Tag: ancestry

Learning from her ancestors

Tasha Faye Evans shares a work in progress at Dance in Vancouver. (photo courtesy Scotiabank Dance Centre)

“With everything I do, I always ask myself, what is the medicine of this work? How is this dance, this play, this project, contributing to the greater health and well-being of my community? Who is this character speaking for? Who am I dedicating this work to? Then, when it comes time to perform,” said Tasha Faye Evans, “I am rarely nervous, because it’s not about me and my skills, its more about the work I am doing and who I am doing it for.”

Evans was speaking to the Independent in advance of Dance in Vancouver, which runs Nov. 20-24 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. The dance and theatre artist, who has Coast Salish, Welsh and European-Jewish grandparents, is presenting t’emək’ʷqən-seed, a work in progress, in a free-to-attend double bill with Starr Muranko/Raven Spirit Dance on Nov. 22, 2 p.m. A moderated conversation with the artists will follow the performances.

“There is not a word in Coast Salish culture for art,” writes Evans on her website. “Our art is functional. Our dances, prayers. Our songs, blessings. I am an artist because I love fiercely and creating work is my way of having hope, preserving the sacred and imagining a better future for all our relations.”

“My own body of work has always been because I am not a blockader, I don’t write the letters to the people in charge, I am weary of shaking my fist in the air,” she told the Independent. “My dance, theatre and community work are my way of addressing a helplessness I feel in the face of the misused powers in the world. My community work is mostly about redress and recalibrating values to align with the original caregivers of these Coast Salish lands and waters. We all share in a sacred responsibility to ensure a future of health and well-being for all our relations, and my work is in service of this sacred responsibility.”

Evans’s choreography has been presented by various companies and she has participated in performances and festivals around the world. She has many projects on the go, in dance and more broadly. One initiative is In the Presence of Ancestors, an exhibition of five Coast Salish House posts being carved and raised in Port Moody along its Shoreline Trail. She was recognized for the 

exhibit with a 2023 Edge Prize, which is given to leaders, or “Edgewalkers,” in the Salmon Nation, described on the prize’s website as “a bioregion defined by the historic range of wild Pacific salmon, from the Salinas River in California, north to the Yukon River in Alaska.”

seed was inspired by a sculpture created by Coast Salish artist James Harry.

“The sculpture was part of KWÍKWI – The Seventh, an exhibit James Harry and his partner Lauren Brevner dedicated to their daughter, the seventh generation born in James’s family since colonization,” said Evans. “seed draws upon what master carver Xwalacktun [James Harry] refers to as the Ancestor’s Eye or the Salish Eye, and the fundamental shapes and teachings of Coast Salish art and design, the sphere, crescent and trigon. The Salish Eye can be found carved into the oldest Coast Salish tools and, for that matter, I refer to these shapes as sxwōxwiyám, part of our original stories, written into the land and shared generation to generation, teaching us how to be human.”

Having collaborated with master carvers for more than a decade now, Evans said her “choreography experiments with how Coast Salish art and design can be expressed in movement, gesture and architecture of the space. I am developing a methodology that is based in the shapes and cultural teachings of the Ancestor’s Eye, the sphere, trigon, crescents, and the space in between. I am passionate about showcasing Coast Salish art form and culture and I am driven to share sxwōxwiyám and invoke a sacred responsibility in my audiences for all our relations.”

photo - Tasha Faye Evans
Tasha Faye Evans (photo by Yasuhiro Okada)

What people will see at Dance in Vancouver is “the tap root of t’emək’ʷqən-seed,” said Evans, “the first part of the work to grow, unfolding itself first towards the earth. I’ll be sharing that vulnerable moment of the creative process where the story is newly manifesting, taking root in the body and just beginning to grow.”

seed was commissioned by Odd Meridian Arts, whose artistic director is Ziyian Kwan. While in residence there, Evans created another work, Song.

“My connection with Odd Meridian Arts began decades ago when I was a shaved-head theatre kid and Ziyian was one of those dancers I’d see on posters and just stare at in awe,” shared Evans. “She’s always represented ambition for me and what a successful career as an artist looks like. (I don’t think I’ve told her this.) Ziyian has always been one of those artists whom I could only aspire to be.”

It was during COVID that Evans said she “got over” herself and responded to a message Kwan had posted on Facebook.

“Song was also a seed,” said Evans. “It was a section of a larger piece I am still creating called Cedar Woman. It was a landing piece in my creative process, when I was exploring how to re-member myself to a legacy of Coast Salish women. I follow the song I hear calling me in my heart. The dance is a journey through the song, all the way back in time to my first grandmother, singing the song as prayer for her grandchildren during the great flood. I don’t dance Song the same in Cedar Woman any longer, but the core of Song, is finding itself in seed.”

For Evans, being part of such diverse ancestry, holding space for her Coast Salish, Welsh and Jewish heritage, is challenging. 

“For much of my adult life, it has been learning how to sit in the circle within my Indigenous community,” she said.

“I didn’t grow up in Jewish culture more than our comfort foods like chicken soup, matzah, and lox and cream cheese. We did not practise being Jewish and I learned very little about this part of me other than the trauma we all carry. For years, I wore a Star of David, mostly because it was a gift from my Nana. Sometimes, I feel my Jewish great-grandmother Faye nudging me disgruntledly until I mention her name, too, when I introduce myself. I’m not sure how to hold being Jewish in this body while living here in these Coast Salish lands and waters.

“There is a piece I’d like to create for my GG Faye, actually. I have a long mink coat that reminds me of one of the photos I have of her, taken just before World War II. I know she’d really appreciate that and I welcome the parts of me I would discover dancing for her.”

Her Welsh heritage has also been less explored, but, said Evans, “I have always longed to go to Wales. To dance on those lands and waters and listen to the language calls me for sure.

“While it’s these Coast Salish lands and stories that dance in me the loudest, I do honour that I am the dream of all my ancestors.”

Dance in Vancouver also features a work by Action at a Distance/Vanessa Goodman on Nov. 23 and DIV Unstructured on Nov. 24 includes Idan Cohen/Ne.Sans Opera & Dance. For more information and tickets, visit thedancecentre.ca.

Honouring ancestors’ stories

Juan Villegas rehearsing Edictum, choreographed by Vanessa Goodman, which is about Villegas’s Sephardi ancestry. The work is part of Dancing on the Edge’s EDGE One July 6 and 8 at the Firehall Arts Centre. (video still from Vanessa Goodman)

“I am very happy to be able to share my work and talk about Sephardic Jews, as I am doing a lot of research and I am discovering a lot about my own culture and where it comes from,” Juan Villegas told the Independent about Edictum, a new work with Vanessa Goodman about his family heritage, an excerpt of which he will perform at this year’s Dancing on the Edge July 6 and 8. “Throughout history, the Jewish community has suffered a lot and I am very happy to be able to pay respect, honour, shed some light and help tell the story of my ancestors,” he said.

Villegas and Goodman had already started their collaboration when Villegas found out that his ancestors were Spanish Jews who, following the Alhambra Edict of Expulsion in 1492 and the persecution of Jews by the Spanish Inquisition, sought refuge in Colombia.

In 2015, Spain passed legislation to offer citizenship to members of the Sephardi diaspora, but the window of opportunity to apply was only a handful of years and Villegas’s family missed it. However, they did apply to Portugal, which passed a similar law, also in 2015. Given the number of applicants, it could be several years before the family finds out. For the application, certified records were needed, so Villegas’s siblings hired a genealogist.

“They did both of my parents’ family trees and both ended up having the same ancestor – Luis Zapata de Cardenas, who came to Antioquia, Colombia, from Spain in 1578 and whose family had converted to Catholicism in Spain,” he said. “What is unclear to me is whether Luis Zapata de Cardenas was a practising Jew and was hiding it or if his family back in Spain became Catholic and raised him Catholic. I find it very hard to believe that people fully converted to Catholicism, as religion is so embedded in one’s culture and must be very difficult to switch by obligation. So, this is probably when they started disguising some Jewish rituals as Catholic, which happened a lot in Colombia.”

Villegas left Colombia in 2003, at the age of 18, concealing from his family his real reasons for leaving.

“I told them that I was going to only be in Canada for eight months to study English and then come back to Colombia,” he shared, “but deep inside I knew that I wanted to find a way to stay in Canada. I am gay and had a hard time growing up in Colombia – without realizing it, I was also escaping from a traumatic childhood, as I had been sexually abused and bullied at school. I was lucky enough that my parents helped pay for ESL studies in Canada and then I was able to do my university studies in Vancouver at Emily Carr University.”

After getting a bachelor’s degree in design from Emily Carr, Villegas worked at a design studio but was let go when the economy collapsed in 2008. He took about a year to figure out what he wanted to do next.

“I had a lot of unresolved trauma and I think it was a combination of having the time and (unconsciously) wanting to be healed from trauma that I started taking yoga and dance classes,” he said. “I met a dance artist named Desireé Dunbar, who had a community dance company called START Dance and she invited me to join her company. Vanessa [Goodman] had just graduated from the dance program at SFU and she was in the company also, this was back in 2009. Then, in 2010, I joined the dance program at SFU and Vanessa came to choreograph for us a couple of times. I always loved working with her and I felt like I connected with her.”

Graduating from SFU with a diploma in dance, Villegas moved to Toronto, where he danced for a few years. When he returned to Vancouver in 2017, he started following Goodman’s work. Intrigued, he asked if she would choreograph something for him and she agreed.

“And that piece that we created was about family,” he said, “but we left it at that, because I did not get the grants I needed to continue the work. So, when I discovered about my Sephardic Jewish ancestry, I pitched the idea to her and she agreed (without me knowing that she also has a Jewish background).”

video still - Juan Villegas rehearsing Edictum
Juan Villegas rehearsing Edictum. (video still from Vanessa Goodman)

Everything fell into place, he said, including some funding, so they took up work again this year on Edictum, which is Latin for order or command. The project was always intended to be a solo for Villegas, and they had started by “diving into his family history and the names of his ancestors to build movement language,” said Goodman.

“Since his family found that they have Jewish ancestry and were a part of the diaspora from Spain and Portugal in the 1400s, we found it very relevant to revisit the starting material and expand on this history inside the work,” she said. “I was raised Jewish culturally and we found, through conversations about our family rituals in relation to culture, food and celebration, there were some very interesting links between his family’s expressions of their identity and mine. We have woven these small rituals into the piece and have found a very touching cross-section of how this can be shared through our dance practice in his new solo.”

Goodman is also part of plastic orchid factory’s Ghost, an installation version of Digital Folk, which will be free to visit at Left of Main July 13-15. It is described on plastic orchid factory’s website as “a video game + costume party + music and dance performance + installation built around the desire to revisit how communities gather to play music, dance and tell stories.”

“I began working with plastic orchid factory on Digital Folk in the very early days of its inception,” said Goodman. “James [Gnam] and Natalie [Purschwitz] began researching the work in 2014 at Progress Lab, and I was a part of that initial research for the piece. Since then, the work has been developed over a long period of time with residency creation periods at the Cultch, at Boca del Lupo, at the Shadbolt, at SFU Woodward’s, and it has toured Calgary and northern B.C. This work lives in several iterations, but the Ghost project is a beautiful way for the work to live in a new way one more time. The cast got together at Left of Main in December of 2022 and filmed the piece for this upcoming iteration…. It is exciting to see a work have such a rich life with so many incredible artists who have been a part of this project.”

Dancing on the Edge runs July 6-15. It includes paid ticket performances at the Firehall Arts Centre, where Edictum will be part of EDGE One, and offsite free presentations, such as Ghost. For the full lineup, visit dancingontheedge.org.