Vice Chair Megan Halkett Secretary Jason Wrobleski Treasurer Annelie Vistica Directors Julianne Chapple, Tin Gamboa, Judith Garay, Arash Khakpour, Rosario Kolstee, Anndraya T. Luui, Andrea Reid Dance Foundation Board Members: Chair Linda Blankstein Secretary Anndraya T. Luui Treasurer Janice Wells Directors Trent Berry, Samantha Luo, Mark Osburn, Sasha Morales, Andrea Benzel Dance Centre Staff: Executive Director Mirna Zagar Programming Coordinator Raquel Alvaro Associate Producer Linda Blankstein Marketing Manager Heather Bray Digital Marketing Coordinator Lindsay Curtis Membership/ Outreach Coordinator Claire French Venue Services Administrator Glenn Cohen Venue Services Representative Alice Jones Lead Technician Chengyan Boon Comptroller Elyn Dobbs Founded in 1986 as a leading dance resource centre for dance professionals and the public in British Columbia, The Dance Centre is a multifaceted organization. The Dance Centre presents an exciting season of shows and events, serves a broad membership of 300 professional dance companies and individual artists, and offers a range of activities unparalleled in Canadian dance. The Dance Centre is BC's primary resource centre for the dance profession and the public. The activities of The Dance Centre are made possible bynumerous individuals. Many thanks to our members, volunteers, community peers, board of directors and the public for your ongoing commitment to dance in BC. Your suggestions and feedback are always welcome. The operations of The Dance Centre are supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia, the BC Arts Council, and the City of Vancouver through the Office of Cultural Affairs.
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Catch 22 SM: I will just share that with IndigeDIV, there is the hope that it will be a bigger part of Dance in Vancouver. At the same time, we, as Indigenous artists, are also not wanting to be absorbed by something without having carved out that space for our ourselves, for our voices, for the conversation. It is a catch-22— wanting to be a part of things and yet wanting to still retain sovereignty and being able to say this is how we actually want to present our work, the conversations we want to have and that we are interested in. We are all trying to figure out what that could look like because it is not as if that has been done before. I feel this could be an opportunity. For me, it is so much about relationships, and not only relationships, but relationality—how we are in relation to one another, as artists, as presenters as Indigenous, non-Indigenous. We talk a lot about relationships like networking, but we are talking about going into a deeper space of acknowledging the relationality that is already there. It is inherent because we are all in this together, this circle or this community. How do we then work together? What are the different values that we bring into the space with one another? What are the blind spots? All those kinds of questions are so much more than having a networking event and talking about what we are up to. In the past, during one of the networking events hosted by The Dance Centre, after we had shown our work, the presenters would be carted or rushed off to the next event. We wished we could have more time to just sit and have a cup of tea together or a meal. It would be our way to feast together and to talk and learn from one another. We are looking at the different venues that we could host, even down to the type of food that will be served and so forth to create an Indigenous experience of what it means to be welcomed to Coast Salish territory and to come together for a period of time.
Dancer: Starr Muranko ©Erik Zennstrom
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Collaborations
Photo: Angela Conquet ©AMrozicki
Surviving Discomfort AC: I could not agree more with Starr, it is about how you orchestrate hospitality which is very important in building relationships. It is not only about networking. I am more interested in long-term relationships, or even friendships between presenters and artists that might eventuate, or not, into concrete opportunities. What I would love, together with Raven Spirit, is to enable this space. We do not have to operate according to the timeline of a delegate’s program. I would really like to just kick that off the table and invite them to function differently. If it is about spending nine hours in a room with Indigenous artists, where it is about sharing food, or whatever Michelle and Starrwant to dream about and to challenge us about, I would be up for it. I have this idea that we can all survive discomfort 8
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"I have this idea that we can all survive discomfort which is always a great methodology to understand better."
which is always a great methodology to understand better or more profoundly. Sometimes you need to be slapped or punched in the gut to really see things differently. It can be because you are watching the work that has an amazing impact on you or because somebody says something in the middle of other things, and it just stays with you—one of those epiphany moments. What I would like to do is really take a step back and hear what dramaturgies or environment that Raven Spirit wants to build, from the vision to the nitty gritty details of choice of space and set up etc. From there, I will see how I can contribute or lead my colleagues by the hand and bring them in, inviting them to open themselves up to the experience. I see this collaboration with Raven Spirit more of a sensorial invitation, one that is inviting all the senses to engage in, not just watching a work-inprogress by an Indigenous artist. That is my invitation that I would like to extend to Raven Spirit: to really go there and I will follow. I will try to best support this and do the work of preparing my colleagues in inviting them to be open, focused and to pay attention. If they do not know how to pay attention, they can learn it right there, right now with Raven Spirit’s guidance. I am really keen to suggest Indigenous artists, colleagues, thinkers, leaders from Australia to enter in conversation (or continue those existing). I would like to point out that what is happening in Australia is not isolated from what is happening in Canada. We are in a world where we are disconnected from where we stand, from the people who have been here before and from other systems of knowledge and leadership. We have to collectively listen now.
Leadership for the rest of the world SM: What is so exciting about what you were
saying, Angela, is that Australia and Canada, and to some extent New Zealand, have a lot of artistic relationships and connections. A few meetings have happened between us and artists from there since 2015, back when we could be physically together. We are a tight group now. We keep in touch through Facebook, it is like family. We share a lot about the different challenges and resources that we have. So, in a way, having you as the curator for DIV just makes perfect sense. How wonderful that we are not starting from scratch in terms of conversations, or even the relationship between Australia and Canada, which I think could provide some leadership and guidance for the rest of the world in some ways. SR: I would like to offer Dance Central as a platform to present the information we are talking about leading up to IndigeDIV and to educate our audience around topics such as decolonizing dance. AC: Decolonization is becoming more and more of a subject of research. In dance, we have to be careful about how we use this word because I do not think it is a metaphor. The word itself is already claiming a space by white people with the risk of occupying a space for the political movements of Indigenous rights and reparations. I am more interested to talk about decentering dance. We work in white institutions and the whitest art form of all, or at least in the ways it has been theorized. I am interested to invite dialogues or reflections by artists who bring Indigenous perspectives, diasporic voices, principles of Afrofuturism, which are different ways of shaping perception and understanding what we see on stage. The spaces these artists have been given in general, whether on stage or on the page, are by far not enough.We are perpetuating a dynamic of aesthetic taste that is completely constructed by us and for us, white people. Decentering this perception is the Dance Central Winterl 2021
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work that we all have to do with ourselves, on ourselves and within ourselves, as audience and ‘orchestrators’ as I call us—the institutions and the curators. As Starr was saying, it is not up to the Indigenous artists to continuously educate us, and to cater for our white fragility and to deal with our discomfort. Let us be discomforted by what we do (or do not do). We just have to acknowledge that we have messed it up, not just dance ecologies, but the ecologies of the earth and the relationships we have with one another. We can use this challenging moment in time with this pandemic to recalibrate. I would like to share a quote from this amazing book that came out very recently in Australia that I had the opportunity to read by Rachel Swain, called "Dancing in Contested Land: New Intercultural Dramaturgies" (Palgrave, 2020): I challenge settler dance artists to understand that the subjectivity without an attachment to land in Australia should not be accepted as the status quo or something neutral. Instead, this can be understood as an active, brutal stance, deeply informed by the white blinders and institutionalized national racism that sustained colonialism.
This is the premise of the book and the very first question we should start with: where we stand and not how we stand. If we do not start with this question, we are already going in the wrong direction.
asked her to make something up and just do something with the material. She said, “I can't! There is a history to it, someone owns that song, someone owns the dance that is connected to a specific place." I think that is the missing piece. AC: You are completely right. In Rachel's book, she mentions Paul Carter who talks about how colonialism is sustained by the creation of subjectivity without an attachment to land. This has a direct translation in the relationship between Western arts of representations and the politics of movement in the colonized ground. There is no wonder that in contemporary dance, Europe is more preoccupied with all this desubjectivation, deterritorialization of the body, abstraction, conceptualism, which is completely disembodied in its relation to where we stand. Detachment from the land is obvious in Australia too. We let it burn, we let it flood. If we are not seeing the arts now through the lenses of climate change and climate catastrophes, and we are not taking into consideration Indigenous eco-knowledges of caring for the land, it's truly the end of our humanity. MO: Angela, the way you position yourself within the conversation is really useful. In itself, it is part of the practice and the work. That is helpful for us to start piecing things together for ourselves.
Whose land is it?
SR: Sounds like a great start to what is going to happen in a few months and I look forward to catching up with all of you again.
SM: What I love about this quote is it flips the idea of land attachment around: when we say Dance in Vancouver, it is specific about dance here in Vancouver but what does that even mean to be somewhere and to be on that land? Whose land is it? It has all those layers that can be unpacked.
Angela Conquet is former Artistic Director/ CEO of Dancehouse Melbourne (20112020). She is now an independent dance curator and consultant, a member of Asia Network for Dance AND+, co-editor of Dancehouse Diary and a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne.
MO: Living becomes an abstraction.You live on this land but it becomes an abstraction because there is no connection to do it. I remember talking to a graduate student whose professor 10
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The artistic vision of Raven Spirit Dance is to share stories from an Indigenous worldview through the medium of contemporary dance. Raven Spirit Dance reaffirms the vital importance of dance to the expression of human experience and to cultural reclamation.
Dancer: Jessica McMann (IndigeDIV ) ©Erik Zennstrom
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Beyond BC
Redefining the Contemporary between Canada, Peru and India by Colleen Lanki, Pamela Santana and Kavya Iyer
Three "Redefining the Contemporary" Symposiums were streamed online from Canada, Peru and India in December 2020, garnering over 2000 views and coverage in local media. The dancers behind this transnational project are Colleen Lanki (Vancouver, Canada), Pamela Santana (Lima, Peru) and Kavya Iyer (Kolkata, India/Paris, France). They curated roundtables with dancers and scholars to discuss the terms “traditional”, “classical” and “C/contemporary” from diverse perspectives in their constant reevaluation of practice-based knowledge in dance. This is the story of how an exciting project was conceived. Great ideas are hardly borne out of thin air: they speak of inspiration, courage to reach out, and last but not least, collaboration. Cross-cultural exchange is much called for in these urgent times of isolation and collapse of old paradigms. The collaboration across continents between Colleen, Pamela and Kavya sets a great example of intercultural bonds and talking about dance without a dominant voice in the room.
Catalyst - Colleen Lanki: I have always found boundaries challenging. It is part of my masochistic nature to choose the most difficult path in the “in-between” places, where labels are not easily fixed, or where I do not completely fit. This is why I love nihon buyō (Japanese classical dance) – which is both dance and theatre, which allows for a crossing of gender in performance, and which is both a classical tradition and a contemporary practice. I am a Canadian performing artist of Finnish 12
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Dancer: Colleen Lanki ©Alfonso Arnold
and Irish/Scottish heritage who (among many other things) practices nihon buyō. Through TomoeArts, I work to maintain the training and legacy I inherited from my first teacher Fujima Yūko (1928-2003), and my creative practice is entwined with Japanese forms and aesthetics. Yet since moving back to Canada from Japan, even the new dance-theatre works I create seem to fall into the category of “traditional” which makes them patently not relevant to the contemporary arts scene. In addition, the optics created by the disconnect between my physical appearance and the “traditional/ethnic” labelling of the dance form is a growing issue, which has intensified my desire to question the validity of the terms “traditional”, “contemporary” and “classical”- or at least to challenge the stigma associated with them. In Spring 2018, while being an Artist-inResidence at the Dance Centre, I gathered some of my favourite choreographer-dancers in a room to discuss how these labels affect their
REDEFINING THE CONTEMPORARY practice. It was a private lunchtime conversation between six artists who each work in a form which has a strong lineage of training (ballet, Bharatanatyam, flamenco, First Nations dance, and nihon buyō), yet who each create new work using their form’s principles and aesthetics. We barely got past the first question of what the terms “traditional”, “classical” and “C/ contemporary” mean to our forms! We had so much to share regarding how these labels influenced funding, programming, marketing and simply how people perceived the work we do. We ultimately decided the conversation was something we wanted to carry on with the general public. I started planning for a public event called “Redefining the Contemporary” that would involve presentations and possibly short performances of our work. I received a small grant, the Dance Centre offered their theatre as a venue, and this group of incredibly busy artists made themselves available in mid-April 2020. Then the pandemic hit and by midMarch everything in Vancouver was closed or cancelled. Life went into a tailspin and, without understanding the magnitude of the marathon ahead, I rescheduled for early December thinking that, surely, we could gather for this event by then…. but within a few months this hope was already eroding. Then in mid-May I received an unexpected email from Peru: I want to ask if by any chance you need some help with research or work. I feel I need to have more grounded experience and at the moment, I am quite free. I would love to be a volunteer or intern with you or your organization. It would be a great opportunity for me. (Pamela Santana , personal communication, May 11, 2020)
I was sitting alone at home worrying about the future and how to keep TomoeArts going. I could not imagine what I could offer, yet I set up a Zoom meeting with Pamela, and that launched an amazing journey. Our conversations and emails were as personal as they were professional. I learned how she was coping with severe lockdowns in her cold, damp winter in Lima, and she heard about our seemingly charmed summer in Vancouver. The tables turned later in the year as Canada launched into a winter of “second-wave” and more lockdowns, while summer arrived in Peru, but our main topic was the "Redefining the Contemporary" Symposium. I knew it would have to move to an online format, but how best to make that happen? And how could we possibly expand its reach? We discussed how to make it an international endeavour. We decided to each organize a panel located in our home territory (mine was already in place but moving online) and to involve a third organizer. Pamela and I were both becoming busy with other work and we knew we had to keep the project manageable, but our discussions had become like little life-rafts. They were proving that the pandemic could actually be a catalyst for positive change: Let’s meet tomorrow and see how we can make this successful without killing ourselves.We can keep it small - and manageable - for this first iteration. I think this pandemic is going to last a while, and this […] could be a long-term project that we do in stages. […] We are both really busy with other projects and the world is in a crazy state. Let’s create a small anchor and see what happens. (Colleen Lanki, personal communication, August 6, 2020) Our team eventually grew with Kavya Iyer joining as the third organizer for India. This topic has proven itself to be important and relevant – far beyond my personal queries. I have loved working with Pamela and Kavya in this “inbetween” space we have created. Dance Central Winter 2021
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REDEF TH CONTEM
Life and work journeys that have influenced the creation of the symposium. "Roots and Routes" was a term used by dance scholar Dr. Cristina Rosa during the Performance of Heritage course undertaken by Kavya Iyer and Pamela Santana during the Choreomundus Program in 2019. 14
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FINING HE MPORARY
If you would like to join them on this evolving journey, feel free to reach out via email at redefiningcontemporary@gmail.com or on Instagram (@redefiningthecontemporary). Design: ©Cle Delgado with input from Pamela Santana Dance Central Winter 2021
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Clockwise from top left: Pamela Santana, Colleen Lanki and Kavya Iyer
Bridge - Pamela Santana: My first contact with Colleen Lanki was through her article, “The Body in Space: Layers of Gender in Japanese Classical Dance” which explored gendered signifiers in Japanese classical dance, nihon buyō. As part of my assignment for the Choreomundus Masters program to analyze a dance different from my own culture, I googled Colleen and decided to reach out to her: I am writing to you because I am fascinated by your work and research and see you as an example of what I would like to accomplish. (Pamela Santana, Personal communication, February 1st, 2018) A few days later, Colleen wrote back to my surprise. I had a feeling that our connection would evolve into something bigger.
a practice-based approach and was writing from her own embodied experiences. After a long hiatus since our first e-mail exchange, I finally wrote to Colleen again during the first week of May 2020. By then, we had been under lockdown in Peru for almost three months. Many feelings pushed me to restart a connection with Colleen. Perhaps the most significant was the drive to continue to be active - to continue working and producing in a world that was urging us to stop. I had been unemployed for several months, and by that time, I was losing hope of seeing any change in that situation. Thus, I decided to invest my time and energy as an intern at an organization. I reached out again to Colleen. Catching up with her felt organic. It was her forthright honesty and depth of thoughts that captivated me:
What lovely emails to receive! I have to say that I feel pretty alone in my world at times, so it is nice to hear when someone else out there is interested in some of the same things. (Colleen Lanki, Personal communication, February 13, 2018)
Time seems to have taken on an entirely different meaning and quality since this lockdown began, and even though I am keeping “busy,” productivity is minimal, and I lose track of days. I heard someone say “I no longer own time.Time owns me.”You call it a “complicated context” - and I agree entirely. (Colleen Lanki, Personal communication, May 22, 2020)
Finding Colleen was refreshing. She came from
“Contemporary” and “traditional” were indeed
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Beyond BC long-discussed terms, but how could these issues be echoed in other geographical and social contexts? How could the symposium be adapted to capture the interests and questions of artists and dance practitioners from other parts of the world? I foresaw the impact it could have in the Peruvian context where traditional dances have long suffered from exclusion and discrimination, and where there is a strong separation between what is considered classical, contemporary, traditional and folk dance. Aware of the relevance of this discussion, I decided to join the initiative. Inspired by UNESCO’s Resiliart model of work, we constructed a small network of three countries and began the organization. Organizing the "Redefining the Contemporary" Symposium was not always easy. During our meetings, we were coordinating technical aspects, making decisions about the panels, and listening to each other and sharing in a time of uncertainty and loneliness. We shared loss, fear, sickness, stress, but also joy, laughs and hope. Amidst this mesh of emotions and circumstances, we managed to build a collaborative network of artist-researchers who worked horizontally and exchanged in a human manner. And from this collaboration, an exciting and beautiful project was nurtured.
Ripple - Kavya Iyer: My engagement with "Redefining the Contemporary" has been memorable, stimulating and refreshing. It is true that there is something about the way artists connect and work with each other which is unlike other work relationships. An organic rapport filled with honesty, empathy and curiosity developed among us, which made working together fun, smooth and also a great learning experience. While organizing the India panel in a span of two weeks was a daunting task, the support from
Colleen and Pamela helped immensely to make it successful. The event even received coverage from a national newspaper called The Hindu which served as a testament to the importance of the topic of discussion. I asked Pamela and Colleen, “Why India?" and got to know that they had planned to have Bharatanatyam dancers on their panels to get an Indian perspective in their discussion. It was this free-spiritedness and willingness to share, expand and explore that brought three dancerresearchers from around the globe together, even under times of duress. My initiation into this endeavour has been in reverse, but from here, there is no looking back!
While the symposium stirred up some answers, it also gave rise to more questions and reflections. It is important to continue the larger conversation in order to constantly recreate and redefine categories and labels so as to make them more inclusive of the “in-between.” Thus, as 2021 unfolds, Colleen, Pamela and Kavya hope to organize and engage with more dancers and scholars in innovative ways to sustain this endeavour in an attempt to break away from siloed notions and reimagine a new "C/contemporary" dance world. Colleen Lanki is the Artistic Director of TomoeArts in Vancouver, Canada. She has practiced Japanese classical dance for almost 20 years, maintaining both her “traditional” practice and creating “contemporary” work using the form. Pamela Santana is a dance artist and researcher from Lima, Perú. She graduated with distinction from the MA Choreomundus program. Her experience resides in the coordination and direction of projects that articulate dance, education and cultural heritage. Kavya Iyer is a dance researcher, teacher, choreographer and performer in Paris, France. As a Choreomundus graduate, she also works as a research assistant with ArtX, an Indian arts and culture consultancy.
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