artist q & a: Heather Ware
by Jesse Locke.
photo by rebecca bruton.
Canadian dancer/choreographer Heather Ware is fascinated by the possibilities of the dancing body, and how complex coordinations affect how we experience emotion. As a choreographer Heather is known for her work with live music, and has a long standing collaboration with cellist Jakob Koranyi (SE), with whom she has created Reapproaching Bach (2017), an intimate duet between cellist and dancer, and Battle Abbey, (2017) a performance work for 3 cellists and 3 dancers. Other long term collaborators include: violist Oene van Geel, mezzo-soprano Cora Burgraaf, and theatre maker Laurel Green. Her work has been presented throughout Europe and has been supported by Banff Centre (Canada), Kulturhuset i Ytterjärna (Sweden) and Podium Bloos (Netherlands). For 2019-2021 seasons Heather was one of the Artists in Residence with Dancers’ Studio West in Calgary, Alberta, where she created We Needed to be Rescued together with musician/composer Rebecca Bruton. Since 2019 Heather has also been affiliated with the University of Calgary, where she teaches contemporary technique and Interdisciplinary studies.
Heather was one of the core dancers of LeineRoebana in Amsterdam (Netherlands) from 2003-2017. In 2010 Heather was awarded de Zwaan (the Swan) for most impressive dance performance of the year for her role in 172 Suggesties aan een lichaam. From 2015-2017 Heather was the recipient of a Nieuwe-Makers Regeling (new makers trajectory) from the Dutch Performing Arts Fund, and in 2019 was one of the makers to receive the PLAN Brabant fund.
In advance of her soundwalk on February 8th, 2022 Heather spoke with NWC Journalist Jesse Locke. This conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jesse Locke: How did you first become interested in dance?
Heather Ware: That’s a giant question! [laughs] I’ve danced since I was knee-high. I was born and raised here in Banff, and both of my parents worked at the Banff Centre. My dad worked as a financial programmer and my mom worked for a very, very long time as an usher at the theatre. When my dad retired he did that as well, and I’ve done it since I was 15.
There used to be kids' community classes at the Banff Centre, which was three minutes up the hill from my parents’ house. It’s pretty amazing how they make some of the most astounding art that’s happening in the world really accessible to little local kids. There would be a dance show on, and I would have no idea it was Crystal Pite’s Betroffenheit, which would turn out to be the biggest dance show in the world. It pre-premiered down the street from my house, and it was free.
It wasn’t just dance, either. When I was 12, I remember being allowed to miss school to watch the finals of the Banff International String Quartet Competition. When they announced who the winners were, I stood up in the audience because I didn’t think the right quartet had won! [laughs] It was this huge international competition and the calibre of the music was so high. Some people might have found it inaccessible or elitist, and it can be for sure, but that kind of art was very accessible to me. I think that’s what made me interested.
What would you describe as the most formative experiences that led you towards pursuing dance and choreography professionally?
The Banff Centre didn’t have those community classes for very long. They only offered them for a couple of years. After that I danced with a woman named Stephanie Christensen, who used to have a studio in Canmore. She did everything herself, creating entire performances for groups of 50 kids as well as adults. Stephanie designed and made all of the costumes herself, wrote the stories, did all the choreography, and even wrote and performed all the songs herself by singing and playing guitar. She was a phenomenal woman!
One of her performances was called Trouble In The Imagi Nation. It was essentially a story about environmental destruction where adults were tearing down all the trees and kids were coming along to save it. She made another years later called The Caterpillar Thriller. It was about a caterpillar being bullied because it’s ugly and there are no other caterpillars around. All of a sudden it turns into a butterfly and finds its people, although they’re butterflies.
These were children’s ballets that she made, but they made me realize that dance isn’t pretty, and it doesn’t have to be about being pretty. It could have some kind of value impact for the world. I’m aware that they weren’t saving the ocean population, but they were saying something positive. I don’t know if I thank or blame Steph for that, but I think she’s the one who planted the seed in me that dance doesn’t just have to be about pretty movement. After that, it never occurred to me that I couldn’t dance professionally.
Heather Ware and Jakob Koranyi: Reapproaching Bach
You spent 14 years with the LeineRoebana modern dance company in Amsterdam. How did that opportunity come to be?
I left Banff at 13 to go to a professional dance school, and was there until the end of high school. I clearly wasn’t a fit for the classical ballet world, but dance was still my thing, so I did my graduate studies at the Toronto Dance Theatre. When I was in my last year of school in Toronto, I worked with the director of a dance academy in Rotterdam, Holland. The work that he did felt like it fit. It combined a lot of things from my classical ballet background, and worked a lot with quite linear movement. A lot of the modern dance that was going on in Canada at that time was quite contracted, and I was more linear.
This university in Rotterdam has a post-graduate program where you can come and only do the fourth year. One of the things that appealed to me was that you did an apprenticeship with a professional company. It’s a kind of bridge program that sadly doesn’t exist in many places in Canada. There, it’s a prerequisite of graduating that you have to do an apprenticeship somewhere. When the director of the school taught us in Toronto, I told him that I loved what they were up to, and asked him if I could come. He said they were supposed to have a big audition process, but sure! [laughs] Six months later I was moving to the Netherlands. I didn’t know a thing about the place, but I liked the dance they made.
When I was in Rotterdam, I did my apprenticeship at LeineRoebana. Once again, it was an experience that felt like it clicked. They work a lot with live music, which was one of the main things that really fascinated me. We collaborated with baroque ensembles making very contemporary music composed for and with the work we make. We did a long-term collaboration with an Indonesian gamelan ensemble, so we worked a lot in Indonesia as well. The music was always as integral as the dance.
The dance that they make decentralizes the core, which means any part of the body can be leading whatever is going on. It can seem a bit possessed, and you’re always striving for something that you’re never going to achieve. If you do achieve it, the choreographers will throw another loop at you. You can’t ever get there or be finished, and it took me a while to realize that’s the point! [laughs] It also meant that I stayed. I went as an apprentice in 2003 and did my last production with them in 2018. I had no concept that I was going to stay that long, but the work kept fascinating me.
What did you learn during your time in Europe, and how have you brought those lessons back home?
All of this is only spoken through my own experiences, but one of the things that I noticed in the Netherlands is that it was a given that dance had value. I didn’t feel this constant pressure to prove that it was worthwhile. I also think that changed over the course of being there for 20 years, but if you tell someone in Amsterdam that you work as a dancer, they just say “OK!” Then you have a conversation about it.
Sometimes here in Canada I tell people that and they assume that I must be a dance teacher or choreographer, instead of just making my life’s work as a dancer in a company. Of course it makes sense that it’s not such a given because it’s not as prevalent in the culture here. The fact that dance didn’t always have to prove itself meant that it could develop differently. It’s a very different energetic space that you’re moving from if you’re just investigating things instead of trying to prove that you have worth or value.
When I first became interested in coming back to Canada, I did a workshop with One Yellow Rabbit in Calgary. Denise Clarke had first come to work with my cellist partner in Banff when we were doing a residency, so we collaborated again. What I noticed from that One Yellow Rabbit crowd, and I also see this in other aspects of Canadian dance culture, is that the work can’t forget about its audience. If it does forget about its audience, it’s not going to exist. That’s the flipside of always having to prove yourself. You always have to be reaching out to let people in.
There were certain times when I was working in Holland where the work got a bit cut off. It almost didn’t matter if people came to see it. But actually it does! [laughs] I don’t put music on and dance by myself. I dance because I want to share something. It’s a communication between myself and fellow performers or the audience. That multiplicity of how we exchange as people is at the core of why I dance.
Can you tell me a bit about your process of telling stories in interactive performances with audiences?
One of the physical ideas that LeineRoebana works with, which I brought into the work that I was making by myself there, is the idea of allowing something to happen to you. That links back to the decentralization of the engine of the body. If our natural engine is the core of the body and we’re moving outwards from there, it’s very self-driven movement. I as a dancer am making this thing happen. Alternatively, if someone comes from behind and knocks you over, that allows a whole sequence of movements to happen.
In the Calgary dance community, it often becomes a situation where you’re the performer, the maker, and the marketing person finding your own audience. You’re doing the whole thing yourself, so there’s an active feeling that “I’m doing it.” I also feel that infiltrates the physical dance that’s happening. It becomes very centre-driven and core-driven, reaching out from itself. That has a very beautiful quality, but I’m also interested in how it can sit in contrast to the idea of allowing something to happen to you, rather than making it happen.
I always find “story” to be a tricky term because I very much don’t work with narrative. Those things are often equated with one another. As people, we make stories out of things we see. Our brains are wired to create relationships between things. When Rebecca Bruton and I worked together at Dancers’ Studio West, we explored the notion of putting two things next to each other. They would be happening at the same time in the same space, but we as makers were not necessarily building a relationship, even if the audience will connect them.
The work that I make rarely remains improvised. It often includes two things that are very set, but with a little bit of sketch space on either side where improvisation can happen. In that way, they bump up against each other a little bit differently every time because it’s live performance art. I love offering those moments up as the work we’ve done. I understand the meaning in it, but I want audiences to make their own meaning.
For example, if I make a straight line with my arm, I could just be making a straight line. But because we all understand bodies in some shape or form, you as the person on the other side will see me reaching for something: wanting, longing, maybe even grieving. You’ll read a million things into it, but it’s really just a straight arm reaching into space.
What can people expect from your upcoming Soundwalk?
One of the biggest things I believe about dance is that whether you’re doing it or just experiencing it as an audience member, it changes us. Right now I’m working at a university with a group of non-dance majors. I have a class full of law students, French students, and economics professors. It’s a really neat mix of people. We go in and do one exercise together, and then I ask everyone how they feel. I do a lot of work with repetition that might take a long time, but you really do feel differently after you finish the class.
What I’m curious about with the Soundwalk is linking that idea to how movement changes the way we experience sound. Then breaking that down even more into how movement changes the way we listen. What I have planned is a very strict series of walking movements. For example, over the course of eight minutes, you’ll walk 10 steps. Then over the course of eight minutes, you’ll walk 100 steps. At the end of each movement, you’ll take a moment to listen to the inside of your body, the narrow space around your body, and the far space as far away as your ear-imagination can go. How is that different based on how quickly you’re moving?
I’m interested in the idea of being non-judgemental about any of that, because everyone has a natural speed. Therefore, because you’re doing something prescribed, it’s probably not how anyone would naturally walk. I’m curious how putting people into that pattern will make them listen differently, and then hear differently. We can also have people walk by themselves and then walk next to someone else. Those are the ideas I’ve built in, and I’m trying to keep it only that complex. We’re going to walk next to the river where there’s busy traffic on one side and then wild, rushing water on the other. I love that juxtaposition.
