winter 2021
BALLET IN THE STREETS Photo shoots by Karolina Kuras
HONING RESILIENCY
Future-proofing students’ careers
CLICKING REFRESH
The issues between artists and funders
Display until April 7, 2021 / $11.95
Canada's leading national dance magazine - now available on PressReader. The scoop, the action, the issues, the artists! Inclusive of all genres, The Dance Current takes the reader inside the art and culture of dance in Canada
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the dance current
WINTER 2021
contents
Volume 24 Issue 1 winter 2021
Marilyn Daoust in Le temps des fruits / Photo by Julie Artacho; Jesuino in The End / Photo by David Wong; Wang and Abreu / Photo courtesy of the National Arts Centre
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DEPARTMENTS
CURRENTS
FEATURES
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Masthead
W HAT’ S O N ?
F EATURE PROF IL E
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Your Notes
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20
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Editor's Letter
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Contributors
Event Previews
P RO F IL E
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Circling Back to Healing
Deanne Hupfield teaches powwow dance online to reach a wider audience by joy henderson C HEC K IT O U T
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BIPOC Dance Health Directory
A free online resource for performing artists by anne dion P ROVO CAT IO N
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Adding Colour to Dance Health
Leadership in dance health lacks cultural diversity by blessyl buan
The Chaos of Possibility
Kevin Jesuino explores how Queerness, liveness and failure might provide insight into reinvention, approximately one year after the onset of COVID-19 by jillian groening EDUCATION
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Honing Resiliency
While the pandemic has put constraints on post-secondary training, dance programs are working to future-proof students’ careers by lee slinger MONEY TA L K
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Clicking Refresh
Can COVID-19 emergency granting measures make the funding game more equitable? by kallee lins
C RE ATIO N
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ON THE COVE R
24 Ballet in the Streets
Pandemic photo shoots with photographer Karolina Kuras
You've Got Mail
Co-creators Naishi Wang and Jean Abreu have yet to meet in person by dylan schoenmakers T IP S
Five Strategies for Hands-Off Teaching 19
winter 2021
Tips for when physical adjustments aren’t possible by scotty mac
POSTSCRIPTS F IRST PERSON
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Why I Left Toronto
The city boasts inclusivity and opportunity, but that’s not what I experienced by samyuktha punthambekar BODY
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Defining Posture and Alignment
What are the differences and how can we use imagery to improve? by donna h. krasnow and andrea e. downie BALLET IN THE STREETS Photo shoots by Karolina Kuras
HONING RESILIENCY
Future-proofing students’ careers
CLICKING REFRESH
The issues between artists and funders
POETRY
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Jamaican
by peter chin
thedancecurrent.com
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photo essay
BALLET
I N T H E S T R E E T S Dancers: Brenna Flaherty and Kota Sato
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the dance current
WINTER 2021
Karolina Kuras is a ballet and portrait photographer in Toronto. In addition to her work for The National Ballet of Canada, Kuras is the creator of The Company Project, a set of interviews with dancers from the National Ballet by Anne Donafeld. The following photos are from a series that Kuras shot when COVID-19 restrictions slightly lifted in Toronto, during Phase 2 last spring. “Living spaces in Toronto are tiny, and the dancers had been cooped up in their small homes for so long, trying to do ballet class in their kitchens and living rooms,” Kuras says. “It was exhilarating to take to the streets and have space to move and practise our respective art forms again.” As uplifting as it was, Kuras also says that the pandemic wasn’t totally out of mind. “The shoots were actually very emotional: a mix of joy to be out again with other people and with the underlying sadness and heaviness of the time we’re living in right now. There were some tears, but mostly of joy.” To see more from the series, check out World Apart | The National Ballet of Canada on YouTube.
Sommaire Karolina Kuras est une photographe de ballet et portraitiste à Toronto. En plus de son travail pour le National Ballet of Canada, Kuras a mis sur pied The Company Project, un ensemble d’interviews avec des danseurs du National Ballet par Anne Donafeld. Les photos suivantes font partie d’une série prise lorsque les restrictions sanitaires initiales ont été assouplies à Toronto, lors de la phase 2. « Les espaces de vie à Toronto sont minuscules, et les artistes avaient été enfermé.e.s dans leurs petits domiciles pendant tellement longtemps, à essayer de faire des classes de ballet dans leur cuisine ou leur salon », décrit Kuras. « C’était enivrant de descendre dans la rue et d’avoir l’espace pour bouger et pratiquer nos disciplines respectives. » Malgré le plaisir, Kuras note que la pandémie n’était pas absente de l’expérience. « Il y avait beaucoup d’émotion : la joie de se retrouver, sous-tendue par la tristesse et la lourdeur de la période que nous traversons. Il y avait quelques larmes, mais surtout du bonheur », partage-t-elle. Pour en savoir plus, consultez World Apart | The National Ballet of Canada sur YouTube.
thedancecurrent.com
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education
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the dance current
WINTER 2021
Honing Resiliency While the pandemic has put constraints on post-secondary training, dance programs are working to future-proof students’ careers by lee slinger
Tanya Berg / Photo courtesy of Berg
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ust before 5:30 in the morning, Rayn Cook-Thomas lets himself into the Dance Victoria studio he’s currently using to take class in Victoria, B.C. If it had not been for the COVID-19 pandemic, the young dance artist would have been in Toronto, beginning his second year in the York University dance program. Instead, this fall term, he has chosen to stay in Victoria. It seemed safer and many of his friends weren’t going back either, but, most importantly, it would ensure he had access to a sufficiently large and appropriate training space. Twice a week, he bikes to the studio and gives himself 15 or 20 minutes to warm up his tired body before his ballet class starts at 8:45 in Toronto, or 5:45 in Victoria. “No,” he tells me, “I am not a morning person.” In the small town of Creston in the interior of British Columbia, Tiera Joly Pavelich was also waking up at five in the morning in September. She would head to her partner’s mother’s restaurant where, before they opened for the breakfast service, all the tables and chairs were moved aside so that she could have a large enough space to take class. A final-year dance student at Concordia University (she also studies psychology), she would log in to her technique class streamed from Montreal. By the time class was finished, restaurant preparations would be quietly underway in the background. Even though the environment in Creston was very supportive, Pavelich says, “I was really craving shut doors and a place to be back into my body.” After a couple of weeks, she and her partner made the difficult decision to return to Montreal. Now, her classes are at 9:00 a.m. local time, but she is in the living room of her apartment: “I keep hitting my plants or the light bulb,” she says. Like so many instructors and dance artists across the country, Cook-Thomas and Pavelich are contending with the ways both time and space have been reshaped by the COVID-19 crisis. Now mainly online – with only some programs able to continue in studio for part of the fall, and even those had to adopt strict social distancing and other safety measures – post-secondary dance training looks drastically different. I spoke with instructors and students in universities and professional programs about professional dance training during the pandemic. Despite the current constraints
on training, which have been keenly felt by the students, the teachers are endeavouring to ensure that the situation allows students to hone different skill sets and to emerge nonetheless as resilient artists.
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S IS OFTEN THE CASE with such historic events, most of the people with whom I spoke could immediately recall where they were last March when they heard their world was shutting down. On Friday, March 13th, between two sections of her movement for actors class, Seika Boye, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto (U of T), and all of her students received the notification that that would be the last day of in-person classes for the term. Pavelich had gone to teach her jazz class at McGill University, but no one showed up. By Sunday, she had secured a job as a nanny to compensate for her lost teaching income. At U of T, Tanya Berg, who teaches in the faculty of kinesiology and physical education as well as the dance department at York University, was in a tech workshop with two information technicians, having cancelled her morning’s class to get help with an online teaching platform with which she had little experience. By Friday evening, less than a week after classes were cancelled at Concordia, Colleen Nagel, a student in the contemporary dance program, had already gotten off a plane in her hometown, Yellowknife. In the spring, the motivations for both instructors and students were to keep bodies moving, complete programs and retain a sense of community in a chaotic and isolating situation. At The School of Toronto Dance Theatre (STDT), Johanna Bergfelt, artistic associate and dance artist, led a morning technique class from her son’s bedroom for all 55 professional training program students. “My goal,” she says, “was to get them warmed up and ready, to feel like a community, to let them know ‘We can do this.’ ” As performances and projects were cancelled, instructors and students banded together to support one another, and programs found ways for students to complete their year’s requirements. But by the summer, as it became clear that at least some restrictions would remain during the fall, the university departments and professional training programs needed to find alternative
Cook-Thomas / Photo by Lia Crowe
ways to build community while ensuring the continued support of their students, instructors and staff. According to Faye Thomson, co-director of The School of Contemporary Dancers (SCD) in Winnipeg, course preparations for the upcoming school year were like “trying to hit a moving target,” as government recommendations and regulations changed. Schools had to anticipate what would be permitted and educate themselves on best practices and public health standards. Pat Fraser, artistic director of STDT, describes their preparations as “exhaustive.” The day after I reached out to STDT for this article, the Government of Ontario announced on Oct. 9th
with strict social distancing protocols, the limitations on space have changed some course offerings while also introducing new avenues of exploration for students. As it has across the art form, filmed dance is proving to be fertile ground for learning and exploration. At STDT, they “determined that it would be impossible to apply social distancing protocols in some classes and so decided to cancel courses in contact improvisation and bouffon and to replace them with film for dance courses,” the school said in an email. The dancefilm course is taught by Allen Kaeja, Canadian film director and choreographer, and explores basic film technique and aesthetics and includes handson practical experience shooting and screening
Twice a week, [Rayn Cook-Thomas] bikes to the studio and gives himself 15 or 20 minutes to warm up his tired body before his ballet class starts at 8:45 in Toronto, or 5:45 in Victoria. “No,” he tells me, “I am not a morning person.” new regulations that dashed the school’s hopes of offering a hybrid in-studio/online format in the fall term; they were in the midst of pivoting to their prepared strategy to go entirely online for the next 28 days, with the hopes of returning to the studio after that. Whether classes are online or in-studio
short films. Christina Medina, a dance artist working in Vienna, who would usually provide an in-person process with the students at SCD, is this year working with them on a film project, where the students will film themselves. At Concordia, some dance instructors have incorporated regular filmed explorations thedancecurrent.com
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poetry
Jamaican An excerpt from the poem by Peter Chin
porousness like rain on limestone hills seeping down deep and leaving the brush parched and exposed but alive on Long Mountain on the way to Palisadoes this exterior the uppermost layer of many more much much more beneath lets water flow through surface lushness sacrificed for subterranean substance changes me from the inside nourishing and eroding interior chambers and hollows carved by the percolating tears hold inner spaces filled with unknown
Read the entire poem online >> thedancecurrent.com/column/jamaican Peter Chin is the artistic director of Tribal Crackling Wind, based in Toronto and Cambodia, and the co-founder of the NKK International Dance Centre. 50
the dance current
WINTER 2021
Photo courtesy of Unsplash
Mama, my Black grandmother, makes chocolate tea ‘parching’ the cocoa seeds on zinc in the sun grinding and shaping them into ebony orbs grating these to dark dust into boiling water mixing measuring into it the sweetened condensed milk that mellows bitterness cinnamon leaves plucked from the tree in the yard join with bracing pimento berries into the hot brew a glistening oiliness appears floating on top an expression of the cocoa seed’s life this I pour into myself nourished and scorched