Vancouver dance artists find new national platform in 60-film CAPSULE video gallery
Dumb instrument Dance’s Ziyian Kwan conceives project with NAC and F-O-R-M to screen free short works from the past pandemic year
Dumb instrument Dance’s Ziyian Kwan in The Odd Volume-Remixed. Still by David Cooper
Olivia C. Davies’ X̱wáýx̱way Swoon.
Olive theory’s reach close (2 home).
VANCOUVER’S DANCE community has produced an inspiring and artful array of video works since COVID-19 lockdown. And now many of them have found their way into a new national video gallery that’s available online today, called CAPSULE.
Hosted by the National Arts Centre, the site has gone live today with free films by 60 Canadian artists—including local names Ziyian Kwan, Jeanette Kotowich, Chengxin Wei, Olivia C. Davies, Ralph Escamillan, Raven Grenier, Josh Martin, Joshua Beamish, Shion Skye Carter, Erin Lum, Idan Cohen, and more. National artists familiar to Vancouver audiences include Daina Ashbee, Peter Chin, Margie Gillis, Crazy Smooth, and Tedd Robinson.
A testament to the resilience of the dance community during the pandemic, the project was the brainchild of Vancouver dance artist Ziyian Kwan, of dumb instrument Dance, working with NAC and F-O-R-M (Festival of Recorded Movement). The works are available to stream from May 3 to August 31. They range from just a few minutes to more elaborate 15-minute works, filmed everywhere from forests and beaches to parking lots and designed stage sets.
The works span an incredible range. Many speak directly to this pandemic moment. Wei’s touching A Wish for My Son is a personal reflection on anti-Asian racism during the pandemic; it pairs beautifully with Kwan’s autobiographical The Odd Volume—Remixed, a poetically narrated reflection on the racism she experienced growing up in the 1970s, playing scenes of the dancer off the child Joshua Wei. Meanwhile, Erin Lum strikes a bleak and melancholy vision of solitude on an empty parking lot that moves from day to night in Zì Jǐ (a F-O-R-M commission created with and Corinne Langmuir.) Olive theory’s must-see reach-close (2 home) is haunting and avant garde, with Sky Carter and musician Stefan Nazarevich navigating and noise-making with a sculptural, amplified set of piano wires. Other standouts include Martin’s intense and claustrophobic Company 605 solo Brimming (one of our top-10 isolation-themed works from last year)
Kwan was inspired to launch CAPSULE at the beginning of 2021, when she realized she and her dancer colleagues had limited means to share videos that they had created during the first year of the pandemic.
In response to an open call, artists submitted short films created between March 2020 and March 2021. From a total of 139 submissions, 60 films were selected by a committee of Canadian dance artists: Angie Cheng, Karla Etienne, Brian Solomon, and Tamar Tabori.
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