Josh Martin & Emma Metcalfe Hurst
Interview for Coming Out of Chaos: A Vancouver Dance Story

October 5, 2020

Josh Martin, Dance artist, co-founder of Company 605, collaborator on Karen Jamieson’s Body to Body piece

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: So, what is your background entering into contemporary dance? Please share your dancing story.

Josh Martin: The beginning of my dancing story is that I started taking tap dance lessons when I was nine, or ten, or something like that, I think because my parents thought I had too much energy. I'm from a small town in Alberta so I was the only male dancer at the studio and I just continued on through my teens. I took a class a week, switching to jazz, and then a little bit of ballet, and then a little bit of street jazz or hip hop [laughs] – small town, Alberta, so it wasn't really legit. It was all we had. But then, when I got to the end of that, end of highschool, I wanted to keep going with dance so, for me, it was trying to find a commercial gig. That’s all I really knew there was in terms of a dance career. So I ended up just trying to go down the commercial dance routes, but I had to move to Vancouver in order to do that. My community of dance was around Harbour Dance [Centre], and the drop-in classes there. I was doing hip hop classes, popping, a little bit of b-boying and break stuff, but trying to do all that because it was something I didn't have in Alberta, so that was what I was doing for the most part. It was only through doing that, that some of the dancers that I was working with on a regular basis were getting a call from Martha Carter, and she was doing a project called iDUB Interactive Digital Urban Ballet, and was hiring some street dancers in order to be part of her contemporary dance project, so kind of merging the contemporary dance world and street dance, club dance world. It was just through that, that I stepped into The Dance Centre as a building for the first time, and it was from that point on that I met that side of the community, and kind of saw what was going on there, and thought that was really cool. So my contemporary dance training only started happening around that particular time, I guess. Previous to that, I was doing the So-You-Think-You-Can-Dance contemporary dance, which is a little bit different, a little bit more like lyrical jazz, sort of like street dance.

So, to summarize, I started with commercial dance, and then shifted into contemporary dance, which has really been through the act of doing. I don't have formal training, just drop-in classes, and workshops, and traveling around in Europe to take workshops. That sort of thing. Falling into contemporary dance was just kind of an accident and seeing that there was a lot more that I wanted to uncover inside of that, that wasn't being offered inside of the commercial dance world.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Very cool. Do you have an athletic background as well? Were you doing other sports?

Josh Martin: [laughs] Not really, no. I didn't play hockey growing up. I mean, I did a little bit of soccer, but no, I would not consider myself an athlete [laughs] in my earlier days. Dance was my physical activity, and that's just what I did.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Cool. So moving into Company 605 then, where does that kind of exist in relation to your entry into contemporary dance?

Josh Martin: Yeah, so there were a few of us gathering at that time. There's about five of us that I would say were kind of the “core artists” of what we considered to be the 605 Collective when we first began late 2006. We were very similar-minded in that we all came from that commercial dance, street dance world, but we were all kind of interested in creating something else. I think a lot of us were doing projects where we would get hired to do a music video, or a commercial, or something like that, and we had done all this dance training, and then we were doing step-touches [laughs] for our actual income, which was so strange to us. So there was a lot of craving for us to actually utilize the training and the artistic interests that we had, but we didn't know what to do with it. So it [605 Collective] was just more of a group of commercial dancers getting together to create something that was longer than just like a combo or a phrase, and to try and train one another. We were at the point where we were all taking each other's classes anyways, we were all teaching. This was kind of like taking it out of the institution of a [paid] drop-in class. We just took turns kind of teaching each other the stuff that we were working on. So it [605 Collective] really kind of came out of like a peer-to-peer, professional development type situation where we wanted to just learn from each other, and then to kind of collaborate, and mix these things up, because we all had similar backgrounds in some ways, but were approaching it differently. It was like the music that we were listening to was different, and we were trying to just get excited about all the different things that we were doing together. We didn't set out to start a company, we set out to just kind of be together, and make stuff up that we weren't finding elsewhere, and that we didn't know how to find elsewhere.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Did 605 Collective have a conceptual framework to it as well?

Josh Martin: I guess in the early days, what we thought we were doing was hybrid mixing forms, like, this comes from studio dance–this idea that dance is in these categories of “jazz” and “hip hop,” “popping,” and “ballet,” and that you only do one of those things at a time, you know? [laughs] That was our thinking at that time, and we were going to mix them, you know, we weren’t going to say, this is a hip hop piece, but this is a hip hop piece mixing with classical dance, that sort of thing. So, for us, we thought that was very experimental because we didn't know what contemporary dance was [laughs] and because we didn't know that this is exactly what people are doing all the time. If there was thematics that were running through our experiments, it was this idea of blending all of our influences together, and trying to make something that felt like a hybrid, or some sort of like clash between urban dance and contemporary dance, and I think in some ways it was that, because of how little we knew about contemporary dance [laughs]. We had these two ideas of what they were, when in fact they are kind of one and the same as I’ve learned later on in life. It's all contemporary dance as far as I'm concerned.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: So when you became Company 605 was it at that point when you started to become aware of and involved with the contemporary dance community here, and realized that what you were doing fits into a larger historical trajectory?

Josh Martin: It was earlier than that. The original group was Sasha Kozak, and Maiko Miyauchi, and Lisa Gelley, and Shay Kuebler, and we began making stuff [hybrid work] like that in 2006. We made our first full length work in 2009, called Audible, and it was around that time that we realized that Oh yeah, we're actually just a contemporary dance company. That was when we incorporated as a society too, in 2009. But all throughout that [time] we were very much connected with Amber Funk Barton who was such a big influence on us, to get us to understand that we're actually part of this community, or that we could be part of this community if we wanted to be, because she was such a great tie-in between those worlds. She was very much doing contemporary dance projects herself and finding that world, and was excited about what we were doing, and was trying to bring us into the fold in many ways. So yeah, I think it wasn't until 2013 or 2014 that we made the name switch to Company 605 to reflect this idea of a company structure, as opposed to a collective structure. That name switch was also just to recognize that we were not doing all the same things that we used to be doing, and we were not working with just the same group of people. It’s a shame, but this concept of a collective has such a strange connotation. It's thought of as this coming together of emerging artists, you know [laughs]? In dance, the idea of the collective is often: Oh, yeah, you just came out of school, and you made a collective with your friends, but we felt like we were kind of maturing past that definition – even though we do create collectively, and we do have collaboration as our base. It just felt like a nice progression.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Could you talk more about the significance of collaboration within Company 605?

Josh Martin: Well, yeah. We didn't realize that people don't always work in that way, but for us, we were excited by the idea of making something together that none of us could make by ourselves. So just this idea of everybody contributing to a pot, when you start to lose track of who made what – no one's got a signature on it, and that was exciting to us because it was about the idea that we could independently have careers and artistic practices that were very much ours, and that this space, this 605 Collective, or Company 605, was a space to make something other than yourself, to make something other than what you do. You get to have two practices, two different trajectories for your work, and that's really exciting because if you think about the creative cycle of an artist, there's typically this kind of development phase, and then you're producing and making something, and then you finish the show. And then, there might be a period of time where you just don't know what you're doing for a while! [laughs] You know, you don't know what to work on next, you don't have the inspiration, you don't know where to put your efforts, but this idea of collaboration really helped keep that alive because now it wasn't just solely on one artist to conceive of, and bring into life each new thing. It was about letting people take the lead in different ways, and that idea of leadership and authorship being blurred, and having something that was more fluid just felt like that was naturally what was happening early on with what we were doing. Even just making up a phrase of steps, it was like, I want to do this, this, and this, and then somebody else was like, Oh, wouldn't it be cool if you did that with this? or you see how somebody takes your movement, and what they string onto the end of it. It could be as simple as that. We just kept on building, and building, and building, and I think so much of what we were doing–and continue to do–we didn't know where the idea came from, it was just in the room. We try to keep that alive inside of the idea of collaboration.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Very cool. I've also noticed that you've worked closely with media artists as well, to consider dance existing in relationship to film, or music; otherwise these other forms of artistic collaboration. Could you talk about how you started doing that?

Josh Martin: Yeah, again, as we started to take on this identity of collaboration, I think it was important for us to think about what else we could be doing here to bring in a different perspective into our work? Somebody who doesn't speak in the language of dance, you know? So there was collaboration with media artist, Miwa Matreyek, based in LA, who we had shared a program with at a festival in San Francisco, and we just liked this idea that instead of her just inserting her amazing work into our dance piece, that we could approach questions together about how to bring choreography and animation side by side, so to try and create her work as part of the choreography, or to have it interact with the choreography in a way that it had its own life. It kind of became a dancer itself in a way. Anyways, these are early thoughts about us not knowing all these other elements of production, and having conversations about working with collaborators, and not just doing what they do, and dropping it in, but actually being changed by – or their contribution being changed by us, and vice versa. I think as this idea of collaboration was happening inside the dance thing, it made sense to reach out to work with theatre artists, and sound artists, and these sort of people. Most dance companies do this. Everybody collaborates with these different designers. I guess just for us, the value has always been that we can really make this a conversation between forms, so that it's not just two art forms that happen to live side-by-side, but that they are really in conversation with each other on stage as well – inside of the process and inside of the performance.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Right. I was also reading that there was a point when Company 605 was focusing on "movement inventions." Is that the right word?

Josh Martin: "Movement invention"?

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, like a vocabulary of movement.

Josh Martin: Again, nothing brand new there [laughs]. In terms of what we do as dance artists, I guess it's about what we value, right? I think it was particularly early on when we thought we're making this hybrid form of dance, and we're trying to combine urban dance with all these other forms, that we started to realize that there was an actual specific vocabulary there. We were making up a lot of movement fragments and steps that became part of a greater whole, a vocabulary, as we were trying to define our own language. If you think about artists like Crystal Pite, there's an aesthetic there, but there's also an established movement language there – like words that get pulled into sentences often – and you see that iconic movement language gets utilized, and actually influences other artists and their movement. And so, this idea of "movement invention" is just about putting value on trying to actually build new and defined steps, body pathways or ways of moving that fall outside of the typical dance menu, constructing movement beyond just seaming together a phrase or responding to task, but actually finding what feels like invention, finding something “new” in our bodies. I think these pursuits become part of your identity, and some of these become touchstones for your artistic practice. I can think of multiple artists that have these things about them that feel like they are threaded through their work, and it's not just about their aesthetic, it's about actual movement – ways of doing movement, ways of creating steps of movement. I think that's what we mean by "movement invention." So for us, we had this value in not just creating work under certain concepts or themes, but that we actually wanted to make movement that we hadn't seen or felt before. Of course, every movement has been done, there's nothing new under the sun, but we had this idea that what we loved about dance was finding something that we hadn't done in our bodies, finding movement that we thought looked cool, that felt cool – that to us, felt like we hadn't seen those things paired together before.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: It also sounds like it's about the transference of these kinds of languages that just happened to be in the room, that comes through the people that you're working with as well.

Josh Martin: Mm hmm. Yeah. I think you start to see that the combination of people creates parameters around movement, and then it becomes more and more defined as to what it is that you do, and the way that you move as an ensemble.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, it's really neat hearing you speak about your collaborative working experience in the midst of working on the Coming Out of Chaos project, in that you’ve worked in a similar structure, but in the case of Coming Out of Chaos, strong personalities were clashing and the dancers seemed like they were just ready to go their own ways because they had such strong choreographic minds and directionality at that point. It's interesting to see the different ways that the process of collective creation can either work really well, or can not work [laughs]. My final question around Company 605 is: can you speak to how it has evolved over the years and where it's at now?

Josh Martin: Yeah, sure. So the structure evolved. In addition to making our own work, we did a couple of commissions too. The first one was a work called New Animal (2012), where we commissioned Dana Gingras, from Animals of Distinction at that time, and formerly The Holy Body Tattoo. We were nobodies, but we were just like, Let's just ask the person that we want! And she said yes. And so she came to collaborate with us, and work with us to build a piece. There were things like that happening, where we, our core group of artists, were trying to expand out of what we do, and to realize that we didn't know what we were doing [laughs], and we wanted to see other people work, we wanted to be inside of other processes, and learn more about how people make work. So there's things like that happening and we were touring a lot as well, which meant realizing how many things we want to change about it. You start to create more and more opinions about how to make things better. Meanwhile, we're also all working independently on our own stuff too, or with other artists. Something maybe kind of interesting about Company 605 or 605 Collective is that we all continued to work as dancers for other people, very often, which is maybe different than other companies where the company is all that the Artistic Director does, it's their company.

Lisa Gelly, Shay Kuebler and myself were the core artists, and kind of the three that were holding it together as we worked with other artists, but Shay was also starting to do a lot of his own independent work. He wanted to do more and more of his own company stuff, and really spend more time and focus there, and he was finding a lot of support in doing that. I think he also probably wanted a break from having to [laughs], having to deal with talking so much, explaining himself, having to explain yourself along the way of what you want all the time when you’re in a collaboration. But also distance played a part because he was also working in Montréal quite often. We were often in different places. Anyways, those were the main changes: in 2013, Shay stepped back from being one of the core artists – he wanted to focus more on his company, so he was going to dance but no longer going to be Co-Director of 605. We did one last project with him before he basically just said, like, “Okay, enough is enough, I need to focus on this thing so go on without me.” So Lisa and I remain the Co-Directors of the company, and our collaboration continues.

At that time, the first major stage project that we did without Shay was The Sensationalists (2015), which was a collaboration with Maiko Yamamoto from Theatre Replacement. From that point on, it was sort of under our direction as to what projects the company would do next. That was also the time where we decided, Okay, let’s change the name to Company 605, we won’t be 605 Collective anymore. Let's honour the fact that Shay [Kuebler] is not here anymore, and that Maiko [Miyauchi] and Sasha [Kozak] are not here anymore – Sasha [Kozak] moved to LA because he wanted to do commercial stuff, Maiko [Miyauchi] started doing other projects, and now is doing OURO Collective. There was change there, and we were working with different people, and we were starting to build a group of dance artists – independent dance artists that were coming and going throughout our projects and work. There was a collective nature, and we were starting to build a family around it, but it was a company because now we had these people that we were calling the "dancers," you know? It had changed in that way, whereas previously, we were all just part of the Collective. So that was the evolution and ever since that point, Lisa [Gelley] and I have been trying to curate projects, and propositions that we think are about gathering groups of people together to ask questions, to engage in different conversations and artmaking, around the things that we think are interesting and important. It's not far away from any sort of dance company creation anymore, especially now that it's become so typical to work with dancers as collaborators, and not as just bodies that you tell what to do. So the value continues to be on creating that space for collaboration with the artists that we work with, artists that we engage with, in each project. Now it's about reaching out, having different projects that engage different people, and maybe moving away from this idea of "movement invention," [laughs] and more towards trying to figure out different ways of working, and trying to establish distinct practices around specific projects, as opposed to we only have one practice. Maybe it's about creating a practice within each project so that the development of the way of working, and how we'll be in the room together, becomes the creation itself.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Right. I think this would lead quite nicely into another question I have: what is the creative atmosphere in the Vancouver contemporary dance community? I know collaboration is something that's come up multiple times in the interviews that I've done.

Josh Martin: I don't get out of town enough, but I think that Vancouver has such a rich ecology in terms of different ways of making, so I would say there's actually quite a diversity of the creative models and formats that exist. I do think there is a lot of collaboration here, and there's a lot of crossover, which is really interesting to see how influence runs through different threads and trajectories. If I'm just talking about right at this moment, yeah, collaboration is key. I also think we are getting back to finding different physicality. I think there are these ebbs and flows of how interested people are in the movement itself [laughs]. There comes a time where it's about really developing the movement aesthetic, and then there are times where it's really about developing conceptual aesthetic, and I think this might be a time where people are trying to figure out how to move again [laughs]. Different ways of moving.

I guess the atmosphere I feel is, if I was to describe it, it's less about collaboration and more about community, and more about recognizing that what you might be doing independently is actually part of a conversation that other people are also carrying out in different ways. This, for me, is a moment where there is an interconnectivity that's happening, that people are aware of. I mean, there's always a connectivity in some ways, but I think people are really aware of it, and they're really utilizing it. They're looking for ways to see how everyone fits together to make a whole, as opposed to saying like, You do that over there, and I'll do this over here. People are still working separately. It's not like everything is just homogenized, but I think you're starting to see how it all fits into this sense of community.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: And then I think that also ties into my following question about the conditions that are driving this work, or in this case, driving that strong sense of community. Would you say there are specific factors that are causing this to come to the forefront?

Josh Martin: Well, yeah. I don't know if there's anything new. Obviously, Covid-19 has changed things, and I think we have yet to see what the results of that are, but I think there are things like space. You know, you go to Montréal, and every dance company's got a space, so they all work in their space. Here in Vancouver, we have to cobble together [laughs] so we're all crossing paths inside of the same spaces, and that does something. Even just seeing somebody on your way out the door, that does something. Not to say that this doesn't happen elsewhere, it's just in this pooling of resources that needs to happen in order to be sustainable. But when we create, we overlap with one another, and without forced shared space that might otherwise not happen.

There's also something about being on the West Coast – removed from the rest of Canada – that we are both delayed and ahead. We only get some things to come over here, and again, I think Covid-19 is going to change this a lot. We're missing out on so much artistic work that's happening elsewhere, because it just never gets over here. But because of that, we are removing ourselves from influence from other things, and therefore it creates this void that we are filling with other things that aren't elsewhere. In some ways, I feel that we're ahead because we're having to create our own destiny [laughs], as opposed to just following trends.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah. You can carve out a very distinct identity because of that isolation.

Josh Martin: I've talked to curators who have come to Vancouver to check it out for the first time and have been shocked by what's going on here. Not that it's this amazing dance place, but you would just never think it, based on where we are. There is such a strange diversity of the way that people are making things, and what they're making, and I think it's out of a lack of being infiltrated [laughs] by so many other influences.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Extending off of that, where would you say your dance community is physically located? So, neighborhoods and studios...

Josh Martin: Primarily, we've been working at The Dance Centre for the past five years. When we started, we were working out of our own studio, Apartment 605, in East Vancouver off of Commercial Drive. The Dance Centre, I'd say has been our hub, where most of the creative activity happens. Of course, we have residencies, like the Shadbolt Centre [for the Arts] in Burnaby. We've worked there quite a bit. Lately, we've been tenants of Progress Lab 1422, on William Street, which is kind of back towards East Vancouver near Commercial Drive again, and that's a really interesting production space because it's been primarily theatre artists who work there. If I was to say where our home bases are now, it's probably Progress Lab because that's where the majority of our creative activity is happening.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Nice. Would you also say online? Have you done anything online now due to Covid-19?

Josh Martin: Not yet. We've had online creative processes as a response to having to cancel our own creative stuff, but we haven't done actual online dance rehearsals. I just can't yet fathom how to make that useful for what we’re working on right now, or the projects underway haven't been in a place to make that sort of thing necessary yet. We have been switching to film work, and putting that ahead in our schedules to work on now. I’m sure we’ll be doing some live-stream performances and Zoom sharings soon too, if this goes on long enough,

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah.

Josh Martin: We've been trying to envision a lot of what can move online, or what should or should not move online, just to make sure that it's reflective of what the work's intention is, as opposed to just [laughs], being a bandaid fix.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Exactly. So Progress Lab, that sounds really neat. I'll have to look into that. I don't know that space. One of the ones that I heard about recently and was excited about was Morrow Shop?

Josh Martin: Yeah, Ziyian [Kwan] acted so fast on that initiative. I feel like it was within weeks she had that space, and said, Yep, this is what I'm going to do and it's gonna allow me to do this, this, and this, and it's so great. It's been so great for the artists who get to put their work there, like their crafts, their artisan-ships there, and what an interesting solution to a number of problems.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, I hope she can continue to find creative ways to sustain it. I was looking at the website, and it looks like there’s a network of support running through it. Okay, let's move on to your work with Karen Jamieson now. How did you get involved with Karen Jamison Dance company?

Josh Martin: I feel like the first time she might have reached out was an Amber Funk Barton connection [laughs], because they were doing a Sisyphus remount, taking that out on the road, and so she contacted me to be a dancer in that piece. I couldn't do it because of a conflict, I was dancing for Amber Funk Barton [laughs] on another project, so it never worked out to do the actual tour. I was so ecstatic just to be asked because, again, I didn't know much about contemporary dance, and here was this well-known, contemporary dance choreographer who asked me to be part of this project. So I didn't want to lose that. I think I ended up maybe offering to apprentice, or understudy, or something like that. I ended up coming in for what few days I could, just to see them working, and just to watch. Later on, there was another project called Collision (2011), which was the first time we actually got to work together in a meaningful way. It was just very much a research process at that moment because it ended up being more of a community-engaged project at the Roundhouse, as far as I can remember, but the details are all fuzzy. Karen later reached out for the project Solo|Soul (2014) which was great, because then we got to work one-on-one. I just really liked the idea that she was putting forward of a dance conversation, and dance creation through conversation, but I was also very nervous [laughs]. It's part of that. So that was the first time I got both.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Very cool. Do you have any memories of what it was like kind of going through the Solo|Soul work with her [Karen Jamieson] initially?

Josh Martin: Well, yes. So again, I think I was nervous about it because I understood that there were multiple people engaging inside of these components, with different people, different conversations, and I was, like, a nobody [laughs] in that. I was just sort of imagining what those other conversations might be, and who they were with. I think there was Jennifer Mascall, and maybe Serge [Bennathan], and so these people who I knew were very mature in their practice and artistry, and then here was me coming from the urban dance community, more dancer than creator. But as I recall the interaction, it felt so great to be able to just talk about the way that we interpret bodies, the way that we interpret where movement comes from, which we don't often get enough time to do. I remember just being really, really fascinated with how deeply Karen had come into these different systems of imagining body. I say, imagining, but I think for her, it is very real.

So, [laughs], I remember one interaction where we were basically taking turns to guide each other through an exploration of the body. I can't remember the exact practice that we were doing, but it was to deal with the energy body, of how you move energy through your body, where it comes from, routed from the floor, up through the floor, and then how it moves through the body, through different systems, or through different pathways. It was really difficult for me because it was very much like trying to meditate, or visualize these things happening, and I'm also somebody who, inside of my practice, I like to get a kinesthetic response of feeling it, like physically moving to feel it, as opposed to just imagining it, and hoping to conjure that. Anyways, we went through her [Karen Jamieson’s] concepts of energy body, multiple times, and then it was my turn. I started to explain to her what I feel, and what I think when doing waving movement, or how to move in this idea of an energy ball, how I think about push it through to the edge of my skin, and the outer side to create movement by imagining that energy passing through. And she said, Oh, you know, but that's impossible, bodies don't move that way, or energy can't travel that way because it actually travels this other way. She was explaining to me that my little made up energy ball can't actually travel through this particular network I was imagining because of how it has to pass through this other part first.

So, there was this collision of our own ideas of how energy can move through bodies because of what she had been practicing for years, and this was how she's come to understand the body, and how to make movements – or not movement necessarily, but how to imagine where this energy can move from, how it moves. It was such an awakening because you start to realize how much of dance is based on these, I'll say belief systems. But there's a real spirituality that is there, that you realize how much people base their understanding of their dance practice on something that is really only this imagined thing [laughs]. So, I was like, Well, you know [laughs], that's what you think, what you understand, and this is what I think about, and the sort of cautious back-and-forth of that, like discussing a differing faith. It was so funny because it was just this idea of trying to engage with one another in conversation about our practices, but feeling held back by having to undo so much of our learning of how we've come to approach bodies. But so interesting, so fascinating, to see how deep that is, and to see how embedded these ideas are, physically, to your understanding of yourself.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah. It must have been hilarious trying to explain that. And obviously, the way that you experience energy in your body is so subjective, and so embodied and abstract, in and of itself. It would be hard to be able to truly express that in words.

Josh Martin: Well, this is the thing - like none of this is real [laughs].

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: [laughs]

Josh Martin: If we pull out the anatomy books, nothing is going to mention how the energy comes from the roots of the floor, up through our femurs. None of this is going to be in that. Like, this is purely made up nonsense.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yep.

Josh Martin: But it was real.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah. But as you said, a belief system that has grounded an entire practice [laughs].

Josh Martin: Yeah, yeah.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Very cool. That's a great story, thanks for sharing that. Let’s see... so Solo|Soul, that was one of the first Body to Body projects, right? And then the re-staging of the Solo From Chaos (1982), that was the second project that you worked on with Karen under Body to Body?

Josh Martin: Yes, I think so. Solo From Chaos. Yeah, it must've been that. Now I'm kind of confused. I can't remember which one, because I also worked on a Sisyphus remount [first created in 1983], but it was probably that solo, yeah.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah. So then Solo from Chaos, I know, that one's more recent so could you talk about the process of working with her [Karen Jamieson] on that? And then with Darcy McMurray and Amber Funk Barton as well?

Josh Martin: Yeah, I love the whole project because of this idea of taking work from the archives, and bringing it forward into a new context, having conversations about it, trying to look at it now through a different lens. I really was fascinated by the historical elements of it. I think all of us were really engaged by the story of how that solo came to be; having Karen [Jamieson] talk about the ladder, of how that was just there. When you start to piece together where she was at in her head, and the choices that she was making, and the state that the world is in, and the state that her practice was in, it's just so cool to be able to get the inner perspective of that work. We did a lot of trial of interrogating what was important about that work, what were the key components, and I think all of us, including Karen, were interested to find that out what inside of this thing really matters still, today, to the integrity of the work; what is integral to this piece and what is extra, or how can we change this movement before it becomes something else, and changes the piece entirely. Again, fascinating to watch an artist who made this work long ago still hold on so tightly to their choices, and to their belief about what was important, how it needs to be this and not this. It's really inspiring because as she pulled out the work to look at it, it was this thing that she had made; the more we looked at it, the more she remembered what it was for her, and why it was important, and why the choices were there, the more we had to get into that world, into that headspace, to feel like we were still bringing the essence of what it was.

Meanwhile, knowing that our initial job was to blend, to mess with it, to bring ourselves to it, to have it meet us in the middle, because of where we are now, as the younger generation of artists. I think she wanted to have people not picking at it, or poking at it, but to reinterpret it for today, and that's such a hard thing to do. But you realize that a piece like that solo [Solo From Chaos], when we started looking at the core of its structure, and the elements that were there, there is something quite universal about it. In fact, I ended up showing her [Karen Jamieson] a solo that I had made in 2013 [Leftovers], and it actually followed many of the same structural points in terms of its arc, even in terms of some of its spatial references. It was like there was overlap. I thought that was so interesting because these are both works that had central ideas of conflict, and self-discovery, and renewal, and cycle. All those themes were part of it and we were coming from completely different places, but we had landed inside of the same ideas, just coincidentally.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: And if I remember correctly, it was also a revelation to Karen [Jamieson] that the Solo was a duet as well, with the voice, and originally with Ahmed Hassan's vocal contributions–

Josh Martin: Yeah.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: –to the piece, and then the way you guys interpreted that was really neat.

Josh Martin: Yeah, it was so cool to be able to dance to his voice too.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Mhmm.

Josh Martin: And then to understand through trial, how difficult [laughs] that is too. It's quite amazing.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah. Very cool. I’m wondering if you found any obvious commonalities between your own practice, or your own interests, and Karen [Jamieson]'s practice at all?

Josh Martin: I guess it depends on the work that we're talking about. I don't know Karen [Jamieson]'s entire body of work, but from what I've experienced in the pieces that I have, this idea of taking the body to a state where it becomes something else is there, in terms of this idea of endurance, and pushing to the edge of something with the hopes that edge will release, opening a gateway to something else. It's not quite as simple as just transformation. There's something about trying to really dive deep enough into a particular state, or particular movement task that through doing it, and for doing it for long enough, or doing it hard enough, something else occurs, and that can't be choreographed. I believe in that, and I believe that's something that she also believes because in something like Sisyphus, or something like the Solo From Chaos, there are these moments where you're trying to break through – not in terms of the narrative arc of what's happening, but you're trying to break through in terms of your performance, and you're trying to dig at something enough that it becomes you, as opposed to you becoming it.

That's a hard thing to describe, but for me, one of the things that I care about most in dance is unlocking a place inside a performance that you can't just turn on, that you have to get to, and there's something there about work and labour. That's what I consider the labour of dance – it's like all this other stuff that has to occur first before getting there. All of that labour is part of the dance, and it's not just that moment. I think that that's something that we're all striving for, is to find that transformation through doing, not just to be able to do. There's something in witnessing that endurance and that process.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, both physically and mentally.

Josh Martin: Yes, yeah.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Nice. I'm curious to ask you this next question just because you have your own company, and it's had a lifetime of its own now that is implicated in the history of dance in Vancouver. Why is preserving Vancouver's contemporary dance history important to you?

Josh Martin: Like I said, with doing the Body to Body project, it is the stories that are just so fascinating – seeing how we're all re-living similar conversations in multiple different ways. Not to say that there's not this idea of progress, the artist, the artistic community keeps changing, but the world around it is the thing that's really interesting to look at to see how these influences have shaped where we are now. There are so many similarities between the stories that Karen [Jamieson] might be telling about the early ‘80s, versus where I am right now, in terms of the relationships of people, the way that people were working, what they cared about, their values and priorities, and of course, they manifested in different ways, in a different world, in a different time, but they're the same sort of interests, there are the same sort of desires for change, there are the same sort of desires for future, but the lens is just different.

For me, that just connects me to something larger, like, it's the practice that I have right now, and the artists that are inside of my community right now, you know, this is a time, this is a place, but if you look at it, pulled apart, seeing everything that's come before it makes you realize how important it all is. It feels like I'm linked to a much greater network, and that the threads of my interests, and my influences, and the things that I care about are connected to conversations that happened long ago. They've been running through people, and if I was to summarize the dance that I care about, it really is dealing with people, and historical dance preservation is keeping those people present, and keeping what they’d done in the past in the present in a way that is not just informative, but it also needs to be valued as a realization that it's part of your work. I can't separate myself from the history that's already happened, especially here in Vancouver.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: What more do you think needs to be done to ensure that that history is preserved? And I'd be curious to hear your perspective as someone who has a dance company of their own, and whether you think about your historical traces and archives?

Josh Martin: I don't know because for me, none of it is about preserving factual information [laughs]. It's not important for me that people watch videos of our work, or that interviews that might have happened with people talking are perfectly kept. Maybe it's just feeling the connection points along the way. For me, those are really the most exciting things.

I don't know what needs to be done more of, other than what I would hope for is to trace a lineage back through the people who have been inside of each other's work, and who have been inside of certain projects together, something like this Coming Out of Chaos project. That's just a node, it's a landmark, and then you see what spreads out of it, but this isn't the only thing. There were so many other places where these intersections happened, and I guess I'm curious about these intersections as being the things that we preserve as information; when people came together and when people had been part of dialogue. We don't need to know what was said, or what happened inside of it, but you can make a lot of the story come alive of how things transpired along the way by just knowing where those intersections are.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, yeah. Would having a centralized dance archives in Vancouver be useful to you?

Josh Martin: Ahh...

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Or is it more about using the archive, and actually embodying it – like in the case of your Body to Body work with Karen [Jamieson]?

Josh Martin: Mm hmm. No, I think it's tremendously valuable, and especially because we now have such great means to have a collection of the things that exist, and to be able to have access to things on a very quick basis. There are so many times that have come up, for me, where somebody will say, “Oh, yeah, and there was this piece that this-and-this-and-this happened,” and I want to know more about it, and I just can't because I don't know who to ask, who's got a video, or who's got anything. I feel like if there was a place, online, where I could hear people talk about it, or get different perspectives, or takes from that time, then I would totally be fascinated. I think that if [a place existed] that was full and rich of many different opinions, and perspectives, and stories, and recollections of a place and time would be something I would get lost in, for sure [laughs]. I would spend multiple hours probably just listening to people talk about what they were working on, and why. So when you say "useful," I don't know about "useful." I think it would come into me feeling more inspired, I guess. Useful for inspiration in that same sense that I'm talking about, like, being connected to a larger undertaking that's been jointly held up by so many people. I think that's useful to me when thinking about persevering [laughs] as an artist, but it's not like I would utilize it for getting ideas to make my work. It's more about utilizing it for sustaining energy and passion behind the things that I'm doing.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah. Okay. Very interesting to hear. This is something that we're trying to think about. It would be amazing to have a space in Vancouver where a dance archives could live. If it were in The Dance Centre, for example, it could be an accessible resource, and then you also have a studio next door, so there's this cross-contamination between research and practice. I'm just curious if that's something people would actually be interested in.

Josh Martin: Yeah, I think those things are very cool, and I think it's important that Vancouver finally starts to take itself seriously. These things have to start at some point [laughs], because otherwise, too many things are gonna get lost that don't need to be. Because they are currently sitting there in boxes. But if it was me [laughs], I feel like I would be concerned by the realities that occupying physical space with these things is going to bring so... I don't know if I trust future generations to take advantage of the physical objects. And to really dig through boxes, and to look at these [choreographic] notebooks. I think they should exist somewhere, but I don't know if it's about regular access – like would it be utilized as much and as often as a public library? I just think that so much of the dance community that I know, right now, is about this forward looking thing, but everybody is doing so much reading, and everyone's reading so much about other people's work.

I recently had a conversation with another artist about what can we work on right now? This was a few months back, and we were both saying how the future is such a difficult thing to conjure right now, and what if we don't know the end point of what we're making, what are we working on? And it dawned on both of us that now is such a great time to look at the past, as opposed to the future, and to work on the past as something, as opposed to working on the future. It's such a relevant time too, when we don't know where we're going, and can't know, just look at where we've been. Having quick and easy online access to historic documentation of old photos, and videos, and writing feels valuable in a way that is different than opening up an old chest of stuff, because I don't know if people will really know what they're looking for. I don't know if people are willing to take the time to sift through.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, information overload. For real.

Josh Martin: Yeah, basically. Which is what we're all experiencing right now in terms of all of this stuff going online [during Covid-19]. I'm sure you've seen people, dance companies, digging through their vaults of old video footage that they're now releasing for the first time in many years, and it's just free. It's like you can watch this work from, you know, 1998, and this, and this, and this. There's just so much already, and I'm already overloaded, and feeling like I've missed out on watching so many things because they were up for a week, and now they're gone again. I just wish things like that existed all the time. Forever. Yeah sure, give it your five years touring window, but then, just leave it. Maybe it's not the best video of it, or whatever, but if you have it, I would prefer that it just stayed all in one place. That if one day I got interested in this particular artist, that I could go, and find everything that I could about them, as opposed to contacting their office, and being like, Do you have videos from this piece and this piece? I don't know, I just feel like because we have the capacity now, we should just let these things live publicly. I think some artists, like Sophia Wolfe, who are now working on this problem with their project called videocan, trying to collect everything under one roof. Pure access.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, yeah. I’m hoping to see that happen more because of Covid-19. It's been great that all these programs have gone online, and in some cases, certain organizations have left them accessible for a permanent, or open-ended amount of time, but then, as you said, others place preview caps on them. I think so much of it is just about getting work out there, and as you already pointed out, using the convenience of online, the accessibility of online to expand your audiences and users. I think organizations could really benefit from that.

Josh Martin: I'm not sure the format, but I do think that The Dance Centre is the organization who should be partnering on this. I do think that [laughs] they should be putting resources into it. It would be great to see it start with one place, but then continue to grow, with all the different artists who can contribute to it. The hard thing about these things is how not to put the work on just one person's plate. Is there a way to collectively contribute, so that it becomes populated quickly and democratically with a variety of things and information. Videos, resources.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, it's interesting because thinking about preservation for the future necessitates questions of sustainability. Even digital assets have to be hosted somewhere, and there's upkeep required for that too. It doesn't seem like The Dance Centre is super motivated to preserve dance history in Vancouver, which surprises me, but universities, SFU in particular, seem to be recognizing the value of dance history in Vancouver, and recognizing that they have a really unique part in it due to their own history, and are starting to prioritize that in their archives initiatives now. It could be interesting to consider the potential partnerships that could link together all of these different communities and resources to make a sustainable archives.

Josh Martin: It is a lot.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, it is, and you know, dancers are dancing [laughs]. They're making work, and thinking about these long-term questions and solutions are not always at the forefront of their concerns.

Josh Martin: Mmm yeah.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: There's a lot of nuance and complexities to it. We're [KJD] really trying to find out if there's an interest in a dance archives, and trying to develop some partnerships in hopes of planting the seed for it to grow into something bigger later on. But obviously, it's important just to make sure that it's even something that's desired by the dance community.

Josh Martin: Yeah, I think it is something desired by the dance community. I immediately feel the weight of the issues of accessibility and inclusivity. There is so much responsibility and accountability behind who controls it, how to decide what gets represented, what gets included, how you share it, and even if your motto is to say yes to hosting anything and everything submitted, you’d still have the responsibility of hunting down the people, communities who were not submitting to ensure you weren’t creating a perceived long term historical erasure of stories and events by their lack of visibility 40 years from now. This takes resources, and guts, and the emotional investment of an entire arts community, and even then it might need some more to do it right – whatever right means at that time.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, accessibility and inclusivity would be really important to consider and build into a dance archives. Well, those are all of my questions. Thank you so much for speaking with me. I really enjoyed it.

Josh Martin: Yeah, my pleasure.