Good afternoon and I welcome this opportunity to speak today.
I'm actually based in Mississauga and I'm the artistic director and founder of SAMPRADAYA Dance Creations. This year we celebrate our 21st anniversary as a company. At the same time, in 1990, I also established SAMPRADAYA Dance Academy, which is a professional dance training organization. They're two separate organizations, separately incorporated, and they both are independent not-for-profit charitable organizations governed by separate boards and separate staff.
We are a culturally diverse dance training and dance production and creation organization, and specifically work in a form of South Asian classical dance. I arrived in Canada 50 years ago and I've seen this really incredible arc of dance development for South Asian dance in Canada over the past 50 years. I'm very proud and pleased to say that South Asian dance today is recognized on the national landscape as a Canadian art form, as opposed to the situation when I first arrived, when it was seen as some sort of exotic dance form. They didn't quite know how to describe it; it was seen as a folk form or some kind of ethnic art form. I think, over the years, the efforts of several South Asian dance pioneers have been able to demystify the art form and also to build a better appreciation and understanding of its importance as a Canadian artistic expression.
We are based in Mississauga and have been very active in developing dance in the Peel and Halton regions here in Ontario. Our history with Canadian Heritage is a long one. The company SAMPRADAYA Dance Creations has received support from Canadian Heritage through their Canada cultural spaces fund to enhance and to enlarge and renovate our dance space. Today we're very pleased to say that we have a 7,000 square foot dance facility that also has a 95 seat black box theatre, which is professionally equipped with sound and lighting. This is thanks to the Canada cultural spaces fund in addition to the Ontario Trillium Foundation's community capital fund, which supported this capital program for the company.
Several years ago the academy also received support from the Canada cultural spaces fund to bring in special audiovisual equipment for dance training. We have also been able to access some small amounts of arts presentation support. We are not yet on CanDance, the Canadian Network of Dance Presenters.
So far with what we've been able to accomplish over the past 25 years, the academy is now Canada's leading South Asian classical dance organization. We receive support from the Canada arts training fund from Canadian Heritage.
Our graduates now—34 of them—are dancing in professional dance both in my company and as well as independent dancers. They're sought after dancers working both nationally and internationally. Our academy also holds the only summer intensive for South Asian classical dance professional development and training across Canada annually, which is a very important aspect of what we do.
SAMPRADAYA Dance Creations is a professional dance company. We create and produce work and present it on main stages. That's a very important statement that I need to make because we're no longer performing just for our own cultural community. Indeed, our dance is seen across Canada on national stages, and we are touring internationally as well. We're seen as a Canadian company, not as a South Asian dance company from Canada. That's an important distinction to make.
We are creating, producing, and presenting many artists. Over the last 10 years, SAMPRADAYA Dance Creations has actually expanded its mandate to be a South Asian dance development organization. That means we don't only create and perform dance, but also foster and nurture the development of our community of dance artists and have special presentation theories, such as the horizon series, for emerging new-generation artists. We also have another series for established artists in our theatre.
We collaborate extensively with community groups in the Halton and Peel regions in all disciplines—in theatre, dance, music, literature, and in film—so I think it's vital to state that this opportunity to receive support from cultural spaces has been incredibly important for a small organization such as ours to become a hub for the arts in the Peel region.
I would like to make the following recommendations.
We as a company collaborate with many international artists from across South Asia and the U.S.A. to create work that tours Canada and internationally. Just this past week, we had our 25th anniversary celebration and we had five artists come from India to be part of this production. These artists came under the international mobility program, which is so critical to our ability to bring in foreign artists. We applaud Canadian Heritage for having facilitated this program, instead of going through the very onerous, lengthy, and complex process of having to go through the labour market impact assessment program. I urge Canadian Heritage to continue to allow artists from abroad to come under the international mobility program, which allows us to collaborate with artists from abroad, because it's vital that we do so. I urge Canadian Heritage to remove some of the restrictions.
I will talk about the ripple effect of bringing international artists here. They actually open up direct opportunities for artists from Canada and companies such as ours to go into foreign markets, because these artists are returning to India, talking about the wonderful work that was done in Canada, and are speaking to presenters in India and taking our work back to India and other parts of Southeast Asia. I cannot overstate the importance of disseminating Canadian work across the world. Canadian art, I would emphasize, should not be seen as art that just comes from Eurocentric traditions. I think Canada today is a very pluralistic arts community and we need to be looking at Canadian art as being extremely diverse in both its interdisciplinary work and its artistic voices.
I also would urge Canada—