BC-born dance artist Daina Ashbee brings her intense, unflinching vision to her first group work
The artist, celebrated in Quebec and abroad, brings J'ai pleuré avec les chiens (TIME, CREATION, DESTRUCTION) home
J'ai pleuré avec les chiens (Time, Creation, Destruction). Photo by Nicholas Van Achter
Vancouver International Dance Festival and the Dance Centre present J’ai pleuré avec les chiens (TIME, CREATION, DESTRUCTION) at the Scotiabank Dance Centre from March 22 to 25
This story has been republished and updated, after the show was cancelled in 2022 and postponed to this spring.
CHOREOGRAPHER DAINA Ashbee’s unflinching, powerful work has brought her wide international attention, from Brussels to Montpellier and Guadalajara—raising the question: Why is she still underappreciated in her home province of BC?
Many artists have had to leave town to find acclaim. But could it be in part that Ashbee’s work, with its naked flesh and wracked bodies, is often described as “extreme” or “radical”?
Possibly, but the modest dance artist laughs when we ask her how she feels about those descriptives. “I understand it, but it’s just my personality,” the gently soft-spoken artist tells Stir from Gabriola Island, which she’s been using as a homebase since the pandemic started. “As an intense person, when I use something, I use it all the way—and in my case, I’m working with the body.
“When I was 22, making my first piece, it didn't seem extreme or bold; it didn't seem that radical to me because I was just doing what I was feeling,” she reflects. “I was just doing what was coming out of me naturally, and I didn’t have a process of schooling or university that taught me the rules of creation or choreography. I was just learning as I went….I really think I just approached it from a very natural, deep, subconscious place in myself that didn't ask if people were going to like it or whether I’d done the right thing.”
Nanaimo-raised, the artist of Cree, Métis, and European ancestry trained here in Vancouver with Modus Operandi and danced for a while with Raven Spirit Dance. But it was when she moved to Montreal about a decade ago that she started carving out her own, fearless work and was instantly embraced—there and then abroad.
Her breakout piece was 2014’s Unrelated, a raw, unsettling duet that embodied the suffering of murdered and missing Indigenous women through flailing hair and crawling bodies. In the ensuing years, she’s won a coveted Bessie (the New York Dance and Performance Award) for Outstanding Breakout Choreographer, Montreal’s Prix Découverte de la danse, shown work at the Venice Biennale, and been named one of 25 talents to watch by Dance Magazine. Last summer, she was the subject of an entire retrospective at France’s Festival Montpellier Danse.
Locally, she brought her provocative, ritualistic Pour, inspired by the menstrual cycle and featuring nude dancer Paige Culley dragging through puddles of water on the floor, to the 2017 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival—the same year she was selected for the Dance Centre’s Yulanda M. Faris Choreographers Program.
Though she saw cancellations of her work abroad during the pandemic in 2020, Ashbee has been back in full demand around the globe in the past year. She’s taken her intimate solos and duets to Germany, France, Belgium, Croatia, and Mexico and just returned from Costa Rica. And here she is, back in BC, on Gabriola, where she spent time growing up. “I feel happy close to nature,” she tells Stir.
This week, local audiences get to check in with Ashbee again when Vancouver International Dance Festival and the Dance Centre present her first group piece, J’ai pleuré avec les chiens (Time, Creation, Destruction). It features openly naked bodies moving sculpturally through transformation and catharsis, pain and ecstasy.
Despite the viscerality of her work, the piece started—like her other creations—through writing.
“I do long, long meditations, where I’m imagining embodying it, and writing is just a process that helps me document that meditation,” she explains. “The choreography is in my mind. I imagine it from the beginning to the end, and what it sounds like and feels like and smells like.”
Daina Ashbee.
Ashbee, so known for the intense solos she’s created for other performers, has enjoyed exploring her ideas with a larger group. In her 20s, she says she was often channelling her own voice through a single performer who was close to her own age. Now 30, she is ready to push beyond that—here working with a group of five men and women that range in age from 24 to 58. She says the larger number of bodies allows her to create a new kind of energy in the room.
“To have so many bodies moving: there’s this partnering and overlapping of rhythms and different things happening in the space—so much more moving, shifting, shaping, transforming,” she explains.
In this pandemic era of social distancing, J’ai pleuré avec les chiens has a movement language that’s bracing in its tactile intimacy. Knees bend onto backs, bare feet press onto stomachs and torsos to hoist bodies into the air.
As you might expect, Ashbee works hard to build trust in the studio, her creation process requiring so much literal and figurative exposure from her committed dancers.
Letting them in on her writing and meditations helps create a safe space, she says. “I think there’s a shared vulnerability transferred from me to them and them to me,” she explains, adding: “It’s easier now that I have a reputation; they trust my work.”
With the new piece, Ashbee continues to push into realms that almost go beyond dance—or at least dance as we have come to know it.
“I feel like when I’m creating I’m not trying to replicate dance moves or follow any dance that I’ve learned. I’m trying to create a new way of moving and communicating with the body and its energy,” Ashbee says. “I really try hard not to be influenced by dance I’ve seen and I really try to start from a raw place in my own body to generate movement and energy.”
In other words, this is a chance for West Coast dance fans who haven't yet checked out Ashbee's singular voice to see what is earning her fans around the world. As the good-humoured artist says with another small laugh: "I had a lot of support in Quebec and a lot in Europe and France, so let's see what happens now that I'm back where I was born."
Related Articles
