Mentorship is deeply ingrained in Asian dance traditions and it’s at the heart of this year’s CanAsian Dance Festival (February 9 – 11), opening tomorrow night at the Winchester Street Theatre. Titled Kick Start: 6 Choreographers Pushing Boundaries, this year’s festival pairs six emerging or mid-career choreographers with well-established mentors, each taking on the role of dramaturge.
It makes sense that festival founder and Artistic Director Denise Fujiwara, left, should be interested in mentorship since her own career and dance practice were transformed by her mentors Elizabeth Langley (Concordia University) and especially Natsu Nakajima.
“The experience of working with these senior, brilliant mentors really changed the quality of my work and my life,” confirms Fujiwara. “And I thought that these young people could similarly benefit.”
This year’s CanAsian program features work from Emily Cheung (Toronto), Susan Lee (Toronto), Hiroshi Miyamoto (Toronto), Tomomi Morimoto (Montreal), Meena Murugesan (Montreal) and William Yong (Toronto) working with mentors Peter Chin (Toronto), Langley (Montreal), Guillaume Bernardi (Toronto), Janet O’Shea (Los Angeles) and Tedd Robinson (Ottawa). (Langley is working individually with both Lee and Miyamoto.)
Each of the works is a premier so it’s too early to say what we can expect to see on stage this weekend but Fujiwara says she and her fellow CanAsian Directors asked the participants to “challenge themselves and to use the experience of having a dramaturge to provoke them in new ways and perhaps give them a fresh perspective on their own work.”
Fujiwara was born in Toronto to Japanese-Canadian parents. She studied dance and gymnastics in Scarborough throughout her childhood and went on to study dance at York University. In her 20s she saw a performance by Japanese butoh artist Natsu Nakajima that changed her life. “I realized that she was going to be my teacher,” recalls Fujiwara. “I felt strongly that she had something I wanted to learn. The work was sophisticated and meaningful, life-affirming and female. So I sought her out and she said, ‘No’. It took nine years before I got to work with her so by that time I was in my late 30s.”
Denise Fujiwara in a solo butoh performance
Butoh became Fujiwara’s “obsession. The work is profound,” she says. “Natsu gave me a piece 14 years ago and it took me a long time to learn how to do it well but in every rehearsal for all those years I learned something new about dance because that work has so much depth in it.”
“I had danced in a Western paradigm from the beginning,” she continues, “but the principles of butoh are so different from the principles of ballet and modern dance that all of my training, all those decades of training were suddenly of no use to me. When I started butoh I really had to start at square one and learn about dance and art like a beginner. It was terrifying but also so refreshing. And now I see that I have these two foundations of dance to draw from.”
The CanAsian Dance Festival draws on sensibilities and traditions that span the entire continent from Turkey and India to Japan and Korea. “The festival originally grew out of Asian Heritage Month,” explains Fujiwara. “The criteria for that festival was that you had to be of Asian heritage. When we founded the CanAsian Dance Festival we looked at that criteria and felt it was exclusionary. For us it’s not about race, it’s about the art. If the work encompasses some form of Asian culture, aesthetic, philosophy or dance practice, then we are open to it.”
WHERE/WHEN: CanAsian Dance Festival at the Winchester Dance Theatre (80 Winchester Street, 416.504.7529) February 9 – 12 at 8 pm; tickets $18 – $22.
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