CANASIAN INTERNATIONAL DANCE FESTIVAL featuring works by Ziya Azazi, Jocelyne Montpetit, Mi Young Kim, Tribal Crackling Wind/Peter Chin and Bageshree Vaze. To Saturday (February 26) at the Fleck Dance Theatre (207 Queens Quay West). $25-$30. See Dance Listings, this page. 416-973-4000. See listing.
It’s hard to pin down Peter Chin. His interests range all over the artistic map – he’s a choreographer and dancer, but also a composer, designer and director. And as far as geography goes, you never know where he’ll pop up.
For the past while, he’s made frequent trips to Nicaragua to work on a piece called Fluency.
And one of his two pieces for the CanAsian Festival’s 10th anniversary draws on his work in Cambodia, where he’s travelled periodically since completing a research residency in Phnom Penh in 2003.
He created Old And New, Gold And Blue for five Cambodian dancers who have training in their country’s classical dance as well as contemporary techniques.
“They’re in different worlds,” says Chin, who could be talking about himself – he was born in Jamaica and his heritage includes a mix of Chinese, Irish and African.
“It’s about how these dancers embody the opposing currents in their lives. They’re rooted in traditional forms that make them very Cambodian – some of them have even performed for the king in his palace – but at the same time they’ve worked with people like Robert Wilson and others in Europe, the States, Australia and Canada.”
When the dancers performed the piece recently in their native country, they raised eyebrows among traditionalists.
“The old guard was saying the piece shouldn’t be performed in modern costume, and that it should be made simpler because it wasn’t easy to get the message,” says Chin, who was back home in Toronto at the time.
“Things we might take for granted – mixing up genres and styles – are on the cutting edge over there, and that fascinates me.”
Chin takes even more artistic licence in the solo piece he’s performing, which he says is his fantasy of what Buddhist dance was like on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
“The music is a crazy mashup of Javanese gamelan with West African drumming and Chinese Buddhist hymns,” he says, chuckling. “There are very few records left from that era, so I’m basing this piece on nothing scholarly or academic, just my imagination.”
The third element of Chin’s Can-Asian program includes Jeremy Mimnagh’s film about the revival of the arts in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge genocide of the 1970s. It focuses on the tour to Cambodia of Chin’s work Transmission Of The Invisible, which featured, among other things, images of traumatized children.
How did the Cambodians respond to his piece?
“Many artists found it thought-provoking, both poetic and visceral,” he says. “It was harder to read the reaction from the older guard, though. And a lot of young people don’t even know that history because the war isn’t taught to them.”
glenns@nowtoronto.com
