Local troupe lauds Etobicoke landmark
Kaeja d’Dance slated to animate Montgomery’s Inn with colourful choreography
A colourful chapter in Toronto’s past will be brought to life this weekend. Intrepid local troupe Kaeja d’Dance will descend on historic Montgomery’s Inn to perform a multi-faceted work specifically choreographed to highlight the more than 180-year-old heritage property’s continuing role in the life of the city.
Under the overall direction of dance company co-founders Allen and Karen Kaeja, eight choreographers and a total of 20 performers are involved in a roughly one-hour performance called Stability in Transition that will take audiences on a journey through several parts of the inn’s interior and exterior.
Coming from immigrant stock, Allen Kaeja says he was strongly drawn to the inn’s history as a refuge for travellers and as a community assembly point on the outskirts of the emerging colonial-era city. As Kaeja sees it, the fact that the inn, now sitting on very valuable land at the corner of Islington Ave. and Dundas St. W., has managed to survive within a dramatically transformed environment testifies to its role as an emblem of continuity and stability in changing times.
Montgomery’s Inn, considered an outstanding example of Loyalist Georgian architecture, was built around1832 for Irish-immigrant and York Militia captain Thomas Montgomery. It operated as an inn for more than 20 years, then as a private home and into the 20th century as a rented 400-acre farm.
Heritage activists have managed to repel various attempts to sell it off. In the 1960s, it was almost demolished to make way for a gas station. Just three years ago the inn was on a City of Toronto budget-paring chopping block. In November 2011 about 200 protestors, some in colonial period costume, linked arms to defend Montgomery’s Inn.
As Ken Purvis explains, the issue is not so much the inn’s inherent historical value as its location.
“We’re a busy little spot,” says the Montgomery Inn museum co-ordinator. “It’s just that we’d like to be even busier.”
Like many other heritage sites, the inn retains a strong presence in its community by partnering with a variety of Etobicoke arts organizations and as a popular rental venue and home to a seasonal farmers’ market. Animating the inn with a dance performance by a well-known professional troupe has the potential to attract attention from beyond the immediate community.
Stability in Transition, a free event in development since the early spring, is part of a City of Toronto Culture Division initiative called the Arts @ the Historic Sites. It aims to bring more art, theatre and dance into the city’s museums, especially those beyond the downtown core. Apart from this weekend’s Montgomery’s Inn event, the Toronto Arts Council-funded program brought Toronto’s Keystone Theatre to the Scarborough Museum last spring. There are also continuing events at the Don Valley’s Todmorden Mills — a play called Voices in the Valley presented by Words in Motion — and at Gibson House Museum in North York where visual artists respond to the site’s history in an exhibition called Memories of the Future. For the Kaejas, the Montgomery Inn event is a natural fit. Where dance is concerned, they were in the vanguard of “site specific” performance, going back to the late 1980s. They have become noted for their ingenuity in developing performances that engage audiences more directly. “This will be a much more interactive performance,” says Allen Kaeja as he explains the complex logistics of working in relatively tight spaces. Each audience of around 90 people will be divided into three groups that will in succession see each of three main choreographic presentations in different parts of the inn. Along the way, they will pass other continuing choreographic vignettes. The Kaejas have deliberately cast their choreographic net to embrace a wide variety of dance styles in a mix reflecting past, present and future. A notable example of the future, says Allen Kaeja, is choreographer Judi (JuLo) Lopez, founder of the Toronto BGirl Movement Keep Rockin’ You. “It’s a large-scale production with lots of moving parts,” says Kaeja. “Ev- erything has to co-ordinate exactly.”
Stability in Transition is at Montgomery’s Inn, 4709 Dundas St. W. at1 and 4 p.m. on Saturday and at 1 p.m. on Sunday. For information go to montgomerysinn.com.