My largest artistic influence is from my people, a coastal First Nation known as the Kwakwaka’wakw people in so-called British Columbia. What is paramount in the discussion of Indigenous dance, and sometimes misunderstood, is that my people were and are highly theatrical. When I step into our big houses, known as the gukwdzi, I can sense the rich history vibrating in the cedar walls; I am invigorated when the drummers call the drum to life; my attention is caught when the dancers sweep the floor with a sophisticated rhythm and spiritual demeanour; I am in the theatre when the dancers bring our world to life. The dance is not the art medium; the dancer is.

A choreographer once said to me, “I don’t think the theatre could ever be a decolonial space.” Yet what’s most powerful is that my people’s dances, songs, performances, traditions and expressions were not made to be “art,” like that of western theatre. They were made to be life. When I take this practice of Indigenous theatre and storytelling into my dance, it becomes the exciting challenge of breathing life into the stories I’m telling and the ways I’m moving.

This influences my artistic practice in choreography, creation, and creative process. A prime example is through mask work. In the Kwakwaka’wakw ceremony, large cedar masks are carved and used to tell stories and bring our supernatural worlds and animal kingdoms to life. The subtleties in the performance qualities are potent; using intricate, jerking head tilts and movements, delicate and thoughtful facings in relation to the audience and simple choreography across the floor takes the witnesses (audience) to a spiritual world only awoken in ceremony. The mask is treated as a living being, and in this sense, it comes with special protocols. To translate this work to a contemporary setting is daring but necessary. As I continue to incorporate Indigenous dance movement motifs into my contemporary choreography, it manifests in different ways: using a mask not as a prop but as an extension of the self and the body, which requires an acute attention to nuances and focus; acknowledging the audience as witnesses to the work, which asks for a respect for the story being told and how it will be received; using the dance space as a sacred space, which means that any entities, like masks, that the dancers work with are respected, upheld, brought to life in a good way and used with the required permissions needed from the community involved.

My dance practice is Indigenous, as am I, and as are my people. Our ceremonies do not bring witnesses to the supernatural world, but rather they bring the supernatural to them through complex protocols, a deep respect and a profound honouring of our elders in past, present and future. In the same way, I do not attempt to bring the environments I create through choreography to the studio, but I ask those environments to come to the studio with us, and to do this, I must keep in touch with my community, my identity, the land and my vivid cultural way of living.