Passing on the Baton: Interview with Andreas Kahre and Mirna Zagar

by Shanny Rann

I became the Editor of Dance Central in July this year, seventeen years after I first joined SFU's dance program as an international student. Since graduating, my love for dance has taken me to many countries in various capacities as a performer, dramaturg, scholar and dance anthropologist. I returned to Vancouver in 2015 after being away for eleven years. In a way, this editor role is a homecoming for me as I shifted from a distant enthusiast to the centre of dance conversations in BC overnight.

Andreas Kahre (AK) joined Dance Central as Editor in 2011 and after eight years, felt it was a good time for the publication to reflect the generational shift in the BC dance community. For the past few months, he has been extremely helpful in providing me with the background and technical knowledge of Dance Central. I am grateful for his and Mirna Zagar (MZ)'s support in taking the helm of Dance Central.

SR: What was it that made you want to be the editor for Dance Central?

AK: Dance Central at the time was mainly a newsletter for members, in a simple format with eight pages of content. My motivation in taking it on was based on my past as a collaborator with many different dance artists who had begun to work outside of the hierarchical model, with the choreographer at the top, and started to develop relationships with their performers, designers and composers as co-creators. In many projects the dancers were now generating a lot of the material. In the context of Dance Central, I was interested in creating a format that would give dance artists who weren’t necessarily choreographers room to speak about their practice and explore what they were interested in. To my delight, what I found was that many contemporary dancers had become much more articulate about their practice. They had learned to see their work in a broader context, and I wanted

SR: I like that you were coming from a collective approach but the making of Dance Central in the past has been quite solitary for you, hasn’t it?

AK: We didn't have any funds to hire writers, which is the ongoing challenge in magazine publishing, even at the measly rates writers get. Dance Central was originally perceived as a newsletter for members only, to make members aware of the schedule of events at the Dance Centre. To expand that role was an interesting challenge, but without funding, the best strategy seemed to use the ‘conversation’ and to provide an interdisciplinary avenue for artists involved with dance to speak about their work.

MZ: I think making Dance Central collaborative has been a perpetual challenge for us, because I find a lot of times artists say they don't have time. Or they feel they're not equipped to write about their work, or they simply want someone else to write about them. My sense is that it has to do a lot with artists not being equipped to write about and to speak about their works to different audiences. They're more comfortable speaking in their dance jargon, to their immediate teams and collaborators and to their colleagues, but anything that goes beyond those categories, I feel many of them try to get out of it. Am I correct, Andreas? Is that your experience? A lot of it has to do with language.

DIFFICULTIES OF WRITING AND TALKING ABOUT DANCE

AK: I agree with Mirna. A lot of dancers are certainly more comfortable if they can use a kind of shorthand to describe their work. Dance, like music is difficult to talk or write about at the best of times, which among other things presents an ongoing challenge for designers and musical collaborators: How does a choreographer talk about scenography or lighting? What is our shared aesthetic frame of reference other than “I want to make sure that my face can be seen”?

Beyond that, there is is the question of placing dance in a broader aesthetic context, in a critical way and in a meaningful cultural framework. Over the years, dancers have become much more aware and articulate on those aspects — take Natalie Tin Yin Gan, who I had a conversation with a while back. She was an interesting character to talk to because she is very aware of how different her frame of reference is compared to a local audience, and she credits her collaborators for finding a way to communicate this. To some extent, it's really up to collaborators to educate dance artists, to say if you want to make a decision, here is a framework for it. It's not just that you prefer pink over green but what are we telling an audience? What is their frame of reference for our work? That is an ongoing process, of course, but there are more people willing to help dance broaden its framework. The impetus often still comes from the outside, especially from curators.

That's the other big change, I think — the need for dance artists to position themselves vis-a-vis what a curator might need to understand, and the opportunity for curators to broaden the audience’s language. It's been interesting to see how this has unfolded in Vancouver, especially with curators that aren't from within the local dance scene, as when Mirna brought in Adam Hayward from New Zealand or Pirjetta Mulari from Finland — curators who have a different context for how dance is spoken about and how it is presented.

MZ: I often think of when I studied art history, all we did in the first year was to find descriptive language to describe what we saw in initially more realistic paintings, and slowly progressing to abstract. Although the painting is abstract, you can speak about it with some quite concrete ideas, statements, because you develop the language, perspective and ways of analyzing the art work for what it is and from the context that it comes from, or you create the context for what you are looking at from what you know or see around it. I think that is something that is missing in dancers' education, especially for choreographers; it is not dealt with in a consistent manner. During the study period, they all are very well-versed in talking about their work to a very specific audience, the audience of peers. When they graduate and start speaking about their works, we see often that they copy and paste what they wrote in their grant applications, forgetting that perhaps it requires translation, or transposition of the thought, idea, concept to address another group of people.

I find that artists often get quite attached to certain statements that really mean something to them or to their milieu. I think there's a lot to be done there, and the work should start as early in the study of dance as possible. Choreography is not just putting movements together, to have a voice you must develop your vocabulary, your syntax and this will lead to your style.

HAPPY MEMORIES WITH DANCE CENTRAL

SR: Andreas, what are some of your memorable conversations you have had during your time with Dance Central?

AK: There are quite a few. I should begin by thanking Hilary Maxwell, who has been wonderful to work with, and kept the publication going as The Dance Centre's Membership Coordinator, with an excellent mind for dance writing, and as a sharp-eyed copy editor. One important series was based on our attempt to connect to the indigenous dance community. Initially, we collaborated with Mique’l Dangeli, who was going to act as a guest curator, but had to withdraw when she finished her Ph.D. and was offered a university position in Alaska. But she did provide an introduction to the series, and to some of the dancers, who in turn offered introductions to their peers, and out of these personal recommendations a very interesting series of conversations emerged, based on a completely different set of political, cultural, social and aesthetic perspectives. One particular highlight for me was a conversation with Margaret Grenier who had a fascinating way of positioning her work as a dance artist among a set of historical and contemporary questions regarding protocol, and the dialogue within the indigenous community about what should and should not be shared. I thought that was something that you couldn't easily find anywhere else, and that made me happy.

SR: That's good to know. How has the dancing in Vancouver changed?

AK: The relationship between contemporary dance and ballet comes to my mind. Unlike the 80s and 90s when I began to work with contemporary dancers, there are now a number of companies who combine a completely contemporary approach to dance, with popular culture, hip hop, media content — and ballet. This shift in contemporary dance took place a little before I took over as the editor, but it created a very different dimension of contemporary work, by a generation of dance artists that combined elements in a different way. Another shift is a movement away from the ‘interdisciplinary’ model of combining dance and theatre in the way a generation of dance artists who went through their training at SFU had been working — especially with the integration of text and theatre elements into dance. SFU has created a whole generation of artists with training in both forms, and looked for ways to combine the two — with mixed results that weren’t always successful, either as theatre or as dance. But it found a sympathetic audience and it was really a process of development. My sense is that dance has become more episodic, influenced more by the rhythms of interactive media and video art, and less concerned with narrative, which in the 90s, was very much at the forefront and has since faded, or been replaced by a different mode of narrativity, one that integrates text, space, data in a new way.

DANCE AND TEXT

SR: It brings to mind Ziyian Kwan’s new space, called Morrow on West Pender in Vancouver. I attended a series of solo performances by her and other female dancers as tribute to their grandmothers. They were combining text in their dances with narratives and poems. Sometimes, words got thrown out as they moved their bodies across the space. The whole experience was very new to me, there were just two of us in the audience including myself. It was such an intimate space and you feel the dancers were talking to you, looking you straight in your eyes, performing for you and really engaging you at a level that I've never experienced before.

AK: I would imagine that in a more intimate setting, text is easier to use to communicate in the context of dance performance. It's not the same thing as yelling at an audience of 150 while running in circles. Besides which, there were often technical issues with dancers trying to project text while moving. Those ‘issues’ are interesting in themselves of course, and some dance artists who integrate text now are exploring these questions from a new vantage point. I am thinking for example of Alexa Mardon, whose practice aims to integrate critical reflection on performance and on the body, in society, in a discipline, and across disciplines. And this work appears to be less concerned with the conventional models of dance dramaturgy that have been prevalent since the 90s.

SR: Andreas, now that you're passing on the baton, do you have any hopes for Dance Central?

AK: One thing that comes to mind relates to COVID, and the way it has completely rearranged what it means to be working in the performing arts. As sad as that is, it might create an opportunity for Dance Central to become an artistic platform in its own right, neither a blog nor a magazine but something lively and interactive that allows dance artists to use text and images in a new way. Having a visual and text-based medium that is accessible everywhere might just create an opportunity to develop work that integrates writing in a different format than a review or an ‘article’. I think there is something potentially exciting in that!

Another aspect of Dance Central in the future is, again, connected to the restrictions we are experiencing and has to do with creating an archive of artistic activity of this time and in this time. I am thinking of the artists in the community who tell me that they are having a hard time creating — not just physically, but because the boundaries against which we judge artistic decisions have shifted or even disappeared. So, as a composer might wonder whether the next note should be an E flat or a B, the context has shifted and makes some aspects of creative work feel arbitrary. The other aspect is of course that the social dimensions of our lives are so severely curtailed. And with that, it is getting more difficult to maintain a shared record of our response, both individually and as a community as COVID goes on. Dance Central, like any magazine, has always been in part an archive, but now that function seems more important than ever to me. This is because we may be in this for the next five years, or it may never go away.

SR: That's true. This is such a critical time to be archived, because when we look back many years from now, this is a time when many things are shifting, and it is the start of new beginnings. I like the idea of making the interview process transparent on social media platforms or turning it into a podcast. I agree with you, Andreas, the future of Dance Central is exciting! I envision it to be inclusive of the great many dance styles and artists to reflect the diverse ethnic communities and geographic regions across BC. I look forward to discovering and getting to know all the dance lovers I have yet to meet. Mirna, do you have any last words?

MZ: I just want to thank you, Andreas! I'm sure you're not going away and our paths will cross again in different formats. I really want to thank you and let you know how much we all appreciated where you've taken us. We've got big shoes to fill and standards to uphold, but also as one door closes, another opens! A new pathway is in the making. So the power be with you, Shanny! We are here now on this new path that has to reveal itself and we're all in this together!

Andreas Kahre continues to teach sound and work as a freelance designer and dramaturg. He lives in Vancouver and on Gabriola Island.

Mirna Zagar joined The Dance Centre as Executive Director in 1998.She has been instrumental in building bridges between Vancouver and international communities. In 2009 she was presented with a commemorative medallion by the Governor General Michaëlle Jean for her work in the furthering of cultural relations between Canada and Croatia.