Max Wyman & Emma Metcalfe Hurst
Interview for Coming Out of Chaos: A Vancouver Dance Story

October 12, 2020

Max Wyman, Dance historian, dance critic, and author of Dance Canada: An Illustrated History (1989)

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: How did you get involved in contemporary dance in Vancouver? And furthermore, how did you enter into dance criticism?

Max Wyman: I came to Vancouver in '67 with my then family, which was Anna Wyman, the dancer, choreographer, and two kids, Trevor and Gabby. We left London in '67, came straight here. I didn't actually have a job but I'd written to the Vancouver Sun, telling them I was god's gift to journalism. The morning after I got here, I got a job as a general reporter with The Vancouver Sun. In London, I'd been working in the entertainment business, writing about the evolution of London in the '60s, mostly pop music and theatre: on tour with The Beatles, The [Rolling] Stones, that sort of thing. I'd done some dance reviewing, but more theatre reviewing, in London. About six months after I arrived here, the music critic moved on to another job in the CBC and I became the music and dance critic at The Sun – this was early '68 and that's where my career as a critic began in terms of Vancouver. I'd done some dance writing in London, and Anna [Wyman] was teaching and choreographing to an extent in London at the time when I met her, so we spent a lot of time looking at dance performances and I'd watch her work. The same thing happened when we came here: she set up a dance school very quickly in Vancouver, and I spent a lot of time at the school watching dance being made, watching the way it was put together. Out of that school, Anna [Wyman] began to develop a small dance company. It performed at lunchtimes at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and then it was picked up to go on tour around BC, and I went with it as company manager. I was watching the creation of work in the studio, and watching the way that dances themselves were made, as well as dance itself. Going on tour, watching how it happened was tremendously valuable training – very fast learning about the art.

By looking at dance constantly, I developed a tremendous affection for the art. It still seems to me – and I've said this many times – it's the most rewarding of all the arts. I mean, I'm a writer. I love theatre, I love music, and I've written about them all my life, but dance, to me, is the most rewarding in the sense that it's a language that has no words, but can communicate immense amounts of information and emotion and things that go beyond emotion and language to address elemental things about us. The way you can feel deep emotions by watching people move and the way bodies interact is a constant fascination to me. I'm also tremendously moved by the transience of it all. It seems to be a metaphor for our lives, that we see something that is beautiful, or moving, or upsetting, or funny, and then it's gone, gone. I think part of why I want to write about it is to preserve that. I mean we all wring our hands and rend our garments about how dance is so transient, and there's no records, and so on... That's part of our job, those of us who write about it and archive it, we have to make sure that it's preserved and protected. Otherwise, it's gone. So, much has already disappeared. I believe it's up to us to give it continuing life, to make sure that it's remembered.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, I couldn't agree more with you about all of that. That's a beautiful way of putting it. All of the metaphors that you can find in dance, and how it's our responsibility to preserve dance in some way – even though the written word may not always be the best form, it is a form.

Max Wyman: I've always said that the ideal dance review should be danced because you’re once removed if you're writing about it already. Language is wonderful, and I've spent my life refining ways to use language, but it's still a pretty clumsy tool. We have to wield it in the most precise way we can.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, I noticed when looking over two early reviews that you had written which are in our [KJD] archives, there was a particular focus on language, and the way that Karen [Jamieson] struggled with trying to articulate her practice at that moment in time when she was still figuring out how to express elemental human experiences through the written word.

Max Wyman: It's fascinating, I think, how there's a break between the intent that an artist has and being able to articulate it in anything except their own artistic language. You want to communicate with people, but at the same time, it’s the art itself that does that. It's a very interesting challenge. Writing about dance is a similar challenge because you try to reflect what you've seen, but also what you've felt, and what you've thought, and how it relates to other things that you might have seen – not necessarily other dance, but other experiences you've had, other artworks and artists you might have seen and looked at. You're trying to give it context. Then you also have to try to give an authentic reflection of what you saw. I mean, it's only your impression. If we sat next to each other, and watched a piece of dance, we'd have totally different responses to it. My wife Susan [Mertens] and I found that always. We were rival critics for a long time – Susan replaced me on The Vancouver Sun and I went to The Province, and we’d go to the theatre together, and we'd sit together to review a show. Then, we’d go back to the paper – she'd go to The Vancouver Sun and I'd go to The Province and we'd write reviews. Then on the way home, but not before, we’d talk about it: “Ah, I wish I'd thought of that, I wish I'd said it that way!” Everyone has a different response to an artwork, and your job as a writer is to be as accurate, and as honest as you can about your own response. The idea of objectivity doesn’t come into it, because no one can be objective about an experience of an art form, of an artistic expression. It's your personal response, informed by what you know, and what you've experienced, and even informed by your language.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, writing is deeply personal. So, returning back to that moment when you and Anna [Wyman] and your family arrived in Vancouver, what was the contemporary dance scene like in Vancouver at that time?

Max Wyman: Late '60s, early '70s. It was a time of ferment, certainly. Simon Fraser [University, SFU] had been established in '65. Dance was a part of the Center for Communications of the Arts, although it wasn't a curriculum subject for several years. The dance department was part of the tremendous creative uproar on the hill, there was always something going on. The first founder of the Center [for Communications] talked about it being a new Bauhaus. They would fuse theatre, and music, and dance, and writing, and they'd make something new and revolutionary. I mean, there were demonstrations, and it was quite a lot of chaos on the hill. It was wonderful. The university was filled with draft dodgers and people with revolutionary ideas. It had two professors of futurology – not just one but two [laughs]. It was a place where everything was possible. It was a new dreamland, really, for intellectual activity, and dance was part of that. It was very interesting. Iris Garland, who was there at the very beginning, set up a dance department [at SFU] that was pretty largely influenced by the new ideas that were happening in dance in New York, and Chicago, where she came from. That dance department produced most of the active ingredients that made dance in the city so lively in the '70s. Anna [Wyman] taught there. Paula Ross was another who was outside the university – she set up, I think, Vancouver's first modern dance company in '67. Anna [Wyman] started in '69, '70. They were all exploring their own ways of making movement. That was interesting because Vancouver was very much, at that time, away from the mainstream. It didn't get much exposure to trends in any of the arts, really. Marshall McLuhan came into UBC and did stuff there, sparked thinking there. Iris [Garland] started bringing people in as well, from New York, particularly. Somebody from the [Alwin] Nikolais Company came in. I think that's when Karen [Jamieson] became aware of [Alwin] Nikolais and she went off quite quickly to New York and absorbed all of that.

I went up [to SFU] and reviewed a lot because at that time, the student performances on the hill were open to the public. The paper had a much more generous and inclusive vision of what we should cover in terms of the arts than today, so I'd be up there two or three times a week looking at dance or listening to music. The ferment was astonishing. There was Murray Schafer, in the music department, Phil Werren playing around with electronics, and Bruce Davis – all of the music people. There was this wonderful cross-fertilization of disciplines. There was John Juliani in theatre, there were Iain [and Ingrid] Baxter in the visual arts. Everybody played together and nobody wanted to just learn about the arts, they wanted to do. And that was the difference – it wasn't a place just to go in and study, it was a place to go and make things. We used to joke that every time there was a graduating class in the dance department, there'd be three new dance companies in the city. Everybody wanted to make art, and they did! Out of that came this whole flood in the '70s of creative artists– Karen [Jamieson] at the forefront.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, the SFU workshops have come up a lot, and how foundational they were to dance in Vancouver by bringing in people from abroad for workshops.

Max Wyman: Iris [Garland’s] influence was, I think, fundamental. She brought in all kinds of people from New York who showed our local people, our local students – people who were interested in the art – that there were new ideas to be looked at. One of the things that we didn't have a lot of was training in the city, and money. I think that lack of money, and the competition for it, was one of the reasons why, in my view, the dance scene in the '70s in Vancouver was pretty segmented. A lot of people were rivals because there was not a lot of money around. They were all competing for the same little pot. That tends to set up a kind of rivalry that certainly wasn't healthy. These days, it seems to me that everyone is working together; they dance in each other's companies, they move around. At that time, there was some cross-fertilization, but not a lot. You had the Terminal City [Dance Research] group, you had Mountain Dance Theatre. Later on you had EDAM, and they were little, discrete clusters of dance-making that kept to themselves. I always used to complain about the fact that they wouldn't talk to each other. Sometimes you'd find that shows were happening on the same night. Why wasn't there some kind of central calendar? Anyways, silly things like that.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Could you talk a little bit about the theatrical influence on dance around that time?

Max Wyman: There were certainly the theatre groups at Simon Fraser doing their own thing. John Juliani was the head of Theatre there and he was trying to develop a kind of elemental style of form, of movement – sort of [Jerzy] Grotowski crossed with Peter Brook. People lived their art. John [Juliani] lived his art. He and Donna, his wife, got married at the end of a performance at one of their shows. But I don’t think there wasn't a great deal of crossover between theatre and dance at that time. Wendy Goring was doing mime in the theatre department, but even then, there wasn’t that much crossover. No, they [dancers] were pretty distinct. They would collaborate with visual artists to a degree. Anna [Wyman] worked with Toni Onley, and Jack Shadbolt, and Sylvia Tait. In terms of design, a guy called Frits Jacobsen built her some wonderful sculptures for her work. But generally, I think the idea of gesamtkunstwerk wasn't really established in the dance scene. There was not a lot of costume going on. It was poor theatre, poor dance. There was not much money around. I think Judith Marcuse was the first independent to get a grant from the Canada Council. Anna [Wyman] was the first contemporary company to be sent on tour across the country, and then internationally, but the money was tight.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, I assume it was predominantly project-based at that time, too. There were limited, if any, operating funds.

Max Wyman: There were the government make-work programs, that included the arts LIP, Local Initiatives Program, and OFY, Opportunities For Youth. So a lot of arts companies – theatre companies in particular – sprang up at that time (this was the early '70s) to take advantage of that, and they lived as long as the grants lived, and then most of them went away again. At this time, the late '60s, early ‘70s, Canada was suddenly discovering that the arts were interesting. Up to that time, it really hadn't come into the 20th century in terms of the arts, and then Expo '67 in Montréal had shown Canada how wonderful and rewarding engagement with experiment and artistic expression could be. It gave Canada a whole new identity through the arts, a new sense of confidence in ourselves, as Canadians, making artistic expression. We were no longer the consumers of stuff from other countries, other cultures; we were able to make our own. Out here [In Vancouver], it was quite distinctive. By the ‘70s, the art that was coming out of Vancouver, particularly dance, was by far the most interesting in the country. It was interesting because at that time, this side of the mountain, this side of the Rockies, we were really cut off from the rest of the country, and from a lot of influence. We didn't see much. Whatever was going on in Québec – and lots was going on in Québec. It was phenomenal, and changing their society, and eventually changing Canadian society – didn't really affect us. The artists in Vancouver made their own culture, and it was, to a large extent, their own. Karen [Jamieson] was particularly influenced by the Aboriginal culture that was here. She moved from stage pieces, like Coming Out of Chaos (1982), and Sisyphus (1983), into more engagement with Aboriginal people: Rainforest (1987), Gawa Gyani (1991-1994), and then into what became, it seems to me, her driving force, which was engagement with community to build understandings across cultures. Her influence has been immense in that area. She's driven through with a constant vision of making modern myths with the cultures that exist here. She started with ancient myths, Sisyphus and Coming Out of Chaos, but then she's made a whole series of new myths based on her involvement, a very respectful involvement, with the Aboriginal cultures, and the recognition that they have something timeless to tell us and convey. If we can share those directions, those ideas, then we can perhaps make social progress. That integration of art with society is one of the great gifts to us.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, wonderfully said. I think you said in your review how art crosses between body and mind and spirit and emotion, which are all fundamental to every human, regardless of cultural background or ethnicity or race. How would you say your role as a dance critic has evolved over the years?

Max Wyman: I suppose we all grow up. It certainly has come clear to me that there was, for a long time, a sense of conflict between artists and critics, and that they were at loggerheads. The old joke from Christopher Hampton, the playwright, who said that asking a playwright what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it thinks about dogs... I don't believe it's that at all. I think we're all doing the same thing. We're all on the same side. It may not seem like it, sometimes, but I think that critics, writers are really the interface between the work and the larger audience. A lot of people won't go to see a show, but they'll read the review – or they used to, when reviews were available to read. Essentially the function of the critic is to set out what you saw, what you thought the artist was trying to do, what the artist did, what your view of it was, and pass that on as clearly and as concisely and as entertainingly as possible to a reader. I always used to write as if I was writing for everybody who bought the paper, not just for the people who are interested in dance. That means you don't use jargon, you don't use any special terms, you talk about what you've seen as if you're having a conversation over coffee with somebody intelligent and interested. That's how I treated readers, and that's how I think all writers about the arts need to treat their readers; with respect and a regard for their intelligence, and an expectation that they're interested in what you've got to say, and interested in the work that you're talking about.

I'll read a review of something that I had no idea, no intention of going to see, because I want to know what the writer's thoughts are about it. I won't necessarily want to agree, but that's the other problem: for a long time critics seemed to have this image of career-makers, or career-destroyers, or show-makers or show-destroyers. They used to call Clive Barnes "The Butcher of Broadway." That's just not how it should be. In London, when I was reviewing, there were eight or nine reviews of anything that was on; go to a theatre, there'd be nine reviews, and they'd all be different, and some would love it, and some would hate it, and you would read them all, so that you got a sense of the different points of view that people had, but you didn't take any of them as instructions. But what was happening by the ‘60s, ‘70s was that the media had convinced audiences that there were these gurus who would tell you what was “good” and what was “bad.” It was the whole terrible "thumbs-up, thumbs-down," kind of reviewing. They tried once to do that at The Province when I was there, they said, Look, give us a thumbs-up and thumbs-up at the top of the column so that we know whether it's good or bad. You cannot do that – you're reducing an art form and someone's work to something perfunctory, and it's just not valuable, or decent, or proper, in my view. I think we're all there to make the art form better. I don't think any artist goes out on stage to set the art form back. We all have ambitions, and sometimes we don't always reach them. Our job is to take the temperature, to make an assessment as we see it, to be guardians. I used to get notes that would say, Why are you so negative? And I'd say, I'm not negative, I just want to see things get better. That way you protect the art form. It's gonna die if it's terrible. I want to see it get better. I'm on your side.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, there's an accountability between the creator and the critic, I think.

Max Wyman: For sure. I used to say that with modern dance, the abstract, imaginative, image-centered material, that I was free to make up what it was about, if it was about anything. I was free to write about what I got out of it. And occasionally, I'd get calls from choreographers after my review appeared saying, “Well thanks for telling me about what I did. Now I understand it.” Quite often, it's that sense of needing an outside eye to give you focus. I think we're all collaborators. We're all trying to make something wonderful. We do it bit-by-bit, it's by accretion that things get better.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: And so when you were writing around this time, was there a strong sense of discourse between the critics and between the dancers?

Max Wyman: I never got that sense. No, I didn't get a sense of either the dancers talking to each other or very much of the interplay between writers and dancers. It's a shame. I would do interviews with dancers, and try to talk to them about where they were going, but it was easier to do it with out-of-towners. Say, Robert Joffrey would come in, or Martha Graham, and I would be able to sit down and talk to them about what they were doing. In a sense that was much easier than talking to the locals. I liked to talk to dancers and to choreographers about how they worked and what they were doing, but I think there was a sense of distance, of separation – there was no sense as there is today, I think, that we're all in this together. I always said that one of my regrets about the job was that I met so many interesting people who I wanted to have as friends because they were so, so wonderful to talk to, but I couldn't become more than a certain type of friend because sooner or later, you're going to write about them and you step on their toes. Friendships don't survive that very well, so, in essence, the job cuts you off – or it did then, not so much now, that's for sure.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah. So, moving into how you think the relationship between writing and dance has changed today – have you seen a shift?

Max Wyman: I think writers about dance, today, are far better informed than they were when I was around at the beginning. They've seen more, they have more access – well certainly to online materials to look at, but also to historical material. I wrote the first history of dance in Canada, and there was nothing. Nothing at all. I was making up the narrative as I went along. I had access to most of the people who founded it, which was good, but it's just exploded since then. In the years since I wrote that, over 40 years ago, it's astonishing the number, the range and scope of people writing about dance – particularly at the universities. You have the publications program at Dance Canada [Collection] Danse in Toronto where they’ve put out, what? 30-40 books about Canadian dance. It's joyous to see that. Back then, at that time, there was nothing. I was very fortunate that The Vancouver Sun would send me across the country to look at theatre and dance – even send me out of the country to New York, and to Europe. They'd pay me to go – this was the newspaper! Then I became an assessor for the Canada Council. In those days there was no restriction on how many times they could use you, so I'd be sent across the country, and I saw like every dance company in the country, several times, over that period. I had this really privileged look at what was going on, in terms of dance across the country – who was doing what, how they were interacting, where the trends were, in a way that you couldn't get simply by sitting here at home. You needed to get out and discover, and that was one of the early problems in my career; that there was not a chance to do that, we're defeated by our geography in this country.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah. It’s not easy or cheap flying across the country! Could you talk a little bit about your process for writing Dance Canada: An Illustrated History (1989)?

Max Wyman: I went across the country three times. I got a grant from the Canada Council to take a year off from the paper and went across the country interviewing everybody. Going through every company's archives, and some of them were – you would be horrified. I mean, there’d be a closet with a bunch of piles of paper, and that would be their archive – if they had one, if they had a closet. I was very fortunate because, as I say, most of the people who had been important at the beginning of dance in Canada – which starts really from the '40s, I suppose, professional dance, were still alive and still compos mentis. A lot of stuff I didn't use in the book obviously, but to pin down how the story happened, it was the story of Canada, really. It was two colonizing cultures, the influence of the United States coming in, and then the rise of Québec. It's the story of Canada, told in dance. But it’s very condensed. Dance in Canada, there's only about a page on what happened in Vancouver in the period you're talking about. It talks about Terminal City [Dance Research], and Mountain Dance, and there's a reference to Jamie Zagoudakis. It's very brief because it had to be condensed. Immensely. It just puts them in the context of the whole dance story at that time.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: You also wrote The Defiant Imagination: Why Culture Matters as well.

Max Wyman: That's more general – about why we need to put the arts at the centre of the cultural and the social agenda.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Moving on to the next era, do you remember anything about Coming Out of Chaos? [laughs]

Max Wyman: I remember it as a very powerful piece. It was the beginning, to my mind in retrospect, of Karen [Jamieson], finding a way to make a connection with large ideas, with the idea of humanity striving, and the influence of outside forces. I think this is where the emergence of myth in her concerns probably began. I remember it as being very powerful, and driven in the way that Sisyphus (1983) was driven. There was this driving force. I think she had read a lot of [Joseph] Campbell at that time – I'm just guessing because he talks about myth being fundamental to ourselves as a society, to humanity as a society, the way we tell ourselves stories and take human truths and turn them into stories. That's what Karen [Jamieson]'s done, all the way through, starting off with Coming Out of Chaos (1982), Sisyphus (1983), and then moving into modern times with the modern, but universal and timeless, Aboriginal myths that she integrates into her thinking. She's so careful to be respectful and I so admire that. There's no sense of appropriation, in my mind. It certainly is far more a sense of sharing, and collaboration, and working with – a collaborative growth, a collaborative creation of something new out of the old.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: In terms of relations, yeah. It's amazing to see how that's carried on in the work that they're doing in their archives, as well and going through traditional protocols and consultations for how these works have been documented, and whether it was actually ethically and culturally appropriate to do so in the first place, and how do we move forward for making sure that this this information is properly preserved, but also how it's used, accessed, and distributed in sensitive ways. I think that also speaks to her practice.

Max Wyman: They are very complex questions – particularly now. The whole question of cultural appropriation is fraught with pitfalls. The way that she [Karen Jamieson] has taken her workout into the community, and worked with communities, rather than professional dance people, is, I think, a logical progression from what she's been doing throughout her career, which is to make movement, the use of the body as an expressive instrument, available to everybody. That seems to be developed all the way through. It's a logical outcome of what she's done.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, it's interesting hearing her [Karen Jamieson] talk about this work. She was caught in this form of collaboration with these other dancers, who she was working with in this piece, and it was really hard for her to work collaboratively at that time, because shortly after she went on to develop her own company, and really found her voice, and got her momentum as an independent artist, but collaboration has been a common thread throughout her entire career, regardless of her trying to move away from it [laughs].

Max Wyman: At the same time, she was a phenomenal individual performer. Whenever she was on the stage, Karen [Jamieson] was the one you'd watch. I mean, I got to know her – don't misunderstand me – I got to know her body very well through watching her on the stage so often, and her means of using that instrument as a way to express the ideas she had. Watching that evolve was a remarkable privilege, really. Each time we'd watch the same instrument, saying different things, in different ways, and yet, so eloquently. She was becoming clearer and clearer in her refinement of her expression of herself through herself, and then surrounding herself. Then apart from that, with all the choreography for other people that she made, it was a very individual style and look.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: So, again, just returning back to Coming Out of Chaos, do you remember the Solo From Chaos (1982)?

Max Wyman: What I remember, essentially, is the drive and the energy and the passion and the – not fury, but determination. There was a strength to it that I think is some of the most affecting dance that you can see. It comes from a passion that's inside the performer. Whether it's ballet, or whatever it is, this was the case with – as I recall it, with that Solo. It was driven by something I can't give a name to, but something that you could sum up as passion and not anger, but determination, forceful will.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Do you have any other memories of Terminal City Dance at that time that would be worth sharing?

Max Wyman: So much was going on. There'd be a show by Terminal City, there'd be a show by Mountain Dance, Gisa Cole and her friends put that together for a while. And then there was EDAM. Lola [MacLaughlin] went away and spent time in Europe and was involved with really edgy, new work. Karen [Jamieson] went to New York and was involved with [Alwin] Nikolais and the [Martha] Graham school. The ones who went away and came back brought fresh air into this community. They presented work that was different from what was going on here. They had different influences on them. That exposure to the outside world, I think helped to move modern dance in Canada along. If it had been just left to itself, it would've become even more navel-gazing than it sometimes was. There was a freshness about what came back that informed it, broadened the range of possibility. I remember when Peter Bingham and the EDAM gang got involved with contact improvisation with Steve Paxton. Boom! Contact was suddenly everywhere and had an enormous influence on the dance that was made. The ripples of these influences, [for example] Lola [MacLaughlin's idiosyncratic, very romantic, very personal, very European approach to movement and to theatre... They all have their ripples. I think we have to be very aware that without exposure to those outside influences, we'd be a very different place. And nowadays, of course, it's a total stewpot: different things are thrown in, and different things come out, and it's wonderful, but there's no way you can talk about a Vancouver ethos anymore. There used to be a sense that dance made in Vancouver – art made in Vancouver – had a West Coast flavour. It was laid back, it was involved with the environment, it spoke to spiritual concerns, it was rooted in the land, rooted in the people of the place. You can back that up quite well with the examples from visual art, and from dance. Paula [Ross and] Anna [Wyman] did an Emily Carr dance, and certainly Karen [Jamieson]. There was a sense that West Coast art had a West Coast feel.

There was that whole “searchers” thing as well. Vancouver, was a real centre for spiritual “searchers” – and still is to a degree – where everybody comes. My wife Susan [Mertens] has this wonderful image of Canada being tilted to the left, so that everything comes unscrewed in Eastern Canada rolls down and ends up in Vancouver. So, we're filled with slightly [laughs] loosened individuals. And that's where a lot of the West Coast reputation for eccentricity comes from, and that was reflected in the dance that we got. It was very endearing because this was a place where you could try and fail. You could be ridiculous, you could be experimental, and nobody cared because you weren't being judged. There was no way that they would judge you, because you were doing it yourself and you weren't sending it anywhere else. So, what emerged was a real sense of art with social roots – it was art you could develop a real warmth towards because it was an expression of the place, rather than something formal. You can make formal dance quite easily, anywhere. We didn't get that here, not at all, it seems to me, until finally, we now have Ballet BC, which is wonderful, but it's certainly influenced not by here, but by elsewhere.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah.

Max Wyman: One of the reasons ballet never took off here was because it's expensive. There were a number of times when people were trying to get ballet companies going. Peter Franklin White, who used to dance with the Royal Ballet in London, came here and tried to get a company going. A couple from Winnipeg came, tried to get a company going. All kinds of people tried to get ballet companies off the ground but you need money, you need space, you need dancers. It was hard to find the kind of properly trained dancers in Vancouver to staff a ballet company, and the good [dancers] that we had went away, because there was nowhere for them to dance. Lynn Seymour was one of them. They went to London, New York because there was nowhere here for them to dance. That goes back into the '30s when the Ballet Russe would come through and pick up dancers here and take them away. But modern dance, contemporary dance, whatever you want to call it, with Karen [Jamieson] and Savannah [Walling] and Terry [Hunter] and Lola [MacLaughlin] flourished. An art form emerged with a distinct flavour of the place. It was a time of tremendous ferment, and not everything was a success. But then, you know, it never is. Many thousands of plays were written in the early part of the 20th century. Nobody remembered them. Same with dance. Not everything is a finished masterpiece. And sometimes people forget. We have to let people grow, we have to let people fail. This was a good place to fail because it didn't matter. I think people were encouraged by that. They had belief in themselves and they had to have that – there was nothing else, there was no money. There were often no audiences.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: I was wondering how you see EDAM as a part of that history?

Max Wyman: Well, it was a melting pot, a crucible, out of which people came. It was the same with Terminal City – they were melting pots. People came together, and rubbed against each other, and sometimes grated against each other, and went off in their own directions. But they were places where they could work together for a while, and then make their own way. I think that was the value of those organizations, and certainly Terminal City and EDAM were places where ideas could be tested. People could find what they were really interested in. Collaboration could happen, or not happen. They were young! They were finding their way and they could find their way together and if they didn't get on, if they didn't agree, then they separated. I mean, EDAM started out with seven and then came down to two.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: The melting pot. That makes a lot of sense. And then these collaborations fracture out into different directions. I'm very curious about EDAM – I don't think they have a fully developed archives, but I'm just so curious about what kind of work they were creating when they first started as a collective – prior to Peter Bingham being the Artistic Director of EDAM.

Max Wyman: Again, it was this sense of explosion of ideas that was going on, particularly with Peter Bingham and Lola Ryan and their contact work.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Do you have any recollection of Ahmed Hassan as well?

Max Wyman: Ahmed [Hassan] was – you know, he never learned music, but he was this astonishing creative force. I loved him, he had a wonderful sense of himself, and of what he could do for music in terms of giving it to people. He said the music he made was tied to his view of the world. He wanted people to wake up to their global responsibilities, but he said there's no point in preaching so he used his music to show people that there was a range to the world's creative expression that demonstrated its diversity in ways that we could all learn from. He would play the strangest instruments. And he adapted the berimbau, which is a Brazilian instrument. He played things with his mouth and his fingers, he'd pop on this, and crack on that. He was quite wonderful in terms of making noise, making sounds that came from different cultural backgrounds. And as he said, he wanted people to understand that there is a great diversity to who we are and that's what we should celebrate. That was at the heart of Ahmed: We are all one and yet we're all different. That was his message. It was a very powerful one. He wasn't gonna give a lecture, wasn't gonna be pompous about it. Just gonna say: Look folks, we are who we are, and we're all different, and it's marvelous, and listen. And that was a great force, a great driving force toward cultural understanding, cultural collaboration, cultural togetherness.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, it sounds like Karen [Jamieson] and Ahmed [Hassan] had a really close relationship. It sounds like their beliefs and world views overlapped.

Max Wyman: Karen [Jamieson] and Jeff as well. Jeff Corness, composer. She always seemed to have a really good relationship with the musicians she worked with. They seem to be on the same wavelength. I think in fact, didn't Jeff [Corness], for a while, co-direct the company with Karen [Jamieson]? I think he did, for a little while. Thinking about EDAM’s influence, I think about Lola [MacLaughlin], she was very smart. She was always intellectually engaged in a way that some dancers aren't. There was also an armour of faith, I think, which made her work very unassuming. It was unpretentious. It was just given to you. You weren't being shown anything, you were being invited to share. That’s what I loved about Lola [MacLaughlin's] stuff. It was always an invitation to share something she was discovering. Some artists want to show you, they want to impress you. With Lola [MacLaughlin] there was nothing dogmatic or assertive, it was let's have fun. And she had this wonderful sense of humour, a great wit about her work. It was all surprising, and there was that theatricality that I talked about earlier on about her work, and enigmatic references – that's the thing about dance, is that it can be enigmatic. It presents you with images and ideas that are not verbalized, they're not even verbalized in your head, but there's something that makes sense to you, or makes you question. It presents ideas, concepts, and intuitions in a way that's visible in front of you for a moment, and you can take them into you, and they make you think in a different way. And yet there have been no words: it's been the movement, and the images, and the manipulation of bodies, of shapes. You can be watching a ballet, you can be watching Sleeping Beauty, and she falls into someone’s arms, and suddenly you get this great sense of trust, and love, and affection, and protection. Nothing's stated, it's just there, an image. And it's so moving, an extraordinary wonder. I think that's what dance is all about.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah, yeah. Those implied exchanges are quite amazing.

Max Wyman: And they happen all the time. You can go to see anything and there will be something that will speak to you in that way.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Okay, final question: Why is preserving Vancouver's contemporary dance history and heritage important to you?

Max Wyman: I think preserving any arts history is important. I think we need to know what made us who we are. We need to know how we expressed ourselves to each other in ways other than verbal. It's important to know what we have created as a community, as individuals, all we've shared. It's history. We need to know – I mean, if we don't know history, we're lost. We have to know where we come from, we have to know who we are, how we got to be where we are. If we don't, we're floundering. So many people don't know where we came from, and why we are, and what we've tried, and what we haven't tried, and what worked, and what didn't work. Dance is part of that story. And it's only one part of it. There's all kinds of stuff that we need to know the history of as well. We need to know what made us because otherwise, we're lost. We can only learn from experience.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: And following that, what more do you think needs to be done, in order to preserve that history?

Max Wyman: We need to increase the level of informed writing about the arts in this town. Not just in this town, in this country, in this world. We've seen a precipitous decline in criticism in the last decade. The internet makes everyone a critic. And when everybody's a critic, nobody's a critic. People will listen to anybody, anybody can have a voice. Democratization of the voice is good, but it's also bad because it allows the most ridiculous opinions, observations to be perpetuated, and the more provocative they are, the more they seem to get traction. So, I think we're at a point where we've never needed informed observation of the arts more, which is one of the reasons why I was so gratified to have Yosef Wosk set up an award in my name a couple of years ago. It's called the Max Wyman Award for Critical Writing and it's an annual prize. It's meant to encourage thoughtful writing about the arts in general – not just dance, but the arts in general in Vancouver. There is certainly a need to restore, to encourage thoughtful writing about creative experience.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Yeah. And do you think the way that's going to happen will be with the support of universities or through newspapers or will it be more collaborative?

Max Wyman: I think that the papers have largely given up the role of providing insightful commentary on the arts – on most of the arts. Something is going to evolve on the internet, and that'll be collaborative. It's already evolving. I mean, there are places where you can go, where they bring together reviewers from around the world, and commentary from around the world. There are online resources, like The Dance Current in Toronto. It's gonna be new forms of distribution, and probably new forms of writing too. But informed and thoughtful commentary on one's experience of engagement with a piece of art, of any kind, is really going to be crucial to help the art form understand itself, and make advances, and to help the wider world be comfortable with it, and understand what's happening in the studios, and the concert halls, and the rehearsal rooms of our artists... and, of course, to widen and deepen the public conversation about issues that matter.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: I also wonder how criticism will shift with COVID-19 even. The fact that we're all at home, and we're experiencing art, very differently, in a mediated way through our screens.

Max Wyman: All I know is that it's gonna be different. If we stop going to theatres – which we probably will, certainly in the way that we used to – there will still be a role for someone to provide that interpretive interface. More so than the way it's consumed right now, which is the “up-thumb, thumb-down,” I hated it, I loved it. Oh, did you? Doesn't matter. I don't care what you thought about it. Tell me about it. That's what's more important. The least important thing to my mind is that kind of personal judgment. The important thing is to present something in such a way that people understand it better, understand the context, and go make a judgement themselves. I'm not sure we're ever going to go back to quite the way it used to be. But maybe we shouldn't.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst: Well, thank you so much, Max. I really enjoyed speaking with you.

Max Wyman: Thank you very much.