September/October 2012
Dance Central A Dance Centre Publication
Dangerously Important A conversation with Su-Feh Lee by Andreas Kahre
Content Dangerously Important: A conversation about Dance and Language with Su-Feh Lee Page 1
Executive Director Mirna Zagar introduces the coming season The Dance Centre
AK: Over the past year, I have been talking to a wide variety of dance artists about their practice, and the language they use to speak of it. When we talk of developing a critical language for dance artists, and efforts like the Dialogue on Dance Writing Facebook group, your name continues to come up. Many regard you as someone who has made a concerted, if sometimes controversial effort to bring a critical language to dance. What moves you? SFL: I think as you start to care about dance, you realize it is a serious artform, but the absence of a critical dialogue about it relegates it to being something more decorative. People often refer to dance as a young artform, but actually it is ancient, and still we haven't developed a language that honours dance as a distinct practice. Sometimes we borrow language or ways of looking from other forms, like visual art, and in the process we reduce it to an object, or frame it in an inappropriate paradigm. In talking about dance I am concerned with making it accepted as a form with the capacity to interrogate and critique the world, not merely to entertain. Dance artists need to get comfortable speaking not just about their own work but also about the world. All artists need to do that, but dance artists have chosen a medium that traditionally tends to be silent. And so their opinions and views remain unvoiced. I think this has repercussions on the dancing body and on dance itself.
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Thinking Bodies: Claire French talks about the collaborative process for Restless Productions upcoming The Moment of Forgetting Page 6
Dance Calendar September/October 2012. Page 12
I was recently talking to Justine Chambers, in the context of our project on discourse The Talking, Thinking Dancing Body. I noted that though some people might consider my work interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary, I identify as a dance artist. For political reasons I insist that I am a dance artist because I want to remind people that dance is more than what they might perceive— that dance can encompass a great deal, including talking and thinking. AK: Thinking back to places like Simon Fraser University during the 1980s, the disagreement in the community as to what dance is and what its relationship to language should be has a long history. I remember how avidly some dance artists embraced interdisciplinary work and the critical language that was forming, especially in relation to performance art, while others rejected it with equal vehemence and insisted continued on page 2