16 minute read
COVER
ARTS Kiran feels empowered as part of “third culture”
by Charlie Smith
Advertisement
Actor, dancer, singer, choreographer, and producer Krystal Kiran knows what it’s like to feel fragmented. As a self-described “third culture” kid—the daughter of Punjabi immigrants— she didn’t feel entirely at home growing up in the largely white world of Penticton with her brother in the 1980s and 1990s.
Now a resident of West Vancouver, Kiran defines the third culture as a space where people feel they do not belong to any dominant cultural group because their parents came from another place with different traditions.
“We were born and raised in Canada, but our parents are Indian, for example,” Kiran said in a phone interview with the Straight. “So when we also go back to India, we’re not seen as Indians. We’re seen as foreigners.”
Like many of South Asian ancestry, she was scarred by discrimination in the 1980s. In her case, a dance teacher told her that another student’s mother didn’t want her in the same class because of her Punjabi Sikh heritage. That caused Kiran to quit for an entire year. She told her mother that she had suffered a shoulder injury.
But Kiran missed dance so much that she returned the following year, more determined than ever. As Kiran looks back today, she feels that this experience was a factor in her drive and dedication, which has propelled her to astonishing career successes. ”I also cannot deny that the sense of striving and accomplishment is also linked to racism and, therefore, trauma,” Kiran added. “As I reflect on my career over the years, I am able to look in retrospect and hindsight where and how this has played out, both positively and negatively.”
Three years after performing at the PNE in Vancouver, Kiran made her professional debut at the age of 19 in the dance ensemble of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Broadway production of Bombay Dreams. Bollywood’s legendary Farah Khan choreographed the show.
Kiran heard about Bombay Dreams when it was being performed in London, and she jumped at the chance to audition when it came to New York. In addition to dancing, she was cast as the understudy to the lead character. The production also featured music by Indian composer A.R. Rahman, whose songs Kiran had adored since childhood.
“That was the first time I got to meet him and I got to tell him that I was such a huge fan,” Kiran recalled.
Later, she was invited to perform in the Toronto stage production of Lord of the Rings, in which Rahman teamed up with a Finnish folk band, Värttinä, to create the music. Rahman was at the piano as Kiran and other cast members sang songs during workshops.
It took many years for producer, performer, and choreographer Krystal Kiran to fully appreciate the benefits that came from straddling both Indian and Canadian cultures. Photo by Sid Ghosh.
Since then, Kiran has acted in western movies and TV shows and performed in major South Asian productions on and off Broadway. These include Gurinder Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges’s Bend It Like Beckham: The Musical, Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, and the Shaw Festival production of The Orchard (After Chekhov). The latter was an adaptation of Chekhov’s The Orchard, featuring a South Asian family in the Okanagan in the 1970s.
She was also a lead singer and soloist on Rahman’s Jai Ho world tour, which was named after his 2009 Oscar-winning song composed for the movie Slumdog Millionaire. With a laugh, Kiran said she felt that she had truly arrived when she was in a Skype conversation with Rahman and saw the letters “A.R.” flash across her screen.
“That really was such a monumental professional experience for me: getting to work with him a few times, but particularly getting to tour with him,” Kiran said.
On tour, she sang in different languages, including Hindi and English, which brought up that familiar feeling of fragmentation. At times, Kiran worried about whether her Hindi was too heavily accented and if she wasn’t sufficiently Indian to be singing Rahman’s works.
But after performing in places like Texas, which has a large community of expatriate Indians, she had a revelation: there would have been no world tour without the diaspora. And this diaspora should be cherished, whether it was in Singapore, Europe, or Vancouver.
“To feel ‘otherized’ or to feel ashamed that we’re not enough…I was, like, ‘You know what? No! I’m going to call bullshit on that and say…the fact that we can straddle two kinds of cultures is our superpower.’”
KIRAN PLANS ON bringing that message to a free song-and-dance lesson over Zoom as part of this year’s Monsoon Festival of Performing Arts. She will rely on a piece by U.K.-based composer Nitin Sawhney.
“He beautifully explores these classical Indian sounds with other forms of music you wouldn’t necessarily think to put together,” Kiran said. “We’ll be doing an intro of the voice work of it and learning the actual lyrics of the song, which are in Hindi. Then we’ll be melding movement to that as well.”
Kiran loves Bollywood music and films, but she also feels that many westerners don’t always appreciate its many layers. For example, some Bollywood movies, such as Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas, feature classical Indian dance, like the Kathak moves that she performs. It’s not all flashy, modern line dances performed in zany settings. And Bollywood films were instrumental in helping her connect to her Indian culture in her youth.
Kiran acknowledged that she never would have been able to pursue a career in arts and culture were it not for the strong support from her parents. Her father, Malkit, grew up in Kolkata, a centre of arts and culture and progressive thinking. Her mother, Jas, was nine years old when she moved from a village in Punjab to Canada. According to Kiran, her mom wanted to attend dance classes but never had the opportunity.
“She put me in ballet in Penticton when I was three, which was completely out of the norm of the community,” Kiran revealed. “So I feel really fortunate that my parents, in both their ways, appreciated the arts even though they didn’t really necessarily practise them themselves.”
Her company, House of Kiran, is partnering with the South Asian Arts Society, which produces the Monsoon fest, on an ambitious educational project next year to help kids of South Asian ancestry in the Lower Mainland reconnect with their roots. According to Kiran, this will embrace a third-culture approach to dance movement and wellness.
The goal is to create programs that help people of different backgrounds forge mind-body-emotional connections through movement and “unapologetic cultural expression”. And that, Kiran hopes, will help them process unresolved trauma in a safe space regardless of their race, cultural background, gender, sexual orientation, or religion.
This isn’t Kiran’s first foray into education. She produced, choreographed, and performed in a short dance film, “Thy Beauty’s Doom”, in honour of Maple Batalia, an artistically talented 19-year-old Surrey student who was murdered by a former boyfriend. The film was inspired by Batalia’s paintings and a Shakespeare sonnet, and if people pay close enough attention, they’ll spot an image of Guru Nanak, the equality-minded founder of the Sikh faith. Proceeds went to the Maple Batalia Memorial Fund, which offers scholarships to students at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Kiran said that her career experiences have put her in a good position to share her insights with the next generation to help them appreciate their heritage. She’s even planning to offer a weekly seva (service with no expectation of reward) class for seniors where they’ll sing and dance old Bollywood hits.
“When moving away from colonized approaches, I believe we actually have the opportunity and ability to heal,” Kiran emphasized. “While I have some ideas on how to approach this, I also know and embrace that the learning process will be continuous and evolving.” g
– Krystal Kiran
ARTS Mushrooms get funky at Vancouver’s Vines fest
by Charlie Smith
British Columbia is home to more species of fungi than any other region of Canada. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that mushrooms are about to become the subject of an outdoor dance performance.
Vancouver dancer and choreographer Katie Cassady told the Straight by phone that she came up with the idea after reading anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s 2015 book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. The matsutake mushroom, a revered and very expensive delicacy in Japan, is thriving in many parts of the world as a result of the degradation of naturally occurring forests.
“In the beginning, she talks about interspecies eating and different senses of time,” Cassady said. “So then I had this idea to make this duet about mushrooms.”
Called funky fungi, it will be performed for the first time for free outdoors at John Hendry Park (also known as Trout Lake Park) as part of the Vines Art Festival.
Cassady said that she will perform the “funky duet” with Sophie Mueller-Langer.
“In the beginning, we’re mycelium, which is like this threadlike network,” Cassady explained. “It almost looks like roots, from what I’ve seen in pictures. I’m working on creating these headbands which have these pom-poms that are like having white tendrils.”
She and Mueller-Langer will also be wearing costumes with stripes, called hyphae, designed to look like a mycelium structure. Then halfway through the show, they’ll turn into mushrooms, reflecting the fungi’s life cycle. “Then we might want to reproduce,” Cassady quipped.
So how will they appear like mushrooms?
“We put on these bike helmets that I’ve embellished a bit,” Cassady responded. “Those are our mushroom hats. And we dance as mushrooms.”
This is not going to take place on any of the Vines Art Festival stages. No siree. This will be a roaming performance, with the dance occurring somewhere in the grounds around Trout Lake amid any people who happen to be in the vicinity. Each dancer will also be singing a cappela at different times. Rehearsals have been taking place near the baseball diamond.
To Cassady, Vines seemed like the ideal presenter, given the festival’s history of supporting underrepresented voices and supporting artistic presentation in the outdoors. Plus, she appreciated the festival’s support for artists during the pandemic and she went to the same Edmonton high school as the founder, Heather Lamoureux.
Cassady trained at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and has performed with Kokoro Dance, Amber Funk Barton, Future Leisure, and TWObigsteps Collective. Mueller-Langer performed in another of Cassady’s duets, II, earlier this year in the TWObigsteps Collective’s final production.
As a choreographer, Cassady likes exploring interconnectedness and relationships—and funky fungi is an extension of this into another species.
“It’s like we’re in the landscape and we’re kind of doing our thing, then we come together and we do more of a dance,” Cassady said. “It’s so nice to perform outside in the world.” g
Dancer Katie Cassady looks forward to performing funky fungi outdoors. Photo byKatie Cassady and Sophie Mueller-Langer.
VANCOUVER SPECIAL
Katie Cassady and Sophie Mueller-Langer will perform funky fungi on Saturday (August 14) at John Hendry Park as part of the Vines Art Festival. It’s part of the Stl’a7shn-chet - Our Feast event, which begins at 1:30 p.m.
AUG 12-29
• LIVE MUSIC • DANCE • SHOWS • FOOD • WORKSHOPS •
NOW ON VIEW
TICKETS AT VANARTGALLERY.BC.CA Open seven days a week
Major Sponsor Supporting Sponsors
Phil Lind The Poseley Family Bruce Munro Wright Joanie Anderson
Media Partners
MUSIC What’s In Your Fridge: Vancouver’s Tess Anderson
My Chemical Romance, OK Go, and frozen Krazy Glue all make the cut for a swimmer turned singer
by Mike Usinger
What’s In Your Fridge is where the Straight asks interesting Vancouverites about their life-changing concerts, favourite albums, and, most importantly, what’s sitting beside the Heinz ketchup in their custom-made Big Chill Retropolitan 20.6-cubic-foot refrigerators.
ON THE GRILL Tess Anderson
WHO ARE YOU I’m a singer-songwriter, music producer, and vocal coach. I grew up in Victoria and moved to Vancouver in 2016 to dive headfirst into a music career. Although music is by far my biggest passion, I was a nationally ranked competitive swimmer for nine years, and only quit because of injuries. I got myself through college working as a lifeguard and swim instructor, and being in the water is still one of the places I feel most at home. These days you can catch me performing at various venues around the Lower Mainland a few nights a week, hiding in my little studio writing and recording all my feelings, coaching my incredible music students, or hanging out with my husband and our four-year-old son. I also have been working on releasing my debut EP for the last three years, and it is finally out this summer.
FIRST CONCERT When I was about nine, my mom took me to go see Hilary Duff at the Save-OnFoods Memorial Centre in Victoria. I was absolutely obsessed with her. I remember walking in the front doors of the arena and completely losing my mind realizing that I was standing in the same building as Hilary Duff. Being a Hilary Duff show, nearly the entire audience was young girls, which meant that the lineup for the women’s bathroom was atrocious, while the men’s bathroom was empty. I remember having to go right before she was supposed to hit the stage, and I really didn’t want to miss her grand entrance, so my mom decided to take me into the men’s bathroom. While I was in the stall, an angry security guard came in yelling at me to get out… I was mortified. Oops. At least we didn’t miss the start of the show.
LIFE-CHANGING CONCERT Sitting second row for Sara Bareilles at the Rio Theatre in 2013. This show was everything. It was part of her solo “Brave” tour, and it was one of the most awe-inspiring things I have ever seen. She jumped back and forth between piano, electric and acoustic guitar, ukulele, and even a harmonium. Seeing her rock the stage completely alone—with not even an opening act—was beyond impressive. Sara is the reason I decided to get into songwriting in the first place, so seeing her up close and personal in such a tiny and intimate venue was insane. I honestly spent most of the show sobbing. Since the Rio is originally a movie theatre, she spontaneously decided it was only fitting to close off the show with an impromptu acapella performance of “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid. So funny. It was pure magic and solidified in my mind that music was what I wanted to do with my life.
TOP THREE RECORDS
Nothing But Thieves Broken Machine
Conor Mason’s voice is otherworldly, and the songwriting on this album is phenomenal. They toured this record here, playing the Imperial on Main Street in 2017. At that point, Vancouver had been the only city in North America that had played their new single “Amsterdam” on the radio. It was probably my favourite concert I have ever attended. Everything about it was flawless, and listening to these songs always brings me right back there.
Sara Bareilles Kaleidoscope Heart If you haven’t figured it out by now, I adore Sara Bareilles. So much so, that over spring break while I was in the ninth grade, I learned to cover almost every single song on this album and posted one video a day for a week straight on my YouTube channel in what I called my “Sara Bareilles Week”. I still to this day occasionally play some of the covers in my shows. This album (as well as her previous record, Little Voice) really inspired my early songwriting, so it will always hold a huge spot in my heart.
Before making “Hang on to your fucking hat” a mantra, chapeau-fixated Tess Anderson lost a couple dozen fedoras, sun visors, and flat caps every time she took a road trip. Photo by Ezra Tsai.
My Chemical Romance The Black Parade
Yup, I was that pre-teen who was listening to Hilary Duff and My Chemical Romance back-to-back. (Okay, let’s be real, that’s still me at 24). I swear this album never gets old. Very little brings me more joy in life than screaming along to “Teenagers” and “This Is How I Disappear” in my car on road trips.
ALL-TIME FAVOURITE VIDEO OK Go “Upside Down & Inside Out” OK Go has always been masters when it comes to crazy over-the-top music videos, but their video for “Upside Down & Inside Out” takes the cake. The video is shot in zero gravity, and they had to go to Russia to film it. It is mind-blowing what they were able to pull off. You have to go watch the behind-the-scenes video to fully understand what is even going on. It’s insanely cool, and definitely makes me want to go up in a plane and experience zero gravity.
WHAT’S IN YOUR FRIDGE Pineapple juice. This is one of my voicecare secret weapons, thanks to a vocal coach suggesting it when I got laryngitis in high school. It’s a natural inflammatory and can also help prevent phlegm buildup in your throat. If you Google it, there’s some debate about whether or not it’s actually effective, but hey, it’s saved my voice on numerous occasions. I have a Costco size box on hand at all times.
Gluten-free English muffins. I learned I was gluten intolerant when I was about 16, after two years of being extremely sick all of the time with no answers as to why. Although I don’t miss gluten anymore (or how it made me feel), finding good bread alternatives is still so hard. After years of searching, I finally came across a brand of gluten-free English muffins that are fantastic, and they’re now a breakfast staple around here.
Krazy Glue. Growing up, my parents always kept our Krazy Glue in the fridge. I never thought to ask why—it just was always what they did. As an adult, when I bought Krazy Glue to fix a broken bowl (still holding together four years later, by the way), I put it in the fridge afterward. My husband has always thought it was super weird, but I kept it there regardless. When writing this, I finally Googled whether or not you’re supposed to keep Krazy Glue in the fridge, and ta-da, keeping it there extends its shelf life. So there you go, nice work Mom and Dad. g
Watch the video for Tess Anderson’s new single, “Don’t Believe In” (cowritten with and produced by Mother Mother’s Ryan Guldemond), on YouTube.
