Dance artist Joshua Beamish reconnects with Vancouver and himself, in Proximity
After a busy 2019, the past year provided a much-needed residency and renewal
MOVETHE COMPANY’s Joshua Beamish in Redemption. Photo by Cindy Wicklund
The Dance Centre streams Proximity: A collection of short works from February 25 at 7 pm to March 11, in a partner presentation with the PuSH International Performing Arts Festival
IN AN EXPERIENCE that differs radically from most of us, the COVID shutdown has brought positive change for dance artist Joshua Beamish.
Working as artist-in-residence at the Dance Centre, he’s been able not just to reconnect with the West Coast and its dance community—adhering to social-distancing measures, of course—but he’s also been able to reconnect with his own body.
Unlike so many artists suffering through a forced hiatus over the past 12 months, he’s been busy creating and dancing. The results of his yearlong journey will be on view in Proximity, an ambitious program of four works by himself and two other choreographers, as well as a new dance film. It’s a chance to see the uniquely expressive dancer perform again.
Late in the summer of 2019, Beamish choreographed a high-tech, social-media-savvy update of the famed classical ballet Giselle, called @giselle. Creating the show, complete with digital projections and 14 performers, took a toll.
“@giselle was all-consuming. It was constant stress and management. Of course I enjoyed the challenge, but my own body was out of shape. I felt really disconnected with myself as a dancer,” Beamish relates. “I wasn’t dancing; I felt like I was an administrator, with no spare hours to go to the gym, or to do pilates or yoga. I thought, ‘Either this is the moment where I stop dancing and don't go back, or I get dance back in my body.’”
At 32, Beamish says with a laugh, he felt 62.
The production of @giselle was just the latest project in a career that had been “all-consuming” pretty much since back in 2005, when the 17-year-old, Ballet Kelowna-trained Beamish launched his MOVETHECOMPANY. In the intervening years, his pieces travelled from Africa to Europe and Asia. Beamish spent many years splitting his time between here, London, and New York City, where he had work presented at the Joyce Theatre and collaborated with the New York City Ballet’s Wendy Whelan.
Knowing he was booked for a residency at the Dance Centre for 2020-21 gave him the space and time he needed during the pandemic to get his body back in shape—not just to dance his own choreography but to channel the kinetic language of other artists.
The program features two of his own creations—the world premiere of a new solo danced by Renée Sigouin (who’s been a standout with Vancouver’s Out Innerspace Dance Theatre, Kinesis dance somatheatro, and Kidd Pivot) and Proximity, a duet performed by Beamish and Sigouin.
Beamish also dances in two solos choreographed for him: Redemption, by celebrated Netherlands-based Belgian-Colombian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, and Ablaze Amongst the Fragments of Your Sky by Ballet BC’s Kirsten Wicklund.
Wicklund and Beamish have known each other ever since ballet school. “I was 17 and she was 13, and right from the start she was insanely talented,” Beamish says. “I remember watching her when we were young and thinking, ‘Who is this amazing dancer?’” The pair lost touch when Wicklund joined Ballet BC and Beamish was spending a lot of time in New York, but he caught her again when the Vancouver company performed at the Joyce there a few years back.
Renee Sigouin and Joshua Beamish in Proximity. Photo by Mikaela Kelly
Since then, Wicklund has been venturing into choreography while keeping up her work at Ballet BC. It’s highly physical dance. And even though Beamish was conditioning himself with yoga, pilates, and strength exercises, he didn’t know, at first, if his body could handle it. “When Kirsten and I started in June, I thought maybe this is a mistake; maybe its over,” he says. But Beamish worked through the pain.
Sigouin, who Beamish had also met through dance when they were young, happened to be in town after Out Innerspace and Kidd Pivot tours got cancelled thanks to COVID.
Falling Upward, a dance film created by Joshua Beamish with former Ballet BC dancer Scott Fowler and composer Stefan Nazarevich, was another of the projects that might never have happened if it weren’t for the world being put on “pause”.
Fowler was due to head to join Nederlands Dans Theater, where former Ballet BC artistic director Emily Molnar had taken the helm, but the trip was in limbo for a short while last summer due to the pandemic. “We’d talked about collaborating for years,” Beamish says.
Fowler grabbed a camera and headed with Beamish out to some old North Shore railway tracks, the woods, and an abandoned warehouse for an improvised shoot. And it turns out the title, Falling Upward, very much captures the quality of dancing outside on a rain-slicked West Coast day.
“Scott did all the location scouting for the film and found all these amazing places I never knew existed,” Beamish says. “I luckily had these rain boots. I fell so many times, slipping on the train tracks. And some of that slipping and falling we did keep in the film.”
The range of work he’s been able to dive into and the connections he’s made have Beamish feeling creatively recharged again.
“I am interested in having more time to build relationships with BC artists,” he says. “I’m also enjoying all of this digital film work. If I wasn’t a choreographer, I’ve always felt like for sure I wanted to be a filmmaker.”
And he’s happy that this limbo we’re in has helped him reconnect deeply with a dance community where he admits he occasionally felt like an outsider—due mostly to his work outside the country.
“I never fully felt at home or that I belonged here, even though I do clearly connect with being Canadian and from BC,” Beamish reflects. “But I’ve always been okay with that because I really loved my place in New York dance community and I loved my work in London.
“The reality has been that you can’t have all things. There's a little part of me everywhere as a creator,” he adds. “But it has been really nice to feel I can connect into how much value there is here.”
You can find more info and tickets here.
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