Dance Central September / October 2016

September/October 2016

Dance Central A Dance Centre Publication

Content Islands in the Mind A conversation with James Gnam Page 2

Weaving Community A conversation with Wal'aks Keane Tait Page 8

Welcome to Dance Central

This conversation took place in response to plastic orchid factory's recent performance Digital Folk, a work 'Video Game/Costume Party/Music and Dance Performance/Installation' created by James Gnam (concept / creative direction), Natalie Purschwitz (scenography / costume design), James Proudfoot (lighting design), Kevin Legere (sound design), James Gnam, Vanessa Goodman, Natalie LeFebvre Gnam, Jane Osborne, Bevin Poole Leinweber, Diego Romero & Lexi Vajda (choreography / performance) and produced by Natalie LeFebvre Gnam and Kayla Devos at SFU Woodwards.

We are very pleased to present two conversations with artists whose work explores being in community, albeit from very different vantage points: The Critical Movements series features a conversation with James Gnam of plastic orchid factory, whose recent work Digital Folk investigates the relationship between technology, representation, embodiment and community.

Our ongoing project of featuring First Nations dance artists, continues with a conversation with Nisga'a artist Wal'aks Keane Tait of the Sim'algax (Nass) / Sm'algyax (Gitxaała), who is a weaver, a member of the dance group Kwhlii Gubaygum, and a teacher of the Nisga'a language.

Dr. Mique'l Dangeli who has taken up her position as assistant professor at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau will continue her series of essays in the upcoming issue of Dance Central.

As always, we thank all the artists who have agreed to contribute and we welcome new writing and project ideas at any time, in order to continue to make Dance Central a more vital link to the community. Please send material by email to members@thedancecentre.ca or call us at 604.606.6416. We look forward to the conversation!

Andreas Kahre, Editor

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Islands in

Critical Movements: A conversation with James Gnam

AK: When I went to see Digital Folk in the basement at SFU Woodwards, I was amused to see that entering the space required the ushers to enter a digital code on the door lock. It seemed appropriate, given what I had read about the project. For readers who don't know the idea behind Digital Folk, can you tell where it began?

JG: It started with family, with my brother Connor and his friends. They are ten years younger than me, and they played Rock Band all the time; weekends, mornings, evenings — you name it, they were in the living room strumming away at that stuff. What amazed me is that they became incredibly proficient at playing these pretend instruments, and yet none of them knew how to play an actual instrument. The same goes for dancing. I was visiting my sister on Vancouver island, and her daughter and her friends gathered in the living room to play a dancing video game, so they were all together organizing their bodies around avatars on a television, and having a completely disembodied dance experience, but with each other, and as a dance artist, I felt compelled to respond to it. I asked myself the question: What if this is the folk practice of a generation? What if this is the way they are dancing and singing and playing music together? That's where Digital Folk started.

the Mind

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Critical Movements

A conversation with James Gnam

AK: Speaking of effort, on the opening night you were completely drenched; I wondered if it was the plastic pants, which reminded me of Buddy Ebsen, the original tin man in the Wizard of Oz, who was nearly killed by his

AK: The performance space felt like a hybrid between Tron and the Oktoberfest; folky and glamorous, hot and cold all at once.

Did the experiment turn out the way you had hoped?

JG: When we started working with set designer Natalie Purschwitz and lighting designer James Proudfoot, thinking about how we were going to work through these questions, the space really sat at the centre of it. The original idea was to have performances take place at people's homes, like the folk house concerts that happened all the time in my old neighbourhood in Victoria. We didn't have a predetermined idea how it was going to play out. We needed to explore the games and continue to refocus our questions with whatever information we were able to glean from the games. Most of the cast who took part in this process had no prior relationship to these games, so we couldn't really envision how it was going to develop. We started from the question and built our way out, rather than from a clear idea of the experience we wanted people to have. What I am most happy with is that we realized right from the onset that the games' relationship to the dancing and singing and to each other was broken, and that we needed to build something that embraced this brokenness — that it needed to be constantly tended to in its construction, and that how it was organized and how the cast interacted with the public needed to be constantly shifting rather than smooth and functional. I am happy we were able to create something that was able to move from us into a space to be shared with the public and be understood, and yet embrace that dysfunction.

AK: You invited your audience to dress up and to participate. Did different audiences behave differently or were their responses consistent?

JG: I was surprised that it was really consistent. There is a twelve minute section between performances which started out almost like a high school dance, then turned into a social thing and finally into a ridiculous dance party. I was amazed how little effort was required from the cast to facilitate that transformation. That part was completely different every night, depending on the mix of people we had in the space, but every night there was a need and a desire to dance and to be ridiculous. It was really consistent as far as how it was received.

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makeup. How did you survive three shows a night?

JG: I was fine, because it was different every time. Part of the design of the piece is that we have twelve cast members and that we have very specific points that we need to meet, but how and by whom these marks are hit shifts with every performance. In the first cycle I had a fairly heavy workload, and in the next one it was a little bit less, but fifteen shows in five days was a lot. I am just feeling like I am starting to recover now, a week later.

AK: The work presents as an installation as much as a performance, and a central aspect seems to be that everybody is learning something — the audience, who have to understand the rules of this universe, and the performers who have to learn how to move with the dancing game, which I understand was not an easy thing to do, but also in the 'Oktoberfest' part, where they try to emulate 'cultural dances' from what they see on their smartphones, and at the 'music station' that involves impersonating a kind of the Rock Star glamour personality. What was it like for them to learn this, compared to learning 'normal' dance movement?

JG: It was really difficult. That was the way in for us. We approached the beginning by needing to unpack these dances and understand the relationship between how they move and how it moved into our bodies and how it resonated. How can a body invested in a life-long dance practice interface with these games? Our relationship to memory, to time, to sensation, to experience; all of those skills that are the legacy of an embodied practice — none of that could interface with these games, because you are constantly in a reactive state, and so you are never really allowed to participate temporally or sensorially in this experience of dancing, and therefore it was extremely difficult, and it took a while for us to put our finger on it. At a certain point we were all getting really tired and frustrated. Nobody chooses to be a dance artist for fame or money, or security; you do it because you have this desire to unpack physical sensation, memory, time, experience, and this whole process was at odds with that very basic need that most dancers have. So we had

"...they were all together, organising their bodies around avatars on a television, and having a completely disembodied dance experience, but with each other, and as a dance artist, I felt compelled to respond to it. I asked myself the question: What if this is the folk practice of a generation? What if this is the way they are dancing and singing and playing music together?

That's where Digital Folk started." to sit down and talk about it, and I felt like I had to apologize

Unless there is a 'secret AI' dance algorithm, it must

for putting this on everybody. I said 'We will find our way

have been created by actual humans somewhere.

to the other side and everything that you are interested in is not actually happening in this experience with these dances,

JG: Yes, of course, there has to be somebody. There

but let's figure out a way to take possession of these experi-

must be a dance artist, a choreographer who does that

ences, or find a way to include a kind of embodiment, or to

kind of stuff. I imagine they are people who work in film

move it past that experience of pure reaction.'

and television and commercial aspects of dance.

AK: Did you find it?

AK: A lot of it looks like chorus line backup for the Brittany Spears' of the world, although it is even more

JG: We did. We need to develop systems where we could

stilted and reduced to a semaphore of 'feeling good'.

help each other. For example, we had a system with the game and a body and two other bodies. The person with

JG: Exactly. There is no sense of reflection or self-

the game was interacting with the game, and the other two

awareness; just 'happiness'...

people were interacting with each other and accumulating this language that was derived from whatever the game was

AK: Thinking about the connection between these

doing, and when the game finished there was this language

games and what we experience as 'folk', for example in

that existed in the other two bodies, who could now share it

music: What do you believe is 'our' — if we can collec-

with a third. At that point we could begin playing and creat-

tivize ourselves this way — folk tradition?

ing and composing, and working rhythmically and spatially with this language we were left with in our memories and

JG: I don't know. I feel like I am really in between. I

our bodies.

turned forty in September, and I still have a very clear recollection of what my pre-internet brain felt like,

AK: Where does the choreography in the games come from?

but my brother who is ten years younger doesn't have Dance Central September/October 2016

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Dance Central The Dance Centre Scotiabank Dance Centre Level 6, 677 Davie Street Vancouver BC V6B 2G6 T 604.606.6400 F 604.606.6401 info@thedancecentre.ca www.thedancecentre.ca Dance Central is published every two months by The Dance Centre for its members and for the dance community. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent Dance Central or The Dance Centre. The editor reserves the right to edit for clarity or length, or to meet house requirements.

Critical Movements

A conversation with James Gnam

that. All his formative years were spent interfacing with technology, and I feel like his ability to work with meme, with language, with imagery is a kind of digital collaging. That is a big part of how this

Editor Andreas Kahre Copy Editor Hilary Maxwell

digital generation communicates with each other; it

Contributors to this issue: Wal'aks Keane Tait, James Gnam Photography: Chris Randle, Kent Danielson, Wal'aks Keane Tait, Kent Apa 'tsti Danielson

references that they are weaving together. It is a

Dance Centre Board Members Chair Beau Howes, CFA Vice Chair Josh Martin Secretary Margaret Grenier Treasurer Matthew Breech Past Chair Ingrid M. Tsui Directors Carolyn Chan Angeline Chandra Eve Chang Susan Elliott Kate Franklin Anndraya T. Luui Starr Muranko Dance Foundation Board Members Chair Linda Blankstein Secretary Anndraya T. Luui Treasurer Jennifer Chung Directors Trent Berry, Kimberley Blackwell, Janice Wells, Andrea R. Wink Dance Centre Staff: Executive Director Mirna Zagar Programming Coordinator Raquel Alvaro Marketing Manager Heather Bray Venue and Services Administrator Robin Naiman Development Director Sheri Urquhart Technical Directors Justin Aucoin and Mark Eugster Technical Manager Shawn Sorensen Accountant Elyn Dobbs Member Services and Outreach Coordinator Hilary Maxwell Member Services and Development Assistant Anna Dueck The Dance Centre is BC's primary resource centre for the dance profession and the public. The activities of The Dance Centre are made possible bynumerous individuals. Many thanks to our members, volunteers, community peers, board of directors and the public for your ongoing commitment to dance in BC. Your suggestions and feedback are always welcome. The operations of The Dance Centre are supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia, the BC Arts Council, and the City of Vancouver through the Office of Cultural Affairs.

isn't linguistic but a collage of very specific cultural combination of music and language and image and popular culture.

AK: What we describe as 'folk' is usually simple enough for everybody to participate and at the same time accumulates complexity across generations and constant practice. Games of the Rock Star and Dance Band type are quite difficult to master at first sight, and at the same time they don't accumulate depth with practice like a musical instrument.

Or do they?

JG: As with all games, the accumulation is in leveling up, in getting better at the thing. Traditional folk practice is about a deepening over time, but it is also intrinsically connected to community. With the games, you can level up, you can progress and get better, but ultimately you are doing it in a living room by yourself and in a completely artificial community. That's one of the things we came up against pretty early on. We realized that these games were born out of a desire to sing and dance and they emerged to fill a void, but for the first time these folk practices aren't connecting people; they are actually isolating them and moving them further apart. We needed to figure out a way to actually create a sense of community that had us singing and dancing, with the technology, despite the fact that it is engineered to isolate, and we tried a bunch of different iterations — an installation, a proscenium performance, and a partially immersive environment. We realized that we needed to move beyond the idea that this is broken.

continued on page 20

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"One of the things we talked a lot about in the creation of Digital Folk was that we were never performing it for an audience; we weren't presenting a thing. It was an artistled experience that we weren't 'performing for' but 'embodying on behalf of' the people we were sharing the space with."

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Thinking Bodies:

A conversation with Wal'aks Keane Tait

Weaving Identity AK: Names are an important part of marking lineage and identity. You use different names in different contexts, such as social media. How do you decide what name to use when?

KT: My Nisga’a traditional name is Wal'aks. I mainly go by Keane Tait for everyday use, but when I am cultural dancing, and especially for social media, I use Wal'aks, because the way it is written and I pronounce it are totally different. There is also another Keane Tait from my community, whose name is curiously pronounced exactly the same that mine is, and we were born around the same time.

AK: You are a weaver and a textile artist. What role does dancing play in your practice?

KT: I dance, with my mom and my brother who lead a traditional dance group called Kwhlii Gibaygum Nisga’a. All of our members are Nisga'a, or have ties through our mothers and fathers, and some of us have been adopted by Nisga'a families. They all live here in the Lower Mainland and we get together on a weekly basis at St. James Anglican Church in the East side. We started the dance group nine Left: Wa'laks Keante Tait and his niece Hlgut Aadii Kassandra, Photo: Kent Danielson

years ago. Before that our family danced with the Nisga'a Ts’amiks Dancers who are also based in Vancouver. Our family moved to Vancouver twelve years ago. Before that, we lived in Terrace, where my mother and I founded the Gitlaxdax Nisga'a dance group in '96 or '97.

AK: What brought you from Terrace to Vancouver?

KT: I came down to attend a Fashion Design school called 'A Touch of Culture', and our family decided to move at the same time. After a year, I decided to stay in the Lower Mainland. We are still very active in our house, in our extended family and our clan, so we go home for potlatches and other family events and we still have family in both Terrace and the Nass Valley.

AK: Do you like living in Vancouver?

KT: I like it very much. It feels like there is a lot of opportunity for artists. We recently moved into a house in Coquitlam, where we share the rent to make it affordable. I also teach the language,

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Thinking Bodies:

A conversation with Wal'aks Keane Tait and my mother and I have been actively using our language at home with my two nieces who are seven and two. My smallest niece is actively using the language now.

AK: Will she grow up bilingual?

KT: I would like for her to grow up trilingual. My mother put my brother and me in French immersion, and we graduated from grade 12 French, and I would very much like my nieces to grow up multilingual as well.

AK: I am curious how you connect weaving and dancing, and how your dancing links with your sense of identity. In the Western, modern tradition, dance is in large measure an exploration of individual rather than communal or collective identity, and cultural legacy is less relevant compared to First Nations dance. How do you experience yourself as an artist between disciplines and cultures?

KT: They all intersect, especially in the question of identity and dance. As we are raised in our community and in our clans, we are taught our identity from a very young age. I especially notice that in our family, where we strive to make sure we know our identity. Our family was almost eradicated because of smallpox and tuberculosis. After that, there were only a grandmother and grandfather, their two daughters and sons in law, and four granddaughters left in our whole family. Those two grandparents were also among the first who converted to Christianity, so we have a very strong connection to the Anglican Church. My grandparents brought their granddaughters to be blessed by the church, to be 10

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fruitful, and now we are one of the biggest clans among the Nisga'a people. We are very grateful for that and our identity is very much a part of growing up.

AK: How do you express your identity in the context of cultural dancing?

KT: When we become part of a dance group, the new members introduce themselves among current members, starting with the self, then we identify the house we come from, the extended family, the clan, and then our tribe— Wolf, Raven, Killer Whale, Eagle — and then what community we come from among the Nisga'a people. That way, when we introduce ourselves, we are able to figure out if we know any of the other families from that collective. It gives us a greater connection with each other, and it's a nice way to get to know the new members. It also gives us an idea of what types of dances individuals might know from their clan dancing, which is fairly new among our people, compared to how long we have been on this planet. Among the Nisga'a it started in the 60s, I would say.

AK: How did it develop? Where did it come from?

KT: Mique'l Dangeli and I have tried to figure out where clan dancing started, but we really can't pinpoint it. Cultural dancing in a community sense was started among the Nisga'a by the late Eli Gosnell, in 1968 or '69 in Gitlaxt’aamiks. My mom was fortunate enough to be part of that group, along with her parents. She got first hand training from Eli and his wife, the late Mary Gosnell. It is amazing to have that first hand account of what happened when they first started the dance group. It was really new among our people because of the

potlatch ban. Before the ban, all of our dancing had occurred inside the potlatch, and mostly in family groups. It had to do with family songs, with their history, and was very much a part of showing their rights and privileges in that house. During the potlatch ban, a lot of the songs and dances became dormant, but quite a few families were strong enough to keep it up, although it was very hush–hush. Some of the songs are now considered to be drinking songs, but if you listen to the words they recount the history of that house. They became drinking songs so that they would be acceptable to the Indian agent who thought 'these are just Indians drinking', but now they are being revived and put back into their proper place in our society, where they are being identified as proper clan songs.

AK: Is the movement being rediscovered? Is it being reinvented, or borrowed or adapted from other dances?

KT: Some of the songs. Some families are fortunate in that other families who are connected with them have a firsthand account of what happened during the song, and with the dance, if there was a dance, or if it was like some songs that were laments, and purely for mourning. For example, Git-Sii’aks is a clan song that was performed in the privacy of the homes, and then it became a drinking song, but now it is a feast song, a celebration song of a smoke house that was built by a chief, and some of our cultural leaders are fortunate enough to have encountered elders who knew the dances and were brave enough during the ban to share those dances.

AK: So they didn't disappear altogether?

KT: Some unfortunately did, but some didn't.

AK: Mique'l made the point in her essay that new dances are being developed all the time, that there is a constant stream of new songs. Is inventing new songs and dances part of your practice?

KT: Yes. For example, with our dance group in Terrace, we got tired of our usual clan dance for the Frog—hopping back and forth—and so my mother and I devised a new Raven dance. Interestingly, I was watching some YouTube clips of a Matawa Metlakatla dance group, and they were using that dance, although I had no direct contact with that person, nor had my mother. It was amazing to see that that dance we created in 1988, ten years later had made its way to Matawa Metlakatla, Alaska. There was some controversy among our clan, some of whom said 'We have never danced like that', but we said we wanted to make this part of who we are and leave this legacy in our house and our clan.

AK: Awareness of the cultural heritage of First Nations may have grown among non-indigenous people, but I often observe our insecurity about appropriate ways to negotiate the relationship between protocol, cultural property and what you might call 'commodity'. Cultural dances are part of a tradition of ownership, and it isn't easy to understand the rules by which indigenous culture is shared and when sharing it is considered appropriation. I remember working with Karen Jamieson and Tsimhsian storyteller Victor Reece on a project that was based on Victor's decision to share his family's story of how Raven stole the light, which some people felt was a serious violation of protocol. Have things become easier to understand?

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"During the potlatch ban, a lot of the songs and dances became dormant, but quite a few families were strong enough to keep it up, although it was very hush–hush.

Some of the songs are now considered to be drinking songs, but if you listen to the words they recount the history of that house. They became drinking songs so that they would be acceptable to the Indian agent who thought 'these are just Indians drinking' but now they are being revived and put back into their proper place in our society, where they are being identified as proper clan songs."

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Above: Kwhili Gibaygum Dance Group. Photo: Kent Danielson

Thinking Bodies:

A conversation with Wal'aks Keane Tait KT: I think they have evolved, in that some folks have a better understanding of their rights to sharing different stories and dances, and greater understanding of how and when and with whom something should be shared. I think the teachings have become more available to certain people.

Going back to property: For a lot of our families, dancing styles are an intangible property of the house. Certain dances and songs can only be done by the family who owns the song. The beauty is that some families are bringing back those dances into their feasts, whereas before our feast system was mainly all about the business, so that for example people who had done work for our family were properly acknowledged for their work. Now we are bringing back the stories and dancing into our feasts so that our witnesses are aware of our rights and privileges, and asserting our rights over those crests and songs and dances. Bringing back the dance to where it was traditionally before is certainly my dream.

Traditionally, when chieftainship was taken up by a new person, they potlatched their name for at least three or four days, where the whole history of the house would be shared, and all the crests that they have ownership over would be displayed in the proper way.

AK: It still seems surreal that in 1991 a BC Supreme court judge could assert, in the GitskanWest'suwet'en land claim case, that "aboriginal life in the territory was, at best nasty brutish and short", and that there was no historical record on which to base claim to land or resources, considering how deeply First Nations are concerned with history, legacy, and transmitting knowledge formally through the generations...

KT: Among the Nisga'a, our word for indigenous people is a new, made–up word. We call all other indigenous people Aluugigat. Aluu means to be visible — basically to be naked — and gigat is people. We are a very public people, and we show our whole self. We don't do anything in private, for example when a chieftainship is passed, we need witnesses, which means it is very public, and in order for the passing to be validated we need other chiefs from the community. If they don't believe that the chieftainship should be passed on to that person, that's when they speak up and that's their right as witnesses.

AK: Speaking of language and dancing, is the correlation between the language and movement based on sound and rhythm, or is it more connected to story?

KT: Both. Certain dances and songs are very detailed and use very specific language in telling a specific story. Other songs are chants; for example, one song in our dance group is a personal power song, and you chant and chant to call on your guard's power to give you strength. There is no specific dance that goes with it, and that gives us freedom to create our own dance with it.

AK: Does the movement change from one performance to the next?

KT: Yes, with our group we have had several dancing styles added onto that one song; it just depends on which choreography we would like to use for a certain performance. It also depends on the space we are using.

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Thinking Bodies: A conversation with Wal'aks Keane Tait AK: When you change or add something, is it observed and commented upon, or do people accept what you bring to it?

KT: With this dance, it has been widely accepted.

There are a few people who follow us and recognize that the choreography has changed, but it has mostly gone unnoticed.

AK: When I spoke with Madeleine McCallum about her powwow dancing she mentioned that she took some the basic steps but that she created her own vocabulary, influenced by her background in jigging and by what she felt was appropriate. That implied that there is the freedom to do this without violating the spirit of what the dance expresses or how it communicates, and it raises the question where the roots, or the bones of the dance are and where it can flower, or change. It is difficult to know from the outside.

KT: Yes, it is. With this song for example, we received permission from the composer, Hlgu Ayee (Peter McKaine), who told us that it is a power song, and that we could use it to honour people, especially the Simgigat chiefs and the Sigidimhaanak’ matriarchs. This way we know that when it comes time to honour someone, we know the purpose of the song and what regalia would be appropriate for that song. There are also certain dances that we can't do, so it gives us certain limitations, but also freedom because there isn't just one style of dance, so it gives us some freedom but it also limits us.

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AK: I grew up in Bavaria, whose 'ethnic' dances are both part of a living folk tradition and a caricature performed for tourists, very much just like the faux 'Indian dancing' I remember seeing as a roadside attraction in Ontario in the 1970s.

Is Northwest Coast cultural dancing making the transition from living culture to commodity, or is it able to resist the collapse?

KT: There is some of that among our people, especially the clan dancing which is swiftly becoming the norm, where you can only dance your clan, and that's what I and a lot of people visualize when they think of Northwest Coast dancing—clan dancing in the red and black regalia. We are striving to bring back some of the older regalia. We are kind of pushing the boundaries that have been brought forward by colonial constructs. For example, it is a misconception that Amalayt dancing used to be done strictly by men who wore black, because it was believed that only men were chiefs, but if you look back at some of the photos, we had women Nisga'a chiefs, and around the turn of the century, they were adorned as chiefs. Now, when we dance with chief regalia, tunics and aprons in an honour song, we make sure that we mention that the dancers aren't identifying themselves as chiefs, but that they are wearing chief's regalia in order to honour chiefs who are there. So we are pushing the norm, because we have women who are now dancing the Amhalayt. We are putting the matriarchs in a place of honour, because we are a matrilineal society.

We have been identifying ourselves like that since time immemorial, but what we are honouring isn't physically there, so we are pushing the boundaries.

AK: Your involvement as an artist and a weaver links to the regalia as well?

KT: Yes, in working to get some of my pieces into shows I have been working on my artist's statement, and I have been thinking about it. I am more of a textile artist, because I do both sewing and weaving, and these two play a hugely important role in our cultural dancing, where we create new regalia and keep adding to our regalia and make sure that it is fine tuned, with new aprons and tunics and dance robes that can be either sewn or woven. What we call Gwiis Maakskw, which is Raven's tails, and Gwiis Halayt, another style of weaving.

We are striving to bring that back to our dancing. In the past, in our trade with the Hudson's Bay Company, we brought the blankets into our community and made them a very strong part of who we are, so that by now that red and black regalia has become almost the norm. Now we are striving to bring diversity back from our family's history. When you look at old photographs, you see that the dancers weren't all uniform, they all displayed their different house crests, and they used more than one design for their regalia. That was showing the diversity of their wealth and the connection to their traditional territories and hunting grounds. A lot of our crests display connections to certain areas in our valley, so we are striving to add that back into our cultural practices, and not just use the red and black. It shows our capability to utilize what is available to us, which is an amazing tradition to our people.

That's how the button rows appeared: It was available to us and we made it ours.

AK: Are there what you might call contemporary visual motifs that appear in work like yours and others?

continued on page 17

"We are pushing the boundaries that have been brought forward by colonial constructs. For example, it is a misconception that Amalayt dancing used to be done strictly by men who wore black, because it was believed that only men were chiefs, but if you look back at some of the photos, we had women Nisga'a chiefs, and around the turn of the century, they were adorned as chiefs."

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"We are striving to bring diversity back from our family's history. When you look at old photographs, you see that the dancers weren't all uniform, they all displayed their different house crests, and they used more than one design for their regalia. That was showing the diversity of their wealth and the connection to their traditional territories and hunting grounds."

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KT: Yes, I was noticing that people now bring in the use of different colours, and that they are creating more abstract designs out of the Northwest Coast form line, which seem a lot more contemporary compared to the traditional form, with a small crest in the centre.

AK: Is your practice centred on traditional visual forms, or do you go further afield?

Where do you place yourself?

KT: I like to push the boundaries. I like to add colour and use different colours, and in that sense I think of myself as contemporary first, but I also like to keep a strong connection to the tradition. We honour the red and black as sacred colours with a deep meaning to our people, and on sacred occasions I wear the red and black.

AK: What is the symbology?

KT: The red comes from different connections to life. For women, the majority of their colour is red, their dress, their button blankets will have red background because they are life givers, and the men wear mostly black as they protect life and to create balance, since red is life, and black is death.

It also symbolizes the semi-darkness our people lived in before Raven brought us the sun, the moon and the stars. Same with the red; it represents light, and bringing light to the people, and that is also the actual symbolism of the button robes, the red on the females blankets represents them, and the black symbolizes the men protecting them, and for the men's blanket black is them, and the red is to remind them where they came from when they were in the mothers' womb.

AK: The colours were originally natural dyes I imagine? Has the colour palette changed since chemical dyes became available?

KT: The traditional colours originate from interactions in nature. For example our contemporary word for yellow is the crab feces — when you open up a crab, there is a small yellow spot. Green is our word for bile, black is ashes, red is blood and blue is the blue jay.

It is a connection to nature, and the traditional regalia for a woman, the very first ceremonial dress she would be given by her paternal relatives, would be a very pale tan hide, almost white. When we are in ceremony, we have red face paint which expresses the connection to the land. It's a red ochre called Mis’aws . And depending on the ceremony, the amount would vary, and so gradually, over time, as she takes off her ceremonial dress when leaving the ceremony, the red would wear off on her dress. That is why our traditionalists are always pushing that women should only wear red dresses, because eventually her whole dress would be covered in the red ochre. That's why red is so sacred to us, because of the connection to the land, and each family has very specific places in their territory where they would collect their red ochre.

AK: How do you get your dyes?

KT: Most of the materials that I weave with are synthetic, except when I get commissioned for traditional materials for weaving. I usually get Merino wool, which is pre–dyed, but recently I have been getting into spinning my own wool traditionally, out of mountain goat and cedar bark.

Thinking Bodies: A conversation with Wal'aks Keane Tait

AK: How did you begin weaving? I have read that you were trained by members of your family, but what captured you?

KT: I really liked the beauty of weavings and wanted to create that, so I sought out different teachers.

I began cedar bark weaving at sixteen, and that was around the same time that I had Hlgu Ayee as one of my mentors. It was headbands and things like that, mostly in Terrace, and I was fortunate that there were various teachers. I have also started to learn to carve from Mike Dangeli. I am very excited about it but it is hard to find the time...

AK: What does your day look like?

KT: I like to start out by weaving when I get up. Part of the traditional teaching of weaving is to weave when you first get up, before eating, because then you are here and you are clean, so that is the best time to sit at the loom and weave. I like to do half an hour to forty five minutes in the morning, and then get to sewing after that, and then get out the door for my teaching gig.

AK: Where do you teach?

KT: At the Native Education College, in the cultural studies program, where we focus on the students making a button blanket for their final project. First, I teach the history of the blanket, and then some small foundation projects. For quite a few students it's their first time sewing and making Northwest

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Thinking Bodies: A conversation with Wal'aks Keane Tait

Coast art, so it’s like three crash courses lumped into one.

AK: That reminds me — when I was in Elementary school in Bavaria, we had sewing lessons, and the first thing we were told to make was an "Indian blanket", a sort of shawl with buttons, adorned with our own "Indian" patterns...

KT: Wow... that is a strange intersection. For my class, I mainly teach them the red and black, but there are people who push the boundaries, which I am glad to see. It is amazing to see the use of different fabrics in the community. For our dance group we have one set of regalia that is red and black and one set that's their favourite colour, so there is a beautiful rainbow in our group when we wear our colour regalia. One of the dancers has said she has always wanted to create regalia with different fabrics, and she appreciated that we created a safe space for her to create that regalia, so she has a really nice bright orange, and zebra pants. It's amazing to see that use of different colour, and her comfort in being able to show what she likes.

AK: You have a strong family background of artists. Not everyone finds that to be helpful in developing your own identity as an artist. How has it affected your journey, since you don't give the appearance of a man who is struggling to get away from his family...

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KT: I have always been fascinated by my grandfather who worked with textiles and created regalia and carved. My mom has always sewn, my grandmother has mainly crocheted, and I was always surrounded by their creativity, and by their willingness to show me things. I always wanted to teach. I originally wanted to be a French immersion teacher, but being brought up in the culture and the language, it is a big part of who I am and making sure that my nieces and nephews are learning that is a really nice way of having that goal intersect with my identities, and being a part of whom I am, and my passion.

AK: You said that your family had a strong connection to the Anglican church. Most churches have traditionally tried to diminish the presence of other cultural forms. How did your family negotiate that force?

KT: The really nice thing about the Anglican church among our people is that the very first missionary who came to us was McCullaugh and he learned the language, just like a lot of the missionaries who went into communities on the West Coast. They learned whatever indigenous language they encountered, and they translated the liturgy of the Bible into whatever language they encountered. McCullaugh did that with the Nisga'a, and that evolved with the orthography people are now using, so there is a sense of being comfortable speaking the language in the church, and being accepted by the missionaries.

Like the Anglicans, we have been taught to have a very strong belief that there is only one good, and there other beliefs, like walking in the light, that we hold as well. Those parallels between our spirituality and Christianity made it very easy for our people to coexist.

AK: Wasn't the Anglican Church part of the power structure that imposed the potlatch ban?

KT: They were, but not in the enforcement. I came across a publication created by McCullaugh called Hagaga (now Hak’ak’a’a), which means 'the key' in Nisga'a language. It was published eight or nine years after the potlatch ban began and it lists all the different people that were arrested or killed at a potlatch.

Part of the article is that he talks about the fact that "Nine years after the ban the Nisga'a are continuing to potlatch no matter what." I think they played a role, but I don't think it was as strong a role as that of the Indian agent.

AK: What will happen next in your life?

KT: Our dance group will be celebrating our tenth anniversary, and we are getting ready for that. We are very excited about that. Next Thursday, we will start a Nisga'a language beginner's course with our dance group, and we are looking forward to that. I have done it in the community, but it will be nice just to

work with our dance group members, because I know their dedication and I know that they will finish what they start. The whole program is being offered voluntarily and the space was donated, so it is going to be an amazing time.

I am working mainly with adults, to create a bigger team of language speakers who can help teach, and we can partner with the Nisga'a pre– school that is starting up in Vancouver.

AK: How many Nisga'a speakers are there?

KT: In Vancouver there are maybe three or four.

In total there are maybe four or five hundred.

Not all can actually speak it, mainly from lack of use, like my Mom who stopped speaking after moving away to boarding school, but both of her grandparents could not speak a word of English, so until she was fourteen that's all they spoke. But they can understand it.

AK: Thank you!

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Critical Movements A conversation with James Gnam

"I think we are on the periphery of a lot of things. We are not visual artists, but we are engaged with that community, we are not musicians, but we are engaged with that community. We are not ballet dancers, but we are engaged with that community, and while I wouldn't really say that we are contemporary dancers, we are engaged with that community."

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Dance Central September/October 2016

Photo: Chris Randle

continued from page 6

AK: The performance had elements of an object lesson:

JG: One of the things we talked a lot about in the creation of

'Look what happens when you touch someone, compared

Digital Folk was that we were never performing it for an audi-

to what happens when you watch the screen.' Speaking of

ence; we weren't presenting a thing. It was an artist-led experi-

the screen dance, is it gendered?

ence that we weren't 'performing for' but 'embodying on behalf of' the people we were sharing the space with. We were inviting

JG: Yes, it is gendered and sexualized but it is also fairly in-

people into our experience cognitively. That was a task: How

clusive, and we are dealing with very clear gender identities

clearly can I unpack what I am experiencing in a way that can

in these games, like princess monsters and Ninja dancing

be demonstrative and shared with people who have no prior

guys.

relationship to what I am doing?

AK: Digital Folk seems to continue an exploration that

AK: With work like this, do you have a sense of where plastic

plastic orchid factory has pursued in performances such as

orchid fits in the ecology of dance in Vancouver at the moment?

Remember When, where embodied movement is fractured by the act of recording and overlaying the movement with

JG: I think we are on the periphery of a lot of things. We are not

a digital representation, and the audience in watching both

visual artists, but we are engaged with that community, we are

at the same time has to negotiate the hierarchy of meaning

not musicians, but we are engaged with that community. We are

and what it means to witness movement in a body and on a

not ballet dancers, but we are engaged with that community,

screen.

and while I wouldn't really say that we are contemporary dancers, we are engaged with that community. I am not really sure

JG: I find the relationship between these things really engag-

how we fit.

ing in unpacking my dance practice. It feels like one of the responsibilities I have as a maker of dance things that I can't really talk about embodiment unless I am creating a context

AK: Thank you!

for it. I also have two very different experiences as a dance artist. My whole career as a ballet dancer was spent in a responsive/reactive state, where I have very little sense of embodiment or recollection of what actually transpired on that stage once I left it. Of course I feel like I had done all of the tasks that I had been assigned, and that was fine, but as far as where I was organizing myself in time, while I was actually doing the task, I was usually thinking ahead or thinking behind, and I wasn't spending much time in the present. And then there were all the years that I spent with Peter Bingham at EDAM, working on a contact dance practice, where you are unpacking the present, and where it needs to be about how you are organizing all your creative rigour around what is transpiring at this very second. I feel like my relationship to dance lives in these two very different worlds, and it is always a conversation unfolding between them.

AK: It brings to mind the question of what we consider or experience as authentic. Folk evokes the trope of being an 'authentic' form of art-making and community activity, while ballet seems to occupy the opposite pole. How does Digital Folk situate itself vis-a-vis the notion of authenticity?

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Dance Central

September/October 2016