Old friends Livona Ellis and Rebecca Margolick build a Fortress by the sea together
Reconnected by pandemic times, the former Arts Umbrella students explore the strength of women at the Scotiabank Dance Centre
Livona Ellis and Rebecca Margolick in Fortress. Photo by Faviloa Perez, courtesy of the artist and Chris Randle
The Dance Centre and BC Movement Arts Society present Livona Ellis & Rebecca Margolick on December 17 and 18
THE PANDEMIC MAY have been a force of separation for a lot of people, but for dance artists and longtime friends Livona Ellis and Rebecca Margolick, it’s brought them together after more than a decade apart.
The result is a full live evening of new work, including the first duet that they’ve created together.
Close all through high school in Arts Umbrella’s acclaimed dance program, the two artists went their separate ways after graduating: Ellis headed to Ballet BC’s coveted apprenticeship program, later becoming a full company member; Margolick went south to New York City’s Tisch School of the Arts and then danced for several years for innovator Sidra Bell’s company there.
But when the performing arts started shutting down and COVID whalloped the Big Apple hard last year, Margolick headed home to Vancouver and Sointula, on Malcolm Island, where her parents live and her mother, dance veteran Mary-Louise Albert, runs the new BC Movement Arts Society. And that’s when Margolick and Ellis’s creative paths started crossing again.
“I feel like both of us are very similar performers,” explains Ellis over a conference call with her colleague. “We have a common understanding of what we’re interested in, in dance. I think maybe our movement vocabulary is different, though, which is why it’s been really nice to work with Rebecca and learn so much and see our differences.
“I feel like we think the same,” she adds after a pause.
“Yeah, I feel that too,” agrees Margolick with a laugh.
After another brief time apart, the pair have just come back together in Vancouver before the show at the Scotiabank Dance Centre for rehearsals. Ellis has returned to town after whirlwind performances of Ottawa and Montreal with Ballet BC—its first tour in many months. “It was mostly full capacity and it was amazing—and exhausting!” Ellis reports.
For her part, Margolick has been working here with Arts Umbrella students; previous to that, she toured to Portland and Costa Rica—showing her solo Bunker, which will be part of the program this week.
The pair had reconnected way back at the start of the pandemic, rehearsing solos separately in Sointula, where BC Movement Arts Society hosts performances and residencies. The live evening of solos by both dancers and Albert was cancelled and streamed online at the last minute in December 2020 due to sudden pandemic closures of performing-arts facilities.
The seed for the Fortress duet came when Margolick and Ellis were together at the beach here in town, talking about the legacy of strong women in both women’s families.
“I had been working on a new solo about my grandmother, and one day we were hanging out at the beach and started talking about our grandmothers,” Margolick relates. “I was really interested and I thought it was really beautiful. I thought, ‘I love the solo I’m creating’ but I’d been working alone for so long—I really want to make something with someone. And so we started that conversation talking about the role of women in our families, of the really strong matriarchs and how that’s affected us. And then a lot of it is where we are in our lives, being 30-31, and where we are in our careers.”
“It’s kind of interesting that it speaks to our connection, and how similar we are in thinking and how our interests align,” Ellis observes.
And so the pair headed to remote, seaside Sointula this past August to co-create the new work Fortress, experimenting with movement, taking walks on the coast, and, as always for this pair inside and outside the studio, talking a lot and sharing memories. “We also laughed a lot,” Ellis adds.
Both dancers share a strength and power in their movement, and they tap that here in this celebration of women’s fortitude and resilience.
“First we had this sort of back-and-forth rocking, soothing idea, then that morphed into sharing weight and taking on what represents burden and responsibility in life and how that shifts through your life,” Ellis explains. “It’s about how you’re leaning on people and having them lean on you, and that just morphed into more and more ideas.”
“We had these gestures we were working with based on images of strength and vulnerability,” Margolick continues, adding there’s a marching motif that emerges in the work. “I think both of us are musical, rhythmical, and we just started working with this marching thing and it started to represent this building of this strength.”
Expect Fortress’s score, by Bulgarian composer Ivan Shopov (whom Margolick has collaborated with in the past), to draw on archival music, including Henry Purcell’s funeral procession for Queen Mary, with its driving drums.
Audiences will see the themes of female strength play out throughout the program’s solos by these two artists, as well. Margolick’s Bunker draws on themes of memory and the shared history of previous generations of women, while Ellis’s own Unmoved explores overcoming the limitations we place on ourselves. The program also includes Ellis performing Peter Bingham’s beguiling 1997 Woman Walking (away), and Margolick interpreting Allen Kaeja’s Trace Elements (2000), a dark call to learn from the mistakes of our past.
After the shows here, the pair takes the program, called Fortress + 4 Solos, back over to Sointula just before Christmas, as well as to Port McNeill and Alert Bay in early January as part of BC Movement Arts Society’s new contemporary-dance series.
And so their connection will continue for a while longer—until the two friends dance out into the world again.
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