At Dancing on the Edge, two works offer interdisciplinary reflections on sisterhood
Furious Grace Dance Theatre’s Gravity in Your Eyes and Method Dance Society’s Behind Veiled Eyes explore female friendships and matriarchal ties
Gravity in Your Eyes. Photo by Furious Grace Dance Theatre
Dancing on the Edge Festival presents Method Dance Society’s Behind Veiled Eyes on June 18 at 7 pm and June 20 at 9 pm as part of EDGE 2, and Furious Grace Dance Theatre’s Gravity in Your Eyes on June 21 and 22 at 7 pm as part of EDGE 4, both at the Firehall Arts Centre
GROWING UP IN THE EARLY 2000s, sisters Anya Saugstad and Sophia Saugstad did a lot of lip-syncing to the era’s biggest pop-radio hits. And while childhood days of giggle-filled collaboration didn’t instantly catapult them to stardom, they did pave the way for how their future careers as creatives would intertwine two decades later.
Anya, an Arts Umbrella–trained dancer and choreographer, is a frequent collaborator with Vanessa Goodman’s company Action at a Distance, with which she has performed on tour throughout Canada, the U.S., and Germany in Graveyards and Gardens and Core/Us. Her own choreographic work Paper Mountains, which features more than 1,000 handcrafted paper airplanes, secured her The Dance Centre’s biennial Iris Garland Emerging Choreographer Award for the 2023-24 season.
Sophia, by contrast, is a Studio 58–trained theatre artist whose directing credits include Bramble Theatre Collective’s 30 Neo-Futurist Plays, Sydney Marino’s Unravelling at Fabulist Theatre’s Or Festival, and Venus and Moon at Ignite! Festival and Vines Art Festival. She performed her wacky one-woman show Long Live Lexi Bezos at the Vancouver Fringe Festival last September, and will be remounting it at the Edmonton Fringe Festival in August.
Anya Saugstad.
The Saugstad siblings have now joined forces to create and codirect Gravity in Your Eyes, an interdisciplinary exploration of sisterhood and the guidance it provides in many women’s lives, which is making its official premiere at this year’s Dancing on the Edge Festival as part of the EDGE 4 program.
“We already know each other so well,” Anya tells Stir over a phone call, joined by her sister. “So we’re able to dive into ideas unapologetically, I would say, and with abandon. We’re not afraid to bring up things that we think might work and might not work, or throw things away, or try new things, because we have already built this relationship with one another. So we don’t have to be so precious with the work. I would say that’s kind of one thing that I’ve been learning—we can really just play and see what happens.”
“I agree,” Sophia chimes in. “I feel like there’s a level of honesty and trust that we have with each other, because we aren’t afraid of hurting each other’s feelings too much.”
Anya recently took the helm of Dancers Dancing, a nonprofit organization started in 1999 by Judith Garay, former longtime principal dancer with New York’s legendary Martha Graham Dance Company and an associate professor at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts (where Anya also received a fine arts degree in dance). Under Anya’s artistic direction, the company will begin a new legacy as Furious Grace Dance Theatre.
Gravity in Your Eyes is Furious Grace’s first official project. The sisters’ creation process began last summer with a two-week residency to develop a script and early-stage choreography, supported by a Canada Council for the Arts grant.
Two beings are attached at the beginning of the piece, and learn to embrace separation as the storyline unfolds. By honing in on themes of independence and sisterhood, Gravity in Your Eyes navigates the contrasts between people’s internal workings and the external world.
Sophia Saugstad. Photo by Ross den Otter
“We’re kind of exploring not just sisterhood, but female friendships, and the connections we make when we’re young,” Sophia shares. “We inevitably grow apart sometimes, but we’re always influenced by the connections we had when we were young, and those always stay with us. This has been an exploration of sisterhood, specifically with this group of women that we’re working with, but it’s also about childhood, and belonging, and home as well.”
Eight performers will deliver the work at Dancing on the Edge: Nasiv Kaur Sall, Sarah Hutton, Cassidy Hergott, Laine Gillies, Simran Sachar, Sarah Formosa, Eowynn Enquist, and Katrina Teitz. The group is a split between dancers and theatremakers, but the artists all regularly incorporate interdisciplinary exploration into their practices.
Learning how to seamlessly combine movement and dialogue, say the Saugstad sisters, has been an exercise in expanding disciplinary boundaries for the both of them.
“As a choreographer, I’ve been using a lot of themes of grief and yearning, and Soph has been working a lot with humour,” Anya explains. “So it was nice for us to work together and kind of pair those two themes into one, and see how humour can live inside my work, and grief and yearning can live inside Sophia’s work.”
Behind Veiled Eyes. Photo by Christos Sagiorgis
While Anya and Sophia’s collaboration is bringing important reflections on female connections to this year’s Dancing on the Edge programming, there’s another work offering up its own unique perspective on sisterhood and matriarchal ties.
Giselle Liu, associate director of Method Dance Society, is presenting her latest work Behind Veiled Eyes as part of the EDGE 2 program. The duet, performed by sisters Caitlin McCormick and Abigael McCormick, blends dance and dialogue in an exploration of healing through family lineages.
Liu’s inspiration for the piece comes from a recent development in her own family. When her older brother gave birth to a daughter, she began to consider intergenerational relationships and matriarchal lineage in a different light.
“I had never met any of my grandmothers,” Liu says over a Zoom call, while on a trip to London to conduct research for an extension of Behind Veiled Eyes. “And I was always curious about that—but also about never being able to imagine three generations in the same room. I think that really surprised me when she entered the world. It wasn’t for any reason other than it not being in my life. And when that happened, I was like, ‘Ah, okay—there’s something here.”
A foundational value that Liu, a Prince Rupert–raised dancer who spent 11 years working abroad in Hong Kong, centralizes within her practice is collaboration. Behind Veiled Eyes was created using what Liu calls an intermodal, spontaneous “expressive-arts approach”, which means the final 15-minute piece is ultimately the product of close teamwork between the choreographer and performers.
In one section of the performance, the McCormick sisters experiment with how to trace Chinese characters in space using their bodies, which Liu says is a spot-on demonstration of her collaborative style. Instead of imposing her own ideas for the concept onto the dancers, Liu allowed them to experiment with different linguistically inspired shapes and movement pathways on their own. She then drew from those explorations, which gives the choreography a more organic feel.
Giselle Liu.
Liu’s focus on collaboration and family ties in Behind Veiled Eyes has another facet to it. Her mother, designer Katherine Liu, created the piece’s costumes out of paper. Adapted from a paper kimono designed by Marsha Roddy, the garments pull inspiration from traditional Hanfu clothing. The Liu matriarch will also be reading out a Chinese poem about ancestors during the work.
“In regards to a bigger scope and as a value for myself, family is really important,” Liu says. “Whether that’s building family in my own bloodline, or my own lineage, or when I’m working with others, that is always an underlying context. So when we talk about healing, I think it really happens over deeper connections, and unveiling these interconnections that we all naturally have. And that happens through dialogue, and that happens through conversation, and that happens through shared time and shared experiences.”
Liu’s parents were born in Hong Kong. When she moved her artistic practice there for more than a decade, that land-based research helped Liu connect to her family’s past. Now, by collaborating closely with her mother at Dancing on the Edge, the choreographer gets to reflect on her family ties once again—and honour all the other types of matriarchal relationships that exist out in the world, too.
“I think the connections that families can have are quite special,” Liu shares, “and I think you’ll notice that with the sisters in this duet—they have a really unique chemistry. That’s something that I was really pleasantly surprised by, and also familiar with: when you see it, you notice something quite special about it. And we don’t often talk about it.”
Thank goodness, then, that Behind Veiled Eyes and Gravity in Your Eyes are offering up two perfect excuses to start that conversation. 
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