What: Crystal Pite’s Kidd Pivot performs The Tempest Replica
When: May 21, 8 p.m.
Where: Royal Theatre
Tickets: $62.50-$82.50 at rmts.bc.ca or 250-386-6121.
If there’s a case study in how Canada lags behind other nations in support for the arts, it’s Crystal Pite.
Despite being one of the most in-demand choreographers in the country, the Victoria-raised dance artist is toiling to keep her company, Kidd Pivot, viable in Vancouver.
Pite said she had to cancel three weeks of the company’s tour of The Tempest Replica, which comes to Victoria next Wednesday as part of the Royal and McPherson Centennial Festival, due to a lack of funds.
“It’s pretty disheartening,” she said.
“At this point, it’s not possible to do what I want to do just in Canada. I need the help of people from outside.”
Previous help from “outside” included about $500,000 annually for three years from a Frankfurt co-producer, which is leaving a noticeable gap.
It would be easier to take a job with an existing company abroad, she said, but Vancouver is her home, so she’d like to stay.
In the meantime, she said she’s optimistic about existing and upcoming support, including a new partnership as associate artist with Sadler’s Wells in London, as well as a commission from Dance Victoria to create a new work for the Pan-American Games.
“The support that I do have gives me hope,” she said.
It has been four years since Pite presented a show in Victoria (although her insect-inspired work Emergence was a highlight of the National Ballet of Canada’s 2011 program.)
Although Pite didn’t grow up in a “dance” family, she said she created works from a young age. Victoria teachers like Wendy Green and Maureen Eastick gave her career-building tools: In addition to classical technique, they taught her a work ethic and discipline that has carried her forward.
But she continues to mature as an artist — in a recent interview with the Guardian, she spoke about how her “Victorian upbringing” instilled in her a politeness and obedience that she’s constantly fighting against as a choreographer.
“Now that I’m trying to go deeper in certain directions in my choreographic work, it’s something I really need to push against,” she said.
It doesn’t serve a choreographer well to avoid conflict, she said, especially when entering territory that’s uncomfortable or destabilizing for an audience.
The Tempest Replica, based on motifs from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, might enter some of that territory with its serious undertones. It’s not the first dance she has based on an existing story — in 2002 she based Field: Fiction on Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. She said she’s still exploring what movement can add to a story that words can’t.
“I think dance works really, really well if you’re trying to get to a certain state, to express emotions,” she said. “I think it has a lot of potency to get people there, to give them a visceral experience.”
Pite abandoned the idea of attacking The Tempest, after becoming frustrated by the complexity of the back stories necessary to understand the storyline. But she said Meg Roe, who had directed the play at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach, helped her focus on its themes.
“She really helped me tune into the higher themes of the play, which were really beautiful, which really caught me,” Pite said. “It was about an artist, a magician, somebody with a lot of power and ambition giving all of that up in order to connect with his daughter, to find his humanity, to choose love, to choose forgiveness. I really thought that was something I could commit to,” she said.
The Tempest Replica premièred in 2011 and has travelled around the world to New York, London, Frankfurt, Munich, Toronto and more. Pite said she’s happy to be able to bring it home, before wrapping up its run.
“It’s had a great life; it’s coming to the end of its life. Victoria will be one of its last shows and it’s a great feeling to be able to bring the piece home.”