At the Chutzpah! Festival, life changes bring new nuance to Livona Ellis and Rebecca Margolick's Fortress
Strength and vulnerability meet in new work inspired by the choreographer-dancers’ mothers and grandmothers
Fortress. Photo by Benjamin Peralta
The Chutzpah! Festival and the Dance Centre present Fortress with Ne.Sans Opera and Dance’s About Time at the Scotiabank Dance Centre on November 8 and 9
LONG BEFORE THEY combined forces on the new contemporary dance work Fortress, Livona Ellis and Rebecca Margolick were childhood friends.
They met at Arts Umbrella dance classes at just 11 years old, later forming the close bonds that come from that program’s intensive professional training through high school.
And then they spent almost 15 years apart, on separate sides of the continent: Margolick in New York City, where she studied at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and danced for the likes of Sidra Bell Dance New York, and Ellis in Vancouver, where she joined Ballet BC.
It wasn’t till the pandemic hit that both reunited in their home city. Pulled out of their professional-dance careers during shutdowns, they started to talk about family—and the idea of creating a work with each other for the first time. Both would bring their farflung experiences and movement languages to bear on the piece, which finally makes its full-length debut at the Chutzpah! Festival this month.
“I came back for six months in 2021 and that was the first chance that we had to just slow down and stop a bit,” says Margolick of the initial idea for the piece, speaking with Ellis on a Zoom call on a rehearsal break. “Because we weren't dancing at the time we had lots of time to reflect and ask, ‘Where are we? Where are we in our lives and our dance careers, and in our relationships?’ Then we kind of got talking about our families. And this is how it all started, planting the seeds.
“We started to talk about our relationships to our grandmothers, and both of our mothers are very strong people in our lives—we're very close,” Ellis explains. “And the women in our families are very determined and strong. So we very much share those same things. And we talked about how you could hold an understanding for the complexities of your mothers and grandmothers as you get older.”
The idea of the matriarchal body as a metaphorical fortress started to emerge as the pair worked together in the studio—“these structures that hold history and are strong and stable and resilient,” says Margolick.
That theme has become more nuanced as Ellis and Margolick have developed the piece; now, they see some irony in the title—or at least understand in a deeper way that women’s sensitivity can be a strength.
“We're also talking about vulnerability and care and softness and tenderness—these contrasting but also complementing qualities,” Ellis explains. “The mother's body: that's your first sense of protection, when you're in the womb, or as you grow up and your relationship with your parent evolves.”
Rebecca Margolick. Photo by Jim Carmody
Livona Ellis. Photo by Aleksandar Antonijevic
The piece debuted as a short duet in 2021 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre as part of a mixed program of the duo’s work. And though they’re working with a new score, lighting, and costumes, Ellis and Margolick have kept some of the movement motifs from the original rendition—back-and-forth rocking that represents the idea of soothing, or the sharing of weight to represent burden and responsibility. But the choreography has evolved as these two dancers have seen changes in their lives and dance careers—Margolick making that permanent move to Vancouver; Ellis leaving Ballet BC to tour with Crystal Pite’s Kidd Pivot.
“We're bringing more about what we're going through in our lives into the work,” says Margolick. “And it feels nice to have a space to explore that. Both of us are going through big life transitions at the moment, and we're bringing that more into the piece. We're thinking more about aging and transformation, nostalgia and memory.
“When we first started, when we didn’t know the longevity of a work, we kind of put all of it in there—we tried to do everything at once,” reflects Ellis. “And now that we've had this time, I think we've learned to trust our instincts and and trust our experience in what we've done—we have more trust in our ourselves.”
That’s comes as their work has evolved, Ellis winning the inaugural Louise Bentall Award for Emerging Choreographer last year, as well as touring with a prominent role in Kidd Pivot’s Assembly Hall.
For Margolick, who has sinced moved permanently back to Vancouver, she’s also establishing herself as an independent choreogapher here. “I wasn't sure where I wanted to land, and coming back to Vancouver, it just felt right, because I have community here, and I'm excited by the dance scene here, and my family's closer,” she says. “So I’m looking towards the future and thinking about finding more stability.”
Both share a dream of Fortress finding a life beyond this Chutzpah! showing—and a chance for their creative partnership to grow. “I’d love for us to be able to tour this and to perform it more and to deepen the life of it after we premiere it,” says Ellis. “And maybe it's a Fortress Part 2—that would be incredible.” 
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