Portrait: Hanako Hoshimi-Caines & Maria Kefirova

Hanako Hoshimi-Caines is a dancer and choreographer based in Montreal. She began making work in 2005 with Little Bang Theory. In 2010, she left Montreal to dance with the Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm for two years. She is currently pursuing studies in philosophy at Concordia University.
 
Why do you move?
Because dance has given me some crazy perspectives on things that I can’t give up now – to live the world sideways, from the floor up, from the point of view of my tongue relating to my stomach and the endless number of angles that I don’t get to experience in the world otherwise. When I’m not dancing I realize that I end up standing on two legs and looking straight ahead most of the time.

Of what people have said about your work (good or bad), what has most stuck with you?
I can’t remember any specific comments but that people have been touched to the point of crying and/or laughing, and that they have taken the time to write to me about it afterward. I also can’t remember any specific bad comments. I think most people have kept their bad comments to themselves, for better or worse.
 
What does dance most need today?
Boring and broad but, I think, true: more money and institutional recognition. But so that it can be studied, shown, discussed and practiced more visibly as the very rich and vast system of knowledges and aesthetic possibilities that it is. I think dance is close to an ultimate play/research zone for humans and their relation to their world (body, mind, relations, aesthetics, politics, performance, well-being, presence, impermanence, and more) but because the field is so marginal the assumptions of what it means to be a dancer and what dance is are still so narrow. I think it comes down to a kind of dumbing down of the kind of knowledge that dancers and choreographers have and produce. This is very detrimental to the field and to the practitioners. Dance needs the means to be visibly practiced as physical and intellectual work. The fact that dance gets thought of and that all dance performance is fundamentally part of a plane of ideas and practices that produce knowledge is important. So basically I think dance needs the means to take up all the spaces that it can (theaters, schools, universities, books, practices) and not to make such detrimental distinctions between intellectual and non-intellectual work. To embrace the fact that dance has the opportunity to do both (to not see the mind and body as a duality) and so to straddle very vast kinds of practices.
 
Given the means, which dance fantasy would you fulfill?
Start some incredible dance center that would somehow find the way to fund all projects according to a perfect system of evaluation (which maybe would be based on the desire of the dancers and choreographers involved) without making dance an hourly wage affair. Aha. OK, so I would give everyone (dancers and non-dancers) a life-wage and create some kind of amazingly rich space(s) for all kinds of research and practices, from the most experimental to the most classical – super different things practiced close to each other. And no money is involved (actually my dance fantasy would abolish money), but all possibility is there.
 
With which artist would you like to collaborate?
There are lots here and abroad! Most of them I know, but someone I don’t know and whose work has fascinated me recently is Antonija Livingstone.

Hailing from Bulgaria, Maria Kefirova settled in Montreal in 1992. While simultaneously working as a performer, she has developed her own distinct choreographic practice that merges dance, theatre, performance, and video. She is fascinated by the correlation between internal and external realities, as well as the body’s role as an interface between the two, which is at the heart of many of her works: The Nutcracker (2014), Why are dogs successful on stage? (2011), Corps. Relations (2010), Gold Meat (2010), Manufacturing Tears (2009). From 2009 to 2012, Maria trained at DasArts, a residential laboratory for performing arts research and innovation located in Amsterdam. Recently she was invited as a visiting artist to the dance department at Concordia University. She has a particular passion for blind spots and Russian dolls.
 
Why do you move?
Bouger me donne du plaisir et m’aide à communiquer ce que j’ai à exprimer. Aussi, souvent je bouge pour aller ailleurs, pour changer.
 
What is your biggest inspiration when creating?
It depends… Often the inspiration is related to a personal question/problem/process that I need to understand and live through.
 
What are you most proud of?
Walking in a jungle alone during the night.
 
What or who was your first dance love?
Hummmm… I think the first, first love was Charlie Chaplin dancing with his two pieces of bread.

​What does dance most need today?
It depends on the context where The Dance is situated; but Here and Now dance needs a lot of things: urgency, risk, sensible relation with the socio-political context, money, audience, festivals, experimentation, platforms that help us dance makers to stay aware, searching, fluid and specific.
 
How do you feel about dance criticism?
I am curious.
 
Given the means, which dance fantasy would you fulfill?
I would go out dancing regularly. I would make a group piece for non-dancers. I would make a piece for ten dancers.
 
With which artist would you like to collaborate?
They are too many interesting and inspiring artists with whom I would love to collaborate. I would love to develop a new work with a sound artist. And for sure another work with Hanako.
 
What motivates you to keep making art?
What motivates me is the quality of the relation with reality that art makes me develop. And also… I guess the imperfections of living + some curiosity, desire, stubbornness, drive, etc.

The Paradise
November 19-22
www.tangente.qc.ca
514.871.2224
Tickets: 23$ / Students: 19$

About the photographer: Meryem Yildiz was born in Montreal. She is found in translation, writing and photography.  www.meryemyildiz.com