Kristen Lewis

Honouring My Teachers—the sources whose wisdom lives on through us.

I have been lucky, in this life, to have several excellent teachers, whose influence lives on through my work. My primary teachers include: Stu Phillips (Contact Dance and relationship process), Yuri Beskrovny (systema, Russian martial art), Emile Fromet de Rosnay (theories of gesture and improvisation), Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (dance & embodiment), Anne Green Gilbert (Laban-based Dance Education), and David Westcott (Lakota-Cree ceremonial tradition).

In addition, I am perpetually grateful to my first serious, long-time teacher, the late Clifford Matthews, a saint-like coach who used the medium of long distance running to teach me, and many others, about how the right combination of discipline and surrender can lead us, step by step, to the twin peaks of high achievement and deep peace.

About Me:

I was raised and received my formative training in Halifax, NS. My first dance teachers included: (in addition to the cold wind and magnificent ferocity of the North Atlantic) the wonderful faculty at Halifax Dance, where, in the early 1980s, preschool creative movement classes included live music and profoundly skilled dance artists as instructors, who exposed me and my blue-leotard wearing cohort to foundational tenets of American modern dance, coming out of the great experiments of the 1960s and 70s. Later training included a 5-year stint in competitive gymnastics at the Maritime Academy of Gymnastics/NovaGold, an intensive period of Balanchine-based ballet training with the legendary, inimitable Clare Bader at the Halifax Ballet Theatre in my early teen years, and, later, from age 15 to 23, eight years of elite-level distance running, culminating in a Canadian national 10km road race title in 2003.

After I was finished with my distance running career, I slowly became a dancer again, in conjunction with my emerging work in experimental performance—my early text-based works (first experimental play appeared at the Atlantic Fringe Festival in 2002) made it clear to me that I needed to articulate ideas through gesture. Thus began a slow, tedious, but very joyful process of giving birth to my dancer self anew. This occurred, as in those beginning preschool creative dance classes in the early 1980s, through an exposure to, and deployment of, foundational principles of American modern dance, especially the Laban/Bartenieff work. I complemented this with a deep, multi-year study of embodied anatomy, through the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.

This rebirth happened, too, through the discipline of several solitary years (8) of daily, largely solo training in large, empty church halls and community centres, often with only my faith in the emerging process to guide me. During this time I developed a practice of engaging the natural environment and land as primary training and research partners, rebuilding the primary relations I came to see exist between bodies and land—the rural landscape of Salt Spring Island, where I lived during this time, slowly called me back to a remembrance that we, humans with bodies, are not separate from the environments that form us. I learned to dance that relation and more than that, to let it dance me. This remains a fundamental discipline for me. My teaching and dance-creation work springs from and returns to that source.

From 2012 to 2017, I developed work in collaboration with elder David Westcott, through our Salt Spring-based production company, Walking Bear Productions. Westcott’s rich, deep, extensive experience in the ceremonial traditions of the Cree (Nehiyaw) and Lakota people gave our work, product but especially process, a timeless, priceless depth and texture. This period yielded 3 evening length solo dance works, as well as many shorter works (in both theatre and gallery settings), combining text, gesture, and image, as the dancer in me started to walk on two legs. During this time, I also founded and ran a unique child-centered dance school, the Children’s Dance Workshop, where I developed an approach to dance education based in a combination of the Laban/Bartenieff work and a deep honouring of the relations between the dancing genius of each child and its connections with the natural world.

From 2018 to 2022, my practice evolved to include cross-pollinations with academic work, sourcing social, political and legal theory as a mode of interrogating the ways that movement and gesture might inform justice-oriented social change, starting at the level of the body and its habits, where the deep regimes of normalization hold too many of us in cages defined by highly restrictive social conditioning—include the habit of under-using our bodies and thereby failing to taste the potential of the human form. These cross pollinations developed over the course of my law degree (JD, class of 2020, University of Victoria Faculty of Law) and continued in my graduate work at the Osgoode Hall law school, from 2020-22. During my legal studies, I was blessed to collaborate regularly with legal scholar and theorist of improvisation Dr. Sara Ramshaw (University of Victoria Faculty of Law) and with the film studies scholar Dr. Emile Fromet de Rosnay (Director, Cultural Social, and Political Thought Graduate Committee, University of Victoria), and have benefitted from the colleagueship of fine thinkers whose theoretical work informs my teaching and creative practice.

Since exiting the academic world, my work has returned to its roots in simple observation of the human process in conversation with the total context of our life in time: we are conceived, we are born, if we are lucky, we live for awhile, and then we die. In between, we have many obstacles to overcome and many delights to lighten the load. The earth, space, and our bodies are our constant companions, throughout, carrying us, often beyond the mind’s capacity to endure or to imagine.

I maintain strong ties with the professional contemporary performance community, through collaborations with other dance and performance artists (both in Canada and internationally). I have presented in a variety of venues, from academic conferences to community-based productions to professional performance contexts—in dance, experimental theatre, and performance art. This has included: a commission for the 2021 Dance-in-Vancouver 13th biennial contemporary dance festival; a performance-research presentation at the 2022 International Theatre Research conference, hosted by Cambridge University in Rejkajavik, Iceland; a performance residency with the Vancouver-based contemporary dance company Co. Erasga in April 2023; a teaching and performance residency with White Lab studio in Montreal in February 2024.

Law is one of the mediums I work through, as a dance artist with a law degree, and a licensed security professional active in the protection field. I see dance as a practice of deep justice, and performance-creation and dissemination as ways of positing modes of being-otherwise than according to the profound forces of normalization that condition the social and the political (and hence also the capacity for what might be called the spiritual) in our devastatingly precarious but even-still rich-with-potential present. I see dance art as a site to enact practices of genuine freedom.