The bustle of people, the noise of the crowd and the intricately painted backdrops almost transformed the Museum of Anthropology’s (MOA) great hall beyond recognition. Far outnumbering the capacity of the seating, the crowd gathered in a mass to watch the performers, spilling out into the corridor that links the MOA galleries.
Throughout the week of March 3, the MOA, along with the Anvil Centre in New Westminster, hosted the 19th Coastal Dance Festival, directed by Margaret Grenier, executive and artistic director of the Dancers of Damelahamid. The festival’s program brought together Indigenous artists from all over Canada — as well as Sámi guests from Norway — for a series of performances, artist sharing sessions and film screenings.
The festival’s matinee school performances, which took place on March 4 and 5, were intended for children of all ages, who saw a program featuring Sámi singers Sara Marielle Gaup Beaska and Lawra Somby as well as a performance by the Dancers of Damelahamid themselves.
Introducing herself to the public in North Sámi and then English, Gaup Beaska familiarized the audience — mostly elementary schoolers — with her homeland of Sápmi, a cultural region that stretches across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia’s Kola Peninsula. Captivating her audience, she explained the Sámi traditional song form of yoik, where the song evokes the essence of an animal, person or element. With an animated smile, she started her first yoik, mixing clear song with excited physicality and cries, inviting the younger audience members to guess which animal she evoked, with some eventually correctly guessing a puppy.
Gaup Beaska then took on the same melody in a gruffer, lower tone to evoke an adult dog. Joined by Somby, who complemented Gaup Beaska’s clear tone with her lower voice, the singers’ dynamic contrast resonated across the hall. The gákti-clad pair went on to yoik feelings, like happiness, and people — an old man looking back to his life with the knowledge he lacked at 25. The singers closed their portion of the show with a powerful song celebrating love. They also explained their attempts at reviving Sámi traditions at weddings, a practice that has become sparse due to Scandinavian settler colonization.
The second part of the show saw the whirlwind entrance of the Dancers of Damelahamid, an Indigenous family dance company from the Northwest Coast of BC. Grenier said her grandmother started teaching dance to her family and community members after the federal ban on Potlatch was lifted in the 1950s.
It was tough going at first — the family only “had a few masks that [Grenier’s] grandmother had hid inside the wall of her house, and when you listen to the old recordings of her, she has a kitchen pot and a wooden spoon that she's using as a drum.” The Vancouver Olympics, through the Cultural Olympiad — a digital arts festival that ran during the 2010 Olympics — allowed enough resources to restart the festival and form a partnership with the MOA, which led to the Coastal Dance Festival as it is today.
Introduced by a voice-over as a family and as Gitxsan — the people of the river of mist — the Dancers of Damelahamid’s performance showcased a series of danced animal narratives, brought to life by performers with elaborate masks and regalia.
First was the mountain goat dance, where two performers in white covers — one wearing a large goat mask — joined the dancers on stage to the beat of the drums, momentarily approaching each other, wrestling and moving apart again. The beat of the drum was reflected in both the movement of the dancers and the physicality of the animal, with the clash of the goat’s hoofs becoming a part of the musicality. Other scenes included the frog dance, where a squatting dancer with an oversized green head and a chime wrapped around their neck chased the dragonfly dancers, complete with squawking sound effects from the soundtrack.
The dancers portrayed the spinning of the dragonflies, the fluid waves of the sea and the fluttering flight of the birds in a subtle but clearly identifiable way. The regalia accented the movements while revealing intricate details, with the cape’s pattern resembling wings during the flicker dance.
In their masks, the performers gave into the full physicality of the animal they portrayed, with one particularly notable moment being the grasshopper’s impressively high vertical jumps. During one of the final pieces, which featured an enlarged dark head mask, every dancer became a piece of the progressively assembled animal, with the final puzzle clicking when a burst of white feathers erupted from a hole in the mask, falling over the audience and dramatically revealing the animal to be a whale.
Grenier explained that their practice “is never just choreography or song” — the regalia and mask creation are an interwoven process. “A song will be created with a mask in mind”, and every creation starts by telling a story.
Alongside the school performances aimed at younger audiences, the March 6–8 lineup included four completely unique shows, featuring different group lineups during festival stage matinees and signature nights. For Grenier, “the core of the festival is about supporting the community”, and many of the artists and groups represented have built relationships with the Dancers of Damelahamid over the years.
After an opening song from a young Squamish soloist, Grenier introduced the first group of the March 7 stage performance as the Yisya’winuxw Dancers, a Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw family dance group from BC’s Northwest Coast. While a backstage chant broke the silence, the audience looked in anticipation as the five drummers and singers entered one by one — the song and drumming growing more powerful with each addition — lining up beside the stage entrance nestled between the MOA’s usual exhibited totem. Joining them were three female dancers in long regalia, who complemented the men’s sonorous voices and the loud drum beats with the liveliness of their choreographer, as they spun dynamically across the space and alternated between raising their forearms to the floor, audience and ceiling.
Next up were the Dakhká Khwáan Dancers, an award-winning Inland Tlingit group based in the Yukon, whose return to MOA was long-awaited since their participation in the 2018 festival. Throughout their set, their stage presence projected passion and power, amplified by the sheer number of performers, spanning at least three generations. Elders sat on chairs while young children actively participated in every move, not needing to look to their family members for help. The dancers’ passion was made all the more striking by the acknowledgment of the group’s own emotions, who had lost three community members close to the date of the performance.
The Rainbow Creek Dancers, named after a creek that runs behind the village of Massett on Haida Gwaii, took the stage next. A repeating motif in the group’s dances was the use of bird masks, with the dancers in full-bodied physicality, parading and approaching audience members closely enough for them to see the small string they pulled to clack their beaks. One song saw the entrance of a larger mask covered in cloth which took centre stage and left the audience in awe when it suddenly split in two mid-performance to reveal a smaller mask.
The final set was a performance by Git Hayetsk, a group uniting Sm’algyak speaking peoples. The group went a step further in its integration of younger family members, with one performer including the bouncing and walking of his baby in the dance. Other notable moments included the use of seashells, which the two lead performers blew into, and the bursts of white feathered fluff which spread across the dance floor from atop the performers’ hats and masks. The children led a performance of the “Eagle Song” completely on their own — a particularly impactful display of knowledge imparted on future generations.
Throughout the festival, stage performers could be spotted sitting in the audience and appreciating their fellow artists' work and stories. Grenier emphasized that Indigenous dance is “lived practice.” She explained that the MOA “is a very special space because ... all of the artists that are coming have a connection to some element of the collections that are here.” For Grenier, the festival is “a way to bring life and healing and understanding.”
“It is only through bringing these lived practices into the space that we can begin to dismantle a lot of what has been done, and really celebrate and understand [Indigeneity] in a way that I think you can do only by … seeing how it is danced and shared.”
