9 minute read
Ritual and transformation: Salome Nieto’s collaborative choreography
by Tessa Perkins Deneault
With a strong butoh influence, Salome Nieto’s works are grounded in a sense of life and death, of rebirth and transformation, and intense spirituality. She has been an integral part of the Vancouver dance scene for over 30 years as a choreographer, teacher and performer.
Before launching her performance and teaching career in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Nieto studied ballet and modern dance in Mexico City. In 1992, she immigrated to Vancouver and began studying under Barbara Bourget at Kokoro Dance. She continues her work as a teacher and choreographer while working with companies including Kokoro, Raven Spirit Dance, and Donna Redlick Dance. In 2013, Nieto co-founded pataSola dance and has performed her works in Argentina, Canada, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Thailand. The Vancouver International Dance Festival recognized her contribution to contemporary dance in 2017 with their choreographic award.
Nieto recently completed her Master of Fine Arts at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. Inspired by intersectional feminism and cultural blending, her research explores ritual and ceremony in contemporary dance. Her 2011 solo work Camino al Tepeyac explored these themes via religious iconography and Mexico’s Realismo Magico (magical realism), which was most evident as Nieto embodies the female deity Tonantzin or Virgin of Guadalupe, who represents the convergence of two distinct belief systems. The work was performed in a traditional theatre setting as well as a sitespecific venue that allowed audiences to become part of the ritual.
Similarly, Nieto’s MFA thesis, The 13th Chronicle, presented as a public performance in June 2023, is a site-specific work that invites the audience to participate in a ritual that travels the halls of the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts. When she began her master’s program, Nieto felt like there were certain spaces in the building that were off limits, and it took her some time to settle into the space. This prompted her to conceive of her thesis as a sort of transgression into the space or a disruption of space. The audience arrives in the lobby where the piece begins before it moves through the building. “I felt that it would be interesting to interrupt this informal gathering, when everybody arrives to a performance, you are mingling, you're chatting, you're meeting your friends, and you're relaxed; I wanted to interrupt that with my presence,” she says. The audience is greeted by a banner displaying names of victims of feminicide and welcomed by a Oaxacan elder. This set the tone for the theme of ceremony that runs through the piece as the audience becomes a procession moving through the building.
The 13th Chronicle is a response to Sabes Algo de Mariana? (Do You Know Anything About Mariana?), by Mexican scholar and dramaturg Andres Cuestera-Micher. The play involves twelve chronicles that describe terrible stories of violence against women. Nieto’s 13th chronicle imagines how to break the cycle of violence, while honouring women who have been victims of feminicide. "I have witnessed gender violence and as many women, I have experienced micro-aggressions," says Nieto. “I have been touched by feminicide very closely in my family, so it is very close to my heart.” Nieto’s personal connection to the subject matter in The 13th Chronicle makes the work all the more meaningful.
While Nieto usually does solo work, for this piece she felt it was important to have 13 dancers. “I needed to do what the work needed me to do,” she says. Her fellow performers were students in the dance and theatre programs at the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts. “We created a safe space because the topic is difficult to deal with; it was really emotional,” she says. “I have so much gratitude to the performers because they were so committed, and I saw their journey which added so much to my project and to my experience in school. I felt that I could give something to the university, to the students in the programme.” Nieto’s initial goal of an all-Mexican cast became less important as she considered the universality of her subject matter and the beauty of a diverse cast of women from different cultural backgrounds and ages.
Other collaborators emerged organically, such as sound designer Jami Reimer who was in one of Nieto’s classes. They travelled to Mexico City together to gather field recordings and we had conversations with other women about their experiences. “It was a beautiful trip. When you sit down at a table with women and you start sharing things, the conversation can go for hours. It was informing me, telling me you're going the right way; it was gratifying and inspiring.” Reimer ended up joining the work as a performer, playing the accordion, and singing.
After the audience gathers in the lobby and becomes integrated into Nieto’s work, they move up to the second floor where they encounter Barbara Bourget performing on the stairs, dancers running through the space, and Nieto moving along the hallway playing with light and perspective. “I don't remember how it all happened, but I thought maybe I should ask Barbara to perform,” says Nieto. “Then I thought, how am I going to direct my mentor?” It turned out Barbara didn’t need much direction, as Nieto explains, she knew what she needed to do, and it was a rewarding collaboration.
Bourget has been a mentor to Nieto for many years and encouraged her to pursue her MFA.
After thinking about pursuing her master’s for 20 years, Nieto finally felt that she was ready and had enough work behind her. “Barbara first inspired me; I saw her do her master’s in the early 2000s, and since then I always felt that, yes, I can do it. When I decided that it was time to apply, I talked to Barbara and there was no doubt after our conversation that I needed to do it. She supported me 100%,” says Nieto. Both Barbara and her partner Jay Hirabayashi checked in often and offered to read her work or provide rehearsal space, supporting her along her journey through the program.
After encountering Bourget and the other performers in the open hallway spaces, the audience is led into one of the studio spaces and guided into a circle formation. “It wasn't very successful because we are used to having a frontal view to witness performances, so the audience stayed mostly on the north side of the room.” A final processional march leads the audience back to the lobby where they are now a community with shared ritual and history, no longer strangers in their individuality. Nieto says she was intentional about this circular structure and hoped to shift the consciousness of the audience. “I felt that we arrived as performers and audience, and then we went through this journey witnessing performances and sharing the space. We came back as a community.” Similarly, Nieto began her MFA in a cohort of individual artists and finished it part of a new creative community that she can continue to draw on as she conceives of her next projects. She says she found the process validating as she had never worked with a large group of dancers in this way and with so many collaborators.
Nieto plans to choreograph for a group of dancers for her next project, which will explore the subject of mass migration. “I am contemplating the journey of migration where there is a process of letting go, of generosity or sacrifice, and to ensure that those that come with you or after you arrive at the destination,” she says. “I think of the monarch butterfly and how it is the first generation that arrives at the destination to procreate. Once that generation arrives in Mexico, there are many generations to come back all the way up to Canada so that they can reproduce and then go back. They are demonstrating incredible generosity to ensure that the other ones can continue.”
A longstanding member of The Dance Centre, Nieto has performed there in other artists’ works and hopes to bring her own work to the space in the near future. Nieto is also interested in further exploring the idea of dance as disruption in unconventional spaces.
“I am not so attached to the traditional or the controlled environment of the theatre anymore,” she says. “I think in the context of the realities of the world right now, we need to be more progressive to go out there and make ourselves present. In Spanish, we say “poner el cuerpo”we need to ‘put the body;’ I want to explore that idea of interrupting spaces more."
Mexican born, Salome Nieto is a Vancouver-based dance artist known for her transformative works and evocative performances. Highly influenced by butoh, the cultural syncretism of Mexico and intersectional feminism, her research considers the significance of ritual and ceremony during process and in performance in the context of contemporary dance. In 2017 Nieto was awarded the Vancouver International Dance Festival Choreographic Award in recognition of her contribution to the art of contemporary dance as a solo artist. She has performed her work in Argentina, Canada, Mexico, Nicaragua and Thailand. As an interpreter and collaborator, Nieto has worked prominently with Vancouver-based Kokoro Dance, Donna Redlick Dance and Raven Spirit Dance. As an arts administrator Nieto held the position of Fine and Performing Arts Programmer for Dance at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts with the City of Burnaby in British Columbia for ten years. In 2023, Nieto earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts in the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
