Finding Community Through Dance: Our Conversation with Julie Lebel

Our longtime community partner Karen Jamieson Dance has returned with the Carnegie Dance Troupe to present their work in progress performance Recollect. This year’s collaborative performance was lead by Julie Lebel, a choreographer with a wide breadth of experience with community engaged dance.

The Carnegie Dance Troupe are residents of the Downtown Eastside, with a wide range of cultures, ages, abilities and talents. The group is joined by Lebel as a facilitator, and assistant leaders Caroline Liffmann and Megan Andrews who all join in dancing in the performance. There is also four musicians who perform a variety of instruments for the dances.

Lebel chatted with us about what lead her to work with the Carnegie Dance Troupe, the structure of community engaged dance, and what she has learned from her facilitation work.

FROM FROLICKING TODDLERS TO CARNEGIE DANCERS

Before being mentored by renowned choreographer Karen Jamieson, Lebel was creating Dancing the Parenting, a project for parents and their little ones to create dance together. She explained as a new mother of twins, “the project really emerged out of my desire to continue my practice with my children.”

Comparing working with parents and their children to the Carnegie Dance Troupe, Lebel gleefully says, “on a practical level, we do a lot more floor work with the parents and children… because [the children] are small!” She also explains that she leads both practices from an embodied perspective, giving “participants lots of references to their own bodies: breath, touch, all the sensations of weight.”

“The more we are connected to our own bodies, the better we are at connecting with others.”

In both workshops, dancers often are facing trauma, which needs to be addressed with an informed lens. “[When] having children, the birth is often a surprise to many people. It doesn’t go well every time. So many people come out of these situations with a very different life, sometimes with postpartum depression,” Lebel adds. She emphasizes that her work is not as a therapist, but as an informed dance instructor: “In both practices, it is not my job to address trauma. I am not a therapist. We are dancing. we are making dance together, we are connecting.” This is where the embodied methodology comes into play, as these Lebel argues that these techniques support dancers who have been through trauma.

 “I need to be focused on the arts. Because if I become a social worker, then the art goes out the door because of course those things are more pressing and important. So this is the line.”

CREATING DANCE TOGETHER

What does “community engaged dance” mean? Lebel’s definition includes collaborative methods, process-based creating, and alternative timelines. Instead of a focus on a final product for audience consumption, the emphasis is placed on “creating a container where people can be the best artists they can be at this point in time.”

One of Lebel’s favourite elements of community engaged dance creation is the ability for the group to create their own rules: “I love that we can decide how we work. I love that we have the power to generate spaces, listening to the possibilities, and then making art together.”

“I have a firm belief that everyone in this group is an artist, and would be a professional if they didn’t have big events happen in their life.”

Some of the Carnegie Dance Troupe members bring their own pieces to group, including poetry, dance, and song, such as Dolores Dallas and her poem ‘Grandchild.’ This work had been previously performed in other contexts and was then incorporated into Recollect. Other pieces in the performances were created by former troupe members who have passed away. Lebel explains, “I love that in this particular context the work produced by this troupe gets to live beyond the creators and that we also get the opportunity to remember them together.” This is particularly relevant since many of the troupe members are seniors, with the oldest participant being 89 years old.

LISTENING, LEARNING & LOVING

A key component of the Carnegie Dance Troupe is absolute inclusivity. This means that the door is open at all times during rehearsals for dancers to join. This can be tricky at times for Lebel, but she says ultimately it serves to make the group more accessible.

There is a variety of lived experiences and cultures present within the Carnegie Dance Troupe. The Downtown Eastside encompasses the historic area of Chinatown, and contains a significantly higher percentage of Indigenous people compared to the overall measurements of the City of Vancouver. Dancers bring forward knowledge that the facilitators may not know, and then this knowledge can be incorporated into the creation process.

“As a facilitator, I am really trying to be in the position of listening and learning as much as I can from people’s backgrounds and knowledge, and then reflect that back into the performance. “

Participants gave her culturally specific knowledge, such as when Musician and Indigenous Music Consultant Anthony McNab Favel of the Cree Nation explained how to finish certain songs in order to accompany the spirits away. “I feel so blessed when Anthony as a musician, drummer, and singer corrects me,” she says, “this is not my culture, so I don’t know that information.”

“Being in a position of learner and listener allows people to yield their trust, to be who they are, in their culture and lived experience. Sometimes participants tell us stories that are difficult to hear. They tell us because we have developed a trusting relationship. That’s a real thing. I am not a therapist, but I am also listening to them and taking their stories into consideration.”

On reflection, Lebel says the most important thing she has learned facilitating the workshops thus far is that “eldership comes from anyone, at any point, at anytime. You just have to listen for it. And as a facilitator, if you give space for eldership to rise, it will come. You have to trust the process for people to show up.”

The Carnegie Dance Troupe meets annually for rehearsals, and presents one performances each year. Participants grow and develop with each new work, teaching each other through osmosis. Next year’s performance is sure to be yet another opportunity for both participants and audience members to gain new understandings.

All photos from Recollect 2019 performance credited to Chris Randle.

Julie Lebel is a Vancouver based choreographer invested in community engaged dance and in interactions between public space and community. She graduated from UQAM with a bachelor degree in Dance in 1998 and is based in Vancouver since 2005. Her choreography is shown across Canada in city centres and rural contexts, with dance, theatre and multi-disciplinary presenters, festivals and museums. 

You can learn more about her practice here.