MADE IN CANADA
Dance festival showcases new and emerging artists across the country,
For Vanessa Goodman’s 93-year-old grandmother, Thursday is going to be a very special night. When Goodman, a Vancouverbased dancer/choreographer, was growing up in Toronto, her arts-loving grandmother took her to her first live dance performance. It sowed an inspirational seed that eventually blossomed into a professional career.
Now Goodman, 34, will be performing her own work for the first time in Toronto and a very proud grandmother will be there to see it.
Goodman will dance the Toronto premiere of Container, an intense solo that explores the idea of the body, oppressed and liberated, as the container of identity and inherited cultural past.
Container is part of the opening program of the 2017 edition of Dance: Made in Canada/Fait au Canada, a biennial festival showcasing both established and emerging artists from across the country in a jampacked four-day schedule of performances, exhibitions, film screenings and “arts encounters.”
Festival artistic director Yvonne Ng describes it as “a holistic experience.”
Dance: Made in Canada combines two programming approaches. There’s an uncurated Fringe Festival-like component called “What You See Is What You Get,” with participating artists competing for spots by lottery.
Then there are three different hour-long mainstage programs. Each bears the name of the guest curator who shaped it. A call for proposals goes out far in advance. Ng and her curating colleagues — this year Danièle Desnoyers and Marc Parent — then sift through the applications to devise coherent programs.
“We focus on the distinctive voices of the artists rather than where they’re located,” Ng says. Even so, taken together, they cover a lot of geography — coast to coast — and esthetic territory.
“There’s a huge range of genres, forms and career levels,” Ng explains. Thursday’s first mainstage show underlines the point.
Apart from Vancouverite Goodman’s Container, Rhonda Baker of Halifax company Mocean Dance performs the Toronto premiere of Live from the Flash Pan, by actor, director, choreographer and Gemini Award-winner Cory Bowles of Trailer Park Boys fame. Bowles’ theatrically vivid choreography captures the angst of a disillusioned, on-the-brink bar singer.
Meanwhile, on the same bill, Montreal’s Ebnfloh Dance Company will perform artistic director Alexandra (Spicey) Landé’s Complexe R, a hiphop work for five street dancers that takes a high-energy but critical look at the complexities, limits and obsessions of everyday life.
Landé explains that the title references neuroscientist Paul MacLean’s concept of the “reptilian brain,” a part of the brain responsible for species-typical instinctual behaviours. Each of the five women in Complexe R is a character embodying a particular obsession.
“I’ve always been interested in psychology,” Landé says. “My work has tended to delve into the troubles of the mind.”
In this case, her focus is potentially self-destructive obsessions such as money, fashion, the quest for perceived physical perfection and the corrosive influence of social media.
The festival’s mainstage shows are all triple bills. This provides the chance to showcase more artists, but it also restricts the length of individual works. As a result some, such as Complexe R, are shorter versions of longer works. Ng knows this is not ideal, but her focus is on presenting a wide range of artistic voices.
Ng, who left her homeland of Singapore to settle in Canada in the late 1980s, launched a modest version of the festival, essentially a presentation series, 16 years ago in a studio at Ossington Ave. and Dupont St.
It slowly evolved and expanded, making the National Ballet School of Canada’s Betty Oliphant Theatre its regular venue in April 2009. It officially relaunched as a biennial, latesummer festival two years later and introduced guest curators for the mainstage programs. One of these, curated by Ng, is named in honour of the late David Morrison, the lighting designer and technical supervisor who, before his death in 2007, had urged her to take this ambitious step.
Ng would like to make the festival bigger still — more days and more artists — but that goal has been frustrated by funding constraints. With a mandate to represent a broad range of contemporary Canadian dance, and a commitment to underwrite the costs of travel and accommodation for visiting artists, budgeting the festival has been balancing act.
From the vantage point of artists from both coasts and points in between, it is a rare opportunity to show their work in Canada’s biggest city and not, as often happens, to be out of pocket in the process. “It’s incredible to be fully presented like this,” Goodman says. “The festival treats artists with so much support and respect. I feel very privileged.” Dance: Made in Canada happens Thursday to Aug. 20 at the Betty Oliphant Theatre, 404 Jarvis St. See princessproductions.ca or call 416-533-8577 for full schedule and ticket information.