Marissa Wong prepares for Departure, and then the arrival of Vancouver's newest dance company
The TWObigsteps team performs a final show, as the artist takes the helm at the response., renaming it The Falling Company
Marissa Wong in Departure. Photo by Belen Garcia
Katie Cassady’s II. Photo by Susanna Barlow
The Dance Centre livestreams Departure, by TWObigsteps Collective’s Marissa Wong and Katie Cassady, on May 28 at 8 pm and May 29 at 3 and 8 pm.
DANCE ARTIST Marissa Wong is used to constant shifting during her career. That’s included a training program at Alonzo King’s celebrated neoclassical LINES Ballet in San Francisco in 2013, a residency with Ottawa’s Dorsale Dance, and work facilitating and curating shows for herself and other artists during a stint in Montreal under the umbrella of TWObigsteps. Eventually she brought that collective back to her home on the West Coast in 2017.
Four years and a global pandemic later, we find the dance artist embracing change again, at both a creative and career level. TWObigsteps is preparing to livestream a show of new work, featuring Wong’s first solo for herself and her most deeply personal piece to date, as well as a duet by the collective’s cofounder Katie Cassady.
The double bill, aptly called Departure, marks the end of this chapter—and the beginning of an exciting new one for Wong. As of July 1, she will take over as artistic director of the response., the 13-year-old company run by Amber Funk Barton. Wong will be renaming it The Falling Company.
“It’s the idea of surrendering to the moment and to experiences, and that was heavily influenced by my time at the Alonzo King LINES ballet,” she tells Stir of the company’s new moniker. “What I’m trying to do is questioning history and structure…hopefully to create inherent change.”
Wong envisions a highly inclusive new kind of dance company, where marginalized voices can be centred, youth and different styles can feel welcomed, and rehearsals can emphasize process and prioritize mental health.
Marissa Wong wants to build a new kind of dance troupe with The Falling Company. Photo by Albert Normandin
“It’s going to be a year of transition and a transition out of COVID—so The Falling Company can really create that space for change,” she elaborates.
Wong’s DIY attitude fits well with the vision of the response., launched with a similar ethic by a young and emerging Amber Funk Barton over a decade ago. Wong took part in the company’s apprentice program in 2017, with Barton becoming a mentor to the newly returned Vancouverite. (Barton is stepping away from the company to focus on other projects.)
“Marissa reminds me so much of myself when I was her age,” Barton said at the time of the announcement. “She’s so wonderfully determined, industrious and has such a clear vision of what she wants to do.”
As ever, Wong will continue to perform and create—as she will at the Departure show, the final work from TWObigsteps, which will dissolve quietly after the livestream. The production is presented by the Dance Centre as part of explorASIAN.
Wong’s solo, also called Departure, shares the bill with Cassady’s II, which features dancers Sophie Mueller-Langer and Sarah Wong. “Both these pieces are deeply about relationships and storytelling and the human experience,” Wong says.
Wong’s solo was supposed to premiere in May 2020, but was delayed due to pandemic lockdown. “Because so much time and energy had been put into it, I initially went, ‘Oh my gosh, I just want to finish it and have that closure!’” she relates.
That was in large part due to the intense inner reflection and some of the darker plces the piece had forced her to confront. It was born out of Wong working through a traumatic sexual experience, and then exploring how it lived on in her body.
“It shifted away from a trauma narrative to how important it as for me as a Chinese female dance artist, as a marginalized artist, to take sexual trauma out of the shadows,” she says. “I started to go into memory and sensation and look at the multifaceted layers of a singular moment….That complexity and sensation and thought provides many nuances.”
The intensity of the piece and its creation arises partly from the fact it is a structured improvisation that requires her to explore her inner sensations, but also those that come from the haunting sound and light in Departure.
Jamie Bradbury’s original music and soundtrack include recordings of people in Wong’s life speaking—her grandmother, parents, childhood friends, and ex-lovers. “I’m grappling in real time with history and my relationship to that history,” she explains.
The pile of clothes that sits on the stage is made up of garments from Wong’s past wardrobe—from old dance costumes to her first pair of pyjamas that she sewed in home-economics class.
Wong is finding her voice in the piece—which marks her first solo for herself. Like so much of the contemporary work she creates in this latter part of her still-early career, it’s a purposeful departure from her rigid ballet training as a youth—an environment that never invited that kind of personal expression.
Departure has moved away from being a private narrative to capture a more collective experience of learning, letting go, healing, and processing personal history, she says.
Which brings us back to the weight of this work, and the courage Wong found to carry it through another year—after a much-needed pause late last spring. “The piece is very vulnerable. It demands a lot of listening to the inner self,” Wong says. “The process of growth is something I’m so curious about, but at the same time it’s so heavy and nuanced and difficult.”
That kind of resilience, determination to find voice, and the ability to maintain a safe place for vulnerability will carry through to the next exciting chapter in Wong’s life and work—and to Vancouver’s dance scene at large.
“That’s another value I’m taking into The Falling Company: knowing what those boundaries are, what my capacity is, and when I can say ‘No,’” she says. “The depth of where the piece is now couldn’t have existed if I had not had a moment of pause and not creating.”
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