REVIEWS AND RESPONSES

Women Exploring Dreams, Myths and the Senses: Edge One

 soft foot by Robin Poitras

The Karolina Sisters by Caroline Liffman and Lina Fitzner

peeling away like a bubble in wallpaper by Vanessa Goodman

Firehall Arts Centre: July 5 and 7, 2012

Edge One featured three works by four women choreographers, highlighting the breadth of women’s creativity in contemporary dance.

By Mary Theresa Kelly

Robin Poitras’ soft foot, commissioned and performed by Ziyian Kwan, is marked by Kwan’s gifted kinesthetic intelligence. The work is dedicated to the memory of Amelia Itcush, renowned for incorporating into dance the principles of Mitzvah Technique, a therapeutic system of body mechanics that emphasizes the correct relationship of the pelvis, spine and head in movement sequencing. Appropriately, Kwan’s upper body is nude, allowing us to observe a well-aligned spine, and her movement clarity practically inspired my own vertebra to subtly adjust.

While somatic approaches inform the movement, the mythology of Ursa Major, also known as the Great Bear constellation, informs the themes. Kwan, a white stripe painted vertically on her torso, appears as a warrior, signifying cultural myths that depict the stars in the constellation as hunters chasing a bear. In many sections, she works with two extremely long bamboo poles, manipulating them with ease as extensions of her spine; I read them as symbolic references to the “pointer stars” in the Bear constellation that orient one to true north. Projecting guttural syllables from her body’s depths, Kwan somatically and imaginatively enacts her transformation from woman to bear. Conceptually, Poitras and Kwan seem to parallel the spaces deep in the body with the deep space of Ursa Major.

Sculptures become dance partners for Ziyian Kwan

By Gen Handley – WE Vancouver Published: April 18, 2012 2:00 PM

When dancer Ziyian Kwan was younger, her family would host parties, making soymilk while her father would tell guests’ fortunes with the ancient Chinese practice of I Ching.

As part of International Dance Day at the Scotiabank Dance Theatre, Kwan is channeling those memories into an interactive performance titled throwing coin squeezing soy. “I’m trying to pay respect to that tradition in a way that’s light-hearted,” she says, sitting at window-side table at Habit Lounge on Main Street. “Ultimately, I want to make a piece that’s a homage to what I experienced with him as child.”

 For close to 25 years, the Hong Kong native has been dancing, moving to people, objects and events that she finds inspiring. Along with childhood memories, the sculptures scattered around Vancouver parks have also motivated her work – she has created performance pieces around what others have created. “I think that’s a really beautiful way to respond to art — to allow whatever happens instinctively,” she says. “When I interact with the objects, people either pretend you’re not there or they totally get into it — that’s interesting.”

 It was through this process of “trespassing” into public art that Kwan developed a performance she will give as part of National Dance Week called, because the world is round. It takes place around the Engagement sculpture — the two massive diamond rings just south of English Bay. Kwan says “The imaginary world suddenly exists and I never know where my imagination intersects with somebody else’s imagination.”

 During Dance Week, Kwan will also be involved with a third performance called echoes at Kitsilano Beach Park with 21 French immersion students from Henry Hudson School. “They wrote a song about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, in the natural environment,” she explains. “I’m going to plan something around that.”

So what does Kwan’s father think about the homage to her childhood memories? “When I told him about it, he said, ‘Very interesting,’” she says with a smile. “I don’t think he totally understands it, but he thinks it’s great.”

 National Dance Week takes place throughout the city from April 23 to 29; International Dance Day is April 29 at Scotiabank Dance Theatre. For more information visit TheDanceCentre.ca.

National Dance Week descends on Vancouver by Jessica Werb on Apr 17, 2012

(L-R) Ziyian Kwan and Jane Osborne will perform at Sunset Beach Park as a part of Vancouver’s first National Dance Week.

Don’t be surprised if, in the next few days, you find yourself confronted with lithesome bodies moving in strange and compelling ways: the inaugural National Dance Week starts Sunday (April 22), and with site-specific works as well as stage performances scheduled, Vancouverites are about to experience acts of dance when they may least expect it.

In a partnership with the Vancouver Biennale, dance artists will be interacting with public sculptures around the city in daily performances. Look for tap-dance improv by Danny Nielsen at the Walking Figures sculpture outside the Broadway/City Hall Canada Line station on Monday (April 23) at noon; flamenco by Flamenco Rosario at the Echoes piece at Kits Beach on Wednesday (April 25) at 10 a.m.; and a romance for two brides performed at the artwork Engagement, in Sunset Beach Park, enacted by Ziyian Kwan and Jane Osborne on Tuesday (April 24) at 11 a.m.

Kwan, has, until recently, been working primarily as a dancer. But over the past year, she has been experimenting with the creation of her own work—and next week will see her appear in two site-specific works, in addition to a performance in the Dance Centre lobby next Sunday (April 29) on International Dance Day.

When it comes to because the world is round, the work being performed April 24 at Engagement—a Dennis Oppenheimer sculpture resembling two engagement rings—Kwan, in conversation at a Main Street coffee shop near her home, says she plans to “work with the concepts of intimacy in space”. She elaborates: “The rings are so giant, and there’s the whole backdrop of the mountains and oceans. There’s so much spaciousness, and yet it’s going to be my challenge to show intimacy and engagement between two people.”

She adds that when she was first presented with the opportunity to create a work for the site, she had not fully absorbed the meaning behind the sculpture.

“My instinctual response was, ‘Oh, I’ll do a ceremony for two brides,’” she recalls. “I didn’t even think, cognitively, that it’s two diamonds, and consequently it’s a same-sex marriage for two women. Obviously art has a way of entering your psyche.”

While that work, still in development, will have Kwan interacting with another dancer, her other Biennale-inspired work will have her sharing the spotlight with performance partners of quite another ilk: almost two dozen seven- and eight-year-olds.

On April 25, Kwan will join 21 Grade 2 and 3 French Immersion students from Henry Hudson Elementary School for echoes. It will be performed at Echoes in Kitsilano Beach Park, a sculpture by Michel Goulet featuring a series of steel chairs engraved with script. The students will sing an original song, with gestures, while Kwan gives a mostly improvised performance.

“I’m just going to follow the cue of the kids,” she explains, “because they’re so amazing. My inclination is to stay very, very fluid. I’d like to just be a lens, almost, to facilitate seeing them more.”

Kwan will step into the fore, however, on April 29, when, as her blond-wigged alter-ego akaSuzi, she’ll perform throwing coins squeezing soy, an interactive work in which she’ll give I Ching readings to passersby through word and song, assisted by dancer Anne Cooper.

Kwan, whose father is an I Ching scholar, is the first to acknowledge the irreverent work is “totally crazy”. And while the piece is a lighthearted take on the Chinese fortune-telling art, she says she has her father’s blessing: “It took him awhile to wrap his head around it, and then he was like, ‘Oh good! Very good idea!’”

It’s an exclamation that is likely to be repeated many times by Vancouverites over the coming week.

dumb instrument is a play on words that expresses Ziyian Kwan’s experience of dance:
the ineffable musings of the body
this our physical intelligence

dumb instrument Dance is a collage of activities:

other than usual dance actions with various interlopers , commissioned works, Ziyian’s nascent experiments with choreography.