Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today about something that has been a major part of my life since 1978. Dance has played a role in Canadian lives for a very long time. The dance profession in Canada goes back further than most Canadians realize. It also intersects with the broader social, political, economic, and military history of Canada. The stories of dancing Canadians are truly Canadian stories.
I'm the director of collections and research at Dance Collection Danse, a non-profit arts organization that is a combination of archives, exhibition gallery, publisher, and research centre. Our mission is to safeguard and disseminate Canada's theatrical dance heritage. We are the only organization in Canada with this mandate. We serve all kinds of people, from scholars and students, to journalists and filmmakers, to curators and amateur genealogists, to the artists themselves. We create live exhibitions in our gallery in Toronto. We loan artifacts to other museums, such as Pier 21 in Halifax, and we co-produce exhibitions with partners such as the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown.
We disseminate Canada's dance history to the wider public through our annual magazine, as well as the 39 books we have published, including the only bilingual encyclopedia of dance in Canada. We offer programming to the public through lectures, panels, screenings, and our grassroots archiving workshops.
We also have extensive content on our website that tells the stories of dancing Canadians, and we strive to make connections between our dance ancestors and the vibrant community of today. Among the varied researchers who come to us are those Canadians who have discovered that their mother or father danced professionally. They come to us asking about their parents, and we help them reclaim a part of their ancestry that was little known to them. One such man, a retired geographer from Kingston, did so much research that he ended up self-publishing a book about his mother's dance career in the vaudeville era.
Not as many walk through our door as they do at Library and Archives Canada, or at the Royal Ontario Museum, but for those Canadians we help, we are often the only ones who can help. The importance of Dance Collection Danse lies in our ability to extract the extraordinarily rich record of dance in Canada that is beyond the consciousness of most Canadians. We are anxious to continue to discover and tell that story.
The stories contained within our collection are linked to the broader story of Canada. Over the decades that the suffragettes and then the Famous Five women were fighting for the rights of women, dancers and dance teachers were practising and legitimizing the kind of female empowerment that Agnes Macphail and Nellie McClung were striving for. Women in dance were earning their own money on the vaudeville stages of Canada and buying their independence and their right to choose their own lifestyles. The teachers of the period were business owners and entrepreneurial women who paid rent for studios and performance halls. They paid musicians, bought sheet music and costumes, and contributed to the economy.
Toronto dance teacher, Amy Sternberg, even created what is probably the first teacher training program in dance in Canada, thus developing the next generation of teachers, and empowering young women in the 1920s.
Dancers also contributed to the war effort during both world wars. Their role in boosting morale by organizing troop shows and visiting local bases was vital for the men waiting to go overseas. Groups like the Bomba-Dears in Winnipeg and the Rhythmettes in London would gather after their school or work days with a brown bag dinner in their hands and board a bus to travel out to the bases in their region and perform. They returned home in the wee hours of the night only to get up early the next morning and do it all again. They sometimes found themselves shovelling out the bus during snow storms so they could get to the troops. Some of their counterparts made it into the big military reviews that toured Canada and then followed the allies into Europe after D-Day.
Dancers organized benefit concerts to raise money for recruitment or Red Cross efforts. There was not a dry eye in the house during the Peace Ballet that was part of Amy Sternberg's fantastic extravaganza at Massey Hall in 1915. The audience looked to the hundreds of soldiers in attendance who had been training at the CNE grounds and would soon be heading overseas.
Dancers also became soldiers and medics. The male ranks of Boris Volkoff's Canadian ballet were quickly depleted at the start of World War II as dancers joined the Canadian medical corps or the air force. For many, those years without training ended their budding careers, but several returned to dance after the war using their DVA credits to pay for training.
Canada’s immigration story is also revealed through dance. It is likely that social and sacred dances have been practised here since the arrival of Canada’s earliest aboriginal peoples. Ballroom dances were transported by French and British settlers, and every immigrant population has brought its vernacular or folk dances.
Even when we trace Canada’s theatrical dance heritage and the work of professionally trained dancers, it also parallels our immigration history. During and after the Russian Revolution, imperial-trained Russian ballet dancers started opening studios and arranging concerts in various Canadian cities. After World War II, displaced persons began arriving from eastern Europe, bringing ballet as well as the German expressionist modern dance of Mary Wigman.
Our three oldest ballet companies were all developed by immigrant women, and when the doors of immigration opened wider to Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean in the latter 20th century, a diverse range of artists brought their dances to Canada and provided Canadian audiences with exciting forms that they had only previously been able to access through touring companies. Menaka Thakkar and Rina Singha brought bharatanatyam and kathak from India. Patrick Parsons brought the dances of the Caribbean. William Lau added Peking opera to our artistic landscape, and there are still mysteries to be solved. We have found evidence of a school of Spanish and flamenco dance in Toronto as early as 1925. We know there is more to discover and that the history is richer and deeper than we currently realize.
When the federal government enacted the Canada Council into existence in 1957, everything changed. That one cultural policy shift created possibilities for the development of a professional art scene in Canada. It gave artists a fighting chance to develop Canadian culture despite living beside the behemoth of the United States. Artists could share Canadian stories with Canadians and the world in a rich and vital way.
For dance, it meant better training, proper venues, and the chance to earn a living as a dancer in our own country. Dance Collection Danse ensures that the investment made in dance by government, foundations, and private donors has an enduring legacy for future generations.
I envision a Canada where dance and its heritage matter. I would like to see a cultural policy that recognizes all of the arts as a valued asset within Canadian society and where dance and its heritage are seen as a necessary thread in the fabric of our great nation, a nation built on vision, a vision built in the ballrooms of Charlottetown and Quebec in 1864.
Thank you.