DANCE COLLECTION DANSE

DANCE COLLECTION DANSE
Number 75 DANCE THAT LASTS
Fall 2015
New in the Archives: Barbara Cook
Elizabeth Langley:
Embracing Transformation
Moving, in Tandem:
25 Years of Kaeja d’Dance
Finding Mrs. Colville:
WWI Patriotic Performances
in St. John’s
Stephanie Ballard:
An Indelible Mark
Gadfly: The Evolution
of Form

Dance Collection Danse Magazine
Number 75, Fall 2015
New in the Archives: Barbara Cook
by Amy Bowring ........................................................ 4
Elizabeth Langley: Embracing Transformation
by Philip Szporer ........................................................ 8
Moving, in Tandem: 25 Years of Kaeja d’Dance
by Samantha Mehra ................................................. 16
Finding Mrs. Colville: WWI Patriotic Performancces
in St. John’s
by Amy Bowring ...................................................... 24
Stephanie Ballard: An Indelible Mark
by Cindy Brett ........................................................... 31
Gadfly: The Evolution of Form
by Soraya Peerbaye .................................................. 39
Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann
Opening
Remarks
BY MIRIAM ADAMS, C.M.
Last year a dancer visited our offices and came across a book
about a mentor of his; I said that DCD had published it and he
said, “What does that mean?”
DCD has published 39 books. Thirty-Nine. I make this
fact known each time I have the opportunity to speak
publicly about DCD’s achievements. Few outside of
those intimately involved in publishing are aware
of the duration, the intricacies and yes, the anxiety,
of this process. We started in the 1990s by printing
books in our home office and assembling them using
a toaster oven, harvested from the Goodwill, that
Lawrence Adams had fashioned into a book binder.
When we graduated from the toaster oven to a professional
printing company, we ran between 500 and
2000 copies per title, depending on the book’s “imagined”
market; three titles were reprinted several times.
Books sold consistently to universities, professional
schools, bookstores, library services and individuals.
We published memoirs and manuals, biographies,
anthologies and cultural histories, dictionaries and
a bilingual encyclopedia. We worked with emerging
writers, established authors, and those in-between; we
eagerly tracked down the images of dance photographers.
For the Dictionary of Dance (1996) we commissioned
20 contributors who provided “words, terms
and phrases” representing diverse dance genres. For
the Encyclopedia of Theatre Dance in Canada/Encyclopédie
de la danse théâtrale au Canada (2000) we commissioned
43 writers to craft the entries and we worked with an
editor, translator, research co-ordinator/copy editor,
French- and English-language readers. Over the years,
we spent intense hours, days and weeks in conversation
with authors; and in some cases the book’s subject;
and then in further lengthy discussion with designers,
editors, translators and printers. Given that the average
length of time it took to grant a book its life was 3.5 years
(one of them took 8) the writers clearly “did it for love”.
A handful of them received a grant to bulk up DCD’s
modest fee; and with the foresight of prophets, the Dance
and the Writing & Publishing programs at the Canada
Council assisted with several of these books … 9 of the
authors and 7 of the subjects have since passed on.
Working with writers was an inspiring and challenging
exercise. There were only a few tiffs over grammar,
punctuation, language. And in dealing with biographies,
the occasional hefty discourse about the moral responsibility
of whether or not to “exclude” certain facts.
In our March 2008 fiscal year, DCD earned over
$45,000 in book sales – slowing down dramatically
beginning with the financial crisis of that year. Our last
book, Renegade Bodies, was published in 2012. So publishing
has ceased (for a while) as we have evolved into
other equally engaging activities to spread the word
and share the stories about Canada’s dance history.
Who wants to buy a dance book? We have lots.
dcd.ca/shop/
The Magazine is published by Dance Collection Danse
and is freely distributed.
ISSN 0 849-0708
301–149 Church Street, Toronto, ON M5B 1Y4
Tel. 416-365-3233 Fax 416-365-3169
E-mail talk@dcd.ca Web site www.dcd.ca
Charitable Registration No. 86553 1727 RR0001
Cover: Walter Foster and Barbara Cook, 1952
Photo: Marcel Ray Photographers
Design/Layout: Michael Caplan michael@michaelcaplan.ca
No. 75, Fall 2015 3

New
in the
Archives
Barbara
Cook
Photo: Travis Allison
BY AMY BOWRING
We recently acquired a small collection
from long-time DCD friend
and supporter Barbara Cook. I first
heard Barb’s name in my early days
at DCD doing research on London,
Ontario’s dance history. In my
interview with London-based ballet
teacher Bernice Harper, she talked
about her 1960s trips to Sudbury to
teach during the summer sessions
at Cook’s Sudbury School of Ballet.
Barbara Cook in Don Gilles’s I Want, I Want
Photo: E.E. Amsden
Members of the Winnipeg Ballet and the
Volkoff Canadian Ballet, May 31, 1948
Born in Hamilton on March 28,
1930, Barbara Cook began her dance
training with Nancy Campbell in
1933. A move to Toronto at six years
old brought Cook to Boris Volkoff’s
studio where she studied with him
and his wife, Janet Baldwin. Cook’s
theatrical training was further
enhanced by a decade with Dorothy
Goulding’s Toronto Children Players.
By 1946 she was performing with
the Volkoff Canadian Ballet. With
Volkoff, she participated in the
his toric first Canadian Ballet Festival
in Winnipeg in 1948; in the 1949
“Salute to Canada” pageant in Mid -
land, Ontario, commemorating the
300th anniversary of the martyrdom
of a group of Jesuit priests; and in the
Canadian Festival of Ballet in New
York City in 1950, which also featured
Ruth Sorel’s group from
Montreal. Cook danced with the
Janet Baldwin Ballet in the 1950s and
par ticipated in all six Canadian
Ballet Festivals. She was part of a
pioneering generation of Canadian
dancers whose efforts ultimately led
to the professionalization of ballet in
this country.
4 Dance Collection Danse

Her introduction to the Royal
Academy of Dancing (RAD) method
came through Janet Baldwin and
Gweneth Lloyd, the indefatigable
Don Gillies
Photo: E.E. Amsden
co-founder of the Royal Winnipeg
Ballet who opened a branch of
her Canandian School of Ballet in
Toronto in the early 1950s. Cook
ultimately became an RAD teacher
and examiner. She taught for Baldwin’s
school from 1951 to 1957 and
was then brought to Sudbury by the
Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’
Union to teach in a dance program
the union had initiated for its members.
She replaced modern dance
teacher Nancy Lima Dent – a colleague
from the Ballet Festival years.
Following her work at the union’s
school, Cook opened her own ballet
school. Like many rural teachers in
this period, Cook travelled to reach
students in nearby communities
such as Garson, Copper Cliff, Elliot
Lake, Espanola and Kapuskasing.
She mounted recitals and directed
an amateur concert group that gave
performances in retirement homes,
schools for mentally challenged
students, and other community
organizations.
Her years with Volkoff fostered
important friendships with dancers
Don Gillies and Ruth Carse. She
Members of the Volkoff Canadian Ballet in Boris Volkoff’s “Polovtsian Dances” from Prince Igor at the First Canadian Ballet Festival,
Winnipeg, 1948
Photo: Arthur Kushner
No. 75, Fall 2015 5

Janet Baldwin Volkoff, Gweneth Lloyd and Boris Volkoff at the First Canadian Ballet Festival,
Winnipeg, 1948
performed in Gillies’s choreography
for the Janet Baldwin Ballet and later
brought him to set work on her own
group in Sudbury. Her connection
with Carse led to teaching opportunities
in Edmonton with Carse’s
newly formed Alberta Ballet. Cook
was also an important team member
in the initiative to start a dance
program at Grant MacEwan College.
Margaret Hample, Arnold Spohr and
James Pape, May 31, 1948
Cook made a career change in
the 1980s when she began studies in
theology ultimately being ordained
as a United Church Minister in
1984. During her
years of ministry,
she also
choreographed
liturgical dances.
Her church
work brought
her to Manitoba
and eventually
retirement in
Winnipeg where
she assisted her
dance colleagues
in the archives at
the Royal Winnipeg
Ballet.
Cook’s collection
fills several
gaps in the story
of Canada’s
burgeoning
professional
ballet scene of
Barbara Cook
Photo: Marcel Ray Photographers
the mid-twentieth century giving
us more details about Boris Volkoff,
Janet Baldwin and Don Gillies.
Lillian Lewis, May 31, 1948
It also provokes more questions
about the activities and connections
between members of this generation.
For example, a series of snapshots
depicts members of the Winnipeg
and Volkoff companies picnicking
by the Port Credit River in Mississauga
roughly a month after the
First Canadian Ballet Festival.
There are also rare items in the
collection including Cook’s costume
from Gillies’s acclaimed work
I Want! I Want! for the Janet Baldwin
Ballet, and photographer Arthur
Kushner’s photos
taken from the
balcony of the
Walker Theatre
during the first
Canadian Ballet
Festival. I spoke
to Kushner about
his photos almost
twenty years ago
and he told me he
had given them
all away, mostly
to Gweneth
Lloyd. Lloyd’s
photos from
this period were
sadly lost in the
1954 fire that also
destroyed her
company’s documents,
musical
scores, costumes
and sets. DCD now has some copies
of these treasures from the past.
6 Dance Collection Danse

Elizabeth
Langley
Embracing
Transformation
BY PHILIP SZPORER
Elizabeth Langley is someone of limitless
growth. Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1933,
she has been in Canada for fifty years – first
teaching and directing performances, then
founding the dance program at Concordia
University. Not one to remain idle, she leads
a rich life in post-retirement, performing as
well as directing, providing dramaturgy and
the coaching of dancers and choreographers.
8 Dance Collection Danse

Call it the importance of being Elizabeth Langley.
The octogenarian dancer-choreographer
and educator has been variously described
as a mentor, a teacher, an innovator … and an original,
outspoken woman who can be brutally honest.
Dancer-choreographer Denise Fujiwara worked with
Langley for twenty years. She says she was exposed to,
and benefitted from, the full force of Langley’s “many
qualities that make her intimidating to work with: an
incisive eye, a critical intelligence, an inability to lie about
the work, a sophisticated aesthetic sense and an impatience,
which means she does not suffer fools gladly.”
Langley’s vision and discipline continues to influence
Zelma Badu-Younge, professor of dance at Ohio University
and a Concordia dance graduate. She’s deferential to
her mentor’s “beauty, grace, power, strength, brilliance
and a wealth of knowledge and intelligence. Such an
engaging and creative spirit here on earth guiding, teaching
and inspiring us all with honesty and pure heart.”
Asked why she chose dance, Langley replies, “I don’t
think I was supposed to be a dancer. But I’ve had a really
good life, so I don’t feel badly about it. I think I was meant
to be an actress.” Her sister, ten years older, had already
“confiscated that performance mode.” Langley’s upbringing,
like many Australian children, was very physical.
“I had played every sport since I could stand on my two
feet. And I used to do my ‘thing’. I didn’t even know a
word to describe it at that point.” She’d dance and “interpret
the music,” says Langley. “Then one of my brother’s
girlfriends said to me, ‘Oh, I go to a studio where they
do that.’ Now, the idea of people coming together to do
my ‘thing’ was really exciting. So my mother took me
to the [dance] studio.” The next week … she began.
In 1951 Langley took a teacher’s course in creative
dance. Two years later she was offered a job teaching
adult and children’s dance classes. For seven
years, she packed thirty-five to forty classes per week
into her gruelling schedule, plus personal training,
choreography and performing. “It was total absorption.
I’d lie in bed at night bone-tired.” But she says,
“If you can turn your passion into your profession,
you’ll be one of the happiest people in the world.”
She was married briefly, for one year, in 1958. “It was
one of the things you did,” she says. 1960 was a turning
point. Harry Belafonte’s company was touring Australia,
and some of his musicians came to a friend’s party.
She jokes that she was wearing a “horrible green and
Top left: Elizabeth Langley teaching in Melbourne, Australia,
late 1950s
Bottom left: Elizabeth Langley, 1964
Photo: Guenter Karkutt
Top right: Elizabeth Langley rehearsing Angst, directed by
Denis Faulkner for CBC television, 1974
blue tartan ensemble.” Regardless, she met Belafonte’s
accompanist Ernesto Calabria, and for the length of
the tour they were “inseparable”. It was decided that
Langley should join him in New York and become his
common-law wife. Belafonte sponsored her student
visa to attend the Martha Graham School. A letter dated
October 10, 1960, written by Hanny Kolm Exiner, principal
at the Studio of Creative Dancing, in Melbourne,
supported her application. Langley, it states, has “intelligence,
imagination, and great zest … She is a forceful
dancer, with originality and a great sense of comedy.”
She arrived in New York to a huge snowfall. Wading
through snow banks, she made her way to Graham’s
beautiful studios on East 63rd Street. She watched faculty
class. “I said I am going to stay here until I know that,” she
recalls. Even with all her experience, she was placed as a
beginner. Graham told her, “You don’t even know how to
breathe.” Langley gives a vivid description of the legendary
Graham. “She was very short. Her body proportions
were Asian, long spine and short legs. Her stacked
hairstyle extended her height. At this stage she had a
drinking problem, but she was an incredible genius.” She
stayed with Graham five years. “What I loved about the
Graham technique is that you danced from your gut to
your fingertips and not from your fingertips to nowhere.”
No. 75, Fall 2015 9

Tessa Hebb and Christopher House in
Elizabeth Langley’s Anais Nin, Ottawa, June 1976
Photo: Courtesy of Christopher House
Politically and artistically, the city was a hotbed,
though she didn’t meet up with the Judson Church artists.
“In New York you can’t do everything. There was
so much there, and I was starved.” But life in the city
could last only so long with her student visa expiring,
and she wasn’t looking for a serious dance career there.
As for her relationship with Calabria, she says, “He
wanted to get married. But you make your choices.”
She boldly lit out from Second Avenue to a log
cabin on Meech Lake. The year was 1965. In Ottawa,
she says, “there seemed to be a lot of people waiting
for somebody with energy to come and do
things … [And] I came full of ideas and with a lot
of toughness having survived in Manhattan.”
A dress boutique she opened had difficulties
and did not provide satisfaction. She
rebounded as manager at the city’s noted Café
Le Hibou Coffee House, where performers
Josh White, Jr., Odetta, James Cotton and Bruce
Cockburn headlined. While performing in a
theatre piece at the space, in which she uttered
only one line, she met a future husband, with
whom she had a daughter. They later divorced.
In the meantime, the Strathmere Farm
summer day camp in North Gower, Ontario,
hired her to teach dance to, says Langley, the
“verbal, engaged and intelligent” children of
activist parents. The experience prompted her
to open a studio on Laurier Street. “I never
forced a class plan on children, but I did on
adults. I never wanted disciples. I wanted
free spirits,” she says. Circa 1972 she was
living and teaching at Ottawa’s Pestalozzi
College, which wasn’t a college but an urban
commune, with rent-affordable housing.
Toronto Dance Theatre’s current artistic
director, Christopher House, then a major in
political science, was enrolled in her Movement
for Actors course at the University of
Ottawa in the fall of 1975. “I knew in the first
class that I had encountered an extraordinary
person,” he says. Within days, he was taking
her evening sessions in modern dance at
Pestalozzi. He describes her classes at U of O
as “very inspiring, teaching us a new awareness
of our bodies and unlocking sensations.”
He quickly figured out what dancing meant
to him, and how he moved most naturally. “I
have a strong memory of a ritual we performed
outside in a field, a hunt of sorts. At a certain
point I started to run in a huge circle. The experience
was utterly euphoric, and by the time I
stopped running I was a different person.”
Meanwhile Langley was exhausted and
felt her practice did not have potential for growth. She
booked tickets on a ship to New Zealand, where she
had family and support. She was forty-five, poor and
with a nine-year-old child. That’s when she received a
phone call from Alfred Pinsky, the then dean of Fine
Arts at Montreal’s Concordia University, offering her
a job to first teach in the theatre department (a course
called Dance Practicum) while designing a Canadian
university dance degree program geared to training
choreographers. It was a “top opportunity, in a city
that I’d been told I would love.” Langley became the
first chair of the Department of Modern Dance, inaugurated
in the 1980/81 academic year and renamed
10 Dance Collection Danse

Elizabeth Langley and James Tyler, “Improvisation”,
Victoria School Gym, Montreal, 1980
Photo: Ian Westbury
the Department of Contemporary Dance in 1987.
She had moved to Montreal late in 1978. “Some
very heavy rumblings were happening here, artistically,
politically and sociologically,” says Langley,
referring to the game-changing election of the
Parti Québécois two years earlier that saw masses
of people leaving the province. “There was a passion
here [after the PQ win]. Also, raw beginnings
and disturbances are the most exciting of times.”
The degree program was “one of the peak experiences
of my life,” she says. “Everything that I had
done [previously] prepared me for this job.” The
small department started with her as the only fulltime
faculty member and a roster of part-time teachers,
including Silvy Panet-Raymond, who would
become full-time faculty and Langley’s constant colleague
throughout her tenure. The program required
someone who was tough, but equally generous and
supportive, to give leadership and feedback.
Langley states in an unpublished transcript: “Some
people when they first come to the department see me
as a tyrant. Maybe it’s because I am very concerned
with people learning how to work. I am of the idea
that if you can do this you can always get work.” Langley
inherited that ethic from her father. “He also had
a philosophy, which I still live by, and it fits a day or
a life span,” she says. “You wake in the morning – or
you are born. You find out what you do best, and you
do it the best you can. You do an honest day’s work
for an honest day’s pay, and you deserve a dry bed
and a warm meal at night, or a peaceful death.”
The Concordia curriculum was devised to support the
students’ development as original artists. Teachers did
not teach their own method or choreograph on students.
No. 75, Fall 2015 11

Elizabeth Langley (and her life-sized puppet) in her one-woman
show in camera or not (translation “in private or not”), Montreal, 1998
Photo: Steve Leroux
In essence, the program supported the liberating power
of the imagination. Year-end shows would include
works by the students. “I really like four-minute works,”
Langley indicates. “I think in four minutes you should
be able to get on, make the statement you want to make,
and get off. And I think that’s also good for the audience.
Don’t hang around when the message has been spent.”
A chapter entitled “Like Cactuses in the Desert:
The Flourishing of Dance in Montréal Universities”
in the book Renegade Bodies (DCD 2012), makes hay of
Langley’s perceived outsider status in the Montreal
dance community. Co-authors Dena Davida and Catherine
Lavoie-Marcus write: “As a newcomer in the
city and as a unilingual Anglophone, she worked in
relative isolation from the others,” referring to Francophone
counterparts from other university dance
departments. Langley states, “Members of the community
questioned my right to be here and do the
job.” She adds, “Foreigners see things differently than
local people, because we come and things are fresher
to us, and I think we’re paying more attention.”
Shortly after she arrived in the city, the Octobre en
danse festival took flight. “I sat through every single
program, and it was as though every dance company
in this town was being promenaded in front of
me.” The upsurge of rebellious dance experimenters
in Quebec fascinated Langley. “There are always
people doing something that other people are not
doing. There’s faith in my heart about that forever and
ever. This is why art keeps evolving; there’s always
somebody that’s asking questions and creating.”
During a sabbatical in 1997, she studied at Amsterdam’s
School for New Dance Development. “I drifted so
far from my desk. I didn’t know how I’d get back,” she
says. She retired from her university job and jumped
full throttle in re-establishing her performance life and
12 Dance Collection Danse

the creation of her own one-woman shows. At a theatre
festival in Turkey, Langley met Australian director Paul
Rainsford Towner (known professionally as Rainsford),
who heads an innovative company working in dance
and physical theatre forms. Langley calls Rainsford “a
visionary … a man that has an uncompromising desire
to make theatre and a strength to create original work,
and I see those things in me too.” Together they created
Journal of Peddle Dreams, based on the writings and life of
Australian author Eve Langley [a possible relation]. The
emphasis was on getting to a stripped-down zone and
making her presence felt. “He made me the best performer
I had been in my life,” she says. “I got to the point
where I was shameless, getting to the heart of things.”
In a profession driven by the cult of youth and
beauty, not to mention the physical demands of dance,
Langley extends and defies the parameters of her
domain. In 1999, she received the prestigious Jacqueline
Lemieux Prize. The award committee described
her as “an inspiration to the community who stretches
the boundaries of the art form,” and praised her “command
of the direction she has chosen to move in, and
the strength and power with which she is doing it.”
Post-retirement, Langley has also worked consistently
as consultant, dramaturg and mentor for many artists.
In late 2011, Toronto-based dancer-choreographer
Sashar Zarif was re-imagining a lost dance form called
mugham, which combines poetry, music and dance,
and is connected to the Sufi and Shamanic cultures
of Azerbaijan, Iran and Central Asia. “I’d heard Elizabeth
was upfront and honest, and with her I’d get
feedback. I wanted that. I didn’t need someone to
pamper me.” They met at a dance studio. Zarif said,
“I dance, you watch, we’ll talk.” As Langley recalls,
“He took me into a world I didn’t know existed.” A
month later, they started intensive work together.
Crucial to Fujiwara was how Langley catalyzed
her development as a choreographer and performer,
helping her to navigate into “the arcane art
of butoh and into the deep performance required for
Natsu Nakajima’s solo Sumida River.” She admires
Langley as a “deeply compassionate and a skilful
communicator so that even in the most difficult
times, she was always encouraging and inspiring.”
Denise Fujiwara in Sumida River
Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann, courtesy of Denise Fujiwara
No. 75, Fall 2015 13

In 2011, Langley delivered the
keynote address at the Society of
Dance History Scholars’ international
conference on dance
dramaturgy in Toronto. She
distilled advice in a compelling
ten-point framework based on
over thirty years of her experience.
As Pil Hansen (with Darcey
Callison and Bruce Barton) writes
in “An Act of Rendering: Dance
and Movement Dramaturgy”,
Canadian Theatre Review, Summer
2013: “Langley sees the
dramaturg as mentor, a person
who helps a choreographer reach
clarity about his or her choreographic
expression by responding
to the emerging work from
the position of an informed ‘first
spectator.’ Langley operates from
a neutral position, in which the
dramaturg attempts to leave no
artistic imprint on the work.”
Zarif celebrates Langley’s seasoned
perspective. “She’s become
a big part of my life.” While House
acknowledges, “She gave me lots
of great advice that has stuck with
me for forty years. I wouldn’t be
a dancer or a choreographer if
I hadn’t met her.” Badu-Younge
comments that in her homeland
of Ghana “there are many
names in Ewe, the ethnic group
of my father, to best describe
[Langley’s] excellence: ‘Emefa’
– Calmness, ‘Akorfa’ – Consoler,
‘Dzigbodi’ – Patience, ‘Etriakor’
– Undefeatable, and above
all [she is] a ‘Kplorla’ – Leader.”
Langley has always lived in the present and has
never lost her enthusiasm or ability to embrace ambiguity
and transformation. “She continues to remind
people, through her own actions, how much one can
love life, how to live in the present with courage and
with a big open heart,” says Fujiwara. After sixty years
in dance, Langley is not in a phase of career summation.
By no means finished, she is in full “evolve and change”
mode. “I’m designing myself a new life. I just don’t know
quite what that is yet,” she says with a hearty laugh.
Elizabeth Langley delivering the keynote address at Society
of Dance History Scholars Conference, Toronto, 2011
Philip Szporer, writer, lecturer and filmmaker teaches at Concordia
University and is a scholar-in-residence at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance
Festival. His dance writings have appeared in The Dance Current, Tanz
and Hour, among others. He is co-founder, with Marlene Millar, of
the arts film company Mouvement Perpétuel. Together they have
co-directed and produced award-winning documentaries, short films
and installation projects.
14 Dance Collection Danse

Moving,
in Tandem
25 Years of Kaeja d’Dance
BY SAMANTHA MEHRA
If you haven’t heard the name Kaeja,
prepare yourself: its nuances will
exhaust you.
Allen and Karen Kaeja have
moved in synergetic tandem for twoand-a-half
decades, infusing
the name with many meanings.
Kaeja means dancer. Kaeja means
choreographer. Filmmaker. Archivist.
Teacher. Lecturer. Writer. Festival
Producer. Husband. Wife.
16 Dance Collection Danse

Allen and Karen Kaeja, University of Toronto, 2013
Photo: Zhenya Cerneacov
The Kaejas, partners in art and in
life, recently celebrated the twentyfifth
anniversary of their Torontobased
company, Kaeja d’Dance
(formed in 1991), culminating in a
performance as part of Harbourfront
Centre’s NextSteps series. The
evening captured the very essence
of each half of the company. Karen’s
Taxi! saw the cast of dancers take
the audience on an emotional and
kinesthetically engaging journey of
the search for love, with an emphasis
on relationships, sewing through
provocative vignettes where costuming
(including wedding gowns) and
spoken text provide a vivid sensory
experience. Allen’s .0 similarly
considered the points at which
human beings intersect, but using a
distinctly athletic, physical, fastpaced
vocabulary. While both were
exploring the intricacies of human
relationships, they did so with their
signature kinesthetic voices under
the umbrella of one evening.
The Kaejas’s reservoir of collected
performance programs and photography,
along with their memories,
are an archivist’s dream. This, as it
turns out, is no accident; the importance
of archiving in an effort to
preserve history is of great import
to both. “My father [Morton] was a
Holocaust survivor, and when he left
the camp he had no photographs,
or anything else. When he came to
Canada, whatever he could find from
other people was gold, precious to
him,” Allen Kaeja (born Allen Norris
in Kitchener, Ontario, in 1959) says.
“He kept his boat ticket, his train
ticket, and other things so that his
five children could have a history.”
Understanding the importance of
retaining artifacts, Allen began collecting
personal items from a young
age – anything that he considered a
“part of his genetic makeup,” from
his first wrestling award to his first
dance program. Karen Kaeja (born
Karen Resnick in Toronto in 1961),
too, admits to having an instinct
Allen Norris and Cynthia Hawkes in Norris’s Avari (1981)
Photo: John Lauener
to save, a deeply rooted part of her
personality. “I began to keep everything
because I started dancing
late [at age eighteen], and I thought
that becoming a performer would
be a miracle. When I saw my name
in print, it was a miracle realized,
and [saving things] has been a
continued fascination for me.”
Both Kaejas began dance later
in their lives, but the emergence of
their craft coincided with exciting
times in the Canadian dance fabric,
worthy of remembering. Prior to
dancing, Allen was submerged in
the worlds of competitive wrestling
and judo. At sixteen, he visited Israel,
where he chanced upon a memorable
dance experience in a bomb shelterturned-discothèque.
“I found my
dance that night, and it changed my
life,” he remembers. “When I came
back to Canada after six weeks, I
felt my traditional western training
was inadequate for me in terms of
endurance, so two close friends and
I would sneak into discos and start
dancing. I danced so wildly no one
would dance with me. If I cleared
the dance floor, it was a good night.”
This foray into dancing initially fell
outside of his family’s understanding;
admittedly, his father, a butcher,
did not understand the arts. But
after he attended the University of
Waterloo and had been invited to
No. 75, Fall 2015 17

Karen Resnick, age 10
train in wrestling at an Olympic
level, he considered ballet as a way
to improve his balance and agility.
He remembers walking into his first
ballet class adorned in wrestling
gear, where his teacher, Gabby
Kamino, told him, “Lose the hoodie,
lose the shoes and go stand at the
barre.” After beginning to cull his
technical skills, Allen’s first dance
performance was as a super for
The National Ballet of Canada’s The
Sleeping Beauty in the fall of 1980.
By the following year, he decided
to dedicate his life solely to the arts
and dance. This led him to enroll
in a six-week summer program at
York University, which sowed the
seeds for his interest in site-specific
work. Dance artist and instructor
Terrill Maguire had her students
explore the campus by performing
site-specific pieces. In the fall of 1981,
Allen auditioned for The School of
the Toronto Dance Theatre (STDT),
where he was accepted under probation.
During the two years he was
there, he felt more confident that he
was, at his core, a choreographer
even though he was still submerged
in training. During his time at the
school, he began cultivating a body
of work and founded the Allen Norris
Dance Theatre in 1982. Ever the
rogue, he was admittedly evicted
from STDT after stripping down
onstage during a performance. But
this moment did not signal an end
to his relationship with STDT, but
a beginning. “Within eight years
[Karen and I] were both on faculty,
teaching partnering, contact improvisation
and our Kaeja Elevations.”
Karen also entered dance later
in life. Born to Devora and Arthur
Resnick, Karen knew from a young
age that she wanted to work in
Allen Kaeja and Karen Kaeja in Allen’s Auro Choreola (1993)
Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann
the realm of psychology, but had
similarly always carried a natural
instinct to move. This innate desire
eventually brought her to the halls
of York University, where she would
join the dance program, initially
with an emphasis on dance therapy.
“This was back in 1980, and I had
no ballet training. I took a course
at Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT) to
figure out what modern dance was,
too,” Karen recalls. She submerged
herself in the rigours of ballet and
contemporary dance training on
a daily basis at York, while also
minoring in psychology, and even
started her own therapy practice,
leading a dance therapy program
at Baycrest Hospital (1982–1983) as
part of a practicum for a York dance
therapy course. But by this time, the
performance bug had truly bitten
her. Inspired by the dance professors
and occasional guest artists at
York (such as members of Toronto
Independent Dance Enterprise), she
18 Dance Collection Danse

Mairéad Filgate and Karen Kaeja in Allen Kaeja’s Armour/Amour (2011), Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Toronto
Photo: Andréa de Keijzer
submerged herself in more performance
courses and workshops.
These included a contact improvisation
course offered by Sally Lyons,
where Karen firmly “took a hold
of the curiosity that followed me
through a lifetime.” She was later
featured in the works of choreographers
such as Kathleen Rea, Peter
Bingham and Randy Glynn.
Allen and Karen collided in 1981
during a choreographic process
workshop to which Karen arrived
late. “I saw this goddess walk into
the studio, drifted over to her and
started dancing with her,” Allen
says. “It was because of Karen that
I took my first contact class at TDT
with [choreographer] Paula Ravitz,
and we began to partner right away.”
The meeting of the Kaejas was
kinesthetic kismet, and no doubt
resulted in their fascination with
contact improvisation, site-specific
works and their own branded
contact movement technique, which
they call “Elevations”. The process of
understanding their own movement
practices was born out of their first
collaborations. Allen’s initial view
of the body was based in wrestling
and judo; yet, through their work
together, they found a mutual
understanding of each other’s bodily
listening and responsiveness. “We
never allowed ourselves to get
complacent in our improvising.”
In their years creating together,
each have amassed a distinctive
body of work, some of which have
toured internationally and earned
them many awards. As early as
1990, they were creating their own
site-specific work as a duo: Savage
Garden, for instance, was created and
performed by the pair, and moved
vertically through the many levels
of the Cecil Street Community
Centre, and later became part of one
of their first performance programs,
Kinetically Charged (1991), at the
Winchester Street Theatre. Karen
initially acted as a muse and feature
performer in Allen’s works, while
also building her own choreographic
voice. Seminal works for
Karen, which explore identity and
human relationships with provocative
imagery, include Crave (2004)
and Sarah (co-created with Allen in
1994), which explores the identity
of Morton Norris’s wife (whom he
married prior to the Second World
War) and toured across Canada.
Karen’s Eugene Walks With Grace
(1995), initially set on Allen and Eryn
Dace Trudell, was remounted in
2012 on Mairéad Filgate and Zhenya
Cerneacov and became part of the
Dusk Dances Ontario Tour in 2013.
Allen’s work has often incorporated
highly physical and athletic
movement, while also at times
exploring certain themes, such as the
legacy of displacement and destruc-
No. 75, Fall 2015 19

Karen Kaeja in a solo she created for Allen Kaeja’s Asylum of Spoons (2004)
Photo: Albert Camicioli
tion wreaked by war and the Holocaust,
such as Old Country (1995) and
Resistance (2000). Seminal multidisciplinary
works for Allen also include
Lost Innocence (1992/93), a work for
five dancers and two actors exploring
the events of a displaced youth
being brought into the arms of the
Children’s Aid Society, and Armour/
Amour (2011), which takes a magnifying
glass to the architecture of the
body and of the self. Combined, the
two artists have deconstructed much
thematic and physical territory and
have been able to reach out to and
emotionally engage with international
audiences through the universal
nature of many of their works.
Within the Kaejas’s body of work
are a significant number of dance
films, twenty-six to date. Allen began
working with multimedia in the
1980s and soon became interested in
using the camera as the third dancer.
Karen also investigated dance on
film during a course run through
the Dance Umbrella of Ontario. In
the mid-1990s, the pair began to
focus their mutual interest on the
convergence of film and movement,
adapting several of their stage works
for the camera including Witnessed
(1997), Old Country (appearing first
as a duet for TVOntario in 1994 and
then for CBC Television in 2004)
and Asylum of Spoons (2005). Witnessed
is adapted from the stage
work Courtyard and explores the
displacement of ghettoized individuals
during WWII, hearkening back
to Allen’s family history. Shot in
only one day, and edited over a few
weeks, it has toured internationally
and is now part of the permanent
collection at New York’s Museum
of Modern Art. They also found
Allen and Karen Kaeja in Allen’s Resistance (2000)
Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann
some revelations in exploring this
medium on the performative level:
“Underneath, I am a shy person,”
Karen says. “Film suited my personality
as it is a private encounter
with a camera, but it allowed
me to communicate to many.”
The Kaejas have also continued to
make site-specific and audienceengaging
performances a central
aspect of their annual work. As early
as 1987, they embarked on a multidisciplinary
work titled Beare: a Celtic
Odyssey, involving seven performers
at the Winchester Street Theatre with
live music by Loreena McKennitt and
script by Allen. More recently, they
have performed as part of Toronto’s
Nuit Blanche. In Stable Dances (2008),
they sourced from a previous
site-specific work (Bird’s Eye View) to
create an all-night installation in the
historic stables and carriage rooms of
Casa Loma for a revolving audience,
incorporating live video projections,
with music by Edgardo Moreno and
over twenty performers. They are
also the masterminds behind annual
outdoor community events such as
Porch View Dances.
The Kaejas are prolific teachers
in the Toronto dance community
and beyond. Indeed, their teaching
20 Dance Collection Danse

contracts with the Scarborough and
Peel Boards of Education in the 1990s
funded their initial concerts. Their
goal has been to build communities
while also encouraging risk-taking,
kinesthetic understanding and confidence
in dancers and non-dancers
alike. Through improvisational
structures, the Kaejas allow for
movers to experience sharing weight
and working with momentum. In
addition to mentoring students at
STDT, Canada’s National Ballet
School and the Canadian Children’s
Dance Theatre (now Canadian Contemporary
Dance Theatre, CCDT),
they have taught in the public school
sector. The fun has been in seeing
movers transform before their eyes.
“Karen and I worked with CCDT,
and we got a nine-year-old to be
able to take me on her shoulder; it
changed her life and instilled in her
a kinetic understanding of being
powerful,” says Allen. “Partnering
is universal; if we can give you the
foundation, the world is yours.”
DCD co-founder Lawrence Adams
coined the title of another Kaeja
creation, a teaching syllabus for
schools called Express Dance made
in collaboration with drama teacher
Carol Oriold, and published by DCD
in 2000. The syllabus crystallized
as an idea after Oriold requested a
handout following a 1998 workshop
at the Council of Ontario Drama
and Dance Educators conference.
A primer for teachers, it incorporates
compositional frameworks
and movement lexicons, engaging
students from grades four to twelve
in a co-operative and creative movement
space. After Oriold shadowed
the Kaejas for over a year at various
teaching events, she compiled the
notes, which were then edited down
by Allen and Adams into a now
frequently used publication. Indeed,
this primer set a tone for movement
creation that reached beyond the
classroom and into the Kaejas’s own
processes. Their interest in educating
translates into the emerging artist
world as well. The pair created a second
company, K d’D2 (2000–2005),
which offered graduates from dance
conservatory programs (such as
STDT and CCDT) the opportunity
to begin dancing in professional
works, such as Allen’s Resistance,
and tour Ontario. These tours also
offered the dancers the opportunity
to engage with new communities,
develop relationships and teach.
Both Allen and Karen have also
helped to nurture the festival culture
for dance in Canada. Estrogen, a
festival for women creators, was
co-founded by Karen and Sylvie
Bouchard. Karen also co-founded
The Festival of Interactive Physics
(with Pam Johnson), which ran for
ten years and invited luminaries
of North American contemporary
improvisation, such as Andrew
Harwood, Nancy Stark Smith and
Peter Ryan, to conduct workshops
Zhenya Cerneacov, Merideth Plumb, Ana Claudette Groppler, Michael Caldwell and Allen Kaeja in Karen Kaeja’s Taxi! (2015),
Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Toronto
Photo: Ken Ewen
No. 75, Fall 2015 21

Karen and Allen Kaeja in Allen’s X-ODUS (2013),
Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Toronto
Photo: Ken Ewen
for over thirty participants. In his
own right, Allen co-founded the
CanAsian Dance Festival (1996) with
Denise Fujiwara after being asked
to help coordinate the dance portion
of Asian Heritage Month. “[Denise]
was as passionate as I was,” he
says. “We felt the community was
in such a rich place, moving forward
in many contemporary ways.
We wanted to promote and assist
the aesthetic.” Prior to this, Allen
co-founded fFIDA (fringe Festival
of Independent Dance Artists) in
1991 with Michael Menegon. During
its run, fFIDA was a successful
vehicle for independent dance
artists from Canada and beyond to
plant their feet in the dance milieu
22 Dance Collection Danse
and produce their own shows.
The duo continues to prolifically
perform and create, in addition to
presenting at conferences and serving
as artists in residence across
the country. Most recently, they
performed in lifeDUETS, a commissioned
series for the pair that, in
its various incarnations, has taken
them on tours across Canada, to
Mexico, Europe and Asia. In October
of 2015, they commissioned
choreographers Tedd Robinson
and Benjamin Kamino to make
works that challenged their “more
current bodies”. This challenge
has also seen them involved with
Older & Reckless, a series featuring
senior artists and founded by
Claudia Moore, artistic director
of MOonhORsE Dance Theatre.
After cultivating such a diverse
and relentless repertoire of projects
for well over two decades,
raising two daughters and working
in beautiful synergy, one has
to ask: what’s next for the Kaejas?
“Sky-diving,” says Karen. “That
is what we do as artists; we take
the plunge, and it stimulates us.”
Samantha Mehra Donaldson (MA) is a professional
researcher and historian with an
emphasis on media, dance history and heritage.
She has contributed to Dance Collection
Danse Magazine, The Dance Current, The
Canadian Encyclopedia Online and The Oxford
Forum for Modern Language Studies.

No. 75, Fall 2015 23

Finding Mrs. Colville
WWI Patriotic Performances
in St. John’s
BY AMY BOWRING
Newfoundland has been the
home of my maternal and
paternal ancestors for over 200
years. Its theatrical dance heritage
has been a fascination of mine,
and various research trips over the
years have revealed the early echoes
of theatrical dance in St. John’s in
the twentieth century, as well as
the later achievements of those
who followed. It is a dance story
that both reflects other patterns in
Canadian dance history and that
also etches its own distinct path.
July 1, 2016 is an important date
for the people of Newfoundland.
It marks the 100th anniversary of
the start of the Battle of the Somme.
There, on that first day of July in 1916,
at 9:15 a.m., 778 men of the Newfoundland
Regiment went over the
tops of their trenches near the French
village of Beaumont-Hamel to attack
the Germans. When the next roll
Mr. Leonard Reid, Miss Mary Doyle, Miss Bartlett, Miss Lois
Reid, Mrs. Helen Colville and Miss Flora Clift (sitting down)
in Mrs. Colville’s Triumph of Harlequin, 1915
call was taken, 68 men answered
their names – 386 were wounded;
324 were dead or missing and
presumed dead. It was a defining
moment for this small country. Even
after Confederation with Canada
in 1949, July 1 for Newfoundlanders
has never been so much Canada
Day as it is Memorial Day. Knowing
the significant military sacrifices
made by Newfoundland during the
Great War, and knowing the prominence
of patriotic performances
to raise funds for the war effort in
other parts of Canada, I became
curious to know what Newfoundlanders,
and specifically women
in St. John’s, were doing in terms
of performances for benevolent
purposes during World War I. And
that’s when I found Mrs. Colville …
In the Dance Collection Danse
archives, there are photocopies of a
handful of pages from a 1916 publication
called The
Distaff produced by
the Women’s Patriotic
Association of Newfoundland.
An article
about amateur theatricals
includes two
references to a Mrs.
Colville and includes
two photographs of
her productions: The
Triumph of Harlequin
and a pastoral play
held at Vigornia,
Cover page of the 1916 edition of The
Distaff published by the Women’s Patriotic
Association
which was the estate of St. John’s
bakery owner John Browning. With
the help of archivists and digital
sources at the Centre for Newfoundland
Studies at Memorial University,
Mrs. Colville’s contribution, and
that of others, began to unfold.
Born Helen Withers in the early
1890s, Mrs. Colville was the daughter
of John and Emma Withers;
Withers had become the King’s
Printer in St. John’s in 1890, replacing
his own father in this role. As a
member of the Church of England,
young Miss Withers would have
been educated at Bishop Spencer
College in Newfoundland’s
church-run school system. By the
late 1890s, Bishop Spencer College
had a reputation for offering
a wide variety of extra-curricular
activities including dramatics.
24 Dance Collection Danse

Numerous news paper clippings
demonstrate that Helen Withers
had a keen interest in performance;
one of the earliest clippings found
shows that she was in the cast of a
production of C.M.S. McLellan’s
Leah Kleschna at the Total Abstinence
Hall (T.A. Hall) in January 1909. And
in the following month, she was in
a comedietta called Mrs. Oakley’s
Telephone at the British Hall and a
production of the one-act farce My
Lord In Livery at the Synod Hall.
She was back at the T.A. Hall in
April in the play Liberty Hall. 1910
saw our Miss Withers in a “Grand
Variety Entertainment” at the Canon
Wood Hall where the audience took
in songs, dances and a playlet.
In the spring and fall of 1911,
Helen Withers performed in benefit
concerts for the Feild-Spencer
Association in aid of these two
Church of England schools: Bishop
Feild for boys and Bishop Spencer
for girls. On both occasions,
she appears to have sung a duet
with a young man named Cecil
Clift. On February 14, 1912, she
performed in a one-act comedy at
a Valentine Social for the Imperial
Order Daughters of the Empire at
the Methodist College Hall. This
comedy was followed by a “Japanese
dance” and then a tableau. And in
the same evening, she performed a
Pierrot dance with Clift at another
Valentine benefit, which “scored a
great success” with the audience
according to the Evening Telegram.
In October 1910, Helen Withers
and many other single society girls
were invited to a ball at Government
House to entertain the naval cadets
of the HMS Cornwall. It is quite
possible that it was here that she met
her future husband, Lieut. Mansel
Colville, as he was assigned to the
Cornwall. Colville, himself, had trod
the boards in A Pantomime Rehearsal
at the T.A. Hall in 1909. The two were
married on September 11, 1913. Serving
in the Royal Navy would have
Lady Davidson as
depicted in The
Distaff, 1916
taken the lieutenant
away from home
for much of the
year particularly
as the possibility
of war increased.
Eleven months after
their marriage,
Britain declared
war on Germany
on August 4, 1914
and the call for volunteers soon
went out across Newfoundland.
The women on the home front
also got to work right away. An early
“Patriotic Concert” in St. John’s, if not
the first, was given on September 29,
1914. It was organized by the Women’s
Patriotic Association, which was
tremendously productive throughout
the war with fundraising,
making bandages and organizing
women to knit socks and other items
of comfort for the men overseas.
Through much of the war, they
were led by Lady Davidson, the
governor’s wife, and she often
opened up Government House as a
centre for the association’s labours.
This particular benefit concert was
held at the Casino, a local vaudeville
and movie house that often hosted
patriotic performances during the
war and was located on the second
floor of the T.A. Hall. In addition to
a number of patriotic songs, such
as the Marseillaise and the Russian
national anthem, a group of national
dances of the United Kingdom were
presented. The latter half of the
program was dedicated to a series
of seven tableaux vivants with titles
such as “Newfoundland’s Offering”,
“The Hero of the Hour”, “The
Allies” and “The British Empire”.
The term “tableaux vivants”
translates to mean “living pictures”.
Costumed performers posed in
an arrangement that depicted a
scene, or living picture, and then
they moved to transition into a new
picture. In patriotic performances
using tableaux, the personification
of nations was quite common.
Tableaux were a widespread form of
entertainment with roots in the royal
pageants of the early Renaissance.
The tableaux of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries,
often performed by refined young
ladies – and sometimes gentlemen,
are more connected to “Delsartean
Expression” developed by French
music and drama educator François
Delsarte. Delsarte approached
drama education from a scientific
and analytical perspective. He saw
human experience as physical,
mental and emotional-spiritual, and
he divided the body into parts that
corresponded to these distinctions.
Examples of Delsartean expression
for “watching” and “ridicule”
No. 75, Fall 2015 25

Members of the Rossley Kiddie Company, St. John’s, 1917. These costumes provide a good indication of the personification of nations
that was typical in patriotic tableaux.
Photo courtesy of the Rossley Kiddie Company Collection (COLL-472, 1.01.007), Archives and Special Collections, Memorial Libraries
He created a rather elaborate system
determining how certain body parts
should be used to communicate
specific emotions and behaviours.
Delsarte’s methods were introduced
to America in the 1870s by
an actor and teacher named Steele
MacKaye who had studied with
Delsarte in France; one of MacKaye’s
students, Genevieve Stebbins,
also helped to spread Delsarte’s
teachings in New York and Boston.
Considering that the routes of many
of the Newfoundland steamship
companies connect St. John’s to
Halifax, New York and Boston, it
is easy to imagine how Delsartean
Expression and its use in tableaux
could influence performances in St.
John’s. There are several accounts
of tableaux in St. John’s dating back
to the 1890s as entertainment, as a
diversion at school assemblies, or as
performances in aid of organizations
such as the Church Lads’ Brigade.
The records of patriotic performances
uncovered in this research
reveal that Mrs. Colville participated
in twenty-nine out of thirty-five
shows over the course of the war
and we know she missed some
shows because she was in the U.K.
She was variously a performer,
organizer, director and choreographer,
and she often worked with
Mrs. Herbert Outerbridge and Mrs.
Chater. Participants in many of these
concerts include names of old and
affluent St. John’s families such as
Outerbridge, Clift, Reid, Rendell,
Ayre, Job, LeMessurier, Bowring,
Baird and Harvey, as well as wellknown
artistic families such as
Charles Hutton and the Rossleys.
John and Adelaide Browning also
played an important role in patriotic
work through organizational efforts
and through their estate, Vigornia.
The Brownings provided the estate
grounds for several garden fêtes
and patriotic performances to raise
funds for charitable war work. Mrs.
Browning also opened her doors two
or three afternoons per week for the
members of the Women’s Patriotic
Association (WPA) to do their work.
In November 1917, Mrs. Browning
returned from a trip to Canada (a
separate country from Newfoundland
at the time) where she had met
doctors and nurses with experience
in treating consumption. One of her
particular causes was Jensen Camp,
which had been created primarily
on her initiative in 1916 as a hospital
for soldiers with tuberculosis. The
Evening Telegram on June 11, 1918
reported the status of fundraising
for Jensen Camp and listed Mrs.
Colville’s contribution from the
proceeds of patriotic performances
at $410. In 1918, Mrs. Browning
was made an officer of the Order
of the British Empire for her work
with the WPA and Jensen Camp.
Vigornia was situated on King’s
Bridge Road where
the Family Court
now resides. A successful
garden fête
was held on July 14,
1915 and this may
be the first of such
activity at Vigornia.
It was held under
the patronage
of the Governor
Mrs. Adelaide
Browning as
depicted in The
Distaff, 1916
26 Dance Collection Danse

Back row: Miss Agnes Hayward, Miss
Bradshaw, Mrs. Babcock, Mrs. Colville,
Mrs. Chater, Miss Rendell; Front row:
Miss Doyle, Miss Ayre (Cupid), Mrs. H.
Outerbridge, Miss Job and Miss Flora Clift
(reclining) in On Zephyr’s Wings, 1915
and Lady Davidson in aid of cots
for the wounded, though by this
time in the war the Newfoundland
Regiment was primarily training
in the U.K. The St. John’s Daily Star
described the pleasant setting:
“Vigornia is always attractive but
yesterday it seemed as if some fairy
wand had touched the place.”
The main attraction of the day was
the pastoral play On Zephyr’s Wings.
Mrs. Colville played the role of
“Alidor” while her frequent collaborators,
Mrs. Chater (also the director)
and Mrs. Outerbridge, played
“Gracieuse, the Queen’s Daughter”
and “Queen Ilerie” respectively. Miss
Flora Clift, who was also in nearly
every production with Mrs. Colville,
played “Zephyr, Goddess of the West
Wind”. The show was set on a terrace
surrounded by trees and the Daily
Star had much praise for the
production: “The dancing was
perfect, even Terpsichore would have
been envious and the music
delighted all. The costumes – everything
of the pastorale was as the
author intended it should be.”
Further funds were raised through
the sale of candy, flowers and fancy
work. The event was such a success
that it was repeated at Vigornia on
July 26 and the two occasions
combined raised over $600.
It’s important to note that such
performances served more than
just fundraising purposes – they
were also important to local morale
and recruiting, particularly as the
fighting wore on and casualty lists
grew longer. The July 27, 1915 edition
of the Daily Star described the event
at Vigornia as “a scene that one was
loathe to leave.” And an account of
On Zephyr’s Wings in the Evening
Telegram on July 24, 1915, indicates
the power of escape people needed:
The fairy’s wand will again turn
shepherds into princes, shepherd esses
will dance upon the sward, while
Cupid flits among the trees and
wields its magic dart. Mordicante
with her fairies and her gnomes
bringing discord will draw her magic
circle round fair Gracieuse, but
Zephyr’s lightest breath will break
the spell, and Love reign over all.
A patriotic tableau vivant on a float in the Peace Parade, August 1919
This plotline could easily exist as a
metaphor for the war itself with the
malevolent Mordicante representing
the Germans and Zephyr, the
Allies – in the end, love and peace
will reign supreme and the sons
of Newfoundland will return.
An ad for the Casino Theatre on
January 30, 1918 further highlights
the role performance can play in the
war effort, stating: “The machine
that wins the war through fighting
or through industry is the human
brain. And what the brain requires
the theatre gives – change of thought,
relaxation, the real rest that makes
the brain better fit for work next day.”
While one should take the marketing
spin of such a statement into
consideration, there is a lot to be said
for the Casino Theatre’s argument.
A particularly grand event was
held at Vigornia on August 2, 1917.
Called the “Sunshine Entertainment”
it was organized by Mrs.
Charles McKay Harvey. By this time,
the Newfoundland Regiment had
played a significant role in major battles:
Gallipoli (September 1915–January
1916), Beaumont-Hamel (July
1916), Guedecourt (October 1916)
and Monchy-le-Preux (April 1917),
and the work of women on the home
front was more necessary than ever.
Once again the grounds of
Vigornia were decked out in bunting,
with the addition of electric
lights during the evening. The
gardens were in full bloom and there
were decorated stalls where sweets,
ice cream, flowers and handmade
items were sold. The afternoon
performance opened with a dance
of the seasons followed by a minuet.
The press gave great acclaim to Mrs.
Colville and Miss Flora Clift for
their Narcissus and the Nymph dance.
Mrs. Colville choreographed the
movement to a mazurka by Auguste
Durand, and the pool that Narcissus
No. 75, Fall 2015 27

gazes into was created using an
arrangement of mirrors and grass.
The evening show presented a
series of tableaux vivants, which,
according to the Daily Star, “surpassed
anything ever
seen here and was equal
to anything ever seen
abroad on the same
scale.” The first tableau
paid tribute to the newest
ally, the United States,
which had joined the
war just a few months
earlier in April 1917. Mrs.
Colville represented
France and several other
performers personified
other allies: Belgium,
Russia, Italy, Serbia,
Canada, Britannia,
India, Newfoundland
and Greece. Another
interesting tableau was
called “Women Before
and During the War”.
In the “before” section,
performers portrayed a
lady and her maid, suffragettes
and an actress.
During the war, these
characters transform into
lady farmers, munitions
workers and nurses.
Social dancing followed
the performance and
the whole event raised
$1170 for Jensen Camp.
By February 1918,
Mrs. Colville was advertising in
the Evening Telegram for an experienced
nurse to look after a young
child. When exactly her child was
born is unknown but it is highly
likely that she performed the
Sunshine Entertainment while
pregnant – a bold and independent
move for a woman of the time.
The Brownings hosted another
garden fête at Vigornia a year later
that included games and an open
air concert in the afternoon, tableaux
vivants in the evening and
social dancing until midnight.
Among the afternoon games was
Front cover of the instruction manual for the tableau and flag drill Rule
Britannia, performed in St. John’s in 1917
one called “Kill the Kaiser”. The
first series of nine tableaux depicts
familiar stories such as Blue Beard,
Pocahontas and Cinderella. The
next nine tableaux were patriotic in
nature with titles such as “After the
Battle”, “The Red Cross” and “Britannia
Calls Her Sons”. Mrs. Colville
portrayed Belgium in a tableau
with her daughter, and her friend
Mrs. Outerbridge played Britannia
in several scenes. This time, $1121
was raised for Jensen Camp.
Tableaux vivants made a last
patriotic appearance in the St. John’s
Peace Parade in August 1919.
Several of the parade
floats included tableaux
paying tribute to the
other allied nations. Mrs.
Colville arranged the
award-winning tableau
“Britain and her Dominions”
and also portrayed
India while her
daughter, also named
Helen, was a herald.
Mrs. Helen Colville is
but one example of the
patriotic women of Newfoundland
who used
their skills to aid the war
effort in whatever way
they could. They were
obviously energetic and
dedicated women who
no doubt discovered a
new level of independence
through their war
work. It is not surprising
then that many of the
women involved in the
WPA became involved
in women’s suffrage
after the war. They also
demonstrate how holistic
Newfoundland’s contribution
to WWI was – a
contribution that would
be repeated in WWII.
Amy Bowring is the Director of Collections
and Research at Dance Collection
Danse where she began a mentorship with
Lawrence and Miriam Adams in 1993. She
is known in the Canadian dance community
for her advocacy work in dance heritage and
preservation. She teaches dance history at
Ryerson University and is the founder of the
Canadian Society for Dance Studies.
Check out the St. John’s edition of DCD’s inter active map series, Touring Through Time
dcd.ca/walkingtours/stjohns.html
28 Dance Collection Danse

Moving Forward
St. John’s today boasts a rich and vibrant dance scene primarily composed
of independent artists performing a range of genres from traditional
step dancing to salsa to postmodern dance. The performing
arts scene is arguably one of the most interdisciplinary in Canada and
many St. John’s artists do not limit themselves to one art form.
Two of the city’s mainstay arts organizations are Neighbourhood Dance
Works (NDW) and Kittiwake Dance Theatre (KDT). NDW was originally a
performance collective founded in 1981 by Cathy Ferri and Agnes Walsh out
of the classes they were teaching in the basement of the LSPU Hall (one of the
city’s primary arts venues). Initial members included Lois Brown, Beni
Malone, Mandy Jones and Peggy Hogan. Today, NDW’s mandate has shifted
to dance presentation including the annual Festival of New Dance, which
celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2015. Festival curators have included
Ann Anderson, Lois Brown and Anne Troake. Some of the local artists who
have been presented at the festival include Louise Moyes, Sarah Joy Stoker,
Lisa Porter, Evelyne Lemelin, and the Louder Than Words Collective, as well
as native Newfoundlanders Jennifer Dick and Christopher House.
KDT is Newfoundland’s oldest non-profit dance company. A semi-professional
company, it was founded in 1987 by Linda Rimsay, an American
émigré with a background in modern dance and dance education. Rimsay
arrived in St. John’s in 1978 and immediately got involved with Newfoundland
Dance Theatre (NDT), which had been founded by Gail Innes and Lisa
Schwartz in 1975, lasting for just over a decade. It was from the young performers’
group of NDT that Kittiwake evolved. The company’s repertoire
over the decades has included many original works such as Mermaids of
Avalon, spring showcases and choreographic workshops. Its annual Nutcracker
has included distinctly Newfoundland references such as mummers
(mummers dress up in disguise and make house visits over the Christmas
season). Currently, the company is under the direction of Artistic Director
and Choreographer Martin Vallée and Artistic Associate Jennifer Foley.
Lois Brown, Beni Malone, Mandy Jones, Peggy Hogan and Cathy Ferri at Cochrane Street
United Church
Photo courtesy of Neighbourhood Dance Works
No. 75, Fall 2015 29

30 Dance Collection Danse

Stephanie Ballard
An Indelible Mark
“If we are breathing, we are
moving. And I suggest that
our movement throughout
a lifetime is a dance, a very
personal dance that is carefully
choreographed by each
individual human being.”
– Stephanie Ballard
BY CINDY BRETT
California-born choreographer Stephanie Ballard says
that she “adopted the Prairies,” or that the Prairies
adopted her – a perfect description of Ballard’s intimate
connection to the Winnipeg dance community where
she has worked for the better part of forty-four years.
Ballard belongs to a generation of artists who grew up
under the nurturing watch of the indomitable Rachel
Browne as a member of Winnipeg’s Contemporary
Dancers (WCD) in the 1970s. She went on to become
an award-winning dance artist with a reputation as
an intelligent and poetic choreographer, a creator of
humanist expression that explores isolation, relationships,
mythology, literature and the female psyche.
However, what makes Ballard extraordinary is not
merely the depth and scope of her numerous creations;
rather, it is her intense awareness of dance and movement
as a vehicle for personal discovery and artistic
ancestry. For Ballard, movement is a medium that
simultaneously defines and expresses our identity: who
we are, where we come from and where we are going.
Left: Stephanie Ballard, 1987
Above right: Stephanie Ballard in Norbert Vesak’s The Gift
to be Simple, c. 1976
No. 75, Fall 2015 31

Ballard’s journey began in San Francisco, California,
where her first memories of making movement are of
directing pageant-like “movies” with her brother and
neighbourhood children. She remembers her expansive
view of the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate City from her
bedroom window in Twin Peaks – a vantage point that
she believes gave her an innate sense of adventure and an
insatiable thirst for exploration.
Following her parents’ separation, Ballard moved to
Los Angeles with her mother and began studying jazz
dance with choreographer/actor Roland Dupree, best
known for creating a style of dance known as “West Coast
Jazz”. For a time, Ballard envisioned herself dancing on
Hullabaloo (a variety show similar to American Bandstand
that aired from 1965–1966). She also trained in Graham
technique with former Graham dancer Fanya Sage.
Although she inherited a strong work ethic from these
early influences, a rebellious streak in high school
eventually alienated Ballard from both academics and
dance. It was only by happenstance – during an
impromptu visit to her stepfather back in San Francisco
– that Ballard wandered into the studios of Merriem
Lanova’s San Francisco Conservatory of Ballet. Eyeing a
return to dance as a potential source of personal restitution
– and with nothing to lose – Ballard enrolled in the
conservatory’s two-year diploma program.
During Ballard’s time at the conservatory, she performed
character roles in its student company Ballet
Celeste, which toured across the Western United States,
and she met her then-partner, fellow dancer William
Starrett. When she graduated, a friend found her a job
with Shirley Cobb Beckworth – daughter of baseball
legend Ty Cobb and owner of a famous bookstore in Palo
Alto. Meanwhile, Starrett had gone to Canada on a scholarship
to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s (RWB) training
program. Eager to remove the 3000 kilometres between
Stephanie Ballard, Leslie Dillingham and Margie Gillis in Linda Rabin’s The White Goddess (1977)
Photo: D. Héon, courtesy of Linda Rabin
32 Dance Collection Danse

Francisco Alvarez, Tedd Robinson, Monica George, Gaile Petursson-Hiley, Marilyn Biderman, David Holmes Jr. and Mark Chambers
in Stephanie Ballard’s Snow Goose (1979)
Photo: David Cooper
them, he arranged for Ballard to audition for Contemporary
Dancers (later Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers) –
a small repertory company founded by Rachel Browne in
1964. Ballard was accepted as one of the company’s firstever
apprentices and, badly needing a source of income,
also graciously accepted a job as the company janitor.
The timing of Ballard’s entry into the Winnipeg dance
scene was highly advantageous for an impressionable,
young artist. WCD was charged with exciting activity
in the 1970s: the decade’s opening years saw the company
receive its first Canada Council operating grant;
its first studios in the historic Aragon Building; and a
new subscription series that, coupled with annual touring,
provided rich performing opportunities. Ballard’s
free-spirited approach to people and witty, vivacious
personality has drawn many to her. She had immediate
exposure and connections to several high-profile international
choreographers who Browne was commissioning
work from at the time, such as James Waring, Robert
Moulton, Sophie Maslow, Richard Gain, Cliff Keuter,
Lynne Taylor-Corbett and Paul Sanasardo – many of
whom hailed from New York’s modern and experimental
dance scenes. Meanwhile, several Canadian choreographers
were finding their artistic voices in the 1960s and
’70s, and Browne also began tapping into the wealth of
bourgeoning choreographic talent from artists across the
country such as Karen Jamieson, Judith Marcuse, Paula
Ravitz, Jennifer Mascall and Linda Rabin – Rabin in
particular would have a major impact on Ballard’s career.
Living in an isolated prairie city and working in a
small company, meant that Ballard also forged strong
personal relationships with the tight-knit community.
Browne was a trusted mentor and friend to Ballard and
other protégées, such as Faye Thomson, Gaile Petursson-
Hiley and Odette Heyn – who all danced with WCD in
the 1970s and today sit at the helm of its affiliated School
of Contemporary Dancers (SCD). They, and many other
generations of Winnipeg artists, consider themselves to
be Browne’s “dance daughters”. Ballard’s relationship
with Starrett also brought her close to Arnold Spohr
(artistic director of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet from
1958–1988), and when Starrett returned to the United
No. 75, Fall 2015 33

School of Contemporary Dancers 2003 graduating students
Kevin Côté, Emma Doran, Zach Schnitzer, Allison Wersch and
Brooke Noble in Stephanie Ballard’s Prairie Song (1980)
Photo: Rodney Braun
States in 1976, Ballard became Spohr’s go-to dinner date
and loyal friend. These personal relationships fostered
an important network and planted roots that became
integral to Ballard’s identity as an artist. She felt a strong
spiritual connection to the city and, almost immediately,
began identifying herself as being “from Winnipeg”.
The year 1977 marks a significant turning point in
Ballard’s career. In 1976, Montreal-based choreographer
Linda Rabin began assembling dancers for a new
project and needed mature artists for what she knew
was going to be an experimental process. Rabin had first
worked with Ballard when setting Domino on WCD in
1974 and remembered her trusting and open approach
to creation. Although Ballard was suffering from
rheumatoid arthritis and had actually decided to stop
dancing, she was assured by Rabin that only minimal
exertion would be required. Already sensing the significance
of the project, Ballard joined Rabin in Montreal.
Since its first presentation, The White Goddess has been
regarded as an event of mythic proportion. Based on Robert
Graves’s book of the same name, the work pays homage
to female consciousness and honours the concept of a
great goddess, or feminine deity. Nestled in the zeitgeist
of second-wave feminism, and more ceremony than
dance, the work had a profound impact on many of those
who experienced it. Ballard remembers that Toronto
Dance Theatre co-founder Peter Randazzo was intensely
affected by its performance at the 1977 Dance in Canada
Association (DICA) Conference and was reduced to tears.
For Ballard, the choreographic process of creating
The White Goddess was transformative. Aside
from the introduction to the unique artistic climate
in Montreal and the formation of important friendships
with artists Margie Gillis and Candace Loubert,
Ballard was inspired by Rabin’s creation methods
and instilled with a tremendous respect and curiosity
for artistic process. She returned to Winnipeg
consumed with her own creative energy.
The spark of Ballard’s choreographic notions was
well timed. By then, Browne had initiated a series of
choreographic workshops for the company, and dancer
Joost Pelt had spearheaded a Dance Discovery workshop
performance series. Ballard also received a grant
that provided her with a year’s worth of living expenses
and the opportunity to study the choreographic process
by observing the work of David Earle, Lynne Taylor-
Corbett and Norman Morris, among others. The late
1970s saw the birth of her first choreographies, including
Mahler Duet (1977), Sympathetic Magic (1979) and
her first full-length choreography, In Passing (1978).
In 1979 Ballard was appointed artistic director and
manager of WCD’s apprentice program. This afforded
her more opportunities to flex her choreographic
muscles, and soon WCD’s repertoire contained three
of Ballard’s choreographies: Construction Company,
Snow Goose and her signature piece, Prairie Song.
Ballard has said that Prairie Song was created out of
a “need and desire to explore the mysteries of isolation.”
Having experienced nearly a decade of prairie
winters, Ballard was inspired by the stories of her
friends’ ancestors – many of whom had lived on the
Prairies for generations. Filled with a respect for one’s
ability to survive in such a rough and remote environment
in the pioneer age, Ballard created a work that
touches on the solitude, and almost madness, of five
individuals who are seemingly disconnected from
each other. In an indication of the company’s faith in
Ballard’s merit as a choreographer, WCD was represented
by Prairie Song at the prestigious Canadian Dance
Spectacular at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre in 1980.
Prairie Song was followed by an ambitious rendition of
A Christmas Carol (1981), which attempted to shed light on
the social conditions surrounding the novel, and Time Out
(1982) – an exploration of the relationship between Zelda
and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ballard was also commissioned to
choreograph and perform for Mother Theresa during her
1982 visit to Winnipeg – an experience that Ballard
remembers as one of the most rewarding of her career.
At the end of 1982, journalist/dance critic Robert
Enright wrote in Dance in Canada magazine that the
choreographic trinity of Browne as artistic director,
Ballard as associate artistic director, and Tedd Robinson
as resident choreographer at WCD, was a “potent force”.
However, the promising partnership was not meant to
be. Although Browne was a mentor and friend to many,
some company and board members were reportedly
dissatisfied with her leadership, and in a now notorious
coup, Browne was ultimately asked to resign as director.
34 Dance Collection Danse

Faye Thomson and Margie Gillis in Stephanie Ballard’s Anna (1987)
Photo: Robert Tinker
No. 75, Fall 2015 35

Although several people considered Ballard to be
next in line as artistic director – and she was certainly
asked by the board to apply, more than once – she
was conflicted by a lack of assurance that either she or
Browne had any kind of a future with the company at
all. In an act of defiance over how the search process was
handled, Ballard withdrew her application and followed
Browne out the doors at the end of the 1982/83 season.
Facing the loss of the company structure in which she
had thrived for the last eleven years, Ballard adjusted
to a challenging new reality as an independent dance
artist, leaning on her network for support. Since The
White Goddess, Ballard had remained in close touch with
dancer/choreographer Margie Gillis, whose solo career
had by then earned her a reputation as an international
superstar and beloved Canadian icon. Despite this, Gillis
was seeking artistic advice and asked Ballard to come
to Montreal to observe some of her work. An artistic
exchange began to take shape and Ballard became Gillis’s
artistic advisor and company manager for the next ten
years. During a decade of working together, Ballard also
set several of her own works on Gillis, including Lithium
for Medea (1984) and Gillis’s signature solo, Mara (1989).
Ballard was well recog nized for her success in the
1980s, receiving the Clifford E. Lee Choreography
Award in 1982, the Jean A. Chalmers Award in 1985
and the Jacqueline Lemieux prize in 1986. And, though
she worked closely with Gillis and lived with her parttime
in Montreal, Ballard spread her talent and energy
across North America like creative wildfire. By 1986,
Starrett had been appointed artistic director of South
Carolina’s Columbia City Ballet and began commissioning
Ballard to set some of her modern work on the
company. Keeping to her roots, she also maintained
an apartment in Winnipeg (which she rented to visiting
artists) and occasionally returned to create work
such as Trouble in the House (1986), Anna (1987) and
Continuum (1990). Of particular note is Continuum, an
expression of artistic and feminine lineage set on several
dancers from Ballard’s past including Thomson,
Petursson-Hiley, Rabin, Gillis, WCD dancers D-Anne
Kuby and Ruth Cansfield and, of course, Browne.
Ballard admits that, at the age of forty, she was
thinking heavily about the concept of continuum
that year. Having graduated from the apprentice
program with Thomson in 1972 and watched other
colleagues follow closely behind, Ballard was struck
by the interconnectedness of their paths. Reflecting
on her family of dancers and the artistic and feminine
histories that connect them, Ballard wrote in the program
notes that Continuum celebrates “an energized
dance relationship between dance artists that I have
worked with, some for as long as eighteen years.”
This theme of heritage and legacy would become
a cornerstone of Ballard’s career. In the mid-nineties,
Ballard embarked on an extensive project with the
intention to explore and document several overlapping
concepts of personal legacy. The Legacy Project,
as it was called, involved not only the revisiting and
documentation of Ballard’s artistic history but also the
exploration of movement as a form of revealing legacy
itself – a way in which, working from the inside out, she
feels we simultaneously discover and express ourselves
by exploring movement patterns and impulses
Rachel Browne in Stephanie Ballard’s Homeagain (2010)
Photo: Vince Pahkala
36 Dance Collection Danse

as an accumulation of experiences and memories. As
part of this process, she created work on non-dancers
from British Columbia’s self-help retreat The Haven,
an experience that inspired her to eventually pursue a
Master’s degree in therapeutic counselling. As another
part of The Legacy Project, Ballard created a record of
the archives and history of both WCD and SCD. And
she developed a course for SCD on personal, Canadian
and international dance history, which she still teaches.
At co-directors Thomson and Heyn’s request, Ballard
has been a Guest Artist in Residence for the school’s
Professional Program since 1997. Working closely with
SCD has allowed Ballard to develop relationships with
aspiring artists, passing on artistic experiences that
she embodies. Since 2003, she has created Landscape
Dances, or site-specific works, as a means of animating
her community with an architectural sentiment
and providing performing opportunities for young
artists. One of her most recent Landscape Dances was
performed at the opening of the Canadian Museum for
Human Rights in September 2014 – an experience that
she says was spiritually commensurate with performing
for Mother Theresa. And, as Spohr reached the end of his
life, Ballard brought a Landscape Dance to his garden.
Further musings on memory and retrospective led to
experimentations with intergenerational choreography
such as the 2004 work George (Grand Dames in Dance)
Back: Faye Thomson, Stephanie Ballard, Arnold Spohr, Rachel
Browne, Tom Stroud and Tedd Robinson
Front: Gaile Petursson-Hiley and Odette Heyn, 2004
and Homeagain (2010), in which Browne performed at
the age of seventy. When Homeagain was restaged in
2013 it was presented as a homage to Browne, who died
in 2012 while at the Canada Dance Festival in Ottawa.
The idea of movement as a form of legacy is amplified
as a generation of Canadian dance pioneers dies and as
new artists take to the stage. In 2006, Ballard co-founded
both a heritage organization (Winnipeg Dance Preservation
Initiative) with charter RWB dancer Margaret
Hample Piasecki and a youth-based collective (Mouvement/Winnipeg
Dance Projects) with Petursson-Hiley.
Mouvement became a conduit not only for the creation
of new works but also to restage past works on their own
“dance daughters” – Kathleen Hiley (Petursson-Hiley’s
daughter); Robyn Thomson (Faye Thomson’s daughter)
and Arlo Reva (Ballard’s honorary adopted daughter) –
all graduates of SCD. In 2010, Hiley, Thomson and Reva
founded their own Winnipeg-based collective, Drive
Dance. As a solo artist, Hiley has also performed Ballard’s
Mara (as has fellow SCD graduate Jolene Bailie)
and Lithium for Medea. Other companies such as Young
Lungs Dance Exchange and Peter Quanz’s Q Dance (for
which Ballard is artistic advisor) have also been spearheaded
by young Winnipeg artists in recent years.
We often discuss dance as being the most ephemeral
of the arts – vanishing as quickly as it is created. In a
way, Ballard’s life and career challenges this notion and
promotes movement as a vehicle for the expression of
both personal and artistic lineage. Just as we inherit our
DNA, dance artists embody the spirit and artistry of
their predecessors and their cohorts … eventually adding
their own indelible mark to the great continuum.
Kathleen Hiley in Stephanie Ballard’s Mara (1989)
Photo: Lauren Helewa
Cindy Brett holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance and English literature
from York University. She is currently the Archives Associate
at Dance Collection Danse and the copy editor of The Dance Current
magazine.
No. 75, Fall 2015 37

Gadfly
The Evolution of Form
Valerie Calam, Paul
Kus, Simone Bell,
Ofilio Sinbadinho,
Apolonia Velasquez
and Andrew Chung
in Velasquez and
Sinbadinho’s Klorofyl
Photo: E.S. Cheah
BY SORAYA PEERBAYE
A multi-year grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation has allowed DCD to undertake several new initiatives – one being to
address the gaps in the DCD archives. We will be working with one group from three dance genres currently under represented in
the archives: urban, Asian and aboriginal. The objectives of this program are for DCD to assist each group with archival preservation
techniques; provide a notator to create a score of a selected choreography; and, publish a feature article in the DCD Magazine.
Gadfly is the first of the three.
Ofilio Sinbadinho still remembers
one of his first meetings with a
presenter – barely five years ago,
near enough for the memory to be
fresh and sharp. He and partner
Apolonia Velasquez, artistic codirectors
of Gadfly, were seeking
opportunities for their first production,
Klorofyl – the title perhaps an
apt metaphor for two urban dance
artists who were – or were seen to
be – young and green. They showed
the presenter a trailer; she watched,
cool, and then turned off the screen
and asked them to explain the
premise of their work. “It was like a
quiz,” Velasquez interjects, before
Sinbadinho continues: “We were
like little kids, excited to talk to her.”
Finally she said, breezily, “This
street dance stuff … it’s just the
flavour of the month; it won’t last.”
Sinbadinho found the presence
of mind to address her prejudice
without anger, but ultimately the
most resounding argument is
Gadfly’s success – and that of street
dance itself, which can celebrate a
more than thirty-year history in both
Canada and the United States. The
form has unapologetically thrust
its way forward through Canadian
innovators such as RUBBERBAN-
Dance Group, which preceded
Gadfly by nearly a decade, and Yvon
“Crazy Smooth” Soglo’s Bboyizm.
There have been succeeding waves
of new artists and groups, with
distinct intentions: Break It Down
(Jon Drops Reid, Toronto), Tentacle
Tribe (Elon Högland and Emmanuelle
Lê Phan, Montreal), the 605
Collective (Vancouver), and Luca
“Lazylegz” Patuelli (Montreal),
who this year delivered the message
on behalf of Canada’s dance
community on International Dance
Day. And these are only a very few.
No. 75, Fall 2015 39

Tara Pillon, Lauren Lyn and Celine Richard-Robichon in rehearsal for Apolonia Velasquez
and Ofilio Sinbadinho’s B8NUAR, The Citadel, Toronto
Photo: Ofilio Sinbadinho
As for Klorofyl, it was cited by
Paula Citron in The Globe and Mail
as the Breakout Performance of the
year and earned three Dora Award
nominations, claiming the 2012
Award for Outstanding Performance.
The company has become
known for its theatrical productions,
but also for the Toronto Urban Dance
Symposium, an annual professional
development, networking and
showcasing event. Since that meeting
in 2011, Velasquez says, “We no
longer doubt what we believe in.”
Gadfly is a joint venture, though
its co-directors display very different
temperaments. Sinbadinho is
exuberant, quick-speaking, while
Velasquez has a thoughtfulness
that is both taut and supple at once.
Watch them execute a choreography
in sync and you’ll see their physicality
likewise inflected: Velasquez’s
compact body locks into each move,
smooth and solid as iron pistons,
while Sinbadinho is loose, elastic,
jittery – micro-twitches in all limbs.
I ask them what qualities they see in
each other. “Curiosity, authenticity,”
says Velasquez of him. “Everything
he creates is original.” He laughs, “I
thought you would say that I’m all
over the place.” Of her, Sinbadinho
says simply, “She commands.”
Velasquez was born in Canada to
Chilean and Guatemalan parents
and studied ballet, Mexican folklore
and a touch of jazz before finding
street dance at the age of eighteen.
Born in El Salvador, Sinbadinho
moved to Montreal at age seven,
studied martial arts and played soccer
“like every other Latino.” When
a group of rappers accompanied
by dancers visited his high school,
he was entranced: he began studying
street dance at around the same
age as Velasquez. She became a
political science major at Concordia
University, “dancing on the side. I
didn’t know that being a dancer, a
choreographer, was a thing.” Says
Sinbadinho, “We wanted to dance,
not make money out of it. We liked
training, getting better, performing
– we stumbled into the profession.”
In the early years, they studied
with Montreal-born Natasha
Jean-Bart before she assumed the
role of Lady Madonna in Cirque
du Soleil’s production of LOVE.
Jean-Bart introduced them to Brian
Green, whose versatility of styles
astounded them. “We got schooled,”
says Sinbadinho. “He used to teach
in New York once a month,” continues
Velasquez. “We were addicted
– we would spend all our savings
to go.” Their first choreography, a
duet suggested by Sinbadinho, was
unusual in a field where performances
are either solo or battles of
crews. “Our studio was my parents’
apartment,” says Velasquez, “our
mirror the little TV that we had.”
Their choreography is full of the
ripples and ricochets characteristic
of street dance – as though the
body were a graph of transmissions,
interruptions, reversals and
redirections of force. But it is also
theatrical – there are suggestions of
persona, a self, a search, that give
an attitude to the dance. Early on
they were attracted to the music
of Canadian electro-violinist Dr.
Draw, and most of their choreographies
have been accompanied
by his compositions – aggressive
and lyrical at once. There is grace,
but also a wildness in the rise of it,
vibratos that threaten to veer out of
control. “His music spoke in a way
that fit perfectly [with] what we were
working on,” says Velasquez. “There
is rawness, realness in his music.”
Celine Richard-Robichon,
Andrew Chung, Apolonia Velasquez,
Sarah Tumaliuan and Raoul Wilke in
Velasquez and Ofilio Sinbadinho’s Arkemy
Photo: E.S. Cheah
40 Dance Collection Danse

Sinbadinho and Velasquez are
used to being asked to describe
what they do – street, dance theatre,
contemporary dance … they won’t
settle on a single answer. “There
are three essentials to street dance:
artistry, athleticism and authenticity,”
says Sinbadinho. “If you have
that, I don’t care what style you
do.” They’ve mixed house, hip hop,
break, locking and popping with
contemporary, ballet and pointe.
They have a fraught relationship
with the word “inspiration”. “I think
our work comes out of who we are
and where we stand,” comments
Sinbadinho, “We talk about society,
about people.” Says Velasquez,
“About ourselves.” Sinbadinho
continues – “About today.”
Their choreography is peopled
with archetypes, whether inspired
by Akira Kurosawa’s film Seven
Samurai, the imagery of manga or
their own socio-political observations
on power, vulnerability,
the desire to be true to oneself. A
tongue-in-cheek humour is part of
it, too: Arkemy, a commentary on the
privilege of living in North America
created characters named Aidunno,
Woo Ai and Mei-B. Regardless of the
Marisa Ricci, Alyson Miller, Natasha Poon Woo, Melissa Mitro, Ashley St. John and
Margarita Soria in Apolonia Velasquez and Ofilio Sinbadinho’s Stygmata
Photo: E.S. Cheah
transformations, Sinbadinho says,
“The show is not abstract. It speaks.”
They have frequently worked
with dancers without training in
street dance: Stygmata, a commission
from Dance Ontario, was created
on five classically trained dancers.
They created Uplika for Laurence
Lemieux in a partnership between
Gadfly and Coleman Lemieux &
Compagnie and have been commissioned
by the Canadian Contemporary
Dance Theatre, MOonhORsE
Dance Theatre and Kaeja d’Dance.
Why did they turn to the stage?
“Freedom”, Velasquez says simply.
It’s an intriguing statement, when
one might think of the play and
spontaneity of battle as freedom.
But it is the answer of a choreographer,
as Sinbadinho affirms:
“Out of a whole crowd of dancers,
of movement, I might just want
that hand, with this colour, that
text, to get at something meaningful.
So people see what we see.”
Alexandra “Spicey” Landé,
founder of Montreal’s Bust A Move
competition, captures the uniqueness
of what they do. “Street
dancers,” she says, “are used to
performing to a crowd; to getting
a direct connection, reaction and
gratification from what we do.”
Gadfly, she argues, suggests “a story,
a way for elements to relate, to make
something more meaningful.” The
proposal isn’t without its detractors
– even Spicey herself. “We have
a friendly, ongoing argument about
it,” she says. “I’m more of a purist.
I love to see street dance just how
it is, with honest energy. Apolonia
and Ofilio love mixing things up;
they’re not afraid to push into less
familiar territory – even to the point
that it’s not recognizable in the end.”
Still, it’s clear that Spicey embraces
the disruption. “They have a genius
way of taking something that’s not
hip hop, adding their flavour and
turning it into something else.” The
impact on street dancers, she feels,
is significant: “They’re creating a
future for street dancers, letting
them feel free to express themselves,
to ask the question: how can I
innovate?”
“For us,” says Sinbadinho, “it
needs to draw from different
sources, perspectives, music, movement,
to be interesting. When we’re
asked, ‘What do you guys do, is it
urban?’ – we joke, ‘It’s ’aybrid. It’s
just us.’”
No. 75, Fall 2015 41

Laurence Lemieux and Erin Poole in Apolonia Velasquez and Ofilio Sinbadinho’s Uplica, October 15, 2014
Photo: Kristy Kennedy, courtesy of Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie
The Toronto Urban Dance Symposium
(TUDS) was perhaps an
early form of Spicey’s question
– “How can I innovate?” – while
Gadfly was still formulating its
own response. TUDS made public
their own process of inquiry: how
to make a living, how to make a
life. “There was nobody helping
street dancers,” says Sinbadinho.
Christine Moynihan, then executive
director of the Dance Umbrella of
Ontario, encouraged them to apply
for their first grant. The first edition
of TUDS in 2010 was simple: workshops,
information sessions and
panel discussions. Its achievement
was tremendous – it made visible
a significant, young and diverse
community, skilled and versed in
an extraordinary range of styles.
Arts funders, service organizations
and presenters paid attention.
Now in its sixth edition, TUDS
has grown from a one-day event to
a five-day festival. Its vision, says
Velasquez, is “to highlight different
angles of the culture, of the
artist; to empower street dancers,
but also to showcase the art form.”
42 Dance Collection Danse
TUDS now also includes professional
battles, solo and company
and performances, commissions
and the Gadfly Awards. This
year, Sinbadinho and Velasquez
are remounting works on young
dancers who haven’t yet worked in
a professional company context.
TUDS, says Sinbadinho, was
intended “to give the form a chance
to become a practice.” He describes
what has been the culture’s tendency
towards entropy: “You’d go to a
showcase, and you’d see someone
who’d make you say, ‘Whoa – this
one’s killin’ it.’ If this was classical
dance, you’d think, in ten years he’ll
be in The National Ballet of Canada.
But in the context of street dance,
even the most brilliant dancer might
disappear: this one will end up
waitressing; that one will devote herself
to teaching without noticing that
she’s stopped performing; another
one will go back to college to study
kinesiology. Three years later, at that
same showcase, you’d find a whole
new array of dancers.” Sinbadinho
describes Gadfly’s vision to develop
the culture so that “the commitment
deepens and the art can evolve. Now,
young dancers see dancers who are
mature, who are thirty years old,
who are training rigorously. They
see a dancer like Lady C, and I hear
them say: ‘That girl – every night,
she goes home, she pushes back her
furniture to the wall and she trains.’”
Ronnie Brown of the Oakville Centre
for the Performing Arts is among
the presenters who have developed
a long relationship with the company.
Brown programmed Klorofyl
in 2012; that same year, before the
Oakville premiere, the Downtown
Oakville Jazz Festival was featuring
Dr. Draw, and Brown convinced
the committee to present Gadfly
alongside as an outreach strategy.
It paid off: the company performed
on an outdoor stage for an audience
of 3000; that fall, when Gadfly
performed at the Oakville Centre,
the show sold out. “What they were
doing wasn’t just for young people,”
says Brown. “They were turning
on all ages. Children came with
parents and grandparents; teenagers
came in social groups. I don’t

think anybody knew they were
coming to see a street dance company
… that was something they
learned reading the program.”
Brown describes Gadfly’s tremendous
influence beyond the
Oakville Centre’s walls, including
the company’s recent work with
the Hamilton Art Crawl, as well as
ArtHouse, an Oakville youth arts
organization that prioritizes lowincome
families. “Apolonia and
Ofilio are amazing with people,
even if they’ve never experienced
dance.” Brown notes both the waves
of street dancers who are compelled
by the possibilities of the theatre and
contemporary dance artists who are
influenced by a diversity of urban
dance styles and says, “I see this as
the future of contemporary dance.”
Andrea Simpson-Fowler, founder
of Leaping Feats in Whitehorse,
describes an equally enthusiastic
response in a wholly different
context. Simpson-Fowler initially
brought in Velasquez to offer workshops
to the large body of students –
up to 800 in a season – with a passion
for urban dance. “She was incredible,”
says Simpson-Fowler. “We
have foster kids, kids with ADHD,
autism; we deal with behavioural
issues, coordination issues, learning
disabilities. And we also have
serious dancers who go on to study
dance at Ryerson University. It’s
rare to find an instructor who can
manage every single point on that
spectrum the way Apolonia does.”
Like Brown, Simpson-Fowler
has invited the company as often
as possible, each time with deepening
involvement. Through the
Breakdancing Yukon Society,
Simpson-Fowler’s emerging professionals
initiative, she developed a
collaboration between Gadfly, Tony
“Ynot” DeNaro from Top Rock (New
York) and Kim Sato from Vancouver
to create a new work with young
dancers. The subsequent year,
Gadfly returned to mentor these
artists to create works of their own.
“You can see Gadfly’s impact across
Canada,” says Simpson-Fowler.
“Apolonia and Ofilio are encouraging
street dance artists and companies
who want to get into the theatre,
with openness and generosity.”
Street dance still faces significant
hurdles in the broader dance community.
This year, for the first time,
two individual urban dancers were
nominated for the Dora Awards:
TUDS’ featured performers, Caroline
“Lady C” Fraser and Axelle
“Ebony” Munezero competed for
the title of Best Female Performance.
The award went to Lady C, but not
before a dispute within the Toronto
Alliance of Performing Arts (TAPA),
which presents the awards. According
to Scott Dermody from TAPA,
the issue was the nature of the
Lady C and Ofilio Sinbadinho battle at TUDS, 2014
Photo: E.S. Cheah
No. 75, Fall 2015 43

Apolonia Velasquez and Ofilio Sinbadinho with the “Summer Sizzlers” (Town of Oakville
camp counsellors) during a rally/training session for the 2015 camp season
Photo: Courtesy of the Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts
Skills + Soul event. Perhaps surprisingly,
it wasn’t the fact that this was
a battle (competitions, for instance,
are currently ineligible at the Canada
Council for the Arts). Dermody
states that TAPA was unable to
direct jurors as to how to fairly
adjudicate the full run of a production
where significant elements of
performance change from night to
night: the pairings of battlers and the
choreography, which is improvised.
Gadfly’s registration for Skills +
Soul was initially disqualified. The
company challenged the ruling, and
ultimately TAPA allowed the registration
to proceed, but a decision
will be made this fall on future
eligibility, and a new policy drafted.
To suggest that the improvisational
nature of street dance presents
a problem for adjudication is
questionable, especially in a period
where structured improvisation
is becoming more and more a part
of contemporary dance and interdisciplinary
performance: think of
Public Recordings’ what we are saying
(Ame Henderson), which won two
Dora Awards in 2014. And yet these
kinds of negotiations reflect the
tensile nature of the politics of urban
dance: the tone may range from
anxiety and resistance, to curiosity
and a willingness to re-envision.
Through juries, policies, criteria for
eligibility, assessment, membership
… the dance community is being
asked to come to terms with urban
dance’s origins and culture, even
as artists such as Velasquez and
Sinbadinho imagine the possibilities
of the art form in the theatre.
Apolonia Velasquez and Ofilio Sinbadinho
in rehearsal for their work Klorofyl
Photo: E.S. Cheah
This is undoubtedly why the
journey of companies such as Gadfly
matter so much. “They’re fighters,”
says Simpson-Fowler. “They got
street dance into the Doras; they’re
arguing with institutions that have
formed opinions on an art they don’t
understand. They’re fighting for all
of us to get into the arena. Maybe I
shouldn’t say this, but my experience
with Latinos is that, coming from a
country that lives with oppression,
they’re critical thinkers and fighters
and creative geniuses.”
Velasquez reminds me, too, that
the company swears fealty to street.
“We’re often asked,” she says, “if we
lose the rawness of street dance by
bringing it into the theatre. No.
Urban dance lives in the studio, the
theatre, the street …” Sinbadinho
agrees, and advocates for a perspective
that is larger than their own
aesthetic, that can include not only
their company but also the myriad of
practitioners of the dance. “You will
not see a greater diversity of people
in another form,” he argues, speaking
of age, colour, culture. He
describes how enraptured he was
travelling to Taiwan, coming across a
“massive” museum, glass-walled,
within the heart of the city. “At
midnight,” says Sinbadinho, “you
could walk around and see groups of
street dancers, practicing, watching
their reflection to perfect their
technique. House. Break. Lock and
pop. Dancehall, funk. Krump. At
midnight, you have people who
come together to dance, to express
themselves, to create. Imagine if that
were the society, here in Canada,
everywhere.”
Soraya Peerbaye is an arts manager living in
Toronto. She works primarily with diasporic
dance forms and body percussion, as well
as improvisation- and contemplation-based
practices. She is also a poet whose second
collection, Tell: Poems for a girlhood, is forthcoming
from Pedlar Press.
44 Dance Collection Danse

Many Thanks to Our
Recent Donors
Foundations
Anonymous
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Foundation
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Judy Jarvis Dance Foundation
The Winnipeg Foundation
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Visionary Partners ($10,000+)
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Anonymous
Miriam Adams, C.M.
Anthony Giacinti
In Memory of Lola
MacLaughlin
Ahava Halpern & Frank Lavitt
Patti Ross Milne
Laurie Nemetz
Richard Silver
Robert S. Williams
Deluxe Box ($500+)
Anonymous
In Memory of Grant Strate
Carol Bishop-Gwyn
Sally Brayley Bliss
Earlaine Collins, C.M.
Kathryn Elder
Ann Hutchinson Guest
Robert Johnston
Allana Lindgren*
Jeffrey Milgram
Selma Odom
Kenny Pearl*
Nadia Potts
Dora Rust-D’Eye
Rhonda Ryman-Kane
In Memory of Lawrence Adams
& Grant Strate
Jane Spooner
Philip & Dianne Weinstein
Orchestra ($250+)
Anonymous
In Memory of Michael Conway
Lynly Bailie
Cheryl Belkin-Epstein
Amy Bowring
William Boyle
Annette Browne
In Honour of Rachel Browne
Elizabeth Burridge
Susan Cohen
In Memory of Lawrence Gradus
Jocelyne Côté-O’Hara, C.M.
Michael Crabb
Kathleen Fraser
Maxine Goldberg
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In Memory of Germain Pierce
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In Memory of Grant Strate &
Beverly Miller
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In Memory of Lois Smith &
David Adams
Grant Strate, C.M.*
Karen Wierucki
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Balcony ($100+)
Anonymous*
Anonymous
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
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Arens
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Dr. Bernie Goldman, C.M., &
Fran Goldman
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School of Contemporary
Dancers
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In Honour of Nadia Potts
Jini Stolk
Lorna Surmeyan*
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In Memory of Lawrence
Adams, Gladys Forrester &
Gweneth Lloyd
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Loree Martin Vellner
Jonathan Voigt
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Mary Jane Warner
Fen Watkin
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In Memory of Grant Strate
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Up to $99
Anonymous*
Anonymous
In Memory of Len Gibson
Anonymous
In Memory of Gwen (Cox)
Payne
Mauryne Allan
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In Memory of Angela Leigh
Kelly Arnsby
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In Memory of Betty Bates
Jesshope
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Ken Dent
Colin Dobell

Georgie Donais
In Memory of Grant Strate
Martine Époque & Denis
Poulin
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*Donations made in Memory of DCD Co-Founder Lawrence Adams
Individuals acknowledged above donated between September 1, 2014 and October 1, 2015
If your listing contains inaccuracies or omissions, please contact us.
Dance Collection Danse gratefully acknowledges the support of our funders, all the individual donors and foundations,
and the late Nick Laidlaw. Dance Collection Danse extends lasting gratitude for the generous bequests
from the Linda Stearns and the Lois Smith Estates.
An agency of the Government of Ontario.
Un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario.
an Ontario government agency
un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario
Have you considered DCD in your Estate Planning?
When Lois Smith passed away in 2011, Dance Collection Danse became a recipient of funds from her estate. She was
The National Ballet of Canada’s first prima ballerina and the first to make a future gift to DCD through estate planning.
We will be forever grateful.
This gift supported a bold move to our new facility which
in turn has boosted our ability to celebrate this remarkable
art form she so loved.
You too can help give Canadian dance artists a firm
footing in the continuum of history. No matter what your
income, you can make a future gift to DCD now without
impacting your cash flow, lifestyle or family security.
There are different types of planned gifts and contributing
can be as simple as adding a sentence or appendix to your
current will.
We invite all dance lovers to follow Lois Smith’s lead by
including DCD in your estate planning. Through her
magnificent generosity, Lois Smith has set the bar high. A
great dancer, a great lady… a great example for all.
Lois Smith in Giselle, 1952
Photo: Gene Draper, courtesy of The National Ballet of
Canada Archives
Please let us know if DCD is named in your Estate Plan.
For more information, contact DCD’s Development
Co-ordin ator Pamela Grundy – 416-365-3233
pamela@dcd.ca