Home and native land

>> Culture clash for choreographer Gaétan Gingras

by MELANIE KLIMCHUK

"I can really feel my Indian blood when I dance," Gaétan Gingras tells me. Gingras' strong features and intense black eyes come courtesy of Iroquois ancestors. But until about five years ago, he knew almost nothing of his heritage. When he started looking into it, the veteran Carbone 14 dancer noticed a lot of dancing: "All the time, in all the rituals and ceremonies," he says. "Sometimes it was more sacred, sometimes social. But I didn't grow up in native culture, so it didn't feel right. Things like the Eagle Dance didn't feel like they were mine."

Curious since up until then, he peformed other people's dances for a living. But that was business, and this was personal. So the former Concordia student made his own dances, then brought them back to the native community for feedback. The result was more ritual than performance. In Osheron, for example, he tried to call up animal spirits. "Traditional people thought it looked very contemporary," he says with a shrug. "But to people who don't know the traditions, it looks very traditional."

With his latest work, Burning Silence, he's moved onto his own turf, and looks at how he can integrate fragmented city life with a nature-based worldview in which everything one sees or does is meaningful.

"It's about equilibrium," he explains. "I'm still trying to make a connection between the spiritual world and the day-to-day empty stuff in the city. The piece is about becoming conscious."

In lieu of further explanation, Gingras, Robert Bergmar and Sophie Lavigne go over parts of Burning Silence one last time. They move like tired robots. The music is discordant, frenzied, repetitious. Then, another beat takes over. Their bare feet slap out an accelerated heartbeat, exactly the rhythm used by shamanic drummers across many cultures. I become lightheaded. The pace becomes dreamlike, and I feel like I'm walking in the woods, I can almost see the light filtering through the leaves. Good one, I think.

The dancers wear masks and have gold arms to look like the bodyless spirits, Gingras explains. He points to an imaginary line of burning trees, upside down, stage left. This seems like a really dumb way to die. He laughs. The fire, of course, won't be real. And the term Burning Silence means "concentrated spirituality." He pulled the term out of a book by an Eastern European woman--he no longer remembers her name or the title, but it was about the need for stillness in order to listen to the spirit, to the self.

"I think that's an element of human spirituality," Gingras observes--just before we charge down to the noisy, impersonal buzz of St-Laurent.

At Tangente, Nov. 20-22, 8:30pm; Nov. 23, 7:30pm, $15 & $12. 525-1500