Katie Cassady
Taking an empathetic approach to dancemaking
LIKE OTHER RESIDENCY PROGRAMS, MADE IN BC’S
Re-Centering/Margins Creative Residency supports dance artists through vital development opportunities. It provides a stipend, free rehearsal space, a mentor of the artist’s choosing and professional development workshops and culminates in a spring 2021 showcase. But as its title suggests, the residency has another purposeful mandate: to specifically support and elevate emerging BIPOC dance artists. Three participants are selected annually, and this past June, Katie Cassady learned she was one of them.
Cassady applied to the residency with a relatively defined idea, intending to create a contemporary dance duet that explores relationships and intimacy. “I want to reflect complex relationships between women that reject being distinctly categorizable, showing a close female bond, which falls somewhere between friendly, familial and romantic, with elements of rivalry and envy,” she explains. “I am looking to reflect the diverse ways women connect and support each other, and how power dynamics exist and shift continually in the context of intimacy.” Her choreographic approach is informed by her own work as a dancer, including with the butoh-influenced company Kokoro Dance. Speaking of Kokoro’s founders, Cassady admires “how ardently they believe in dance and the power of dance as a physical/metaphysical form and as a practice of life.”
As much as the outcome, Cassady is anticipating the residency process. “What I’m most interested in getting out of this residency is understanding what the culture my collaborators and I want to cultivate in the studio is,” she says, “and how we can collectively create and uphold that.” Her collaborators include a cohort of emerging BIPOC artists, a mentor and an emerging writer of colour, who will respond to the creative process with a reflective essay.
Building on previous collaborative experiences, she hopes to establish an environment that conscientiously accommodates flexibility, security and joy and responds to and incorporates each contributor, a communal coming-to-creation. “As each person … brings a unique approach and perspective to art and life, I think it’s essential to work collaboratively to find our way in the piece together,” she says. In selecting artists for the residency, the committee praised Cassady’s “empathetic approach to dancemaking.”
This inclusive approach is appropriate given the residency’s fundamental emphasis on diverse identities and voices – a focus particularly relevant to dance for Cassady. “Because dance is an embodied form … the understandings I have about my body and identity are intertwined with how I understand and interpret movement,” she says. In a noteworthy update to this year’s program, all residency applicants, including artists not ultimately selected, will receive some form of development support. It’s a decision that, along with the residency’s mandate, foregrounds equity in artmaking and speaks to Made in BC’s important place in the dance community – a shared space created, enriched and sustained through the artists like Cassady who contribute to it.