BC Movement Arts expands its rural reach with residencies and new dates in Campbell River
Late-spring season includes a Finnish North American premiere in Sointula and first show in Campbell River
Livona Ellis and Rebecca Margolick in Fortress. Photo by F. Perez
Mary Louise Albert
BC Movement Arts Society’s North Island Contemporary Dance Series continues with Rebecca Margolick and Livona Ellis’s Fortress and Four Solos, June 7 in Campbell River, June 9 in Alert Bay, June 10 in Port McNeill, and June 11 in Sointula
WITH AN EXPANDED residency program, the addition of Campbell River to its performance series, and the upcoming North American premiere by a Finnish troupe, Sointula-based BC Movement Arts Society has been growing its vision for contemporary dance in BC’s North Island region.
Hard to believe Mary Louise Albert’s company, after pandemic delays since launching in 2019, is still in the throes of its first fully realized live-performance season. On June 7, New York-based dance artist Rebecca Margolick and Ballet BC alumna Livona Ellis take four solos and their first collaboration, the duet Fortress, to the new venue at Campbell River’s Tidemark Theatre. That’s followed by performances in Alert Bay and Port McNeill.
Those shows are followed June 17 and 18 by the North American premiere of Finnish dancers Maria Nurmela and Ville Oinonen’s The Days—a project that has been years in the making for Albert. She met Nurmela at a dance conference in 2019, and when she told the Finnish artist where BC Movement Arts was based, the dancer was immediately intrigued: Nurmela, like many Finns, was familiar with the history of the utopian community that Finnish immigrants had set up in the remote West Coast outpost at the turn of the last century. The dream was hatched to stage The Days in the historic Finnish Organizational Hall (where, early on, Albert secured funding to outfit a proper dance floor). After the long pandemic shutdowns, and with the support of the new Nordic Bridges—a year-long exchange of art, culture, and ideas between Nordic and Canadian artists led by Harbourfront Centre in Toronto—the troupe will finally perform for islanders, also hitting Port McNeill and Alert Bay before hitting Vancouver’s Scotiabank Dance Centre before heading home.
“There are still original descendants here,” Albert says of the Finnish residents in the area. “That this great scrappy arts organization is part of that North American premiere in Sointula—the community is very excited about that!”
In fact, the community is very excited about contemporary dance in general, it seems. Albert launched the project after leaving artistic directorship of the Chutzpah Festival here in Vancouver in 2019. For several years before that, through Chutzpah, she had been bringing dance artists such as Shay Kuebler and Donald Sales up to the region, where she and her husband have long had a home. Over those years, she’s developed an avid audience for cutting-edge dance where you wouldn’t necessarily expect one.
“You take a pocket of anywhere and there's a range of people. Here it goes from urban refugees to people working in forestry and fishing, and what I’ve found so interesting and always kept in mind is that you can't second-guess that you know your area,” Albert says. “There's been a trust-building. At least in this coastal area, there's a pride around it. So for people to have these visiting artists coming and so enjoying this environment, my audience is loving that. In the Sointula talkbacks [after performances], everybody stays.
“So I'm really hoping that over the next couple years that it will be very established—that it becomes part of the area and ingrained in the area.”
Creative residencies have become a key part of the vision. Over the past year or so, Albert has hosted not just Margolick and Ellis, but Amber Funk Barton, the 605 Collective, and Alexis Fletcher and Sylvain Senez in the leafy surrounds of the island. Thanks to new federal and provincial funding, more residencies will kick off again in the fall—many of them resulting in works that will go on to be performed in BC Movement Arts’ presentation series.
“It was something I was doing when I was running Chutzpah,” Albert says, adding residencies are needed more than ever: “What happened in the last couple years with independent contract workers is that not only were their performance abilities cut off at the knees, but so was the ability and the funds with venues to be able to create work.
“It’s a really important aspect, I feel, of presenting,” she continues. “You can cocoon into this area and space and really have that freedom to work. I've always programmed from the perspective of an artist: that if you focus on their needs and talents, it just naturally trickles into the quality of the work you’re presenting.”
As spring and summer moves into fall again, that trickle looks ready to build into a regular flow of contemporary dance into a new area of the province.
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