Generations connect and cross-pollinate at Dances for a Small Stage
Rising Vancouver artists like Nasiv Kaur Sall share program with veteran talents, as event adds two more late-night shows at Please! Beverage Co.
Nicole Rose Bond.
Nasiv Kaur Sall.
Dances for a Small Stage: Late Night is at Please! Beverage Co. on February 4 and 5 at 9 pm; earlier shows for the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival the same evenings are now sold out
IT MAY BE PRESENTED on a tiny platform in a cozy venue, but the latest iteration of Dances for Small Stage boasts big intergenerational connections.
Artists from their 20s to their 70s have created the program’s 11 short works—the most artistic director Julie-anne Saroyan has brought together in the event’s 23-year history. Amid them, they form a network that links the past and present of the Canadian dance scene—and of Small Stage itself.
Take emerging artist Nasiv Kaur Sall, who’s presenting a captivating dance-theatre solo called Tea. The Arts Umbrella grad has worked with local dance companies from Crystal Pite’s Kidd Pivot, Dance//Novella, and Out Innerspace to Quebec’s Anne Plamondon Productions, while also choreographing commercial dance on film and TV sets.
That lineage carries on with her work with Dances for a Small Stage. The Canadian-Punjabi dance artist says joining the program with veterans like National Ballet of Canada and Toronto Dance Theatre alumna Claudia Moore and Coriograph Theatre choreographer Cori Caulfield has inspired her budding practice as well.
“By seeing them and how they work, I was able to dream for myself a long trajectory in this career of mine,” she explains. “Just to know that somebody like Claudia believes in me has given me the confidence that maybe I didn’t have before.
“Watching her perform, I learned about what’s actually needed in performance. When you’re younger, it can be all about physicality and technique. Sharing a bill with her has given me permission to shed what isn’t needed in my work and to slow down. Usually you are in your bubble with other emerging artists who are applying for the same things and this gives you a grander scope. Working with artists in different stages in their career lets you step back and say, ‘How do I want to build a life?’”
Sall has a new iteration of Tea that’s taking her exploration of identity even deeper than the rendition at Small Stage last summer. The piece is set to a monologue interlude from English-Nigerian rap artist Little Simz’s Sometimes I Might Be Introvert album—the voice of a prim English woman offering listeners tea, against swirling fairy-tale harp. But then it dissolves into a soundtrack Sall cowrote with composer-musician Stefan Nazarevich, and shifts into something meditative and altogether different.
“Originally I wanted to make a theatre piece—something more theatrical and whimsical, because I’m an actor as well,” Sall says. “Working with Crystal [Pite] over the last year, I’ve been able to really work on my theatrical physical skills and I wanted to hone that.
“Little Simz puts it in this kind of Disney whimsy sound that makes it a little more digestible. I wanted it to feel like something fun, and then as you get into it it’s actually quite heavy–you’re seeing this character go through something. The character at the beginning is really just a mask.”
Sall continues to dig in and break down the monologue, finding ever-deeper new meaning in lines like “The bravest of hearts can sometimes be the loneliest of souls/And pride comes with pain.”
The offering of tea resonates for Sall—not only because her father spent time in the U.K. when he first emigrated from India before moving to Canada, but because it also ties into the traditions of Punjabi cha. She’s currently on the lookout for a teacup to use in the piece that captures both the Western and Indian looks.
“Now it feels like that text, that monologue, is a lot of the stories I had been told, and the molds I was fitting into,” she explains. “Now this piece is about what it means to shed that to find home.”
She’s also able to “find home” and develop her practice amid the diverse program at Dances for a Small Stage. The bill also includes solos by flamenco-contemporary artist AJ Simmons; veteran burlesque standout Burgundy; actor-dancer Jessica Dawn Keeling; and contemporary dancer and choreographer Rebecca Margolick, another Arts Umbrella grad who has danced for Andrea Peña & Artists and Sidra Bell Dance New York. The connections continue with Nicole Bond Smith: she and Saroyan hail from the same hometown, they both studied dance at York University, and she performs the work of iconic Canadian choreographer Peggy Baker at the show. That echoes nicely with the fact that Moore is dancing a piece by another Canadian legend—Tedd Robinson—on the same program.
In other words, Small Stage weaves together legacies in Canadian dance with the present and future—tracking what Saroyan calls the “generational shift” that’s happening, and connecting genre-pushing young dancers like Sall with the innovators who laid the groundwork.
The unique menu of dance “tapas” fits well into Small Stage’s ambiance of its cabaret-like new home at the boutique distillery Please! Beverage Co. The mix is obviously appealing to arts fans: both of its shows have sold out at the PuSh Festival, so Saroyan has independently added two more late-night offerings at 9 pm.
“Part of what works with the show is to be really close to the audience,” Saroyan says of the intimate set up. “It nurtures conversations and feedback, and that is really important to the artists—especially right now with diminishing performance opportunities. So it’s wonderful to be able to add two shows in these scarce times.” 
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