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Caribbean dance in Toronto has developed over the last ten years, it's own hybrid, by filtering Afro-Caribbean experience through integration of other cultural influences found in the multicultural city of Toronto. You can call it the new voice in the global village. It brings the traditional and contemporary Caribbean style dance into the western society, but is also inspired by the contemporary and traditional dance forms of the western society like modern dance and Ballet. In this way Caribbean dance establishes a new dance form, by using all these aspects. You can see it as a new cultural mix emerging, especially when you compare this with the history behind the emergence of western and non-western cultural productions. Cultural mixing is not a practice from this time only; all the celebrated milestones of European progress—Greece, Rome, Christianity, Renaissance, Enlightenment, etc.—are moments of cultural mixing. But they not only absorbed cultural influences; “ it was constituted by them”. Western art, then, has always been indebted to and transformed by non – Western art.1 And we see a vice-versa similarity happening nowadays: Caribbean dance comes into the western society, draws from its influence, with aspirations to establish a new western form, with Caribbean heritage as the basis. A minority cultural practice in the mosaic of Toronto, that is in dialogue with the western art form.
There are three professional Caribbean Dance companies in Toronto, that have a big influence on Caribbean dance in Toronto. These are:
History of Ballet Creole: founded in 1990 by Patrick Parson.
Canboulay Dance Theatre: founded in 1993 by Ronald Anthony Taylor
COBA, Collective Of Black Artists: co – founded in 1993 by Charmaine Headley and Eddison B. Lindsay.
A remarkable similarity is that these companies were all founded in the beginning of the nineties. This is no coincidence. The artistic directors, all born and raised in Trinidad, except Headley who was raised in Barbados, came to Canada in the eighties to study dance. Having grown up in a multicultural society and studied dance, generally, they came to North America for advanced dance training with a background in folk, ballet, jazz and modern dance from the islands. Specifically, Parson, Lindsay and Headley studied at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, while Taylor trained at Juilliard in New York. This North American emphasis on technique redefined their island style foundation, by incorporating new ideas of line and movement. After finishing their studies, and observing a shortage of professional black performance companies in Toronto and they saw the urgency to do something for the black dance community, who wanted to express themselves, but did not have the opportunity to do so in Toronto. These companies were the forerunners of Black dance in Canada by creating new avenues for a community with a need. They brought black dance to the Canadian audience, and now move towards presenting their art forms to reach an international audience.
For an overview of these companies and their artistic directors, please click on their linked names.
To research more on Caribbean dance in general, refer to the following resources:
http://www.dancealive.ca
http://www.yorku.ca/aconline/dance/caribbeandance.html, African Canadian Online
To research more on memory and identity, please check out the following resources, which may all be found in the course kit, for those of you that have access:
Halbwachs, Maurice. “On collective memory,” (University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. “Narratativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics,” The visual Culture Reader,ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (Routledge, 1998)
Nora Pierre. “General introduction: Between Memory and History”, In Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions. Directed by Pierre Nora. Trans. By Arthur Goldhammer. ED. By lawrence D. Kritzman. (Columbian University Press, 1996).
Footnotes
1 Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. “Narratativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics,” The Visual Culture Reader,ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (Routledge, 1998)