Late last week, New Works was able to chat with all nine artists from Sunday Dec 11th's emotionally surged Dance Allsorts performance.
 
Each dancer shared his/her thoughts with us, offering insight into their work, their training, or their influences/inspirations. So step into the minds of these nine incredibly talented, emerging artists—who, without a doubt, will be painting stages with their creative movement in the coming years.
 
When/where did you start dancing?
Zoe Nichele: I started dancing at the young age of 3. My older sister was involved in several classes at Dance Studio West (Port Alberni, BC) so typically I wanted to follow in her footsteps. I continued with a few ballet classes throughout elementary school and then when it came time for high school I made the life changing decision to stop my recreational training and start training myself as a pre-professional dancer. I was accepted into the SPARTS program at Arts Umbrella under the direction of Artemis Gordon, Lynn Sheppard, and (at the time) Emily Molnar. The SPARTS program allows aspiring artists or sports stars to do only a half day of school, and then the rest of the day is free for intensive training. For all of high school I continued with the SPARTS program and graduated last year with a diploma in dance from VCC and Arts Umbrella. It was a program filled to the brim with all the absolute best experiences and opportunities! I am now 20 and this is my first year with Modus Operandi.  
If you had to pick one, what would be the most rewarding experience from your training with Modus Operandi?
Laura Avery: I have never been very good at the “if you had to pick one” questions, and that is especially true when speaking about my experience with Modus Operandi, being that the extent of the program’s influence on my life is so wide reaching, and far exceeds the parameters of a single answer response. However, what does come to mind is, quite simply, the time that we spent improvising together in class, when the space was opened up and offered to us for nothing except our own boundless exploration. I cannot pinpoint a certain improvisational experience in particular as the most rewarding, but I can speak to such moments as a collection of memories that I have accumulated over the years of being with the program. When I think back to my time in the program, it is those moments that speak to me strongly. It was being given the time to encounter oneself in a new way, and to simultaneously feel a part of a larger, collective experience of transformation that I found truly enriching.
What's the dynamic like in your group of nine dancers?
Lexi Vajda: I'm sure we can all attest to the fact that this process has been a very steep learning curve for all of us; not only in the craft and journey of creation, but most importantly in our practice of collaboration. Nine individual minds, opinions, voices (sometimes at the same time) and little webs of imagination working in the studio with a common goal: the creation of something material that we all connect to. The most incredible part about it has been the creative momentum that is achieved by the number of us—ideas have fed ideas which in turn feed even more! It has been the challenge of streamlining these ideas, and learning to compromise exactly what we want to create not only a good group dynamic but a flow in the creative process. We are continuously impressed and inspired by what each of us brings to the group, and it also helps that we all really like each other—which makes it kinda fun too!
Why do you keep dancing? Why is dance important to you?
Arash Khakpour: I keep dancing because dance is the only way I can escape the physical world I live in and it allows me to forget everything. It allows me to stop thinking and let my body release all of its frustrations. The removal from consciousness is incomparable to any other state and it forces me to want to dance everyday even if I arrive in that state for moments. It allows me to literally live for moments. It's that alive feeling that amplifies on stage and makes me want to experience it again. I keep dancing because I need to prove to myself that I can physically do the things that I imagine myself doing in my head. Being sore everyday reminds me how much stronger I can be the next day and how weak I was the day before. Dance is important to me because I dream of inspiring people to become better human beings when they watch my body move. The beauty of it is that one might never know and admit who's body has changed something inside them and I might never know if I will ever effect someone and who's moving body has effected me.
What is going on in dance right now that is exciting to you?
Maxine Chadburn: I find dance to be exciting when it's progressive, explorative and, to quote our wonderful enthusiast Arash "pushing boundaries!". What I am super excited about right now is the freedom dance lends us to explore the honest extremes of who we are. Maybe Vancouver has always been this way, but for me this past year or two I have really been moved by the fearless exposure of some of Vancouver's true talents. Tiffany Tregarthen has been a great inspiration and an incredible risk taker in this way (and many others). I find it truly invigorating to delve into my deepest beauty, shame, regret, arrogance, insecurity, hideousness, naivety, cynicism and every other extreme we so tirelessly deny or hide from each other. You may be watching a dark secret that has never been spoken and possibly never will be, but nevertheless we all get to experience this connective honesty that I, and hopefully all of us, are constantly striving towards as artists and actively living beings.
Tell us about a favourite performance you saw this past year?
Renee Sigouin: Ever since I was 12 years old and saw Crystal Pite's kick-line of rubber chickens in The Stolen Show, I have had an appetite for dark humour in contemporary dance. MACHiNOiSY's plaything created and performed by Delia Brett satiated this hunger and was undeniably my favourite work of the year. A multimedia production involving live visual art, puppets and animation, this twisted dreamland was dance viewing ecstasy from start to finish. Solo, Delia drew us in as she stealthily emerged from a black morphsuit to guide us, through a mother and child's perspective, on a wild and unexpected exploration of what 'play' could possibly entail. She narrowly escaped a battle with her vindictive 'other self' to enter an animated world of video games, underwater creatures, and discovery. The most humorous image, one that will stick with me forever, was her silhouette reaching out to an animated baby, so cute, but she squeezes too hard and it dissolves into her womb only to explode in chunders out the back of her head. Projection of blackbird finger puppets juxtaposed against giant mother figure Delia on stilts under an enormous dress aroused morbid details from my childhood that I've tried so hard to bury... A game of hide-and-seek gone awry when I hid under a tree and was startled by a piercing shriek from below, a dying crow under my shoe, it's eye the same color as the yellow paint running down Delia's body. This performance profoundly resonated with me personally as I found my memory being stimulated in new and surprising ways while flashes of nerf guns and ninja games with my little brother appeared in my mind's eye, and I began to wonder how my mother's recollection and feelings of certain events might differ from my own. MACHiNOiSY always manages to plant a seed of introspection inside their audience, and plaything was no exception. Delia's exquisite movement quality, creative perspective and sense of humour are incredibly inspiring, and plaything had all the right ingredients to delight my dance taste buds: sarcasm, irony, playfulness, a touch of melancholy, badass dancing and downright hilarity.
Could you share some background on the show you will be doing at Dance Allsorts?
Kelly McKinnes: The piece took shape from our desire to explore and develop our creation process as individuals and collectively experiment with the collaboration of nine people who bring different ideas, tastes, bodies and experiences. Our piece, Article In, is the result of this mixture combined with our aim to create interesting work that has an underlying concept. In our process, we became interested in the different forms of dependence that are prevalent in our society, as well as the relationships that present themselves within each form. We explore the cyclical nature of the development of dependence that occurs in our society; typically we begin and end our lives as dependents and strive to obtain independence in between. Through out the work we explore our different roles within co-dependent, interdependent, material-dependent, self-dependent and over dependent relationships.
What's your favourite thing about performing?
Jessica Wilkie: Performing on a stage infront of an audience is always a pretty surreal experience. I can't help but feel like i'm in some sort of alternate universe where my experiences and imagination are amplified through movement. In my opinion, one of the best things about performing is the energy and adrenaline that you feel when you step on stage. There is something truly exciting about feeling the focus of an audience and the pulse of those dancing with you.
Who are some of your important artistic influences? (dance or otherwise?)
Elissa Hanson: A strong portion of influence for myself comes from atmospheric images in film, human situations in detailed fiction, general observation of the specificity of environment and circumstance. I think a theme for influence used often in this group, is somewhat anti-impulse. The idea of opposing your natural inclination. We often prompt ourselves out of our 'personal niches' in order to find something new to ourselves, this is largely attributed to a philosophy in our training with Modus Operandi. That being said, we inevitably procure a large amount of inspiration from our peers and the numerous local artists that we commend and admire.