Power of dance unites two countries

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This article was published 11/07/2019 (2512 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nine graduates from the Professional Program of the School of Contemporary Dancers (SCD) are taking their next step when they jet off to Mexico this weekend for the School’s second international exchange program.

And never mind tricky language barriers or the perils of culture clashes. For the emerging dance artists already share a lingua franca with their Hispanic hosts and audiences in the two cities they’ll be visiting July 13-21: blazing love and simpatico devotion to the art form.

“The Mexicans love contemporary dance because it’s so passionate, with art, theatre and music so deeply ingrained in their culture,” says Winnipeg-based choreographer and tour director Gaile Petursson-Hiley, who travels to León and Guanajuato, located in central Mexico, with the collective group of 2018 and 2019 graduates: Emma Dal Monte, Mark Dela Cruz, Neilla Hawley, Anna Protsiou, Kendra Coulter, Anastasia Evsigneeva, Courtney Maertens, Emily Solstice Tait and Jenna Voth.

The Professional Program of the SCD, co-founded in 1981 by Faye Thomson and Odette Heyn, embarked on its first exchange program in July 2017, in honour of the yearlong Canada 150 festivities marked coast to coast, and in collaboration with the Educafin program of the state government of Guanajuato that had sponsored 2017 graduate Ilse Torres Orozco’s four-year professional training at the School.

This year, the exchange program has expanded to also include the León Instituto Oviedo, which is sponsoring the creation of two new contemporary works choreographed by its director, renowned León interdisciplinary artist Roberto Mosqueda, in collaboration with Orozco. The world première of the Mexican artist’s duet performed by himself and Orozco, and a grand finale created for the nine Winnipeggers, will be featured on the mixed bill, which also showcases four diverse works gifted by renowned Canadian choreographers Heyn, Stephanie Ballard and Petursson-Hiley.

The tour includes three public performances, including shows at Mexico’s “most beautiful opera house,” Guanajuato’s architecturally stunning Teatro Juárez, as well as daily master classes, workshops, Ballard’s Landscape Dancing on-site performances, and various cultural activities, including language lessons adding to the symbiotic melting pot of culture and craft shared by both groups.

“This is a true cultural exchange, because the performances and workshops will feature not only our artists from Canada, but also theirs from Mexico,” says Thomson, who serves as the tour’s project director.

“It’s also an opportunity to share our Canadian values about embracing other cultures, welcoming them and having that sharing and value of diversity.”

Torres Orozco, who returned to Mexico last year to nurture her own professional dance career, has been a key player in establishing the program, with a second León native now training at the SCD. She describes her new duet with Mosqueda, known for his “sophisticated and elegant” choreography rooted in his theatrical background, in an email from León:

“It is a piece that speaks about migration, and especially those stories we have heard from the people we’ve met,” she writes of the haunting work set to an indigenous score including Canto Cardenche — referring to a particular kind of cactus — and La Muerte Chiquita, or “the little death.”

“People leave their homes and their families because they don’t see a future anymore. They risk their lives crossing borders and live in constant fear and a feeling of ‘not belonging,’ and missing their homeland if they arrive in another country,” she states poignantly. “We can’t forget that we are all immigrants, and our piece is about feeling homesick and living for those memories.”

But it’s also a bit more personal for the artist: “For me being able to somehow be a bridge to connect my two homes, León and Winnipeg, makes me feel happy and proud,” she adds. “I’m proud to be a graduate of the School of Contemporary Dancers, and I’m proud to be able to share internationally the work that is happening in my hometown,” the dancer says.

Typically, choreographers work up-close-and-personal with dancers in a studio for several weeks. This collaboration gets the creative juices flowing and allows for a mutual interaction of ideas. In this case, the two Mexican artists began their rehearsal process by assigning poetry and writing activities via Skype from León to the SCD dancers, developing phrases and ‘units’ of movement vocabulary to be knitted together into one final, organic and cohesive piece before the dancers can say adios — a process that Thomson says works and opens the door to brave new possibilities for creating on an international scale sans borders — which will be given legs in Mexico next week.

The SCD’s Professional Program, which now has 34 students, has been growing by leaps and bounds lately, now boasting students from all over the world, including throughout Canada, Brazil, the Republic of Colombia, Greece, Mexico, Russia, the United Kingdom and Venezuela. In addition, a full 21 per cent of the Professional Program students have self-declared as having Indigenous or Métis heritage.

“We think it’s wonderful and highly appropriate that our cultural diversity would be growing, as Canada’s population and diversity continues to grow,” Thomson says with palpable pride. “We feel it’s really something to celebrate and it’s fabulous to embark on this new international exchange program with Mexico because there’s so much to share.”

holly.harris@shaw.ca