Emmalena Fredriksson and Arash Khakpour's You Touch Me plays with connection through both spoken and body languages
New dance work explores identity, connection, and migration through ensemble’s multitude of mother tongues
You Touch Me’s Luciana Freire D’Anunciação and Juolin Lee. Photo by Riz Herbosa
You Touch Me is at the Scotiabank Dance Centre from December 8 to 10
DANCE ARTISTS Emmalena Fredriksson and Arash Khakpour grew up far apart from each other, speaking different languages: she hails from Sweden, he comes from Iran. But now a new work, years in the making, draws on their similar experiences of making new connections in a foreign land.
The two met each other here, after Fredriksson came to Canada in 2013 and they danced together at EDAM and other companies. Around 2016, they started creating a work together that explores their personal experience of migration and how we communicate with each other, through words, but also through physical connection—and how, sometimes, things get lost in translation.
That project has grown gradually, over a six-year process, from a duet into a larger ensemble piece called You Touch Me. It features friends Fredriksson and Khakpour, as well as four other dancers who grew up speaking languages other than English: Luciana Freire D’Anunciação, Isabelle Kirouac, Juolin Lee, and Natalie Tin Yin Gan. (Get a feel for the full multilingual array in the trailer below.)
“It’s about us, with our own complex histories and lived experiences, sharing and playing with each other, provoking each other, having conflict and resolution,” Fredriksson says in a shared call with Khakpour, on a rehearsal break at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. “It’s definitely a piece where the line between life and performance is very blurry. The dancers are very much themselves and very much performing from their own lived experiences.”
“It’s about being touched, really connecting deeper with one another,” adds Khakpour. “The goal is to find that connection we find onstage and reveal that to the audience.”
You Touch Me integrates spoken phrases—many in the mother tongues of the diverse cast—as well as those words’ projected translations (via Google Translate). Through dance, speaking, and the text of the instant “translations”, the artists get at the way meaning can lie somewhere between words.
“We speak onstage–we have some text pre-rehearsed and some improvised,” explains Fredriksson. “And with Google Translate, we’re kind of interested in how these translation tools work and how they don’t work—being in that gap or nuance or ambiguity of being multiple things at once.
Emmalena Fredriksson and Arash Khakpour in In My Day. Photo by Yvonne Chew
“That’s like when you live in a different culture than the one where you grew up: you end up having a kind of split identity,” she continues. “For example, I'm more Swedish here than when I go back to Sweden. And when I go back to Sweden, I feel so Canadian. But I don't fully belong anywhere anymore. So I think language and text operate in the same way. Here we speak our mother tongues onstage and try to do it in communication with each other. The audience might understand some of but not all of it.”
Adds Khakpour: “The subtitles here are really the body itself.”
The result is a piece that uses an elaborate web of duets to touch on expansive themes of cultural identity, love, migration, identity, aging, and even climate change. Its mood shifts between the serious and the playful.
Khakpour calls one section, dubbed “The Interview”, as the core of the piece.
“One person is dancing and the other person is interviewing them–it’s sort stream-of-consciousness dancing and the interview has really complex, personal, difficult questions,” explains Fredriksson of the sequence, which, like the rest of the piece, is semi-improvised. “So you’re dancing while you're trying to answer really difficult questions, and the body will often answer before the words will catch up.”
You Touch Me has been years in the making, given momentum in 2017 when the pair won the Chrystal Dance Prize; that allowed them to work on a duet version called Untitled Distance in Victoria and Sweden.
“From there, we performed almost once a year in different places,” Fredriksson says.
But the duo always dreamed of expanding their vision to a larger ensemble.
“I don't speak any Farsi and Arash has only a few words in Swedish,” Fredriksson explains. “We thought, ‘What are the things we can play with in those gaps? We want to try to meet each other.’ And having a group multiplies that effect: what if you multiply the people who don’t verbally understand each other? It reflects how we move through the world together.”
The pair worked on You Touch Me further in an artist residency at the Dance Centre in 2019. “We had a studio showing at the end of 2019 and felt like we were moving forward at great speed,” Fredriksson says. “And then we all know what happened after that.”
The next winter, of course, brought COVID, and several performance delays. So here we are, two exact years after the month the group work was supposed to premiere.
“I’m truly grateful that it is happening because it feels like everything from before is joining it and becoming part of what the piece is now,” Khakpour says. “I’m grateful we had that time to reflect on ourselves and sort of be changed and be able to do it with the support of the Dance Centre.”
“It's been a beautiful gift,” Fredriksson says. “We tried to do a phase in 2020 and again in 2021—but a contact-improvisation piece about touch in the middle of a pandemic, with talking and touching, was a little bit hard at that time.
“We can talk and touch now and there’s that joy of being in the room with the other dancers. It feels really celebratory," she adds. "We all long for connection and togetherness, and I think it’s something the world needs right now where there’s a lot of division and polarization.”
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