Arts Umbrella dance program's Mixed Nuts marks the end of a year of rising to the challenges
Masks and taped-off square floorspace have become the new normal for dedicated dance students
Masked dancers backstage, filming Mixed Nuts; the production takes place in a vivid Candy Land (photo by David Cooper).
Arts Umbrella streams Mixed Nuts from December 17 to 31
FOR JUST ONE small view into the logistical obstacles Arts Umbrella’s dance program has had to work through to keep going during COVID-19, consider the amount of physical contact in its annual holiday show Mixed Nuts.
The fun, Candy Land-set twist on the Nutcracker is normally full of the kind of antics that would give Dr. Bonnie hives.
“My skaters hold hands. My hockey players push into each other. My mice all pile on top of each other,” says its longtime artistic director Artemis Gordon.
For the show to go on, the large-scale seasonal tradition had to shift to a filmed production and it had to be completely re-choreographed. Out with the partnering and roughhousing. In with masks to match the elaborate costumes.
As with other events in a year that will go down in infamy, Gordon’s team was tasked with deciding whether it was worth the effort. Earlier in 2020, the school had faced shutting down and moving online in the spring; the axing of its year-end grad show in June; the devastating cancellation of the students’ much anticipated European tour; the severe downsizing of its international summer program amid travel bans; and beyond-strict protocols--think new hepa filters and constant cleaning--for every lesson in its Granville Island studio.
With Mixed Nuts, the benefits outweighed the difficulties, Gordon says.
Arts Umbrella students perform a masked dance number in the school’s new facility, which it hopes to move into in the spring.
“I sat down with my team and said, ‘What do we get out of it?’” she says. “And there’s a myriad of soft skills--an awareness, the skill set of being a professional dancer, of how to be onstage, of how to take direction, of how to be in a line… They’re building blocks of what it means to be a professional dancer. There is nothing that approximates performance.
“To me it’s important that we don't lose bits of ourselves along the way in this,” she adds. “We’re holding on to everything with our teeth. And maybe now we're realizing it's more important to us than what we thought.”
Gordon has emphasized to her students that all of this terrible year’s demands are actually adding up to a useful lesson: being a professional dancer is all about adapting. At today’s top contemporary companies, you often move between choreographers who have completely different approaches within a single day. You might shift from pointe shoes to street-influenced floor work in one evening’s program. At the same time, the school has a lot to look forward to in 2021: in the spring, the school moves into a massive new renovated facility in a former Emily Carr University space on Granville Island, one with seven spacious, skylit studios and a theatre.
Intense workouts in masks, gallons of sanitizer, and taped-off six-foot-by-six-foot squares that you stick to in the studio: they’re the new normal for students like Ben Waters, who’s part of the professional program’s grad class.
“Since we've been dancing since September we’ve been staying six feet apart, so it’s kind of become second nature,” he tells Stir in a separate phone call. “We have sort of developed as a group this sixth sense of, ‘How close is this person to me?’”
And while he admits that learning to breathe in a mask--let alone perform and project expressivity in one--has been challenging, it’s more than worth the effort. “Whatever the future brings, it will set us up for it,” he says, in a mantra we could pretty much all use right now.
Why go through all this right now? Because, like his colleagues in the professional program, Waters doesn’t so much choose to be here. This is his calling.
Arts Umbrella dance program artistic director Artemis Gordon.
Waters got his start in dance as a toddler at a Burnaby studio, working his way up to hip-hop, ballet, and jazz, and then throwing himself as a teen into the world of competitive dance. After someone suggested he finish up his last year of high school at Arts Umbrella, it changed his entire perspective on the art form.
“I ended up making it into the program and I had just complete, complete culture shock,” Waters emphasizes. “The goals of the competitive world were to be physically impressive and energetic...and Arts Umbrella had completely different values based around art, over being impressive. I really changed my personal definition of contemporary dance, and it’s much more growth-oriented.”
Talk to Waters about the importance of performing his multiple roles in Mixed Nuts, which was filmed at Performance Works, and you get an idea of the show’s importance amid the fun. He can’t even pick a favourite number he’s in, because he says he loves every piece. (Each rolls out a variety of dance styles and characters, with past renditions featuring everything from swirling cupcakes to B-boy mice.)
Dancing, with masks and social distancing or not, is “the most important part of who I am as a person”, he stresses.
“‘It’s just being able to be at the studio and be creative and move in a way that inspires you," he says. “It’s our mind, body, and soul, and COVID won't get in the way of that, and injury won't get in the way of that. It’s more than just physical; it’s more than just a hobby.”
Info and tickets here.
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