Editor's Note
Dance Central, Volume 40, Issue 2
Tribute to Tedd Robinson (1952–2022)
Summer has arrived in Vancouver, and with it, the city’s performance spaces are alive with renewed purpose. This issue of Dance Central marks Part 2 of our two-part reflection on Dance In Vancouver 2024, a celebration of the artists whose practices continue to reshape the landscape of contemporary dance on these unceded and ancestral Traditional Coast Salish Lands.
We are honoured to share new reflections by Ziyian Kwan, Ralph Escamillan and Justine A. Chambers. Ziyian’s Tendrils, first premiered at Dance In Vancouver 2024, emerged from a posthumous gift sent by Tedd Robinson’s collaborators. The moment of unveiling sparked an intimate encounter that led Ziyian to create this newest work, which will return in new iterations this summer at Dancing on the Edge and the Festival of New Dance
In Croquis, Ralph explores deconstruction as a mode of creation. A garment made entirely from paper becomes an embodied archive of memory. Inspired by his earlier work PIÑA and traditional weaving practices from Aklan, Philippines, Croquis meditates on femininity, ceremony, and transience. Like Tendrils, it is a living tribute to Tedd’s enduring influence. That both artists have created works in conversation with Tedd’s legacy is no coincidence. Together, their pieces reflect a lineage of mentorship and experimentation that exemplifies the vibrancy of Vancouver’s dance community. Justine’s lecture excerpts on The Brutal Joy invites us to consider the relationships between devotion, archival practice, and embodiment. Her words honor Black living and how performance becomes a form of living memory and resistance. Justine will be sharing The Brutal Joy as part of The National Arts Centre, The Dance Centre and Mile Zero Dance Society's 2025-2026 season.
As we move into a summer of dance—Dancing on the Edge Festival, Indian Summer Festival, 12 Minutes Max, SummerSpace, and TVTlink at The Dance Centre, and many more—we look ahead with expansiveness, acknowledging that we are always standing on the shoulders of those who have come before us. This issue concludes our Dance In Vancouver 2024 coverage, but the conversation lingers.
We thank all the artists who have contributed, and we welcome new writing and project ideas at any time—keeping Dance Central a vital link to the community. Please send materials by email to editor@thedancecentre.ca.
Shanny Rann Editor
Justine A. Chambers in The Brutal Joy © Rachel Topham Photography
Croquis:
FOLD, TWIST, TIE
By Ralph Escamillan
Deconstruction as a process of creation.
In my durational performance titled, Croquis, the pencil is the body and the paper a modular canvas—dissecting the desire to imprint and archive oneself into physical space. Central to this work is a garment constructed entirely out of paper, which is recreated for each performance out of a humble material typically used to package products. The garment in Croquis extends the handcrafted techniques explored in my earlier work PIÑA , developed through my collaboration and learning with local weavers in Kalibo, Aklan, Philippines — where I learned how to extract and weave fibers from pineapple leaves.
The construction of this garment began in the summer of 2023 when I created an initial draft of the garment as a resident artist at the Vancouver Art Gallery as part of the Fashion Fictions exhibit. During this time I explored techniques for manipulating paper,
and explored the properties of this material both physically and sonically.
This garment can take many forms, but draws inspiration from the historic ball gown skirt, the duality of which has been synonymous with ideas of celebration, femininity and pomp, while also representing a type of confinement and mourning.
The movement in the performance references these aspects, weaving together moments that slowly reveal, with others that express the feeling of breaking free— creating something entirely new while destroying what came before.
This skirt also serves as a tribute to the late Tedd Robinson — a close friend and creative influence whom I connected deeply with before Tedd’s passing in 2022, and who helped inspire the creation of this solo.
Ephemerality is embodied through the ritual of the performance. Performed alongside a hypnotic metronome, the paper’s collisions with the body and floor are amplified— every crinkle in stillness, every tear through motion, becoming part of the choreography. Once the dress is danced in, it is then recycled, and a new dress is built for the next performance—echoing the cycle of creation, death, chaos and rebirth.
Paper Dress © David Cooper
The Dance Centre
Scotiabank Dance Centre
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Vancouver BC V6B 2G6
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info@thedancecentre.ca www.thedancecentre.ca
Dance Central is published quarterly by The Dance Centre for its members and for the 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.
Editor, Art Director & Layout
Shanny Rann
Copy Editor
Kaia Shukin
Design Layout
Becky Wu
Contributors to this issue:
Ralph Escamillan, Ziyian Kwan, and Justine A. Chambers
Photo credits
Front Cover: Croquis: FOLD, TWIST, TIE © David Cooper
Back Cover: Tendrils © David Cooper
Dance Centre Board Members:
Chair
Linda Gordon
Vice-Chair
Selim Hasan
Treasurer
Mark Weston
Directors
Yvonne Chartrand, Mique'l Dangeli, Mirjana Galovich, Anndraya Luui, Sujit Vaidya, Wen Wei Wang
Dance Foundation Board Members:
Shaadi Faris, Samantha Luo, Dallas McMurtrie
Chair Linda Blankstein
Vice-Chair Andrea Benzel
Secretary Anndraya Luui
Treasurer Janice Wells
Dance Centre Staff:
Executive Director
Mirna Zagar
Associate Programming Director
Raquel Alvaro
Associate Producer
Linda Blankstein
Director of Marketing
Heather Bray
Digital Marketing Coordinator
Lindsay Curtis
Development Manager
Catherine Butler
Membership Coordinator
Kaia Shukin
Outreach Coordinator
Yurie Kaneko
Comptroller Elyn Dobbs
Interim Technical Director
Jeremiah Hughes
Venue and Services Manager
Christopher David Gauthier
Established in 1986 as a resource centre for dance in British Columbia, The Dance Centre is a multifaceted organization offering a range of activities which is unparalleled in Canadian dance. We present performances and events, building audiences and nurturing public awareness; invest in programs, resources and support for hundreds of dance professionals working in all genres; operate Scotiabank Dance Centre, a cultural hub and one of Canada’s flagship dance facilities which welcomes tens of thousands of visitors annually; and work to promote BC dance. Through programs, outreach and education, The Dance Centre is committed to sustaining a strong and vibrant community through dance.
Ralph Escamillan is an award-winning Queer artist, choreographer, community leader, and 2nd generation Philippine-Canadian. He is the founder of two non-profits VanVogueJam and FakeKnot, has danced/toured/created with Vancouver-based companies, film and TV, as well as been a beacon for the Ballroom scene on the West Coast of Canada since 2017. His work continues to advocate and create space for artists of color, while also producing and building Queer spaces to inform his work and how he seeks to recontextualize the way dance is created and shared. ralphescamillan.com
Paper Dress © David Cooper
Paper Dress © David Cooper
Tendrils
By Ziyian Kwan
The lifeline of a creative work is so surprising and I’m an artist who seeks in revision, a teacher and a friend. This relates a lot to the journey of Tendrils, which premiered at The Dance Centre’s biennial platform, Dance In Vancouver, in November 2024.
Tendrils began in September 2023, when I was one of several people who received gifts from 10 Gates Dancing as part of its Multiples project, in which artifacts from the performance archives of dance artist Tedd Robinson, were posthumously sent to colleagues across the country.
A box of 4 canvas-wrapped bundles arrived
at Odd Meridian’s studio, Morrow, sent via the care of Angie Cheng and Tina Legari. When I opened my gift, I was with Ralph Escamillan and James Gnam, who also received gifts. It was a random draw and I could hear in my mind’s voice, Tedd asking whether I would make a choice out of habit or if I might choose something that would lead to a new discovery.
So I chose the package that I was least drawn to, a bundle that because of its shape, I expected to be one of Tedd’s artisinal teabowls (an item that did not appeal to me because I was coveting the possibility of a garment). But when I opened the package,
Hat in photo gifted from Tedd Robinson’s archives, as part of 10 Gates Dancing Multiples Project Ziyian Kwan © David Cooper
I was perplexed and surprised. One item, though not a garment, was wearable and when I put it on, I burst into tears, and said to James and Ralph, “I have never felt so beautiful, so seen, and so understood, in my life”.
At that moment, I decided to make a solo with the gifts I had received and a year later, began the process. Along the way I made unsettling errors and in retrospect, realize that the gifts were more than an affirmation. They were also a provocation to keep asking questions, to revel in the liminal space between what is tangible and what is unknowable.
Tendrils at this time, is reforming and I don’t know what it will become: this June at Dancing On The Edge Festival or in October at Festival of New Dance in Newfoundland. Although premiering at Dance In Vancouver was a rich and supportive experience, I grappled with the concept of homage that I had committed to, and therefore didn’t want to perform the work again. But I’m thinking now, that homage can be explicit or mysterious, that ultimately, it’s any expression of appreciation. Through this understanding, the work again calls to me.
Tendrils
Imagine
A constellation of creative thoughts
That seek us out and land on our bodies
Magneting to us like starbursts of acuity
Filling the empty spaces in which we are ghost With galaxies of intelligence
子嫣 Ziyian Kwan (she/her) is a 1st generation Chinese Filipina settler who lives on the unceded ancestral, occupied and stolen territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm Skwxwú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaɬ First Nations.
Since 1988, Ziyian has performed over 100 original works by an eclectic range of artists. Her own choreography collates images, movement, and language. As founding Artistic Director of Odd Meridian Arts, Ziyian stewards programming that is in conversation with the creative adventures of colleagues from across disciplines - including activities at Morrow, Odd Meridian’s cultural space. Energy at play, in bodies in worlds.
oddmeridian.ca
Ziyian Kwan © David Cooper
The Brutal Joy
Lecture Excerpts
By Justine A. Chambers
Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.
—Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Beginnings
This story, this Brutal Joy, begins - for mewith my grandmother, and her stories about dancing on Saturday nights at The Bronzeville Ballroom on the south side of Chicago in the 40s, 50s and 60s. I see her in my mind’s eye, elbows linked with her best friend Marie as they enter the ball room, turned out, and holding her beaded purse in her gloved hands.
I can see the two of them elegantly surveying the room, heads leaned into each other, neck’s long, clocking who's there and noting what folks are wearing. I see them glide over to a table, put down their purses and remove their gloves, because friends, they are about to shake a tailfeather.
My story continues with my Granny taking me to a jazz club in the 80s on a Saturday afternoon. It was a small room: filled with
smoke caught in shards of light and the feeling of bodies listening. Cafe tables and chairs filled the room, and the floor was gritty. The musicians were close - close enough to touch and they held court in a corner of the room.
The intimacy of this space didn’t allow the audience to recede into the darkness. The collective movements of the room were never separate from the experience of the performance: clinking glasses communed with the drum kit, bodies bent and winced in the deliciousness of horn solos, and every head in the joint bobbed in unison. Everyone’s presence was felt. The room held measured stillness and calculated chaos. It was so quiet sometimes that I could feel the invisible, and so cacophonous at others it felt like my internal organs were in spasm. It was sublime.
The Brutal Joy is the final utterance in The Heirloom Suite; a series of performances that
Justine's performative lecture of The Brutal Joy as part of Dance In Vancouver 2024 © The Dance Centre
wield the materiality of Black Vernacular line dance and Black sartorial gesture as physical cogitation, reverie, and devotion to Black-living. The Brutal Joy is a scored improvisational performance for sound, light, and dance performed by Mauricio Pauly, James Proudfoot and myself with our dramaturg/outside eye Vanessa Kwan. The work is an antiphonal relational collaboration, an activation of The Electric Slide and Black dandyism to invoke the Black imaginary, and an embodied counter-archive—a reservoir for gestures, individual affective memories and
under documented histories. A history that begins with the Middle Passage - the stage of the Atlantic slave trade. These social practices that emerge from that violence, persist as epistemologies, contemporary tools for selfdetermination, and reclamations of Black humanitarian value in a 400-year dialogue with colonialism. Dance and garments were a symbol of the bridge between slavery and emancipation. At inception and persisting in the present, Black dandyism and Black style are indications of social, political, cultural and economic change (Miller 8).
Justine A. Chambers in The Brutal Joy © Rachel Topham Photography
Change
All that you touch You Change.
All that you Change Changes you.
The only lasting truth is Change.
God is Change.
—Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
The embodiment of change is required to imagine ourselves otherwise. The vernacular practices in my research, provide practical tools for actualizing change from within our own bodies in concert with our communities. Activating body sovereignty initiates a shift in perception, directs us towards what could be possible, and provokes it to arrive. Through style and dancing, we can practice change and see/feel ourselves beyond the unrelenting strain of being “perversely tied to the dehumanizing logics of white supremacy” (McKittrick, 3). This is the work of the counter archive through embodiment.
Archives
“What happens to our understanding of black humanity when our analytical frames do not emerge from a broad swathe of numbing racial violence but, instead, from multiple and untracked enunciations of black life?”
—Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science
The embodied archive is an imperative of Black life. Knowledge hierarchies and systemic notions of who and what has value
have obstructed Black histories from freely unfurling beyond and below their colonial damage-centered narratives. In response, I feel called to archive and preserve Black life as complex, intimate, valuable, funky, nuanced, faceted, multiple, audacious, and private. Katherine McKittrick speaks to this when she says, “ The story asks that we live with the difficult and frustrating ways of knowing differentially. (And some things we can keep to ourselves. They cannot have everything. Stop her autopsy.) They cannot have everything”.
Curator Denise Ryner writes, embodied archives “become counter-sites to institutions, departing from their conventional role of mapping out historical points in linear time and becoming, instead, tools of Black […] futurity around which anticolonial solidarity can be built and sovereignty reclaimed.” And so, I take up Christina Sharpe’s task to “function as a living library”—a present-future living memory to shirk the flattening of metaphors and tropes in order to “discredit(s) ethnic absolutism” (McKittrick, 5).
The embodied archive is implicitly housed within—and is living evidence of—social, historical, intellectual, conceptual, and theoretical frameworks. Black diasporic histories are held in the flesh and shared through flesh. They contain geographies, colonial fictions, individuals, collectives, methodologies, feelings, symbols and codes. Codes of sociality, codes for survival, and codes of belonging, Our archive must not
be of a singular construction. Our embodied recordings are counter-archives–subjective, mutable, contingent, provisional, coherent, and most importantly exercises in futuring.
Black vernacular line dance and Black style vitalize the counter-archive by insisting upon and building space for individual presence; the feeling and articulation of self from within their forms and structures.
“Perhaps we can each make space in the places where language cannot travel, those corners where there is feeling only, and the sharp vivacity of memory thrives.” —Legacy Russell
Black dance is never just dancing, it never sits alone. It is imbued with everyday living. Embedded in my dancing story is motown, disco, jazz, R&B, hip hop, blues, Stepping, the Roger Rabbit, the Cabbage Patch, MGM musicals, milk crates filled with records stacked in the hall closet, Ebony magazine on the coffee table, the smell of nail polish on Friday nights, braids, beads and barrettes, jars of Vaseline for faces, elbows and knees, getting greased up by my mother, watching the Twilight Zone while eavesdropping on kitchen table conversations not yet meant for my ears, warning glances and side eye, the “ain’t nothing but”, Reebok 54.11s, hot pink bridesmaids dresses with matching netted fascinators, lay-away, beaded purses, stockings hanging over shower rods, swagger, wigs in waiting on styrofoam heads on the bathroom window sill,
“ if you know, you know”, barbecue, overcooked collard greens sitting in a green/brown puddle of juice on a paper plate, German chocolate cake, a pot of frying oil on our stove as a permanent installation in our kitchen, jacks and double dutch. “You feel me? ” All of this coats the inside of the dance.
Feeling and articulation imbues and adheres to these social dances. They ‘counter-act,’ rewrite, and ‘animate over’ as a means to support the preservation, emergence, and continuation of the counter-archive. Individual and collective Black dancing bodies become scaffolds, memorials, and living, moving, breathing monuments from which Black histories can be re-cast through the flesh. From this inheritance of ‘doing,’ our bodies synchronously retain the latent and invite the incipient—our archive has been made and it is arriving right now. The Brutal Joy allows my archive to speak and act when, and as needed. It offers performance as a mode of creative archival access, while also proposing that if the work is a living library then, we must “see the pages formed as forms still forming” (Phanuel Antwi).
Devotion
This work is a devotional act that asks ‘the record’ to expansively include the complex singularity of experiences that constitute this Black life. This performance practice, re-centres Black vernacular practices and their organizing structures as ontology and epistemology in order to echo forward the
possibility to incite change, to be irreducible, and to imagine freely. All of this in reverence for Black-living.
Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist and educator living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum
and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. At the centre of her practice is a question often posed by her grandmother: “You feel me?” Her research attends to individual and collective embodied archives, social choreographies of the everyday, and choreography and dance as otherwise ways of being in relation. Chambers’ work has been hosted at galleries, festivals and theatres nationally and internationally. She is an Assistant Professor at the School for Contemporary Arts at SFU, and Associate Artist to The Dance Centre. Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.
Justine's performative lecture of The Brutal Joy as part of Dance In Vancouver 2024 © The Dance Centre
