Dance In Vancouver 2021

Dance In Vancouver 2021 Dancer Kelly McInnes © Sophia Wolfe

The 13th biennial Dance in Vancouver is coming up November 24-28!

This event is designed to connect presenters from around the world with the West Coast Canadian dance scene, and showcase a range of work to local audiences. Our curators – Angela Conquet from Melbourne, Australia, and Michelle Olson and Starr Muranko from Vancouver – have responded to the challenges the pandemic has created for dance with a distinctive approach. Here is their wonderfully inspiring curatorial statement.

We hope you will join us for the 13th biennial Dance In Vancouver – a gathering of curated conversations, provocations and dance encounters featuring Vancouver’s vibrant contemporary dance community. This edition fully embraces the times that we are in and allows for innovative experimentation and inquiry into how we create, view and disseminate dance.

Dance In Vancouver includes IndigeDIV, which is co-produced in partnership with Raven Spirit Dance and celebrates the unique worldview and perspective that Indigenous artists bring to the global conversation.

DIV CURATORIAL STATEMENT

These are no ordinary times. But hasn’t this always been our problem?

Time. And what we have made of it. With it.

But these are times to ask ourselves what we want to change, what we want to let go of?

It is time now for business as unusual:

for bodies of colour, and bodies of unbelonging for slow listening, slow curating, slow institution-ing

for all the ‘others’ who do not fit in binaries in linearities in questionnaires

for all the stories left out or never invited in for those whose times is a-contemporary and for those whose space is not the stage

for circles and rituals and deep listening

Being stripped of the transactional exchange that seems to be the central engine of our sector has created space for us to drop into the why. Why gather? Why witness? Why dance?

Why gather? Why witness? Why dance?

Dance In Vancouver 2021 Mahaila Patterson-O’Brien Dancers Eowynn Enquist and Isak Enquist

©Sepehr Samimi

As co-curators we have been given the task to navigate Dance In Vancouver through this new territory which demands that we drop into the deeper values of gathering, of witnessing and of dancing. Through collaboration and many conversations, we started to understand the texture and landscape of this upcoming DIV. Artists can unflinchingly look at our reality for what it truly is, and it is their bravery, impulses and insights that have helped us begin to carve out pathways for our gathering in November.

By leaning into the unprecedented moment we are in and allowing it to change us is no small task. It is necessary work in order for our art form to continue to transform and be responsive to the world we live and love in. How we allow ourselves and that which holds us to transform will become the legacy that we leave for future gatherings of DIV and IndigeDIV. This place between is a time to mourn what has been lost, let go of what we must and dive deep into ourselves for the impulses that will move us forward.

Dance In Vancouver 2021 Action at a Distance & Collective Tangaj Dancers Vanessa Goodman and Simona Deaconescu

© Ionut Rusu

This is a time for unusual art as agencer of change, porous in thought and anchoring in holding

Place site and magma

for

emancipating inquiry,

constellational imagination,

potent becomings

for every/body,

the body, irreducible and present and here

We invite you to gather with us to listen, to learn and to discover through dance what this moment in time is whispering to us all.

Angela Conquet, Guest International Curator, Melbourne, Australia

Michelle Olson & Starr Muranko, Guest CoCurators, Raven Spirit Dance, Vancouver, Canada