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
Dance Central Winter 2021
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
