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The performance features four master Canadian dance artists who, steeped in decades of making work, came together for the first time onstage. Audiences saw William Lau in the Chinese Peking opera tradition; Hari Krishnan in Indian bharatanatyam; Peter Chin in his reflection of Cambodian culture; and Alvin Erasga Tolentino in his interpretation of Filipino heritage dances.

For me, watching dance is a tactile experience: it changes the rhythm of my breath, and I feel similar muscular connections as the performer. There’s neuroscientific research to support that this response is common, relating to movement of all types. It’s an experience that dance scholar Susan Foster calls “kinesthetic empathy,” and, before her, dance critic John Martin dubbed it “inner mimicry.” Whatever we call it, spectatorship is more active than we might think.

Tactility is what artist and performer Marites Carino had in mind when creating her installation HANDSHACK – a black box in which two people anonymously and blindly get to know each other by touching hands. This intimate exchange – a dance of sorts – is then projected on a screen for other gallerygoers to see. You can read more about this work within the issue.

Themes of audiences and empathy run through these pages. In our “Practice” section, educator Miggy Esteban writes about how he builds empathy by teaching students about dance while introducing difficult histories into the classroom. Deaf and Disability artist Lawrence Shapiro offers a provocation about how audiences and artists can be active in other ways – by advocating for accessibility in selecting performance venues.

Our “In Conversation” feature also engages with ideas of spectatorship, but from a curatorial perspective. Ann-Marie Williams spoke with two generations of presenters, asking them “How can we embrace the new curatorial generation’s no-nonsense activism, while honouring the milestones reached by the previous generation of presenters?”

I hope you enjoy reading these articles and the other offerings in this issue. Keep an eye out for our accompanying online articles.

Wishing you a terrific fall season!

A career as a professional ballet dancer is not for the faint of heart. The craft demands not only physicality but also mental resiliency. For Felder, a corps de ballet dancer with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal (LGBC), the key to sustaining herself is nurturing healthy outlets for self-care.

Born into a family of academics and raised in Vladivostok, Russia, Mikhaylyuk sensed that her dance practice felt external from the rest of her life. “That was one of the reasons why, for the longest time, I approached dance solely from a technical perspective,” she explains. “I saw value primarily in the execution, clarity and the body as a tool to impress but not to express.” After a year working in commercial dance in China, Mikhaylyuk decided to change her surroundings in search of something more fulfilling. Moving to Canada, she pressed pause on her dance career to focus instead on an art history degree at the University of British Columbia. It wasn’t long, however, before she fell back into her love of movement.

Born and raised in Toronto, Estelle Nicol is a versatile dancer with an extensive background in dance and performance, specializing in salsa and Argentine tango. She is the co-founder and executive director of City Dance Corps, one of downtown Toronto’s leading centres for dance and artistic movement, offering dance classes for both adults and youth. Located in the heart of Queen West, City Dance Corps is celebrating seventeen years in business.

We asked Nicol to share what inspires her in this work.

“Do you touch more people or more technology in a day?” It’s a question Marites Carino asks of those who participate in her interactive installation. The answer is often disheartening. HANDSHACK is Carino’s provocative brainchild, and it’s designed to play with our expectations of social touch in startling and profound ways.

Foot reflexology is a gentle, non-invasive therapy that involves stimulating the nerve endings on the foot. A reflexologist uses gentle pressure and touch to work on the nervous system, addressing areas of difficulty, stagnation and congestion in the body.

Kate Holden, a dance artist and a holistic health practitioner, talks about the benefits of including reflexology in a post-performance recovery plan. 

“The truth about stories is that that’s all we are,” wrote author and scholar Thomas King. In that vein, the forms through which we tell our stories are also revealing, offering information about our identities as individuals, societies and cultures. As dancers, the choices we make in creating, performing and sharing our stories through the body can have impact.

In my own practice, working in a school system, dance has been the key for unlocking conversations about social justice in the classroom. I work with students to develop critical thinking skills to analyze dance and social issues all through a focus on building empathy. This approach has allowed my students, and myself, to better understand the experiences of others and to further question how our society operates. 

I recently attended a performance in downtown Toronto and, as I left, I couldn’t help but feel that aspects of the evening were a disgrace – strong words for a show that I thoroughly enjoyed. Recently I had seen another show by the same company in downtown Toronto. The performances were superb – a memorable hybrid of spoken word, music and movement, through which the ensemble created a rich fabric of expression. The first venue was accessible; the second was not. Accessibility has a huge impact on my enjoyment of the performances.

“In our version,” explains choreographer Jean Grand-Maître, “Victor’s very rich family lives in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, and Victor studies at Harvard Medical School.” Their version is meant to reflect the power imbalances in our society – the way only a few hold most of the political and technological power across our globe.

The era shift is interesting from a movement and costuming perspective. Speaking about the monster, Grand-Maître remarks: “He’s much more agile than we’d think from all the representations – more spastic, animalistic, with a skeletal face and yellow eyes.” Costume designer Anne-Séguin Poirier has spent the summer prototyping the monster’s costume, perfecting the grotesque, partially prosthetic look. She explains that with a story like Frankenstein, the challenge has been to convey the scale of that world.

The production process, stretched across the country, has been stimulating from a cultural perspective: “I work a lot from a distance because I live in Montréal,” Poirier explains. “There’s this sense of a relationship across a great distance. We’re a team but we’re from different cultures, and it’s been interesting to see that exchange.”

The embodiment of ego, Dr. Frankenstein and his experiments have been objects of attention for a century. “There’s a phrase I’ve heard: that he steals the reproductive power of women,” explains Grand-Maître. “And then another one is that we live in a world without God.” Grand-Maître was inspired by Guillermo del Toro’s love of Frankenstein’s monster, a monster who didn’t ask to be born. “The most important thing is to convey the human in the monster’s body,” says Grand-Maître, “and not the other way around.”