Vancouver's TomoeArts joins Burnaby's Satsuki-kai to show diversity of Japanese dance
Program juxtaposes the strict classical with more popular and folk styles
Colleen Lank (Fujima Sayu) in TomoeArts’s Kane No Misaki
Satsuki-kai’s Nakacho Sodachi. Photo by Saito Koichisq
The Dance Centre streams Tomoearts from November 26 to December 10
TOMOEARTS ARTISTIC director Colleen Lanki has had close ties to Japan, ever since a trip to teach English in Tokyo in 1995 ended up changing the course of her life.
The then-Toronto resident had been planning to spend a year there, taking in the vivid performing arts. But when she saw her first kabuki performance she was hooked, going on to study under traditional-Japanese-dance teacher Fujima Yūko, and staying for more than six years.
Now, with a Vancouver dance company called TomoeArts devoted to her complex, traditional art form, Lanki finds herself cut off from the country that feeds her practice. And so she’s turned to other ways of keeping those connections alive.
Instead of looking across the Pacific, she’s reaching out to local groups that practise nihon buyō—the catch-all term for Japanese classical dance. And an online show Thursday is the first step to showcasing the diversity of styles that live within that umbrella.
“I’m an outsider no matter what I do, so I try to get everybody together,” says Lanki, whose dance name, bestowed upon her by her Japanese teacher, is Fujima Sayū. “Originally with this concert I wanted to feature all the dance schools that existed here—and there’s a lot who practise in their basements and community centres—but that became impossible with the pandemic.”
Instead, TomoeArts joins forces with just one of those groups, Burnaby’s Satsuki-sai, run by artistic director Nishikawa Kayo. That group practises folk and shin buyō, or new dance, forms, dancing in events at Nikkei Place, the Powell Street Festival, and elsewhere.
Lanki says you’ll see both similarities and stark differences between her own highly regimented, kabuki-style chamber dance, and that of the community dancers. “The lexicon is similar and use of props is similar, the quality of hand movements and foot movements is similar,” she says, adding of the more popular music in Satsuki-sai’s joyful shin buyo dance: “You can hear western instruments in it and a western quality of singing.”
The project has grown larger than this concert performance by two local companies, however. Lanki has received a grant to make a documentary about the vast traditions of nihon buyoh that exist and evolve in Vancouver, in an attempt to record stories and trace diasporic roots before they are lost.
The concert, with its gorgeous kimonos and beautifully articulated movement, may offer Vancouverites a small bit of the Japanese culture they can’t reach through travel right now. But with these projects and others, Lanki also hopes to open the world of Japanese dance to westerners—and share the magic that so captured her.
“I want it to be open to everyone to appreciate and possibly practice,” she stresses. “Why are western things seen as modern and wide open and other things aren’t? Why couldn’t it be practised by people over the world and appreciated in all its diversity?”
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