Vancouver International Dance Festival: international success despite local dysfunction
To say that the "Vancouver International Dance Festival":http://www.vidf.ca/ is well known to the local populace is a small miracle. A dance festival? Well known – in Vancouver? Alas, with geography akin to a 20 year-old blond with big tits, our gorgeous city breeds more dope-smoking snowboarders than patrons of the arts… let alone patrons of dance.
Many a dance company in Vancouver is all too familiar with the classic three or four-night run The audiences for movement-based work is simply too small to support much more. Certainly, companies such as "Wen Wei Dance":http://www.wenweidance.ca/ and "Kidd Pivot":http://www.kiddpivot.org/ can fill a couple of weeks at the Cultch, but let’s be honest here: most companies feel lucky if they can pull off one or two good nights at the 170 seat Faris studio at the "Dance Centre":http://www.thedancecentre.ca/.
And so cometh the VIDF. Not without its controversies, the Vancouver International Dance Festival prides itself on promoting Vancouver as a great place to see dance. In the words of the VIDF’s Executive Director, Jay Hirabayashi, “Our mission is to support the art of dance through developing a sustaining audience for dance artists.” The festival originally started as a butoh festival in 1997. “There was not a lot of interest from local presenters in butoh so we realized that if we were going to develop an audience for butoh, we had to do it ourselves. We also noticed, however, that all Vancouver contemporary dance companies were suffering from a lack of exposure. It was as if the rest of the country and the rest of the world did not know that Vancouver existed.”
While the annual "Dancing on the Edge":http://www.dancingontheedge.org/ festival – operated by the Firehall Arts Centre and now over 20 years old – was in place at that time, there was no festival dedicated to bringing in international work. It is fair to say that Dancing on the Edge is devoted to providing exposure to local and national dance artists.
“When I was on the Board of Directors of the Dance Centre, I had suggested that the community would benefit from an international dance festival,” explains Hirabayashi, “but at the time, the Dance Centre's energy was consumed with planning for its own building.”
Since that time, the Dance Centre launched its own festival, the biennial Dance in Vancouver showcase series but still the VIDF is the only one that can truly claim to be an international festival, bringing in work from around the globe. This year’s festival alone features artists from France, Thailand, Japan, Spain, and across Canada. Although with the PuSh performing arts festival taking on more international dance work, the VIDF may be starting to see more competition as the major presenter of international work. Of course, this competition should be good news for those keen to see the best in dance from around the world.
In addition to being international, the VIDF also presents many forms of dance, reaching far past its original mandate of butoh. “We knew that this new festival would have to address all kinds of dance if it was to serve the dance community,” states Hirabayashi, “so we set our sights on supporting everything from Bharatanatyam to ballet, but with always a little butoh thrown in the mix.”
So wherein lays the controversy? Let me preface by saying that the Vancouver dance community, for those of you lucky enough to have been spared, is one of the most dysfunctional groups of people I’ve ever encountered. When I was working in dance, I used to attend monthly dance presenter meetings chaired by a consultant tasked with the impossible goal of making us behave like adults. Affectionately referred as our monthly group therapy sessions, I’m hard pressed to recall any positive outcome that came from them. When asked about his thoughts on dance presentation in Vancouver, Hirabayashi himself admits “Vancouver has more dance presenters than any other city in Canada. Unfortunately, we apparently prefer chaos to coordination so there is no coherent overall strategy for developing audiences for dance that we agree on. Having a lot of dance presentations but without an audience that can sustain those presentations is a big problem.”
This complete lack of cohesion is precisely what leads to dance companies running off screaming “Fuck you guys - I’m gonna do this all by myself!”
And so was born the VIDF… “One of my daughters had a t-shirt that said, ‘If it is to be, it is up to me’,” Hirabayashi tells Plank Magazine. “We decided to start a dance festival by ourselves.”
Hirabayashi is passionate about dance in Vancouver, and seems always willing to express his opinions about what he believes in. This enigmatic man has long been recognized for his eerie silence in meetings, only to be followed by verbose, scathing emails copied to anyone important in the dance community. To meet him in person and to read his electronic transmissions is to know two completely different people. On the one hand, Hirabayashi seems an utterly affable guy; on the other, his harsh communiqués with key members of the dance community may have burned a few bridges.
As could be anticipated, given this background and the current disjointed climate in the dance presentation community, the festival is lacking the major local partners one would expect to see, such as the Cultch, the Dance Centre, the Firehall Arts Centre, and DanceHouse. In an industry starved of funds, partnerships often serve to stretch marketing dollars and expand audiences. This begs the question of whether or not this frosty atmosphere is limiting the VIDF’s growth potential, and may explain why the bulk of the festival’s activities remain at the Roundhouse. With no theatre to call its own, as is the case with most Vancouver presenters, partnerships with theatre owners would seem to be crucial for the future.
Another question that is frequently asked in the dance community is regarding the relationship between the VIDF and its parent company, "Kokoro Dance":http://www.kokoro.ca/. Hirabayashi and Barbara Bourget direct and operate both companies. This year the VIDF is presenting Kokoro in three separate mainstage performances. When asked about the relationship between the two companies, however, Hirabayashi explains “Each year, we present ourselves at the VIDF, but we are the only company that does not get a performance fee. The VIDF is a big part of the work that we do as Kokoro Dance. It has not helped us as a dance company nationally. The last time we toured Canada was in 1994 and that was to three cities.”
Internal politics aside, this year’s program includes some of the best artists from around the world. Despite the bitter struggle in the Vancouver dance community, year after year the VIDF is one of the few festivals in town that gets people from outside the arts community excited to watch live performance. An increasingly developed programming vision, combined with a killer marketing campaign, has allowed the festival to grow its audience over time and slowly begin to reach its goals. “Vancouver is a tough town for dance presenters,” explains Hirabayashi, “Developing audiences for dance is a long term project. It will take us twenty years, I think, before we will be a city that is hungry for great dance experiences.”
_The Vancouver International Dance Festival continues to April 4, 2009 for more information go_ "here":http://www.vidf.ca