Indo-Canadian singer/dancer/choreographer Bageshree Vaze wasn’t available to perform at the inaugural edition of the CanAsian International Dance Festival in 2001 so she’s delighted to finally be taking part in next week’s 10th anniversary line-up at Habourfront Centre’s Fleck Dance Theatre. For Vaze, CanAsian offers the opportunity to reach a new audience, to step outside the Indian community to which she frequently performs at South Asian festivals like the annual Masala, Mehndi, Masti.
“You get the same audiences at Indian events,” observes Vaze. “Festivals like this provide a great chance to bring different groups together so they can see a variety of styles that they wouldn’t normally see.”
Although she revels in performing contemporary interpretations of traditional Kathak dance from Northern India (see a video clip here), Vaze is also happy to toe a more traditional line as she’ll do at CanAsian.
“The waters get muddy when you start trying to separate traditional from contemporary,” she notes. “Kathak dance evolved from the Persians coming into India and the sarangi (a stringed instrument) probably came from Persia, too. Similarly tabla drums are a fusion of Persian drums and Indian drums so there’s really no purely traditional form, everything is an amalgamation.”
“All of the material I’m performing is traditional music that’s been adapted for dance,” adds Vaze, “so there’s a contemporary aspect to it.”
To that end, the performer recently released Tarana, a collection of songs adapted specifically for Indian classical dance.
“I created the recording with the idea that it be something dancers anywhere could use to practice or perform. It’s been used by dancers all over the world, including in India. There’s a girl in Brazil who’s used it and it’s on YouTube. I think it’s really great that it’s being used for what I wanted it to be used for.”
In her “contemporary” work Vaze utilizes the traditional dance vocabulary,”it’s more about how it’s presented. There’s a certain set of movements that we all draw from so with my contemporary work I’m trying to open that up a bit.”
Looking beyond CanAsian International, Vaze performs as part of the Contemporary Choreography in Indian Dance festival and symposium at the Fleck March 16 – 19 and she premiers a new work called Avatar (9) May 27 and 28 as part of Harbourfront’s NextSteps program.
“As an Indo-Canadian it doesn’t make sense to just do stuff that is from India and traditional,” concludes the dancer. “I think it’s very important to learn but as somebody who’s grown up here, I’m naturally influenced by so many cultures, especially living in Toronto where we have the world at our doorstep. And I’ve been very lucky to collaborate with artists from different backgrounds. I started with ballet, I took jazz classes – dance is one of those things that no matter where you’re from you can appreciate all styles.”
WHERE/WHEN: CanAsian International Dance Festival, February 23 – 26 at Fleck Dance Theatre (416.973.4000); Bageshree Vaze performs Thursday, February 24 and Saturday, February 26 at 8 pm. Tickets are $25 – $30.
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I saw the opening program last night (Vaze was not dancing in that portion) and the show was AMAZING. Each act was utterly different but mesmerizing in its own wonderful ways. Highly recommended.