Paper Mountains features a score by Stefan Nazarevich with vocals by local actor and musician Amanda Sum
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Dance in Vancouver
When: Nov. 20-24
Where: Scotiabank Dance Centre, 677 Davie St., Vancouver
Anya Saugstad’s Paper Mountains has had a long gestation. The Vancouver choreographer began working on the piece six years ago. But, as with many things, it was interrupted by the pandemic.
“The beginning of COVID was a really tough time for dance,” she said. “I was lucky to have a studio. I had nothing to do, so I would just go there every day and dance around and make something. And I never really had a plan or trajectory of where that movement would go.”
Saugstad, who received the 2023 Iris Garland Emerging Choreographer Award, has adapted some of that improvised solo work into choreography for five dancers as part of the project. This latest iteration — she debuted a stripped-down version a few years ago — will premiere at this year’s Dance in Vancouver.
Presented by The Dance Centre, the 14th edition of the curated biennial event showcases B.C.’s contemporary dance talent. The U.K. director, producer and choreographer Anthea Lewis is this year’s curator.
Along with Saugstad’s work, highlights include Company 605’s lossy, a grief-inspired piece that premiered at last year’s Dancing On the Edge Festival and features dancers in brightly hued costumes performing under neon fluorescent lights; a double-bill of FakeKnot’s Croquis and the world premiere of Ziyian Kwan/Odd Meridian Arts’s Tendrils; and Lee Su-Feh’s Touch Me Hold Me Let Me Go, described as a “multimedia lecture-performance” followed by a performance by audiovisual duo See Monsters.
Saugstad’s company perform Paper Mountains Nov. 23, before Action at a Distance/Vanessa Goodman’s Soft Currents. In Soft Currents, 12 dancers wearing headphones respond to text co-authored by Goodman and the group.
“Her work is incredible, and I’ve been so inspired by her throughout my early career,” said Saugstad, who previously worked with Goodman.
“She’s been a huge mentor for me. She was kind of one of my first dance jobs coming out of school, and I still work with her, and I’ve toured with her all over the world, and I adore her work and her as a person, so I’m very honoured and excited to share an evening with her. And I think the works are quite different, so that’ll be nice for the audience as well.”
Paper Mountains features a score by Stefan Nazarevich with vocals by local actor and musician Amanda Sum, whose contributions are the latest addition to a work that was once going to feature 1,000 paper airplanes.
“I wanted the piece to become more and more raw and human as it goes on,” Saugstad said. “At the beginning there are lots of layers and a lot of different sounds. Then we hear her voice more and more until it kind of empties out into just the vocals and her voice.”
Adapting solo movement that she created in — and as a response to — isolation has become one of the defining characteristics of Paper Mountains.
“I was interested in working with set design and materials as well as dance, and how those two things work together in space. And the paper planes were easy to kind of swarm and fill a space really quickly, and they were quite visually impactful.”
The paper planes are gone now, though. She describes Paper Mountain as “Inspired by nature and animals, the updated work delves into the sorrow and celebration that coexist within us amid a climate crisis.”
“It still has a lot of the same themes and ideas as the original work,” she said. “It just feels like it’s grown a lot since I’ve grown over the past five years.”