“PICTURE PERFECT” Public and Private finds a feminist camaraderie
DJanet Smith
ance artist Ziyian Kwan, like uncountable others, was inspired by the ripple effects of the #Metoo movement—by women across the continent raising their voices, pushing back, and speaking out like never before.
All that material made her start to wonder what kind of feminist she was. And it prompted her to start exploring her ideas in a studio— not alone, as the artistic director of dumb instrument Dance does in solo work like her the neck to fall, but with other female-bodied performers.
“Who am I in this beautiful movement and how are we encouraged?” she asks, sitting in a café around the corner from the Left of Main studio where her work Public and Private soon debuts. “The solution to me is to be in a room together with people and talking about it.”
She gathered dancers Deanna Peters, Delia Brett, Erika Mitsuhashi, and Hayley Gawthrop. And she has set them all in a room at the tiny Left of Main studio with the thundering sounds of Eileen Kage’s taiko drums, under the watchful eye of dramaturge Heidi Taylor. The tight bond the group has formed is obvious.
The day the Straight is there, the artists open rehearsal with their own ritual: sitting in a circle, they take turns saying what they’ve brought to give and what they hope to take away from the day. Sometimes the answers are as simple as “inspiration” and “garlic breath”; the point is, they’re sharing private things—and that flows naturally into Kwan’s collaborative creative process, in which everyone reveals a little of herself in the public realm.
Once rehearsal begins, the artists speak and holler, rearrange each other’s limbs, embrace and intertwine, holding hands. In developing the
David Cooper photo
eclectic piece, Kwan has had to work through their different perceptions of what it means to be a feminist today, what it means to move for the female gaze instead of the male gaze.
For Kwan, it’s also meant digging at her own private history.
“With Left of Main being in Chinatown, I can’t escape the fact that my feminism relates to being Chinesecanadian,” says Kwan. “My feminism was rooted in my mother, who raised two children pretty much on her own while getting an English degree, while also working as a secretary. So my life is rooted in feminism.”
In Public and Private, the dancers invite the viewers into that room with them. The space allows for just about 25 people to sit in chairs along the wall. “It was an intimate piece and I wanted an intimate space,” Kwan says of her first self-produced work. “It’s about intimacy and it’s about camaraderie.”
Like a number of other local classical-music events this weekend (see story, page 19), the Vancouver Cantata Singers’ Threnody: Requiem and Remembrance is intended to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, and to provide a more general opportunity to mourn those we’ve lost in that and other conflicts. But there’s also a pointed message in this sombre and beautiful program, thanks to Kristi Lane Sinclair’s song “Woman”, which reminds us of a slaughter that’s happening right here at home: the undeclared but ongoing war against Indigenous women. Hundreds, if not thousands, of mostly young women are among the missing or murdered— and, more often than not, finding their killers has been a low priority for police forces across Canada and elsewhere.
Not surprisingly, these sad facts were on Sinclair’s mind when she sat down to work on material for her second LP, Dark Matter, which was released in 2015. “This was after a lot of things had started to come out in the media,” the Haida singer-songwriter explains, in a telephone conversation from her Toronto home. “This was after Tina Fontaine—stuff that just really breaks your heart and tears you apart. And then [actor] Misty Upham was missing in Washington state, and nobody would look for her there. Her family found her, because they’re the only ones who were going to look. So I remember being literally floored—i was on my knees, crying, because I was just so angry and so fucking upset…and then I literally stood up. I had an electric guitar beside me, and I just started playing and the song was written in the length of the song.
“I knew it was special,” Sinclair continues. “I knew exactly what it was about; and I knew that it probably wasn’t really my voice. And I knew to just trust that, and let the song become whatever it wanted to be.”
Three years later, the song is now becoming something else, with help from Cantata Singers artistic director Paula Kremer and composer Peter Hannan—who, as it turns out, both had some prior history with its creator. “Paula was my solfège [sight-reading] teacher, and Peter ended up being my composition teacher-slash-mentor,” says Sinclair, who studied music for three years at VCC. “I was going to work with him on writing for strings, and then he said he was in conversation with Paula, and that the choir wanted to try something a little bit different. And he said, ‘I think you should do this, and I’ll help you.’
“I hadn’t written notes on a page for, like, years,” she adds, laughing. “But layering voices like that gave it a power it didn’t have in the original version, with just me singing it. Hearing 30 people sing it is way cooler.”
Sinclair thinks it’s especially cool that a broader audience will now get a chance to hear “Woman”, in a context that will only reinforce its message.
“In the end, the piece is about being inclusive,” she says. “It can’t just be Indigenous people who care, and it can’t just be Indigenous people who take action. In the press, a lot of these women are dehumanized for various reasons—and that’s completely unfair, because they’re very loved and very beautiful, and an important part of our culture and this country. So everybody needs to stand up and protect them.”