Dancing out of the dark

WV choreographer Jennifer Mascall pushing
for dance appreciation at early school levels

Evelyn Jacob
SPOTLIGHT FEATURE

HEN TOLD the

North Shore News

doesn’t have a
dance critic, Jennifer
Mascall leans back into her
chair and sighs.

it's not as if she’s surprised. For
someone who has spent most of
her life exposing people to the
under-appreciated art form, it's yet
another round of disappointment.

The news typifies what the West
Vancouver choreographer sees as
amore pervasive problem facing
her art: the lack of an educated
audience.

“The real issue in dance is
there’s no dance in the schools,”’
says the radiant dancer, who is
expecting her third child in Oc-
tober.

“There is music, art, poetry in
the classroom, but no dance. |
once read that if a child doesn’t
see a performance before the age
of 10, he or she may never see
one. We consider students ab-
solute necessities (as an au-
dience).”’

That is why Mascall has invited
students to attend performances of
Ghosts, her major work of the year
which opens tomorrow night at
the Firehall Arts Centre.

The lack of audience is also
teflected in the lack of coverage
given by the local media and, ac-
cording to Mascall. literary schol-
arship.

“Dance is interesting — there’s
no paper bridge to the layman as
there is with, say, music. There’s
no drawing people can go and
look at, there’s no poem they can
tead.

“People have been writing

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JENNIFER MASCALL is concerned about the future of dance in
Vancouver. Educating audiences, especially young audiences, is
a priority for the West Vancouver choreographer, who opens her
major work of the year at the Firehall Arts Centre tomorrow night.

descriptive things about dance for
ears, but there’s been very little
iterary criticism written about it.

There’s no vanguard magazine

Meet the Artist

that really studies it. Invariably
people say. ‘I don’t really under-
stand it.’ ”’

The dearth of information on
dance intrigued Mascall because,
ironicaily, choreographers create
“teams’’ of notes while they
work,

So, after she graduated from the
dance department at York Univer-
sity in 1975, she compiled a port-
folio of notes made by 60 North
American choreographers which
she called, simply, Footnotes.

She made 30 copies, came to
Vancouver from New York where
she had been warking on a
Canada Council grant, and sold 29
booklets for $10 each. There was
so little information on dance
available that the Lincoln Centre
Library shelled out $300 for her
last copy.

“1 don’t even have a copy.
Maybe it will be worth a fortune
one day,’’ she says, throwing her
head back and letting forth a
deep-throated faugh.

Mascail has been
choreographing in Canada for
more than 15 years. Her fascina-
tion with movement and use of
improvisation has challenged au-

diences and continues to defy
categorization.

She first came upon the Van-
couver dance scene in 1982, when
she moved here from Toronto to
dance with Paula Ross and her
company for one season.

Ever since then she has been
helping to raise the profile of
dance through her involvement
with the Experimental Dance and
Music Society (EDAM) and with
her own company, Mascail Dance,
which she formed in 1989.

While events such as Dancing
on the Edge and Women in View
have helped to expose Vancouver
audiences to modern dance,
Mascall worries about the future of
the art in the city.

It doesn’t help when a potential
audience can’t hope to see the
same performance by the same
dancers twice as it can with film or
other popular art forms.

Dancers are hired for such short
contracts and the companies
themselves are so poorly funded
they often expire before they
reach the mainstreain.

So it's no surprise that the Win-
nipeg-born artist considers it a

luxury to be able to work with the
same dancers for an entire season,
as she has in Ghosts, a three-part
dance series including Within
these four walls and The Lesson.
(At this point Mascall doesn’t have
a title for her third work. She says
she believes in waiting until just
the right name emerges, especially
after one work, which she named
No Picnic, turned out to be just
that.)

It’s no secret that most of Van-
couver’s dance companies have
suffered serious financial hard-
ships, and Mascall Dance is no
exception. It’s painful for Mascall,
because while her own career is
flourishing, her dancers are barely
getting by.

“The situation with dance is
appalling. Dancers who have been
dancing professionally for 25 years
are on UIC or collecting welfare.
I've had to bring food into the
studio some days for my dancers;
they can barely afford to live.”’

Politicians listen to the people,
and neither, she fears, understand
what a loss it would mean if Van-
couver were to lose its dance
community.

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