While dance has the potential to break down barriers, Vancouver-based dancer and choreographer Ralph Escamillan says it’s not always easy to find free classes to train and practice in the city. 

So he created one.

After starting a community organization called VanVogueJam in 2016, the 25-year-old has been teaching vogue, a dance-based art form originating from Harlem’s queer subculture more than 50 years ago, on a by-donation basis each week.

“I wanted to vogue with people who actually needed the dance form,” he says, explaining that accessibility was the catalyst for removing financial barriers from his classes, making it open to those of all ages and levels of experience.

According to Escamillan, beginners can expect to learn some fundamentals during the first hour of class, inspired by the five basic elements of Vogue Fem – hand performance, catwalk, duckwalk, floor performance, and spins and dips. The second hour is usually reserved for freestyling and advanced practice.

Since the age of fourteen, Escamillan has embodied a number of styles in his work, including contemporary, street and commercial dance, but none compare to his passion for vogue.

“Vogue is not just about dancing, it’s about the culture – there’s a whole community connected to it,” he says. “I appreciate what it does politically [and] how it takes space for queer people.” 

Voguing’s cultural influence continually resurfaces in various aspects of contemporary pop culture, inspiring everything from choreographed dance performances from artists like Lady Gaga and FKA Twigs, to the wildly successful competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race.

But Escamillan makes a point to continually remind his class, and himself, of voguing’s deep historic roots. Extending as far back to Harlem’s ballroom scene in the 1960s, voguing allowed members of the black and Latino LGBTQ community to carve out a safe space for resistance, survival and activism, to counter experiences of marginalization and discrimination.

Since then, the world of ballroom has expanded to queer communities across the world, developing into a culturally-rich network that incorporates voguing competitions, themed balls, outreach services, and “houses,” which are support systems formed in a family-like structure.

“When I go into these communities that have been there for so long, I feel like I need to earn my keep,” says Escamillan.

After being exposed to the voguing scene for the first time through Jojo Zolina, founder of dance group House of La Douche, Escamillan later travelled to New York City in 2013 to train with Leiomy Maldonado, an internationally-recognized figure in the community, also known as the “Wonder Woman of Vogue.”

Since then, Escamillan says teaching the dance form to others has been a consistent reminder to continue training himself – which he does by sending Maldonado videos when he doesn’t have time to go to New York to train in person.

For those interested in coming to class, Escamillan says it’s important to know that learning dance is like learning a new language. “Your first class is going to be a shock, but I’m not going to kill you, you’re not going to melt!”

To help foster a sense of community and safe space, class always starts with a “check-in. “We ask for names, pronouns, and we also say something positive [as] a way of connecting people in the class,” says Escamillan.

He admits that in some ways, sustaining his class also goes hand-in-hand with cultivating Vancouver’s local ballroom scene, which is still in its early stages, compared to east coast neighbours like Toronto and New York City.

Along with teaching beginners about vogue culture, the class also gives more experienced dancers the chance to practice for balls, which are the original safe spaces where new and legendary voguers come together to compete in a variety of categories for trophies and prizes.   

“It’s like a catch-22. You need the vogue ball for the voguers, and you need the voguers for the vogue ball,” says Escamillan, adding that these events are often the fuel that encourages students to continue coming to class to train.

This summer, VanVogueJam will be hosting its third vogue ball during Vancouver’s Pride Week, which Escamillan hopes will continue to empower the city’s young and emerging ballroom scene.

“The community aspect is what really inspires me, even more so than the dancing – like how people hug after every competition. Even if there’s shade or drama, there’s still this root of community, which is very beautiful to see.”

VanVogueJam will be hosting a Sci-Fi themed vogue ball during Vancouver’s Pride Week on August 2.

Esie Mensah. Photo courtesy of Asiko Photography.

For Esie Mensah, the delicate balance between artistic expression and political commentary lies in one simple ingredient: intention.

While the Hamilton, Ont., choreographer’s portfolio includes a feature in Drake and Rihanna’s “Work” video, and most recently, a live on-stage performance with hip-hop artist French Montana, she is not afraid to use dance as a vessel for social commentary. “The work you choose to do, and the intention behind what it is you’re doing is the way that you can really make dance a political act,” she says. “Being a Black female, being somebody that has the roots of African descent, I just started asking questions… I had this idea of contributing something within my culture on stage.”

Such was the inspiration behind “Akoma,” a dance theatre production that premiered two years ago. It tells the story of a young immigrant who leaves Ghana, his birth country, to move to Canada, but struggles with his identity, wavering with the decision to stay or return home.

Mensah, 32, who wrote and choreographed the piece, added her own story to the mix. “I claim my Ghanaian background in my work and everything I do, but in Ghana, they don’t consider me Ghanaian, they call me Canadian,” she says, recalling a humbling but difficult experience while visiting to the country two years prior. “It was like, you have no idea what I’m doing for this country abroad and even if I’m not born there, isn’t me being present enough? At the same time, can you really claim a place that you’ve only really been to for two months out of my 32 years of living?”

One of Mensah’s most recent projects is “Shades of Blackness,” which she considers her most political work. The piece involves a series of choreographed performances that blend dance and dialogue to explore the complex and painful experiences that arise from “shadeism,” a practice that has existed as long as racism, where discrimination is experienced within cultural communities on the basis of skin colour. Each performance explores how shadeism rears its head in the Black community, from family dynamics to skin bleaching.

Despite its pervasiveness within communities of colour, Mensah admits that shadeism remains a fragile topic, making “Shades of Blackness” both an “interesting gift and a burden” to bear. “The second time we did it, I don’t think I’ve ever cried that much in my life in a very long time,” she recalls. “I felt like I was being cut and slashed because of these words that were being said.”

Mensah adds that her personal struggles with accessing work opportunities due to the colour of her skin is a reminder that shadeism remains deeply ingrained in today’s dance industry,

“I was told from a friend of mine that was a choreographer—we were working on a shoot with a Black director and Black artist—that they didn’t want to hire me because they thought I was too dark for the video,” she says. “The mantra of my career is the fact that being good isn’t enough, I need to be amazing…. It’s frustrating but at the same time, a part of what we have to go through as artists of colour, in order to make sure that your work can be seen by the masses.”

In order to gain more exposure, many fellow Canadian dancers decide to cross over to the American market, a move Mensah had contemplated earlier in her career. “I had an opportunity to get my U.S. papers years ago [but] part of me was like, I feel like I have something to do here,” she says, admitting that choosing to pursue a career in Canada has been bittersweet.

But Mensah says she has gained a lot more for choosing to stay in Canada, a decision that has allowed her to invest in creating more socially conscious pieces—most recently, a dance solo on skin bleaching at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

“We have to be willing to have these conversations and go through the fire so that we can figure out how to expose this to an audience and how to bring this on stage,” she says. “It’s a really interesting dynamic to be in a space that you really sometimes want to run away from.”

Photo by Aimo Paniloo.

Imagine a teenager, face smeared in soot and red and white paint, summoning the crowd to its feet. This was the breathtaking scene at Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory’s pep rally in the 1990s.

Pep rallies, stirring and spirited as they are, don’t immediately evoke images of overtly political, much less radical, acts. But for Williamson Bathory, a celebrated Inuit performance artist, any space with an audience can be transformed.

With a roaring energy, she would perform uaajeerneq, a Greenlandic mask dance that invokes the power of storytelling, before a field of football players and fellow classmates. It was “in-your-face racism” meets uaajeerneq, an unnerving and moving performance, with its heavy use of sweeping movements and contorted expressions that seem to channel the unhinged— and comical—side of humanity. For Williamson Bathory, dancing became a way to “level the playing field.”

In her hands, uaajeerneq knows no boundaries: It embodies the frustrations, hopes, and ambitions that preoccupy Indigenous communities. Though her days performing at pep rallies are over, she continues to elevate all these raw emotions into national consciousness.

From appearing in “Retribution,” a music video by award-winning Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq, to running workshops at schools on sexual health and the environment, Williamson Bathory commands any stage with her liberating interpretation of uaajeerneq.

In “Retribution,” Tagaq and Williamson Bathory’s performance grapples with humanity’s contentious relationship with the environment, reckons with the road to reconciliation, slays stereotypes, and brings focus to the unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The privilege of having a broad, increasingly visible platform to share her work has connected her to the works of other emerging artists on the cusp of “getting to know themselves,” Williamson Bathory says.

In Timiga, Nunalu Sikulu (My body, the land and the ice), a glacially paced video that both meditates on the silent beauty of the Arctic and upends stereotypes, Williamson Bathory gives a new layer of meaning to the body-positive movement by baring it all. Nudity for Inuit in Greenland—and many elders in Nunavut—wasn’t shameful, but was embraced with a healthy sense of humour and pride. In fact, when she started having children, Williamson Bathory’s mother said, “Welcome to your accordion years.” Only in recent years have the Inuit grown shy about their body.

Revealing every scar, every fold is a political act, an act of decolonization, Williamson Bathory says: “It’s an uncovering to help with the hurt so many Inuit feel about their bodies— an offering of healing.”

That’s just one of the many lessons her parents imparted. Williamson Bathory’s upbringing involved plenty of exposure to her Inuit roots.

Photos by Jamie Griffiths.

And though her ancestors hailed from Greenland, she can trace her lineage to a physical map of Canada. Random fate and artificial lines, which were drawn to carve out the country into discrete provinces and territories, played a part in bringing Williamson Bathory’s parents together.

On a whim, her mother, living in Greenland, ended up in Canada to chase the opportunity to connect with other First Nations students. “[My mother] felt that Greenland was very focused on its relationship with Denmark. She wanted to be in touch with other Indigenous people in the world,” she says. “She pointed at a map of Canada and found Saskatoon.”

With a little digging, her mother, studying to become a teacher at the time, discovered that the University of Saskatchewan had a program designed to prepare its First Nations students to tackle the challenges facing the next generation. That prompted her to transfer, where she ended up meeting Williamson Bathory’s late father.

Her father may have been English, but the entire family spoke Inuktitut at home. Still, Williamson Bathory believes that art can be a path to reclaiming tradition for those who can’t speak their mother tongue. “What we find is if you are a young person who may not speak Inuktitut fluently,” Williamson Bathory says, “it is through music, through creative ideas, that you get excited to learn more.”

For Williamson Bathory, it was through her mother, along with Maariu Olsen, an influential performance artist, that she learned uaajeerneq, when she was 13 years old.

The success Williamson Bathory enjoys now is the product of years of grit and persistence on the front lines, engaging her community through art. After years as a volunteer-run operation, Qaggiavuut Arts Society in Iqaluit, Nunavut—where Williamson Bathory is the program manager—is making strides to realize its dream of creating a hub for artists to collaborate and pass down their craft to the next generation.

Last year, Qaggiavuut secured a total of $1 million in funding through a series of grants, which enabled it to rent out space for an office and community programming. The plan is to have a dedicated building to run its mandate out of. Until then, much of the art that emerges comes from “people’s living rooms, overcrowded houses, shacks heated by oil stoves,” she says.

Still, with a jump-start in funding, Williamson Bathory can simultaneously devote more time to her art and activism to tell the stories of her community.

“To be able to tell our own stories, with our own bodies is an incredible feeling of purpose,” Williamson Bathory says. “It’s really important for young people to see that. I don’t see myself as someone who is dictating an agenda. I really feel like I’m a part of a movement.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Williamson Bathory attended high school in the 1980s, not the ’90s. Since publication, her title has also changed at Qaggiavut Arts Society. The story has since been updated. This regrets the errors.

“Enjoy how your body feels!” dance teacher Kristina Alleyne shouts over the music. The rehearsal hall is lined with standing fans, swiveling hot air. It’s a warm summer day in Toronto, but the dancers aren’t holding back, leapfrogging through the air and improvising to the Alleyne’s rapid counts of six. The morning training session is part of TO Love-In’s summer program. A not-for-profit, volunteer-driven organization based in Toronto, Love-In is dedicated to providing supportive spaces and alternative training to professional dancers.

Amanda Acorn and her friend Eroca Nicols launched TO Love-In in 2009 in response to what they saw as a gap between the technical training required to thrive in the dance world and dancers’ ability to let their own creativity and practice flourish. “After you graduate from a dance program, you look around and think, ‘What do I do now?’” says Kate Nankervis, a contemporary dancer and one of the TO Love-In’s current lovers, as they’re dubbed. “We’re all training in this one particular way.”

In addition to summer programming, the group also puts on a performance series where local, national, and international teachers provide training for local dancers. While the Love-In primarily works within the professional dance community, their workshops are open to anyone. “We work in arts and we make things that are reflective of the world we live in,” says Nankervis. “If there’s no room to have your own voice, your own thoughts, your own body, then how are we going to continue to evolve? We can train forever, but what’s the point if we can’t apply it to making something and sharing it?”

A scene from Just BGraphic’s Summer Arts Academy 2016. Photo courtesy of Just BGraphic

Past the gymnasium and down a stairwell, a standard classroom scene unfolds in Toronto’s Downsview Secondary School. Students file in, arrange themselves around tables, chat as their instructor, Josh Watkis, asks for order. Watkis, a spoken word artist, has scrawled “my childhood tastes like” on the blackboard. “What’s the top rule?” he asks, over the gradually receding babble. “Respect each other, respect yourselves.” (The second rule is “no Iggy Azalea.”) The kids are here, in July, as part of not-for-profit Just BGraphic’s (JBG) summer academy. Watkis demonstrates the exercise. “My childhood tastes like limelight. My childhood taste like divorce. My childhood tastes like bad grades. My childhood tastes like homicide,” he says, adding, “The idea isn’t to write something you can taste. The idea is to match it to something you can’t.”

Launched in 2010 by Kayode Brown, JBG began as an after school program to provide accessible, constructive activities during “at-risk” hours—that unstructured and often unsupervised window after school and into the evening. In its first year, about 60 kids attended JBG programs, a number that climbed to 850 students last year. Now, Brown’s out to do more than offer a safe space for students—he wants to boldly revolutionize arts education in schools and their surrounding communities. “Art plays a crucial role in society, period,” he says. “The power of imagination—the power of seeing something that’s not there and building that—that is what we’re built on.”

During the school year, JBG runs curricula for high school-aged students. Workshops are collaborative and bring together teachers, JBG expertise, and contemporary artists who resonate with their students, including Ivan Evidente, a director at Universal Music Canada, as well as activist and author Sister Souljah. The idea is to make artistic aspirations tangible, a way to shape pop culture into an animating opportunity. Brown says the students are often enthralled with such guests. “I’m talking the room is dead silent. You can hear a pin drop,” Brown beams. When it’s time for Q and A, the hands fly up. “To see that energy—it’s something that’s remarkable.”

Performance builds confidence. Mentorship breeds possibility. Technical skills, like those earned in an upcoming podcasting program about “your ideal school” are transferable. Brown should know. Art runs in his family. Brown’s brother is Luther Brown, dancer and choreographer of So You Think You Can Dance Canada fame. His father, a principal, has been a deejay for years—a way to preserve his Jamaican culture after immigrating to Canada at a time when there weren’t any reggae programs on the radio. Brown himself has a background in marketing and owned his own company. Yet, when he started to lose his sight in 2010, he moved away from marketing and started JBG. In 2014, a year after he had two eye surgeries and lost sight completely in his left eye, he closed the marketing company to focus all his energy on promoting arts education.

JBG programs weave discussions of mental health and identity into its activities, both as theme and self care. Drama classes guide kids in unfolding notions of identity; workshops on stereotype-busting invite students to question their assumptions; literary court scene reenactments have them interrogate forgiveness. Brown believes that having space, as a young person, to deal with the idea of stigma, to deal with notions of self through creation and expression is a holistic approach that works. Plus, he adds, “What good is health and fitness if your brain can’t process imagination?”

Brown now wants to expand collaborations and bridge institutions. While the program is highly localized and the spirit community-based, the Toronto District School Board and JBG are in talks for a centralized programming initiative, which means Brown will be able to bring his brand of inclusive arts programming to students across the city. “We are not conformed to any one type of learner, one genre of music or culture or art,” says Brown “We are as diverse as art can be. One three-letter word represents so much.”

Illustration by Dave Donald.

Of all the arts, dance is arguably the most physically and emotionally exhausting, and with an average annual income of a professional dancer sitting at $18,000, the real-life Natalie Portmans live way under Canada’s poverty line. And the crippling anxiety that might overtake an almost-30 dancer who fears his or her career is ending is very real, because more than likely it is. Dance is such a physical art that while some can go on for decades, many work injured until they’re forced to stop.

“The thing about dance is that for most people, it’s not a job; it’s who they are,” says Amanda Hancox, executive director of the Dancer Transition Resource Centre. “And when the job ends, by choice or by necessity, there’s a lot of emotional trauma that comes along with that loss.”

The DTRC was started in 1983 by Joysanne Sidimus, who had recently returned to Canada from travelling throughout the U.S. with the National Ballet of Canada. She looked up some of her old dance colleagues and, according to Hancox, found them “just looking at blank walls” with no support, no money, and no idea what to do next. She partnered with the Dance in Canada Association and the Canadian Association of Professional Dance Organizations to research and understand the issues facing dancers in Canada, and the DTRC officially opened its doors in September 1985.

Since then, the DTRC has helped more than 10,000 dancers at all stages of their careers, and offers professional counselling, mentoring, workshops, and conferences. The DTRC has offices in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal and regional representatives in Calgary, Winnipeg, and Atlantic Canada.

One of the main functions of the DTRC is to offer scholarships and career counseling for current and former dancers trying to figure out what their next moves should be and assistance in training for a “parallel career,” as Hancox calls it. This often comes in the form of a part-time job to pay the bills, since there are few full-time jobs in the industry. Dancers, like actors, need more flexible schedules to allow for classes and rehearsals, which means they often end up in minimum-wage service jobs (while it’s not uncommon for writers, visual artists, or musicians to hold down nine-to-five jobs, and practise their craft outside of business hours).

Career changes are not uncommon for young Canadians, but what makes an organization like the DTRC so crucial to Canadian dancers is the young age at which many start, says Hancox. They start training at the age of eight or nine, sometimes five days a week or more, become a hired performer by 19 or 20, and then by the time they retire at 35 or 40—often due to chronic injury—they have made so little money that they have to start all over from nothing, and many don’t even know what their interests and passions are outside the world of dance, says Hancox. “It’s not like they went to university and chose a career.”

Dancer Rebecca Halls pictured in stills from director Marites Carino's short film HOOP. Image courtesy Marites Carino.

Dance is an art form often discussed in terms of its complexity and mystery. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” W.B. Yeats famously asked. One wonders, then, what he would make of dance film. For when you add a second layer—the dance of a director’s eye and viewfinder around the dancer—you get an even more elaborate set of artistic relationships. It’s in this genre that Canadian filmmaker Marites Carino is gaining national and international attention.

Also known as dance for camera, dance film “is two choreographies in one,” Carino explains by phone from Montreal’s Mile End, where she runs the production company Video Signatures. For example, in her most recent dance film, HOOP, which explores the relationship of a single performer with a seemingly simple child’s toy, dancer Rebecca Halls choreographed her steps while Carino’s task was to choreograph the camera’s movement around her, creating the composition of shots and the film’s overall structure.

“HOOP isn’t a normal kind of dance film compared to anything else I’ve seen,” Carino admits. “Let’s face it—contemporary dance, it ain’t accessible to the average Joe. I want to appeal to people not just with a dance background. I have a dance background, but I’m also trained to tell stories through journalism, and I’m interested in creating a more photographic kind of environment.” As a result, you could pull out any of HOOP’s frames and hang it on your wall, yet the film as a whole remains fluid and expressive.

Carino’s camerawork communicates the themes— disorientation, fragmentation, suspension, perception, progression—in how it reveals the dancer’s interaction with space, with the hoops, and with her own body within those elements. The film is playful, tender, sensual, ecstatic. Many scenes, like a suspended hoop tunnel or the dancer’s legs floating in mid-air, leave you wondering how the effect was achieved.

“I felt like a magician working backwards,” Carino says of the intense planning, noting it is something you could never replicate in a live show.

All of Carino’s experience comes to bear behind her cinematic composition. Trained in ballet and contemporary dance, she has a postgraduate degree in broadcast journalism and several documentary films, in addition to the dance films, under her belt.

Carino’s unique blend of talents has the Canadian and international dance film communities taking notice. Commissioned by Canada’s Bravo!FACT program in 2009, HOOP earned Carino an artist residency last year as part of the DANCE MOViES Commission at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York. It screened at the Cinedans festival in Amsterdam late last year, and will be at the Dance on Camera Festival at New York’s Lincoln Center this month. Heady stuff for a self-described ballet “bunhead” from Saskatoon.

“I feel like I’m finally going somewhere,” Carino says. “Doing this on your own can be very lonely, but at the residency I felt like an artistic princess!” Her experience of what’s possible with professional resources means she’s now hoping for a HOOP follow up. She’s shy with the details, but hints it will have to do with fire hoops and Iceland.

In the meantime, however, it’s a life of pitching and proposals, and waiting. “I want to do more,” Carino sighs, “but there are so many hoops to go through.” Pause. “I didn’t even mean to make that pun.”

Excerpts from HOOP

Poster for Pamoja's new dance work, Koncrete City.

There’s a scene in the Kenyan dance company Pamoja‘s new ballet, Konkrete City, where all I could feel was the hectic beat of downtown Nairobi, or Vancouver, or Toronto. The dancers—most of them handicapped—depicted the Central Business District, Kenya’s core of business towers and banks, during the rainy season.

Walking, running and jumping; swinging arms, dreaded hair, legs and umbrellas, they moved to the unnerving beat of techno. The audience at the dusty National Theater of Kenya was so entranced that even the children in the front row, who are usually frightened by this type of music, could not tear their eyes away from the unbelievable shapes of the dancers.

Pamoja means “togetherness” in kiSwahili. Exemplifying that concept, the dancers use each others’ bodies to grace the stage— sometimes lasciviously. During one scene, a man pedals a Kenya-style wheelchair across the stage, while two other men, sitting behind him, roll on each others’ bodies, using necks, elbows and legs as support.

Dismas Otieno, one of the members of Nairobi's Pamoja dance company. Photo by Siena Anstis.

Dismas Otieno, 24, is a long-time dancer with Pamoja. He lost his leg at the age of four when he fell off his bike and into the lethal path of a “flying coffin,” a popular nickname for the big East African buses that roar past you with little regard for human life.

His parents, aware of the new difficulties their son would face, ensured that Otieno completed both primary and secondary schools at institutions for the handicapped. Eventually, as his interest in sports grew during his school years, he moved to Nairobi to pursue this passion.

Overcoming the challenges of living as a physically impaired person in a place like Kenya, notoriously unfriendly to the disabled, Otieno is a national swimming champion and is on the national swimming and basketball teams. He also dances full-time with Pamoja. “I don’t see myself walking on crutches,” he tells me, “I consumed and accepted the situation when I was young.” When dancing, he sometimes spends over two hours on his one leg without a break.

While Dismas is well-adjusted to his situation, he admits that most Kenyans aren’t. “The government sees physically challenged people as a problem.”

In a city like Nairobi, being handicapped is not easy. There is limited wheelchair access in all buildings, elevators are often broken, buses and matatus (the popular van-type of transportation) rarely stop for people in wheelchairs. Being handicapped in Nairobi means relying on the goodness of people with their own problems who are mostly looking out for themselves.

In an attempt to change this attitude, Pamoja has made itself a popular local dance group. Performing at big cultural centers like the Alliance Francaise, as well as in remote communities, where there is even less support structures for the disabled, Pamoja, through its contemporary dance work, helps to convince individuals that there is power and possibility within even the most physically challenged body.

The Kenya Working Group, operating under the University of Toronto, supports people with disabilities in Kenya. You can consult their website here.