Jay Hirabayashi & Emma Metcalfe Hurst
Interview for Coming Out of Chaos: A Vancouver Dance Story

October 6, 2020

Jay Hirabayashi, Executive Director of Kokoro Dance and Vancouver International Dance Festival, founding member of EDAM

Emma Metcalfe Hurst, Karen Jamieson Dance Archivist/Creative Director of Coming Out of Chaos

This oral history interview has been edited for length, clarity, and accuracy

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: What is your background entering into contemporary dance? Could you please share your dancing story.

Jay Hirabayashi: I got into dance by accident – primarily through a ski racing accident where I partially tore the medial meniscus of my left knee in the 1969 Canadian National Downhill championship races at Whistler. About nine years after that, my knee started to buckle and I would fall down on the sidewalk. I went to see a surgeon who happened to be the BC Lions orthopedic surgeon, and he told me that either I could leave it, but eventually the knee would probably lock at some point, and then I'd have to get surgery, or I could have surgery then and get the knee functioning. He said he had done that to all his BC Lions football players, and they were back on the field in three months. I thought I'd just take that route, but it was a year before the arthroscopy [“Arthroscopy became the new norm for orthopedic surgery.” correspondence with Jay Hirbayashi, May 2021], so that meant five days in the hospital [for the surgery] instead of forty-five minutes. So, I missed that timing. [Around that time,] I had taken my oldest daughter, she was only three or four then, to the Paula Ross studio for kids’ classes and I noticed that they had classes for grownups. I decided to take a dance class to get my leg back in shape after the surgery, so I did that and enjoyed it. I started taking two classes a week and then after three months, she came out with this offer to take as many classes as you wanted for $100 a month. So, I did that for I think three months and I started taking three classes a day. After I'd been taking classes for six months, she gave me a scholarship, so I didn't have to pay anymore. After nine months, she asked if I would join her company, so that's how I, suddenly at the age of 30, became a professional dancer.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: That's great. Where were you drawing your personal influences from?

Jay Hirabayashi: In the kind of dance that I was interested in, or who I studied with, or what informed my way of moving?

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, all of those.

Jay Hirabayashi: Initially, I didn't know much about dance at all, at least not in formal training. The initial exposure was just through Paula's classes and her company members who also taught: her cousin Donald McLeod was a primary teacher, and Anne Harvie, and Leslie Manning, the other members of her company. Then I started taking ballet with Choo Chiat Goh, and then I encountered Peter Bingham and Lola Ryan, and took contact improv with them. I would also take classes from whoever was in town. I didn't just stay at Paula's studio, but went to Anna Wyman's studio and studied with Danielle Clifford for ballet. I was just kind of hungry to learn as much as I could. My mother had been a folk dancer, so I was familiar with square dancing. She also took us to see the boat show Bolshoi Ballet and other ballet companies. We lived in the Middle East for a good part of my childhood so that was in Cairo, Egypt, where we went to those shows. In terms of my own way of dancing, I think my athletic background informs how I move physically and improvisationally. Skiing was a big factor, because you have to improvise your way down a hill and in downhill racing, you have to put your life at risk. I was used to taking risks.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: And lots of obstacles along the way, I would imagine.

Jay Hirabayashi: Yes, and lots of injuries [laughs].

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yes. Building up your body's ability to do those kinds of activities would definitely result in some injuries along the way. So when you first started with Paula Ross, I assume that was in the late 70s or say, what did the contemporary dance scene in Vancouver look like at that point?

Jay Hirabayashi: There weren't that many companies, or funded companies. Karen [Jamieson]'s first company was Terminal City Dance, and I don't actually think I ever saw them when they were Terminal City. So, there was Prism Dance Theatre, which was Jamie Zagoudakis who was kind of a jazz dancer, and Gisa Cole, who was modern dance, and Danielle Clifford, who was ballet, so it was kind of a hybrid. Their work was kind of odd [laughs] because they each did their own thing, so it was like three different styles in the same show. There was Pacific Ballet, which was the forerunner to Ballet BC, but I don't think I ever saw any of their presentations. Anna Wyman was the best-funded company. I think her funding was in the six figures when everybody else's was in the five figures. When she did a show, she had great publicity, so there were always posters everywhere of her stuff. I saw some of her shows and it seemed to be influenced by Alvin Nikolais a lot; with stretchy costumes and things like that, but strong technically. And then Paula Ross' company. Paula and Anna – I don't think they got along. The ironic thing was that they had the same birthday, but Anna was 10 years older. Then there was Fulcrum, which was Peter Bingham, Andrew Harwood, and Helen Clarke that did contact improv-based performances. Burnaby Mountain Dance [Theatre] was Mauryne Allan, Freddie Long, and Barbara Bourget, my wife. She danced with them for about five years before I met her. Then I danced with Mountain actually, after Paula, for a few months [laughs].

Yeah, so there were just a handful of companies and they were fairly isolated from one another. When I would go take classes at Anna's they always seemed surprised that somebody from Paula's company would be taking a class there. I applied for an Arts B [Canada Council for the Arts] grant, which were the independent project grants at the time – they're called something else now, but back in those days they would fly you to Toronto to audition. You'd have to take a class and then you'd have to do a short performance before about six people. Barbara [Bourget] and I both applied at the same time, so after the first audition – because I was really terrible, they pulled me aside and told me that I didn't meet their qualifications of having completed my basic training and they were pulling me out of the competition. I didn't know at the time that that was an incorrect assumption, because the other criteria was that you either had to have completed your basic training or be a member of a professional dance company. I was dancing with Paula [Ross], so they shouldn't have kicked me out, but they did. Then I did the audition performance with Barbara because we were doing a duet. Afterwards, Richard Rutherford, the Dance Officer [of Canada Council for the Arts] pulled me aside and said that Anna [Wyman], who was on the jury, wanted to talk to me. After I got back to Vancouver, I went to see her, and she offered me a full scholarship in her school. I guess she thought that I was potential Anna Wyman Dance Company material, but she said that I couldn't study with anybody else or perform for anybody else while I was studying with her so I declined because I didn't feel like I wanted to be stuck in one place. So, that's basically what it was like back then.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Right, very siloed. Moving into the ‘80s, was there more cross-convergence starting to happen? Like dancers, who were also choreographers or who had their own companies, was it more common or accepted for them to work with other companies as well?

Jay Hirabayashi: Yeah, salaries were really like $100 a week which is what I made working with [Burnaby] Mountain [Dance Theatre] and there were other companies that could hire dancers for that kind of salary. They were these little islands unto themselves. In the ‘80s, it became more difficult for companies. There were more companies, and it was more difficult for them to keep the same dancers all the time. It became more of a project-based operation where choreographers would get a grant, hire some dancers, and then those dancers would move on to the next choreographer. At a certain point, it almost seemed like the work started to look the same, because the dancers were really contributing a lot to the creation of those works and they were the same dancers for different choreographers. So, sometimes, [laughs] you had to look at the program to see whose work it actually was because more and more it looked like the movement of those particular dancers.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: [laughs] So, dance started to become more homogenous because of that?

Jay Hirabayashi: Yeah, to some extent. The choices and what choreographers were interested in individually were different. There were a lot of choreographers that came out of institutions that didn’t have a lot of professional dance training and who hadn't themselves danced for a lot of different companies and learned that way. They learned from their professors, or people who had been professionals. For economic reasons, I think a lot of them chose to become choreographers because you could get more grant money as a choreographer than you could get to train as a professional dancer. You could get a project grant to create a piece that was more than you could get if you wanted to go somewhere to become a better dancer. So, I think there were a lot of choreographers who were not that skilled and actually impaired movement because they weren't that skilled themselves, in terms of their technique. Their study was limited, so they relied a lot on dancers to generate movement for them.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Interesting. I guess at some points it does come down to economics. You've kind of touched on the creative ethos of that time, as you said, these dance companies operating as little autonomous islands. Could you talk about how you got involved with Karen Jamieson Dance? Did you know about Coming Out of Chaos?

Jay Hirabayashi: Yeah, I think I was working with Paula [Ross] when the Coming Out of Chaos project started. She [Karen Jamieson] fired me a couple of times so I can't remember when – she fired everybody, actually, but usually re-hired them after she cooled down. I don't recall what the process was for Coming Out of Chaos but she [Barbara Bourget] was in the initial process for a few months, but then had to drop out because I don't think Karen was paying people at that time, or hadn't gotten whatever grant she'd applied for. We had three kids so we were both working all the time at other jobs in addition to dancing. I think she [Barbara Bourget] got a job at Safeway instead. So, I knew that Karen was working on something. I don't recall whether she had an audition or whether she invited me [to join her company]. I don't know if she knew who I was. We had met when we were four years old because our fathers were graduate students: my dad at University of Washington, and her dad at UBC, and they were doing a joint research project, studying the Doukhobors in the Kootenays. I think I met her and her family in Nelson, but I didn't remember that, and she didn't either. Her father, Stuart [Jamieson], remembered my father, so when she said that she had hired Jay Hirabayashi, he asked her if I was related to Gordon, my father, and she asked me, and I said, Yeah, that's my dad [laughs]. So, then it turned out we knew each other [laughs] from way back. Anyway, whether it was through an audition or invitation, I can't remember, but I just started working [with Karen Jamieson Dance company] and she had just gotten this studio on Main Street that didn't have a dance floor and she had a friend that gave her old maple floor boards. Her friend – I forget her name – had renovated her house and gave her all this wood. So, the first thing we all did was lay down a sprung floor, and I think that helped us get to know each other – the dancers – because I didn't really know any of them. I knew Paulette Bibeau because I danced with her at Mountain Dance but I didn't know any of the others.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: How many dancers were there at that time?

Jay Hirabayashi: Let's see, there was Tom Stroud, and then Lynne Lanthier, and Alison Crawford, Aaron Shields and Paulette Bibeau, and myself. I think Tom and Alison had just graduated from SFU and Lynne Lanthier, I'm not sure. She was from Québec, so I'm not sure how long she'd been in Vancouver. Paulette had been an independent dancer for a while. So, then we just started working, and largely it was Karen would have us improvise on different ideas she had, and then she would take copious notes, and I guess her idea started to form from what we were doing. As it turns out, she seemed to gravitate to the things that I came up with, like bouncing off walls, and rolling on the floor, and stuff like that [laughs]. I don't know where the lifting came but [laughs] that seemed to be something that came out of some of the improvisations and she gradually decided to build a piece [Sisyphus (1983)] around me as a sort of central figure.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Would you say that you and Karen have commonalities in your practice?

Jay Hirabayashi: You mean in how we create work?

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah.

Jay Hirabayashi: Well, at that time, I had choreographed like two pieces or something when I was with Paula [Ross], but I was primarily interested in dancing. She [Karen Jamieson] had some sort of process, this business of note taking, and then slowly constructing a piece until it became clear to her what the piece was about. I just enjoyed that process of improvising. It was a good group. We all came up with individual ideas that seem to mesh with each other. Some of her [Karen Jamieson]s] instructions were a bit odd, I have to say [laughs]. I can remember once she said, Can you do a jump and turn around in the air and come back? And I said, No, I don't think that's physically possible. [laughs] But I could see what she sort of wanted. Maybe that's where the wall came in, something to change direction [laughs].

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: [laughs] One of the notable pieces that you and Karen worked on together was Sisyphus (1983), right?

Jay Hirabayashi: Yeah, that was the first one.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Do you have any memories from that time of that creation process?

Jay Hirabayashi: Well, it was like I said before. That's what the process was like, and then after a while, she [Karen Jamieson] would have us repeat certain things that started off as improvisational and then it would get more structured, and become a piece of vocabulary for the work, a sequence of movements. She [Karen Jamieson] gradually built it that way. It was an interesting process. I danced for two years with Karen [Jamieson] and in that first piece, she had a deadline because there was an event, Dance in Vancouver or something, where it was supposed to be premiered. I think it was only six weeks. I can't remember. So, she had to finish it. I think that was really good for her to have a deadline [laughs] because later, she didn't have deadlines, or it would be like six months or something, and she would just continue to work and work and work, and not actually find the ending for the process. It became a little bit more frustrating not knowing where the piece was going and taking a long time to figure out what it was supposed to be. I remember one of the pieces had Tom Hajdu, this composer. Karen's way of counting wasn't like most choreographers who just counted in eighths, but it seemed to me that she would do a phrasing, four beats and then add one and five and add one and eight, or there will be a long string of different things. So, I remember when Tom Hajdu asked her, What is the meter of this piece? And she would say, Well, there's this section that's in five beats, and then for nine beats, and then there's one in four beats. He came back with this layered score of hand-clapping. It was multiple layers of hand-clapping, and Karen said, Ah, where is the pattern here? And he said, It's all there. There's one that's in four-four, there's one that's in eight-five, and there's one that's in thirteen-four. They're all there. All you have to do is just count the way you count it [laughs]. It's just this cacophony of handclaps. Actually I thought it was an interesting score [laughs].

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Many polyrhythms!

Jay Hirabayashi: Yeah.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: I imagine that would be a challenge to dance to?

Jay Hirabayashi: It was no more of a challenge than actually having to learn phrases of different lengths. Usually, you just count in straight eights or something. I've had that experience with a composer, Robert Rosen. One of the [musical] sections was in thirteen-four, but Barbara was choreographing in eight-four time, so we were counting eighths to this music, where the downbeat would change. I mean, the downbeat of the eight would sometimes land on the upbeat of his music, because it was not an even – it was thirteen beats per measure. We were counting eight beats per measure. So, somewhere around the thirteenth, one was an upbeat, and it was really hard to count because it was really hard to keep the eight, the downbeat, because people would latch on to the music. They would drop the thirteenth beat and go to the fourteenth, and then start the eight again. Whereas people that were actually counting through it would be about half a count ahead, or behind other people. We had all these arguments amongst seven people saying, “No, it's not this, it's–” [laughs] Anyway, you just have to blot out the music sometimes, and just follow the interior rhythm that you're working.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Fascinating. So, you've already talked a little bit about your memories about Coming Out of Chaos and where you and Barbara [Bourget] were at when that was happening. What were the impacts of Coming Out of Chaos for you? Or the results of it?

Jay Hirabayashi: The piece itself didn't. I remember seeing it, but it didn't really make an imprint upon me. I remember being interested in the performers, and she [Karen Jamieson] had a ladder in it. I remember Ahmed's score. He always used this berimbau and then he had percussion, but I don't really remember the piece [laughs]. So, the only impact was that of course, apart from Savannah Walling and Karen [Jamieson], all the other members – Lola Ryan, Peter Bingham, Lola MacLauchlin, Ahmed Hassan, and Jennifer Mascall, were people who after that piece, asked us if we'd be interested in forming a new collective. I forget which one of them contacted Barbara and I. I think they liked working with each other. I don't think they particularly enjoyed the process of Coming Out of Chaos. It was actually chaotic, I think. EDAM was kind of born out of that chaos I guess [laughs], into another kind of chaos actually, because EDAM was also fairly chaotic in terms of what we did, and how we didn't get along, and stuff like that [laughs].

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, that first year must have been quite memorable.

Jay Hirabayashi: Yeah, we found out right away that everybody had very strong opinions, and that they were reluctant to let go of. Since we were trying to work collectively, it was a bit challenging, figuring out how we could actually work together since [Peter Bingham and Lola Ryan] were contact-based, and had not really done any choreography, or even performed choreography. All of their work was improvised. Lola [MacLaughlin] and Jennifer [Mascall] were trained in universities. Barbara had a long, extensive career in ballet, and had worked with many different choreographers, so she was probably the quickest and smartest in terms of picking up everybody's movement. She has that kind of mind where she can just look at somebody going across the floor and do it, whereas I have to just stumble all over the place [laughs] and repeat many times until I could master a sequence of movement. I'd had a little bit of [training in] everything, so I felt I could do anybody's work. I think Peter [Bingham] and [Lola Ryan] initially had a little bit of difficulty with doing technical movements and resistance to actually working on it until EDAM brought in Steve Paxton, who is the godfather of contact. We'd been having arguments between the two [of them] and ourselves about the value of technical training. I think that they initially felt that technical training would inhibit their improvisational choices and make their improvisations look studied because suddenly there would be some technical movement thrown in. But Steve Paxton, the first thing he did was he gave us a class where we spent 45 minutes doing grand pliés. He explained all of the virtues of doing a grand plié in terms of how it was the most fantastic exercise for building strength, and being the basis for your physical ability to turn your body, and work your body. I think after that, Peter Bingham anyway, started taking ballet classes [laughs]. It was kind of a cross-pollination, that was great. I think EDAM did some really interesting work just out of the conflict a little bit. Barbara and I found it frustrating to get people to – we actually had to hire other dancers because people weren't willing. Frankly, Jennifer [Mascall] refused to do anybody's choreography. She would just decide she didn't like it and she'd just make up things on the spot [laughs]. You'd be looking at her and wondering whose work she was doing [laughs]. She was doing her own work but it was a little bit frustrating for the person whose choreography she was destroying [laughs]. There's lots of stories like that.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: I guess in a way, working collectively was starting to break down because of these very strong personalities and creative visions.

Jay Hirabayashi: It was. Yeah. None of us were very mature, but we all thought we were and that we knew everything [laughs]. Someday I'll write a book about EDAM, I'll make it a novel though to protect each other [laughs].

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Could you talk a little bit about your memories of Ahmed Hassan and Lola MacLaughlin during the EDAM years?

Jay Hirabayashi: Ahmed was only there for a year. We formed EDAM in 1982 and somewhere in that first year, we did an improvisation that Ahmed [Hassan] and Lola [Maclaughlin] organized at some building on Hastings Street. I think it was about the civil war in Lebanon. Ahmed was Egyptian, and I'd lived in Lebanon and Egypt, so I think we bonded because we had that shared experience of the Middle East.

Lola [MacLaughlin], I didn't know that well, but I'd seen her perform at Paula [Ross'] studio. Paula [Ross] had some series where people were invited to perform in these group shows and she did a short piece that was really strong. She was kind of punky, had that kind of aggressive vibe, but she herself was kind of fragile so I thought she was a charismatic performer. I got to know Lola [MacLaughlin] better over the four years and we did Run Raw: Theme and Deviation, initially in 1983, that was EDAM’s first, and only, truly collaborative piece. I can't remember who else did EDAM's children show [Stuff and Nonsense (1984/85)], but we did a school show together, so that was kind of our joint choreography. Barbara [Bourget] did some short choreographed pieces with Lola [MacLaughlin] as well. Ahmed left to work with Robert Derosiers. We sort of stayed in touch, but the years would go by before we'd see each other. I didn't really connect with him again until he got MS and he was not doing well in Toronto. Everytime I went to Toronto, I was – well, sometimes I just happened to bump into him on the street [laughs]. He'd invite me for dinner or something with Peggy Baker, who was his partner at the time. Then I visited him towards the end of his life. I always liked him, but he was one of the ones that we argued with [laughs]. I think for three days we argued about where to open a bank account because he was not willing to go to the Royal Bank, or the Bank of Montréal, or Toronto Dominion because they were part of this whole capitalist thing that mistreated third world countries and so on. It devolved into an argument about if you actually use currency, whether you are taking part in this whole capitalist system that exploits people. Unless you start going back to bartering, exchanges of services or goods for other services and goods, then this element of capitalism is always going to be there, but going to this bank or that bank is not going to really make much difference. Anyway, I think we eventually did go to a Canadian Bank of Commerce or someplace. [laughs] I just wanted to go to the bank that was closest because for me, it was just depositing money and writing cheques. It wasn't about having savings and some investment thing that was exploiting third world countries [laughs]. We also argued for four hours about whether to buy a cash box, you know, to spend $7 on a cash box [laughs]. I can't remember arguments before that, but I just remember it was a long argument. It seemed like we always had arguments about everything: about what show we were going to do, who was going to be in it, if there was a tour, everybody had to go on the tour, even if they were only doing a three minute piece. Things that to me, weren't that practical [laughs]. I guess I was more worried about costs and things like that.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah. The administrative and pragmatic mindset.

Jay Hirabayashi: We hired a company manager and that person went crazy because six people were going to that person and telling them what they did or didn’t do. We had several managers [laughs]. I said we had to stop that and pick a company coordinator who the other EDAM members would tell what they wanted to say to the manager, and then that person would convey it, or translate it. And then this company coordinator position then became an actual position. I think because the first company coordinators they picked were Lola [MacLaughlin] and Lola Ryan [laughs], and not me, and then eventually, they let me do it. I did a lot of the administrative support for whoever we had hard to manage and did a lot of the grant writing. Becoming an administrator was part of my training actually, as well a dancer and choreographer. When we [Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi] formed Kokoro Dance, we chose not to hire somebody else because we figured we could do it ourselves and that if we hired somebody else then we couldn't actually hire any dancers or pay ourselves.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Was there a particular breaking point at the time you and Barbara left EDAM to form Kokoro?

Jay Hirabayashi: I think it was the accumulation of the frustration. Barbara and I, I think, did half of the choreography that came out of those first four years [of EDAM]. We were more versatile, so we were in two thirds of all the work, so we were doing a lot of the work, and I was doing a lot of the administration. The straw that broke the camel's back was when we did a piece called the Bach to the Future (1986) for Expo ‘86. Barbara was picked to be the choreographic director, not the choreographer, but it has to be built from the input of all the performers. It was sort of like Karen [Jamieson], actually. Her role was to put the piece together. I call that choreography myself, but the performers objected to that. I'll tell this story [laughs]. We had been given a commission for Expo '86 at a pavilion called the Amiga Pavilion. Commodore was a computer company at that time, as well as Atari and Apple.

At that time, there was the Apple II and the Atari computer that were used by a lot of musicians. This Amiga computer was a new computer, so they gave us an Amiga computer to use and it was the first computer that we had [laughs]. We were commissioned to make a piece for the Amiga Pavillion, which I think had five moveable rear projection screens. We created a piece with these two computer nerds from Victoria, who hung two black-and-white surveillance cameras from the ceiling which saw the floor in grayscale pattern. Then they programmed that still pattern into different hotspots. Movements in these hotspots would then trigger MIDI signals to this Apple II computer [laughs]. We didn't tell Amiga about that. They used a piece of Bach's music, some fugue piano thing, and they made it so that the parameters of tempo, rhythm, and pitch would slowly decay. It would initially play correctly, and then one of them would slowly decay. There were six dancers and if they heard the rhythm go off, they were assigned to go to certain places on the floor, and just gyrate, and move crazily, and stir up the greyscale, and then that would bring the pitch back to the right pitch. The same happened with tempo; if it started to slow down, two other dancers would have to go and bring back the rhythm. Once they got it back, they [the dancers] had to run back to wherever they had left off in the choreography and jump back into the piece. We were dressed up as superheroes with really hot padded muscle-about costumes with masks – extremely hot. I learned how to do a little bit of animation with this Amiga computer and so when we would choreograph, bumping into each other, I would do those Wham and Bam letters coming out on the screen on top because there was a live video of the piece while we were performing.

Anyway, we asked each other whether we should tell the audience what was happening, or just let them figure it out. We decided to let them figure it out, and what happened was the piece bombed because people said that the music was awful. It was really poorly recorded, and it would slow down. Stuff like this [laughs]. They had also programmed [the music] to exponentially decay faster and faster, so at the end, we were just running around and it was impossible to actually get it back. The whole piece kind of disintegrated into chaos – just moving around. People thought that the choreography was awful too because it made no sense, and there were people always going off someplace, and just gyrating around [laughs]. Before we found that out, I had made a visual of each performer on each screen and I had written "This piece was collectively created by" and listed all of the different performers. I put Barbara's face on the last one and I wrote, "Choreographic Direction by Barbara Bourget," and they [the EDAM members] objected to that one. They said that they had choreographed it, and that they should have a choreographic credit. And I refused. I said I can't – and this was on the dress rehearsal day, and they said that they would not perform unless I made that change. I said, “Well, I can't change it, because I don't have time.” I said, “It took me six weeks to do all this stuff, and I can't do that overnight.” So, they reluctantly performed. Then, we got this feedback that the piece was terrible, and then none of them cared about having the choreographic credit after that. So that's when we, Barbara [Bourget] and I, decided to leave [laughs] EDAM. But that was just one of many, many battles that we just thought it's time for us to just focus on our own interests and not try and organize so many disparate spirits.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, time to read the signs. That's neat to hear about a piece that had involved so much media production.

Jay Hirabayashi: It was way ahead of its time. I mean, that's the thing, I think EDAM did a lot of that stuff. We did EDAM/MADE (1985), which was 50 performers, a four-hour show. It was actually the same show done twice, but the pieces would move. The first time it was done, a certain piece of choreography would be in the EDAM studio on the first floor, and then it would go into the Lux [Theatre, at Western Front] in the second two hours. Then on the way up, there were spoken word poets and stuff happening, and musicians everywhere. It was kind of like the whole building became a venue. I thought it was pretty innovative [laughs].

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, definitely.

Jay Hirabayashi: Hilda's Valiant (date unknown) was another piece with Peter Bingham and somebody else. There was a dancer named Hilda Nanning who had a [Plymouth] Valiant and it was a wreck, so they cut it up and just hung all the parts from the ceiling so that it became a set, you know? We called that piece Hilda's Valiant because it actually was her car [laughs].

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Oh, cool. Was this in The Lux?

Jay Hirabayashi: No, that was in EDAM's studio downstairs.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: So, now, in reflection, what impact do you think EDAM has had on contemporary dance in Vancouver?

Jay Hirabayashi: I don't know because I don't know how many people today actually know what EDAM used to do. They know what Peter [Bingham]'s done since everybody left; Lola Dance was formed, Mascall Dance was formed, Kokoro was formed, and then Peter Bingham inherited EDAM. He had the most stamina and actually the most equanimity [laughs] to remain. He had more of a history too, because he worked in the Western Front before. I think he actually owns part of it, or he used to own part of the Front too. It made sense that he inherited it, but hardly any of the work was documented. I have one tape from '80, '85 maybe, but a lot of the more interesting work was not documented. If you weren't there, you wouldn't know what we had done. And largely, it's the people – Jennifer [Mascall], Lola [MacLaughlin], ourselves [Jay Hirabayashi and Barbara Bourget], and Peter Bingham, and the training that we've done when we branched off and did our own work. I think there's been more of a transference through that with the dancers that have worked with each of us. Some have danced with almost all of us.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: So, it's about these lineages then.

Jay Hirabayashi: Yeah.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Making these historical connections.

Jay Hirabayashi: Kaija Pepper wrote a book about Peter [Bingham], so there's a bit of history there – I mean the preservation of his legacy, which is great. I don't think anybody has actually done what you seem to be doing in terms of getting us to chronicle all of [our recollections] – it would probably be like Rashomon, where we would all have completely different memories of the same thing [laughs].

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Exactly. Savannah Walling said the same thing. Sometimes memories are conflicting, but some corroborate each other too. There are so many connections, it could be an endless project, really.

Jay Hirabayashi: Yeah. It is a long story, actually.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, a very long story. Speaking of stories, writing seems to have always been a really pivotal part of your practice as well. I was wondering if you could speak about the role of dance reading and criticism from your point of view.

Jay Hirabayashi: Yeah, I think I said that the main role [of writing] should be to reflect on dance and to challenge and interest readers in seeing contemporary dance. Good writers have a way of doing that. I don't really enjoy reading reviews of people sort of recounting what happened on the stage, and then the other kind of writing that can be interesting, but doesn't necessarily make me want to see the piece, is kind of like an extended program note; they take what the choreographer has written in the program notes and expands on them and draws in references to other work and stuff like that. I'm more interested in learning about what the journey is for the dancers, less so for the choreographer, because I think for many choreographers, frankly, it seems to me that their theme or intention is more an excuse just to display dancers’ abilities on the floor. It is like a frame.

For us [Kokoro Dance], we rarely have exits in our work. Once a dancer gets on stage, he or she stays on-stage until the end of the piece. It's not 100%. There have been pieces, like Sunyata (2006), which is two and a half hours long, where there was a need to have an intermission [laughs], and there was a need to have costume changes, but otherwise, most of our works are a journey where the audience can see each dancer doing individual journeys, and then there's a group journey too that is made up of all the individual journeys working together. I prefer to think of dance the way you would think of a symphony. You can describe a symphony in terms of the horn section and the wind section and the string section and percussion section [laughs] – when they came in, and how loud they were, how melodic or dissonant they were. Stuff like that. But I prefer to read the emotions that work evokes, and that would make me more interested in seeing or listening to a work of art, because I would realize that work had a power over that writer, that moved that writer, made them laugh, or weep, or get angry. That had an emotional impact. All the words just become noise to me. I don't usually like to read the program notes before watching a piece. I don't want to know what the choreographer thinks it's about or even what inspired him or her. I just want to feel something from the dancers. That is my own wish, and unfortunately, there are not many writers that can do that, or that respond in a way that just says, this work just overwhelmed me somehow. If I read that, I would go see it, but if I read something that is analyzed in terms of postmodern movement, or it fits this genre or that genre, or borrowed from this, where I saw a bit of that, and [laughs]. I just go, Okay, you're not telling me anything about the work that makes me want to see it.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: It sounds like dance criticism can suffer a similar fate to art criticism and reviewing which functions in service of history making and generating cultural capital. Perpetuating historic canons and legacies, for example, generally takes precedence over describing individual embodied and emotive experiences.

Jay Hirabayashi: Right, right.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: It was neat to learn that you had your own publication for a while, Kokoro Moon.

Jay Hirabayashi: Oh, not everybody thought so [laughs].

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: It probably wasn't very common for a dance company to put out a publication.

Jay Hirabayashi: Well, you have to remember that we – and I think we still are to some extent – were marginalized. We started writing because we were trying to get funding from the Canada Council. I would write 13-17 page letters every year that we got turned down, asking for reasons why. They would not respond, so I thought, Well, I have to let them know what it's like. It took us into our sixth year to get funding from the Canada Council. Every year, they would send back this short little response saying: “Your assessments weren't good.” We didn't get funding until I was told that we could let the Canada Council know who we didn't want to assess us. We could ask for particular people to assess us, so I wrote down the names of every single Artistic Director of funded dance companies in Canada. I said, None of them are allowed to assess us. You can only send somebody from theatre, music, visual arts even. Somebody who comes in and evaluates our work on its impact, not on whether our dancers are technically well-trained, or whatever their criteria was. We [Kokoro dancers] were always painted white, had shaved heads, were nude most of the time so we didn't look like anybody. Nobody knew what Butoh was so it wasn't peer assessment. So, I did that, and then we got a grant [laughs] because we got excellent assessments from people that weren't from dance. All the dance assessors were carrying their own baggage about what constituted art and dance. In their minds, what we were doing wasn't art. It was just strange.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: So, Kokoro Moon became a platform for you to be able to express these grievances, but also to get your message across about what you were doing as an art form. Is that right?

Jay Hirabayashi: Yeah, it was [also dance reviews though]. We would sit in and watch shows with other choreographers and they would just be trashing what we would see and then we'd go backstage and they would be saying, “Oh great work. So interesting.” Stuff like this, and not actually saying what they were saying outside. I just thought it was dishonest – if you didn't like something, you should be able to say you didn't like it, and you should say why you didn't like it, and then start a dialogue. Unfortunately, it would have been better had we done the [Kokoro] Moon when the internet was actually happening – this is pre-internet. We knew what I was writing was provocative and challenging, and maybe a little bit disrespectful, or maybe a lot disrespectful. I don't know [laughs]. But we invited people to respond, to write back, and we would print every letter that everybody wrote, condemning what we were saying. I thought it was good to have a dialogue.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah.

Jay Hirabayashi: And then to the rest of them, we said, “If you don't like it, use it as toilet paper.”

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Provocative! It sounds like a great idea to have a public forum like that. It seems like it was something that was really missing. And then to think about what affects the public criticism had on influencing public funding bodies...

Jay Hirabayashi: We heard that the Canada Council really enjoyed reading it actually [laughs]. We were writing something that nobody was writing, and we were writing about Vancouver dance. People in the East were learning that there was all this stuff happening here. It was from our point of view, naturally, but it was descriptive. We were reviewing other dancers, other choreographers. And as Karen [Jamieson] will tell you [laughs], it wasn't always nice. We still love each other though [laughs].

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: How have you seen dance writing shift today?

Jay Hirabayashi: It's difficult to articulate this because there's the #metoo movement and Black Lives Matter and all kinds of discourse now that needs to happen about being sensitive to other people. I just have a little bit of an issue with this whole idea that dancers need to be able to create in a "safe space." I can understand that in terms of a space where there’s not inappropriate objectification, and sexual harassment, and racism. I'm not talking about that. It's more that I feel like a lot of choreographers are so fragile that they can't have somebody, like me, say: “what are you doing? I don't really get it when you explain it to me. Because if you're trying to do this, why are you doing that?” You know, to be challenged. They want dramaturges that are supportive. I've had different directors in theatre, there was Roy Surette, from Touchstone Theatre. He's the kind of guy that everything he said was positive, even if you were terrible. I was an actor in one of his plays and I was terrible [laughs], but he would say “You're doing great, Jay. Just keep at it,” [laughs] instead of saying, “You know, you should actually take some diction classes, enunciate better,” or something a little more critical. Paula [Ross was] like a terror sometimes, but she knew what she wanted, right? She really went after you until you gave her what she wanted. If you stuck with her, you got stronger, you got better. It wasn't pleasant [laughs], but if you hung in there, you became a better dancer. I don't know. I have a little bit of an issue with trying to work in a kind of – to me, artificially soothing atmosphere.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, it seems like there’s almost a crisis of criticism in some way where we’re trying to figure out how to take and give criticism in a respectful way, but how do we articulate it in a productive way, instead of just staying silent or silencing one another? We’ve seen the counter-effects of that in the crisis of the left eating itself, which creates more division and toxicity within a movement. We all want to see each other succeed!

Jay Hirabayashi: Yeah. Anyway, that's my two cents.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: What do you think has changed the most for Vancouver contemporary dance since Coming Out of Chaos was produced in the early '80s?

Jay Hirabayashi: The primary thing for me is that back then every company did their home season or seasons. Some were able to do two, sometimes we'd do three, but they're all self-presents, right? You would just put together a show, rent the Firehall, or the East Cultural Centre, or Main Dance place, or Western Front, and put on a show. Then nobody would come so next year, you'd have to do a new work [laughs]. You had to do that every year. Now, choreographers either can't afford it, which is understandable because everything's so expensive, or they just need to be presented by somebody. We've evolved into being presenters, as well as self-presenters [laughs]. We still self-present but there are many people where the concept of self-presenting is either economically impossible, or it's actually never been in their frame of reference as something that’s good to do. We had to learn about marketing, about advertising, about contracting, renting a venue to do what we do. There are many dancers that are choreographers that have to hire somebody to do everything, so they're less self-sufficient, and they're more dependent. The ones that can't get into the presenting stream of things are kind of left out in nowhere. I think that the work is also more and more about production values. For example, some of the lighting, to me, interferes with enjoyment of the dance. It draws attention to itself. We’ve worked with Gerald King our whole career – actually before, we met him when we were doing this Touchstone Theatre play in 1985 [laughs]. His lights make us look better, they support what we're doing. I see other lighting designs where the only time you can actually see the dancers' faces is at the bow, right? They're obscured, they're in shadows, and there's all this smoke with light beams going all over the place. Flashing lights and LED things that are distracting [laughs]. I am old school. I hate dancers and socks [laughs]. I just don't understand why you have to wear socks. I mean, yes, we had to tape our feet from the blisters that we were getting and stuff like that, but I'm just not with it [laughs].

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: It’s a new world out there. And that brings us to COVID-19, and these realities we're currently facing. I did want to congratulate you for transferring your whole festival online this year. That's a huge feat, since it's not going to be the same as in-person.

Jay Hirabayashi: No, it is different, but I'm actually excited by being forced to do it because now we can see that you can actually do a lot that you can't do on the stage. You know, you're this close to me [laughs and gestures to the screen], which you could not do in a theatre. I couldn't be two feet away from you, right? So, that's fantastic [laughs].

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah. It's true. I guess the best thing we can do is embrace these situations as experiments.

Jay Hirabayashi: Yeah.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: I don’t want to keep you any longer, but is there anything else you’d like to say?

Jay Hirabayashi: Yeah, I have to say I do believe [Paula Ross] is one of the best choreographers that ever came out of Vancouver. People don't understand. She's another unsung heroine in terms of her work – it was extremely well-constructed and moving.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, there have been a few people who have referenced certain pieces that she's choreographed in these interviews. Her presence is quite strong within this project, in terms of who’s trained with her, but also who she’s influenced.

Well, take care, Jay. Thanks again.