Introduction

Photo Credits Carla Maruca, Le Cri du monde, Compagnie Marie Chouinard; Photo: Marie Chouinard

From ballet to breakdance, from Bharatanatyam to butoh, from capoeira to contact improvisation, professional dance in Canada is characterized by the same cultural richness and variety as Canada itself. In fact, the story of the development of dance in Canada mirrors to a remarkable degree the story of Canada’s emergence as a modern nation.

Founded on two dominant settler communities (French and English), deeply influenced by European and American cultures, enriched by the traditions of its Aboriginal peoples as well as by those of the generations of immigrants who followed from all parts of the globe, Canada has built a largely harmonious and well-functioning pluralistic society on the basis of openness, cooperation and mutual goodwill. It has managed this despite the often daunting challenges of its geography (most of its 31.5 million citizens live within 100 miles of the world’s longest undefended border) and its politics (tensions between the two official language groups, and between aboriginal peoples and the immigrant cultures, have sometimes been acute, and the federal and regional governments coexist in an uneasy conjunction). In the still-ongoing process of wrestling a functioning country from the raw materials of location and immigration, Canadians have learned the importance of understanding, compromise and recognition of "the other", and it is on this respect for difference that much of Canada’s international reputation as a moderator of peace and collaboration is based.

It is also on this recognition of the validity of alternate cultural expression that much of the strength of the Canadian dance community rests, though the pluralistic nature of dance in Canada today is only the most visible reflection of this remarkable experiment in nation-building. In fact, it is possible to chart Canada’s history with considerable accuracy in the story of the evolution of Canadian dance. In the beginning, much of what was seen and performed was imported. As early as the 18^th century, the French and British settlers transplanted to Canada both the formal masques and the more informal social dances with which they were familiar, and traces of those social dances can still be seen today, particularly in the reels and jigs of Eastern Canada. In a similar way early professional performance was imported, in the form of touring soloists and companies, both from Europe and from the United States.

A rich Aboriginal dance tradition was in place long before the arrival of the settlers – a tradition of performance, lavishly interwoven with music, masks and costume, whose ritual and sacred significance rooted it far more deeply within its community than the imported theatre-dance. However, Aboriginal artistic expression was steadily eradicated by successive administrations intent on wiping out the culture of the First Nations in Canada and substituting enforced Westernization through the residential school system, and over a series of generations many traditions were lost and artifacts destroyed or dispersed.

This regard for the cultural superiority of the colonizing cultures and the U.S. endured until well into the first half of the 20^th century. Despite the fact that Canada’s teachers (primarily immigrants) were by the 1940s regularly producing dancers who could find employment with the world’s leading companies, all three of the country’s principal ballet troupes (the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, whose origins in 1939 make it the second-oldest ballet company in North America, The National Ballet of Canada, launched in Toronto in 1951, and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, founded in 1957) were built on the talents of immigrant women, all from Europe and all bringing visions and versions of the European classical tradition.

The distancing effect of Canada’s geography meant that for many years those who laboured to establish a hospitable soil in which Canadian dance could flower were only vaguely aware of what might be happening in other parts of the country (even today the costs of travel and touring make it difficult for artists and audiences to stay abreast of developments in the country’s principal creative hotbeds - Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver in particular).

However, in 1948 the fledgling Winnipeg ballet company hosted the first Canadian ballet festival, showcasing, alongside its own work, performances by a ballet troupe from Toronto, founded in the 1930s by the Russian émigré Boris Volkoff, and a Montreal modernist troupe headed by a Polish-German immigrant, Ruth Sorel. The ballet festival movement lasted into the mid-1950s, with more companies participating each year, and did much both to unite the Canadian dance community and to popularize dance made in Canada. More recently, two major events that occur in alternate years (the Canada Dance Festival, which brings a broad cross-section of dance to Ottawa, the nation’s capital, and Montreal’s Festival international de nouvelle danse) have helped unite the far-flung dance community and foster a broader public understanding of its richness and diversity. However, no native-born Canadian was entrusted with the artistic leadership of a Canadian ballet company until the end of the 1950s (the individual was Arnold Spohr, a minister’s son who went on to lead the Winnipeg company to its greatest artistic and international triumphs), and Canadian dance did not really begin to shake itself free of the colonialist yoke until the late 1960s, when all Canadian society experienced a fresh infusion of confidence and self-regard under the liberating influence of the political and social tendencies of the era.

In francophone Quebec, the evolution of modern dance mirrored society in a particularly interesting way. Dominated by a repressive church and a reactionary government, Quebec society was denied much outside influence until the second half of the 20^th century. However, the province’s close connection with France did allow contact with artistic currents in Europe, and in the late 1940s a rebellious group of artists under the influence of French surrealist leader André Breton published a strident manifesto, Refus Global, calling for the emancipation of art in Quebec society and a relaxation of the iron grip of church and state. Refus Global, whose signatories included Françoise Sullivan, one of three modern dance pioneers (the others being Jeanne Renaud and Martine Époque), was ahead of its time, but it helped establish a climate of unrest that led to the so-called Quiet Revolution of the early 1960s, during which a more forward-thinking government took power, enthusiastically reinforced by the province’s artists, and the emergence of Quebec into the modern world began.

For the province’s dance community, the new freedom was an intoxication. Able to express themselves on formerly forbidden subjects, for the most part unrestrained by tradition or technique (occasional pockets of training in European modernism had begun to appear in the 1940s, but no sustained formal training in modern techniques had been available for decades), they began to forge their own vigorously expressive, even audacious choreographic lexicon. It might be said, indeed, that the romantic vitality and graphic immediacy of the Quebec dance modernism of the 1970s and 1980s, seen in very different forms in the early work of, for example, Jean-Pierre Perreault, Marie Chouinard, Édouard Lock, Paul-André Fortier and Ginette Laurin, was a direct response to the spirit of change and innovation affecting all Québécois society. Montreal has remained a crucible of new choreographic thinking, with an influence that spills far beyond the country’s borders.

In other regions of Canada, the development of dance reflects different social perspectives and other Canadian stories. Touring foreign stars continued to dominate the stages in the early part of the 20^th century, and the early professional modernist troupes in English Canada (launched in the late 1960s and 1970s in Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver) were strongly influenced by such European and American modernist ground-breakers as Mary Wigman and Martha Graham. It was not until Canadian universities and a series of national choreographic seminars produced the first generation of home-grown modernist professionals in the 1970s that choreography and performance began to acquire a distinctive Canadian accent. Today, the cream of that generation, and of the generation that followed, has taken the mantle of leadership, with Canada-trained creator-directors at the helm of almost all of Canada’s principal dance companies. Canadian dance has also nurtured a number of internationally renowned solo artists, prominent among them Margie Gillis, Peggy Baker, Marie Chouinard and more recently Tedd Senmon Robinson, Sarah Chase, Peter Chin and Alvin Erasga Tolentino - a phenomenon initially fostered both by the post-60s social freedoms and the economic challenges facing anyone attempting to make a career in professional dance in such a vast land.

What is fascinating is to see how the openness of this new generation to influences and ideas beyond their immediate experience is leading to a new range and synthesis of styles. Old notions of the mutual exclusivity of "classicism" and "modernism" have long been abandoned. Today, Canada’s ballet companies, like many of their international counterparts, enthusiastically embrace both the formalities of ballet’s high Romanticism and the audacities of envelope-pushing modernism, and the modernists play enthusiastically in the "classical" pool.

However, an even more important factor in the development of the modern face of dance in Canada has been the cultural fusion and shared influence fostered and encouraged by the country’s changing demographics – again, a direct connection between the art of dance and the influences that are shaping modern Canada. Canada’s doors are wide open to the world - it is regarded as one of the most welcoming countries on the planet - and in the 1990s and the early part of the new century immigration has had a transformative effect on
professional dance, particularly in the country’s two most culturally diverse centres, Toronto and Vancouver.

The dance traditions of Asia and the Pacific Rim, Africa, the Caribbean, the Arabic countries and Eastern Europe are all represented in the glorious pluralism that is Canadian dance today, and an exuberant cross-fertilization
of influences and traditions is also producing new hybrids of performance and presentation that emphasize the easy and fruitful interaction among cultures that characterizes modern urban Canada.

At the same time, in Canada as elsewhere, the once-impregnable borders between arts disciplines have become increasingly porous, and art and technology cross-breed in an energetic exploration of common concerns. Many of the Canadian companies and individuals who command attention nationally and internationally (Vancouver’s battery opera, for example) draw far more strongly on these cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary influences and imaginative exchanges than they do on the rootstock of early modern dance in Canada.

Meanwhile, Aboriginal dance has begun to reestablish its importance in the dance continuum. The ban on Aboriginal cultural expression, while devastating in its impact, was never entirely successful. It was finally lifted in the mid-20^th century, when the federal government began to replace its policies of assimilation with policies of cultural and economic self-determination. Since that time Aboriginal communities across Canada have strongly reaffirmed the importance of dance and other arts to their culture, both for traditional secular and religious use and in terms of contemporary cultural expression. Several formal performance collectives have emerged, successfully integrating traditional concerns and expressive languages with influences and ideas from the wider indigenous dance world and western influences, such as Coyote Arts Percussive Performance Association (Byron Chiefmoon), Lelala Dancers (George Taylor), Full Circle (Margo Kane), Mi’kmaq Dancers (Joel Denny) and Red Sky Performance (Sandra Laronde). In addition, a number of non-Aboriginal choreographers, particularly on the West Coast, are exploring the interaction of non-indigenous forms with traditional Aboriginal dance.

Enlightened government support has been crucial in this story, as it has in the development of every area of modern Canadian society. It has long been recognized that indigenous Canadian creativity, be it in industry, business, the sciences or the arts, is at a significant disadvantage when forced to compete for resources and market share in the international arena, and a complex network of government programs sustains and encourages Canadian innovation. On the cultural front, the Canada Council for the Arts, founded in 1957 to foster development and appreciation of the arts at arm’s length from government, has provided consistent support for professional artistic activity, and has been responsible in large part for the flourishing of the dance milieu.

Against all apparent odds (the unlikelihood that dance could thrive in a pioneer society, the threat of cultural colonialism from the U.S. and Europe, the brute challenge of the nation’s geography), the story of dance in Canada has been an integral and important element of the ongoing definition of the Canadian cultural landscape, affirming the ability of this evanescent, wordless art of the moving body not only to entertain and to inspire but also to humanize the political and to give visible form to notions of identity, belonging and social aspiration.

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