17 minute read
A Conversation with Andrea Nann
Re-membering the stories we never heard and the renewal of a place we call Vancouver's Historic Chinatown
by Shanny Rann
In October 2022, Andrea Nann, Annie Katsura Rollins, Sarah Chase and Cindy Mochizuki with creative producer Kelsi James, began a year-long series of public outreach workshops and embodied activations in Vancouver’s Historic Chinatown. The outreach both preceded and followed the premiere performance of Dreamwalker Dance Company's production Firehorse & Shadow, co-presented by plastic orchid factory and Chinatown Storytelling Centre at Left of Main in May 2023 for ExplorASIAN during Asian Heritage Month. In Firehorse and Shadow, Andrea summoned women from her matrilineal line, in particular her grandmother Lin Lee, whose story was one of many that was waiting to be released. On February 17, 2024, Dreamwalker will return to Left of Main in Vancouver's Historic Chinatown for Firehorse & Shadow in Community, an immersive evening of movement, stories, music, shadow play and film.
SR: Hi Andrea, I am happy to have you here on Dance Central for the first time! Before we get started, can you introduce yourself briefly to our readers?
AN: Hi Shanny! My name is Andrea. I also go by Dreamwalker, which has been my moniker for many years. I think it says a lot about me. As a whole person, I am experiencing myself in the realms of possibility, as I am grounded on this Earth.
I am a dance artist. My work is rooted in embodied practices, collective communal processes, and collaborations. Throughout my career, I have gone through many different ways of being a dance artist—from dancing full-time in a company performing concert stage repertoire, to choreographing, producing and presenting my own work, designing site-specific participatory installations, devising improvisational score-based experiences...
SR: Thank you for this beautiful introduction. Can you bring us back to your early days, what got you started as a dancer?
AN: Well, I didn't know that I was a dancer in the early days, but I was. I am Chinese Canadian, fourth generation on both sides and I have come to learn a lot more about how this has shaped me. In my early days, I was very quiet, and extremely shy to use my voice. I'm still practicing finding my voice.
Early in my life, I experienced the world a lot through sensation; I expressed myself physically. I loved moving, I loved being out in nature, I loved stamping my feet around and travelling around our house doing cartwheels. I loved using all my senses to experience myself in the world, but I had a very hard time putting any of that into words. I would get extremely shy and anxious if I had to actually speak, even in family situations.
I always found physical expression and nonverbal expression to be my language. I can call that a language of embodiment now. I discovered music at quite a young age. I loved the way music made me feel and after hearing a friend's sister playing the violin, I asked my mom if I could pick up the instrument. She was thrilled. Music in the Asian family is a big part of our life 'training'. At age 5, I became a Suzuki violin student, my brother already played cello, and my mom would accompany us on the piano for our daily practices!
With the violin, I always enjoyed what my bowing arm was doing. I realized I didn't even care about what my fingering hand was doing other than making different sounds for my bowing arm. During my music lessons at the Vancouver Academy of Music, ballet master Soonee Lee was teaching classes in the basement. I would go down during my breaks and watch the dancers. I wanted to move my upper body with that freedom I saw in the dancers’ port de bras. I was 12 years old by that time. That was when I discovered dance as a language I could learn more about, communicate with and commit to.
SR: What was it like growing up in the seventies in Vancouver as a Chinese Canadian? What was your connection with the arts community in general?
AN: In many ways, I was not directly connected to my culture. I went to an alternative school and got introduced to the punk rock movement scene. I resonated more with wanting to know myself outside of the establishment.
For my mom and dad, who were third generation Chinese Canadians, assimilation was the greatest achievement. Fitting in, being part of the status quo, belonging and finding a place for yourself was their value. That was the environment I grew up in. We would go to the symphony orchestra, the ballet, or the art gallery. I was also exposed to a huge diversity of arts and culture, because my mom worked in the field of multiculturalism and race relations.
I rebelled against structure and organization. In some ways, I feel like I cheated myself out of a lot of opportunities where I could have learned more, but I had a resistance and anger in me that I didn't know why or what it was directed towards.
SR: What were you resistant against?
AN: Everything! I just had this feeling of dis-ease in myself, but I didn't know the source of it. Punk music was great. Just dancing! At the peak of my teenage years in Vancouver, I went out dancing six nights a week. We would go to new wave clubs and gay bars and tried to be fashionable and groovy and at punk venues, thrashed, slammed and threw our bodies around. It was very cathartic.
SR: It was symbolic of that era, wasn't it? You have come a long way round. What is the inspiration behind the Firehorse & Shadow in Community event that is coming up in February in Vancouver's Historic Chinatown?
AN: The Firehorse & Shadow project started as an autobiographical piece. I was exploring matrilineal stories, the women's experiences in my family when I discovered I knew so little of them. As I started asking more people around me, it turned out many did not know much about their mothers, their grandmothers, or their great grandmothers either. I thought it was just my family—the silence that I held. My grandmother was Canadian born, but she still upheld those edifying qualities of a 'good wife'. People loved her because of her silence.
How do we learn about the people that nobody spoke about?
SR: What was your relationship with your grandmother like?
AN: It was actually a tough one. I think if we had better communication skills, we would have had more experiences together. We would cook together, I would spend time with her doing things around the house, but we didn't talk. She came to stay with us once and it was really hard on her because my brother and I didn't have her rules. To her, we were misbehaving the whole time (chuckling).
There wasn't a lot of understanding between us, but I felt comfortable with her. She was round and soft, like a dumpling. My memories of her was this incredibly warm, quiet, and beautiful person that I never really got to know. Our relationship could have been different, it was a deeply embodied relationship but I feel like I missed getting to know her.
What are the stories we have never asked our families about?
Firehorse & Shadow is about the stories we never asked our family, especially the women's stories.
What do we carry inside of us that hasn't been expressed, that nobody has ever heard?
How can we learn from the questions we didn't ask?
Why did we never ask our grandmothers what their names were?
Some say it is disrespectful, but why didn't we find out more about their experience?
Why didn't we even think to ask about the experience of women in this whole thriving population? Women were at the heart of the family. They were always busy cooking, cleaning, and ironing, but we never asked:
How are you today? What are you thinking about? Do you have a passion? Do you have a dream? What do you wish for? If you weren't cleaning all the time and cooking for us, what would you be doing?
This is what this project has been about. It's about the inner lives of women, those small histories that we just overlooked, how they're vanishing and how re-membering can bring forward a sense of renewal.
My mom's grandmother came to Canada as a young servant girl and lived in Chinatown. My grandmother and my mother were born and raised in Chinatown. My grandparents founded a home for Seniors on Cordova Street—The Harry and Lin Chin Foundation Golden Age Court, where my mom and dad served on the Board for decades. Because of my mom’s work in multiculturalism, we have never really left Chinatown. Her belief in Chinatown as a place and her connection to it as a community driven citizen is still very much alive in me. But I still feel unconnected...
Can artistic process and collective embodiment help us recover family stories that have been severed, fractured or lost?
SR: Can you share with us the artistic process of the Firehorse & Shadow project?
AN: I made the dance piece of Firehorse & Shadow with tremendous support from Sarah Chase, my longtime friend and creative collaborator, and Annie Katsura Rollins, a shadow artist. What came forward during our collaboration process was the correlation between shadow and silence. Without a light shining on an object, a shadow doesn't exist. When we don't ask about people or ask them to speak... As relationships, choreography and concepts formed, we invited Cindy Mochizuki to be our dramaturge. Cindy is a Vancouver-based multidisciplinary visual artist, who in her own work explores stories of people and places, often generations before her, particularly female ancestors. The four of us participated in the Dance Artist in Residence program at The Banff Centre and that's where the piece really came together.
We were scheduled to premiere the Firehorse & Shadow stagework in Toronto on March 19th of 2020. That quickly turned into a collaboration with filmmaker Henry Mak and web designers Elysha Poirier and Omar Faleh for the creation of what we call an interactive 'web performance experience', www.firehorseandshadow.com. You can even go to the website and learn about your Chinese zodiac animal sign and your element. This speaks to the way I want to be putting work out into the world—to be able to offer opportunities for people to experience the world I'm inviting them into. In the web performance, they are free to choose how to interact with the website, whether they want to find out more about themselves, or sit back and watch a dance piece.
How do we learn about the stories that we still can’t speak about?
SR: I am curious about the meaning behind Fire Horse and how you came in touch with the Chinese zodiac?
AN: There was a time where Chinese restaurants (that cater to a Western crowd, not necessarily in Chinatown) would have placemats with the Chinese zodiac—the animal signs, the birth years, and the characteristics of each sign. It was a fun and charming conversation piece. Even though in my family we often attributed specific behaviours to our zodiac signs, I associate my knowledge with these placemats!
As it turns out, Sarah Chase and I are both fire horses, she first brought this to my attention! Julia Kwan, a Vancouver filmmaker, made an incredible film called Eve and the Fire Horse. There was a stigma about how bad luck it was to have a girl born in the year of the Fire Horse. They would bring devastation to the whole family like financial ruin and early death to their husbands. It is the worst possible zodiac year for a girl to be born in. In 1966, the year I was born, and in 1906, (and in previous Fire Horse years dating back 500 years ago), the rates of infanticide and abortions for baby girls (not for boys) were remarkably increased (Kaku, 1975). There were also more Caesarean sections performed just before the lunar new years of Fire Horse.
SR: Did this happen only within Chinese communities?
AN: It was across the globe, especially in parts of the world that adopted the Chinese lunisolar calendar, like Japan. We are about to come to the next Fire Horse year in 2026; we shall see how the birth rates are affected in two years. With all the destruction the sign brings, clearly the Fire Horse has transformational power! If the Fire Horse girl could harness this power, channel it in the right direction, could there be a positive outcome that changes the fate of her family and herself? Sarah, Annie, Cindy and I laughed about this a lot, but in all seriousness, we pondered the potential that all of us have to take anything that is ill-fated and use that in a transformative way.
SR: The Firehorse & Shadow project is as much about destiny, as it is about creating a better future.
AN: Yes, exactly. We were fortunate to receive a Canada Council public outreach grant, which came on the heels of the pandemic. The Ontario Arts Council took one of their market development programs and they turned it into a program called Artist-Presenter Collaborations. This support was pivotal because the funding gave us an opportunity to have an extensive consultation process with collaborating artists, documentarians and contributing presenting partners in Vancouver months before we started. We designed the public outreach programming from this consultation process. On February 17, 2024, the event Firehorse & Shadow in Community will be a celebration of the people and places that are part of this phase of our project. Some of the delights on the program include short performances by Vancouver based dance artists Kay Huang, Juolin Lee, Lance Lim, Lynda Sing, and Mermaid Li, who will be sharing their own moving stories around the themes of Firehorse and Shadow. We will also premiere a collection of short films and a performance by Rosa Cheng of Vancouver Cantonese Opera. And, of course, there will also be savoury and sweet snacks and tea!
SR: Are the films a culmination of the yearlong community engagement in Vancouver's Historic Chinatown?
AN: Yes, two of them are documentary style and the other two are cinematic. One of the beautiful things that the filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, Ran Zheng and Sarah Genge have been able to do is to interweave my family's archival super 8 film footage (circa 1940s–70s) with present day Activations filmed by Vancouver artists Yasuhiro Okada, Sophia Mai Wolfe and Daniel Loan. In addition to filming my grandmother, my mom, my aunties, uncles, and cousins, my grandfather also filmed scenes of significant places and events that shaped the Chinese community living in Vancouver. My grandfather was a budding filmmaker; I think we thought he didn't even know it, that he just had a gadget toy that he loved. But I appreciate that he was telling stories very intentionally. My grandmother's stories, his stories, the stories of daily life, of community, of a culture of gatherings, fortune, discrimination, loss, resilience, renewal and celebration. I'm so grateful my grandmother's and my family's life continues to exist in these small snippets of films.
SR: What are your concluding reflections upon all the changes you have witnessed over the years in Vancouver's Historic Chinatown?
AN: During the Chinese Exclusion Act between 1923 and 1947 (Chinese Immigration Act, 1923, the legislation that restricted all Chinese immigration to Canada by narrowly defining the acceptable categories of Chinese immigrants), the Chinese community came together and created their own societies, an entire economy and social network that was vibrant in Chinatown.
To know that, for many Chinese Canadians, Vancouver's Historic Chinatown is not a place where they belong anymore, is really heartbreaking for me. Even my family members say, “We can't go back”, “That has all changed”, “All of that is in the past”. For many of us, it was the heart centre of our community. It is where the incredible resilience of the Chinese Canadian community was embodied.
In some ways, my family has never left.
My artistic practice tends to lead me to more questions than statements. My collaborators and I ask:
How are community gatherings and embodied practices helping us to re-member (literally putting a missing part of our selves, us as bodies back into the whole)?
How is it helping us to plant seeds of reconnection between generations, and return us to a renewed sense of place…to Chinatown itself?
What do we each carry and hold, sealed and contained, in our bodies, hearts, minds, souls?
What are the inner lives and small histories that are vanishing as architecture is demolished and washed away?
Does situating the embodiment of memories bring a sense of reconnection and renewal to the place itself? For me it does. Through the Firehorse & Shadow project, I got to walk around the streets of Chinatown and hear not just my mom, but different generations of people who participated in this project talk about places their families would frequent. There has been a sense of renewal that has come out of this project.
SR: I am grateful that we have this conversation. I got to know more about you and your work after our interview today.
AN: Thank you very much for reaching out, Shanny I really appreciate it. I would also like to acknowledge the many people and organizations doing amazing work in Chinatown: Chinatown Storytelling Centre, ExplorASIAN, Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Society, Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Strathcona Community Centre, Natalie and James Gnam of plastic orchid factory and Left of Main, Ziyian Kwan of Morrow to name just a few. I think it's important that when we are coming together as individuals and artists, to directly connect with the people who are already doing the work we want to do. These partners have been on the ground way before we came in so I want to thank them for welcoming us and joining me on this journey.
Andrea Nann’s artistic practice brings her in to relationship with her self and Others — other people, other places, other environments, other realms. She is a contemporary dance artist, deep listener, founding artistic director of Dreamwalker Dance Company, and founder/ co-creator of Conscious Bodies Methodology, an embodied community practice. Through her work Andrea enlivens Dreamwalker's invitation to awaken and experience one’s self in relationship with All that Is. She creates experiences by activating attunement to memory, sensation, perception and nature, and is curious about how contemporary approaches can emerge through collaboration with individuals of diverse backgrounds and diverse ancestry. Based in Toronto/Tkarón:to, Andrea is a graduate of York University’s Department of Fine Arts, and was a member of the Danny Grossman Dance Company for 15 years. She has contributed to the creation of new works by over 70 dance and theatre creators from across Turtle Island and has been recognized with awards for choreography, performance, contributions to the performing arts sector and for her work in community actioning. Andrea dances to reach across distance and to experience herself and others in celebration of possibility, plurality, imagination, originality, and belonging. She believes that dance and embodiment can shift attitudes and ways of being, tuning us into what makes each of us distinct, to what we share, and ultimately how we can live together in wonderment and peace.
