Flicker brings modern visual wonder to traditional First Nations dance

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      A Dancers of Damelahamid production. At the Cultch’s Historic Theatre on Wednesday, May 25. Continues until May 28

      How do you turn a traditional art form into something contemporary, while still respecting its roots?

      We’ve seen increasing numbers of dancers tackling this challenge, whether it’s been Aakash Odedra melding classical Indian bharata natyam with projections and props at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, or even local troupes like Flamenco Rosario, Co.ERASGA, and Wen Wei Dance thrusting into the new and bold while drawing inspiration from cultural tradition.

      Now indigenous dance is getting in on the act—big-time. Think troupes like Vancouver’s Raven Spirit or Toronto’s Santee Smith, whose NeoIndigenA is coming to the Cultch next year.

      Enter the Dancers of Damelahamid: best known for its spectacular ceremonial performances at settings like the Museum of Anthropology’s Coastal Dance Festival, the ensemble is known for drawing on the Gitxsan people’s rich history of mask dancing and is making a departure with its dive into the multimedia and contemporary.

      The result is a work that amps up the art and regalia of indigenous culture with 21st-century style. Flicker inhabits a lush visual world. It blends Andy Moro’s projected video imagery of water, mountains, and sky and Northwest Coast graphic design on a longhouse-shaped backscreen along with Rebecca Baker’s intricate costumes that riff on the masks, beaded boots, and woven dresses of the region.

      Choreographer Margaret Grenier’s dance retains a lot of the powwow-style steps and the animistic movements of traditional First Nations dance-storytelling amid its contemporary flow. The vocabulary is subtle and never showy. It’s slow and rhythmically hypnotic, meditative in a way that you could almost compare to the feel of butoh, except for its steady beat. For music, the group has stuck to stripped-down traditional singing intercut with storytelling in the Gitxsan language.

      The piece is at its best when it reaches a dream state. There’s an extended sequence when Nigel Grenier’s hunter comes upon two mountain goats—embodied by two dancers wielding eerie long hoof-rattles in front of them, wearing stunning frosty-white-fringed dresses and headbands circled with black horns. In the background, grey light and falling snow moves in, Grenier curls amid their interlocked limbs for warmth, and it’s magical.

      The slow-paced storytelling is harder to follow, though it’s clear that Grenier, the sole male dancer, is on a journey that is bringing him back in touch with his ancestors and the traditional spirit world. Flicker culminates in his transformation into the titular West Coast bird, bedecked in a beautiful big beaked mask and design-emblazoned blanket—and reads as symbolic of the way indigenous people, and the rest of us, are connecting with and celebrating a culture our government once tried to obliterate.

      This is a start, but it feels like Dancers of Damelahamid could push even more—in form and content, though clearly this is difficult new ground that requires respect for the past. And yet it’s new ground that’s been dug up, to varying degrees of controversy, by dancers around the globe in recent years; just talk to people like Thai khon master Pichet Klunchun, who’s performed here.

      But Flicker, which now heads to the Canada Dance Festival, is an important start—the beginning of a truly West Coast take on the thriving area of indigenous contemporary dance. And the beginning of change.

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