medium of the body is also the message. It is a privilege as an artist to work with very different bodies, abilities, training, culture and life experience and to discover with them what the dance is. As one of the community dancers said, “Our clay is lumpy.” I believe it is not whether the clay is smooth or lumpy but the practice itself: the more you practice, the more you dance, the more you are a dancer. In these past few years a basis for a transformative practice has emerged, centered on techniques of dancing from the energy body, the invisible body within the visible body. This practice develops understanding of elements like weight, inner space in relationship to outer form, inner and outer eyes, pathways of energy and rootedness. Basic principles of this practice draw upon years of training in both classical and modern dance and upon the principles of Vijnana yoga and tensegrity anatomy. The creative processes of Collision, my most recent work, were based on this energy body practice. The stakes were very high for the professional dancers, whose choreographic demands included speed, extreme changes in level and slamming the body on concrete. They were required, through their practice, to transform the concrete floor into a sea of energy. I believe they were successful and I experienced awe in what they achieved. There were no injuries in this risky work. The challenges for the community dancers were different. Their task was to transform the space, creating a poetic through-line to the work that held it together. I was very moved by what they achieved. There was something deeply exciting in the process and in the resulting transformation of dancers and space. Different artists, inner and outer, past and present, all colliding: this took me somewhere I had never been. Karen Jamieson’s Sisyphus was recognized by Dance Collection Danse Magazine as one of ten Choreographic Masterworks of the 20th Century. A Chalmers Award recipient, her work has toured nationally and internationally. Karen is artistic director of KJ Dance and has created 85 choreographic works with scores by over 20 Canadian composers in her 40-year career.
SU-FEH LEE
I am a dancer, choreographer, dramaturge and teacher. I make dances, I help others make dances. My materials are space, time and the human body. My instrument is my body. My body is a collection of my history, my politics and my desires embedded in a complex organization of bones, tissue and nerves that fills me with wonder, even as it brings me occasionally to the brink of despair with its limitations. I was born in Malaysia, a former British colony with a complicated set of socio-political realities. I grew up part of a Chinese minority, standing in the interstices of numerous languages, cultures, ethnicities, histories and imperfect narratives of all of the above. In my teens, I studied dance and theatre with teachers who strove to find a contemporary Asian expression out of the remnants of colonialism and dislocated traditions. I joined a children’s theatre group, Teater Kanakkanak, led by Janet Pillai. My first dance teacher, Marion D’Cruz, taught traditional Malay dance as well as Graham technique. When I lived in Paris, the late Lari Leong, a transplanted Malaysian whose choreography was influenced by Aikido and Zen Buddhism, sparked my interest in martial arts. In 1988, I moved to Vancouver, where my teachers have included Peter Bingham (contact improvisation) and Linda Putnam (theatre). I have also practiced Chinese martial arts for more than 25 years, with an emphasis on internal systems such as Taijiquan. My two major teachers have been Xu Gong Wei and Yang Guo Tai. My work, through my company battery opera performance, interrogates the contemporary body as a site of intersecting and displaced histories and habits. Inherent in this practice is a search for a language – gestural, spoken, spatial – that both embraces and frees us from accepted 8