ON FAMILY
FAMILY MATTER(S)
Artists unpack and embody shared stories
DANCING THE PARENTING Julie Lebel’s intergenerational practice
IN TRIBUTE
Ethel Bruneau and Danny Grossman
Display until January 31, 2024 / $11.95
contents
Left to right: Ethel Bruneau, 1970s / Photo courtesy of Dance Collection Danse; Photo by Keith Martin; Danny Grossman in his work The Equilibrist, 1989 / Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann On the cover: Mayumi Lashbrook in her work Enemy Lines / Photo by Drew Berry
Volume 26 Issue 4 fall 2023
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DEPARTMENTS
CURRENTS
POSTSCRIPTS
4 Masthead
W HAT’ S O N ?
REF L ECTIONS
6 Now Online 7 Editor’s Letter 8 Contributors
9 Event Previews R E S E A RC H S P OTL IG HT
11 Red River Jig Network
Tracing “cultural DNA” through Métis dance and music by erin joelle mccurdy T IP S
13 Healthy Connections
A registered physiotherapist shares how to care for your tendons by geneviève renaud
38 Family Is What Moves Alongside Me A meditation on forming chosen family through dance by martin austin BODY
40 Safe Lifting for Healthy Spines A chiropractor offers helpful tips for taking weight by dr. joyce fu H ISTORICA L MOMENTS
42 The Clichettes
A model for feminist-forward performance by clara chemtov
FEATURES TRIBUTE
ON THE COVER FEATUR E
32 Family Matter(s)
What happens when artists delve into family stories, making personal narratives public? by candice irwin
15 Remembering Ethel Bruneau A collective love letter to the matriarch of tap F E ATURE P RO F IL E
20 Dancing the Parenting
Julie Lebel’s intergenerational practices and performances explore the coexistence of early childhood parenting and dance by lucy fandel S P O N S O R E D CO N TE N T
25 Dancer Transition Resource
Centre Launches EVOLVE This Fall ON FAMILY
New programming focused on dancer career resiliency now accessible across the country
FAMILY MATTER(S)
Artists unpack and embody shared stories
DANCING THE PARENTING Julie Lebel’s intergenerational practice
IN TRIBUTE
Ethel Bruneau and Danny Grossman
T RIB U TE
27 Celebrating Danny Grossman Friends and colleagues remember his influence by emily pettet
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Ethel Bruneau, 2021 / Photo by Liliana Reyes, courtesy of Dance Collection Danse
tribute
Remembering Ethel Bruneau A collective love letter to the matriarch of tap
“I just love to see people moving… All dance is wonderful; all dance makes you happy.” – ETHEL BRUNEAU –
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he legendary rhythm tap dancer and teacher Ethel Bruneau American tour with Cab Calloway, she moved to Montreal carrying not only her passion for the art form but also her experience working with such luminaries as Bunny Briggs, Frankie Manning and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. In Montreal, Bruneau captivated audiences with her tap and Afro-Cuban acts as “Miss Swing,” performing at Rockhead’s Paradise, the Aldo, the Black Bottom, the Cavendish Club, the Maroon and others, also touring with Pearl Bailey. Before she became iconic, Bruneau was a young girl who fell in love with dance at the Mary Bruce Starbuds School of Dance; she began her training at age three with classes her mother paid for by selling baked goods. As a student, she had the opportunity to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show and play at the Apollo Theater as one of “The Starbuds” and went on to study with Martha Graham and José Limón. Sharing her deep passion for tap became Bruneau’s calling in 1964 when she opened a small studio called Ethel Linda Lee in the Montreal area, and she continued to teach tap until her last studio closed in 2019. As a teacher and mentor at her school as well as the Montreal Tap Dance Society, which she founded, Bruneau helped countless students discover and foster a love of rhythm tap. Many of her students went on to become teachers and performers themselves. Her wide-ranging impact on the art form was acknowledged through the many awards she received including the inaugural Prix Ethel Bruneau in 2020, created in her honour and presented by the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) and Danse Danse; the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award presented by Black Theatre Workshop; a Lifetime Achievement Award from Vancouver’s West Coast Tap; and an induction into the Dance Collection Danse Hall of Fame in 2021. She was truly a tap icon. On July 24, 2023, Bruneau passed away, leaving a lasting legacy that will live on through her many students, mentees, family members and beyond. Below is a collection of cherished memories shared by her family, dance family and collaborators.
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From top to bottom: Newspaper clipping, Le Cabaret, March 19, 1966 / Courtesy of Dance Collection Danse; Ethel Bruneau dancing at Rockhead’s Paradise, 1970s / Courtesy of Dance Collection Danse
was born in Harlem in 1936. At the age of 16, fresh off a North
feature profile
Dancing the Parenting Julie Lebel’s public won’t sit still and that’s OK
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ulie Lebel’s life work as a parent and artist is constantly emerging. For her, people of all ages, movements and ideas collectively have an impact. Her vision of family is equally expansive, both in configurations and socio-political meaning. Lebel was raised in an extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends. Now, as artistic director of the Vancouver-based dance company Foolish Operations, she creates intergenerational participatory performances and workshops for “children and their adults,” she shares, “with a focus on the youngest of humans.” Throughout her practice, she uses the terms parent and caregiver interchangeably to “welcome the children’s favourite adults in the space.” Upon moving to Vancouver in 2005 and having twins in 2012, Lebel bumped up against an unfamiliar parenting culture. She found families isolated. “I didn’t understand how we could raise children like that,” she recalls. She also found the lack of affordable daycares with interesting programs concerning. She sought community while attempting to merge parenthood with her identity as an artist. She created Dancing the Parenting, initially a group of parents with babies in strollers, supported by an artistic residency with the Vancouver 20
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Park Board. A friend cared for one twin while the other stayed in the stroller as Lebel facilitated sessions, exploring flexible choreographic structures that allowed participants to move together in relation to their babies. She gravitated towards what felt like manageable patterns composed of walking and turning, like the set carré found in traditional French-Canadian folk dances. Lebel wanted dance to be the anchor for the group’s evolving parent-child relationships, but the practice made equal space for commiseration. It was necessary that participants felt that they could be in their bodies. This sometimes meant listening to each other’s difficulties in order to transition into a place of embodiment and play. “Some practices were super magical, and some practices, we couldn’t get out of conversations like, ‘I didn’t sleep yesterday’ or ‘Breastfeeding isn’t working,’ ” she recalls. When the newborns outgrew the strollers, sessions turned into a long-term studio residency at the Creekside Community Recreation Centre, and she continued searching to better connect participants to their embodied sensations and capacity to improvise. A visit from her then-mentor, dance artist Karen Jamieson, helped Lebel realize that the key to more substance was in designing a good warm-up.
Photo by Chris Randle
BY LUCY FANDEL
Photos by Yvonne Chew
So Lebel recruited help from participants, among them fellow parents of twins Michele Andersen (a dancer and occupational therapist) and Christophe Lacour (an osteopath familiar with somatic and developmental movement), as well as Janet Walker (an expressive arts therapist and registered clinical counsellor). They experimented with Laban Movement Analysis and Bartenieff Fundamentals-inspired rituals involving breath, touch, core-distal movement and head-tail connections until the warm-up crystallized. The clarity of embodied intention that emerged between parents and children without relying on speech was an important success, and Lebel still uses the warm-up to bring participants to improvise together. Games with touch and moving close to the ground allow adults and children to connect, often rolling, singing, jumping or resting.
If the adult is comfortable, calm and happy to be there, the child will be well and will participate. – JULIE LEBEL –
Intersecting practices At its core, Dancing the Parenting is a creative laboratory. It both nourishes and relies upon Lebel’s research on parenting and child development and her work in ensemble thinking, an improvisational dance practice developed and taught by the Lower Left Collective, of which she is a member. As sessions gradually transformed with time, welcoming new parents and caregivers, the ideas and questions that inhabit the space also evolved. Early on, Lebel was influenced by child-raising philosophies gaining popularity in North America in the early 2000s. These included attachment parenting, which emphasizes the parent-child bond as the pillar of a child’s capacity for development and autonomy, and the Reggio Emilia pedagogical approach developed in post-war Italy where class environments are carefully designed for childcentred, self-directed learning. She now recognizes that some narratives, such as those around baby wearing, forget about the agency or needs of the adult, as caregiver health often takes second place in society. Over time, Lebel’s research and experience with participants reinforced her intuition that a child-centric approach had to first and foremost support the caregiver’s capacity to be present. “Really, we are teaching to adults; we are not teaching to children,” she explains. “If the adult is comfortable, calm and happy to be there, the child will be well and will participate.” Lebel also found clarity in the 2019 revised British Columbia Early Learning Framework, which outlines the needs and roles of family and community in early learning and care spaces. Produced through a collaborative process involving Indigenous organizations and Elders, the framework identifies families as first teachers, caregivers and knowledge holders of their children, a posture Lebel seeks to prioritize in the ongoing decolonization process of Foolish Operations. Integrating the experiences and identities of adults with their caregiving roles is an essential quality of Dancing the Parenting. This necessarily means being sensitive to participants’ traumas as a facilitator. Though she specifies her offering is not therapy, Lebel seeks to adopt a trauma-informed approach through internal trainings for the Foolish Operations team with dance artist Caroline Liffmann, a longtime collaborator, and Luna Dance Institute. With Liffmann, she found tools for calming the nervous system’s activation, many of which were already familiar to her. “The practices thedancecurrent.com
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Danny Grossman, 2018 / Photo by Liliana Reyes
tribute
Celebrating Danny Grossman Friends and colleagues remember his influence BY EMILY PETTET ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF DANCE COLLECTION DANSE
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Danny Grossman’s passion for dance
informed every aspect of his life. As Eddie Kastrau, former Danny Grossman Dance Company member, notes, “Every conversation, when we went to dinner, when we went shopping, was dance. He lived and breathed it, and the conversation always came back to dance.” Grossmann died on July 29, 2023, at age 80, leaving behind a legacy that will impact dancers, creators and dance lovers for generations to come. His friends and colleagues remember him as one of a kind, someone you couldn’t help but be drawn to, both as a performer and a person. Pamela Grundy, former co-artistic director of Danny Grossman Dance Company and a dancer with the company from 1978 to 2008, laughs when she shares, “He was never short of astonishing onstage, whatever he did. I used to have that saying, ‘Never go onstage with a dog, a baby or Danny Grossman,’ because nobody will be looking at you.” Kastrau notes that while Grossman’s talent was outstanding, he went out of his way to hear people because he truly cared about the human experience: “When you talked with him, you knew he was listening. He always heard everything you said. He may not answer right away (he always had his own agenda), but he would always circle back.” Born in San Francisco, Grossman came to Canada to dance for Toronto Dance Theatre in 1973 and five years later founded Danny Grossman Dance Company. Throughout his storied career, he created works for the repertoires of Toronto Dance Theatre, The Paris Opera Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens and The National Ballet of Canada. He was also a faculty member at York University, and his work was performed by students at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, New York State Summer School of the Arts, Adelphi University, The City College of New York, Brown University, Dance Arts Institute, Toronto Metropolitan University and Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre. Countless dancers and choreographers across the country and the continent have stories about how Grossman influenced their work and how they think about dance and creation. Kastrau has been collecting these 28
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Danny Grossman in his work Ces Plaisirs, 1985 / Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann
stories now that Grossman has passed, and the current total shared has surpassed 500. “Many, many, many of them are from students or producers or theatre owners that said, ‘When I saw Danny’s works, it either changed my life or changed the direction of my career; it moved me from this path to dance,’ and also, not just dance.… Some people got into environmental studies because of some of his pieces. It’s really something to see now what people are saying about his work.”
For both Kastrau and Grundy, working with Grossman provided a sense of home, something that led them both to work with him for over 30 years. Kastrau notes that what kept him with the company was “Working with him. And he kept growing too, he never stood still – new ideas, changing, reinventing himself, we didn’t get this grant, we’ll get it this way – he always had a solution to keep moving forward. He changed my life in the fact that I stayed.… That’s where I felt at home.”