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Meet our very first Scholar-in-Residence, dance artist and PhD candidate Ileanna Cheladyn! Here Ileanna gives us an overview of her relationship to dance, her research, and the the allure of slowness.

Briefly describe your dance career to date.

In the decade+ that I’ve devoted myself to dance and dance practice, my career has been a lumpy and shapeshifting endeavour. I trained at Ecole de danse contemporaine de Montreal and at Modus Operandi. At the same time that I was building my dance career here in Vancouver, I pursued a BA then an MA in anthropology at Simon Fraser University where my attention continuously turned towards dance practice and the sensitive brilliance of dancers. Now I’m a sociocultural anthropololgy PhD Candidate at University of California, Davis, looking at how dancers use their movement and creative practices to change and invent new worlds.

As I’ve wiggled through this dance scene, I’ve done pro-d projects, danced and performed repertoire and new works, been a co-creator on solo and ensemble works, created and presented a whole bunch of solo works across mediums, participated in deep choreographic research phases, taught dance practice and theory, mentored & been mentored, written reviews and creative responses to performances, choreographed ensemble works, worked in dance admin, dabbled in costume design, danced in some indie films, presented my work in site-specific settings like galleries and parks and beaches and squash courts, taken classes and workshops, traveled for creative residencies, co-founded an indie performance space, collaborated with artists within and beyond dance, and worked as an outside eye/dramaturge. A dance career for me has been nothing short of a puzzling adventure.

What are the main elements/themes in your choreography and research?

The practice and concept that I’ve been hooked by since around 2017 is slowness. I think about slowness not as the speed of anti-fast, but as a quality of attention, attunement, presence, and sensitivity. I like to ask: if slowness is not what I think it is, what is it? (This is a good question to ask of anything, really.) Staying close to slowness has opened to two other concepts along the way: disorientation and sensitization. All of which I plan to follow up on in a future blog post!

In choreographic projects, I find myself these days lingering within wonderings of vulnerability and honesty through improvisation, focusing on the felt sense of being seen, received, witnessed, judged while working on a task in live-time. And through the slowness, I do love a looooong durational performance work.

You are Scholar-in-Residence with The Dance Centre this season – what does that involve?

This scholar-in-residence role is supporting my dissertation fieldwork. Typically, sociocultural anthropology research relies on a long phase of integration into a chosen community where you hang out with people and learn about what they are invested in; it’s all about going with the flow. I’ve been lovingly calling my fieldwork “just vibing” where I have the privilege to drift through dance spaces and events with a lens of profound curiosity.

I’m still getting into the rhythm of what it’s looking like, but as I slow myself into this role I’ve been spending mornings on the 7th floor moving with a question of drifting: does anything emerge in movement when untethered (from deliverables, from understanding and clarity)? Drawing on the experiences I’ve been having in the community (or, technically speaking “the data I’ve been collecting”) – such as attending shows, taking classes and workshops, participating in creative processes, and chatting with artists about their practices – I am currently curious about the work of language on moving bodies, how it works on and forms bodies through shifting definitions of meaning and value. So, right now I’m worming in the studio with a sensitivity to how the language of dance and dancers here is forming my own movement and body (and definition of “body”!).

If you didn’t have a career in dance, what might you be doing

Ooooooooh. I am so lucky to have two parallel careers of passion and adoration, and even on the hard days where I feel heartbroken and destroyed by both academia and dance (sometimes love hurts, ya’ know?), I wouldn’t be doing anything else. BUT, there’s something about being in food sciences to design the next best McFlurry flavour that really appeals to me. OR, being some kind of expert of some really tiny widget that goes into our devices.

What is your next project?

As these things go, there is always something that pops up on the horizon when I least expect it and I’m so grateful to be in a place to have the flexibility to jump on the opportunities that arise. Performing, creating, teaching, writing, facilitating, supporting; things arise, or I’ll inevitably co-conjure something with my incredible colleagues and peers. But this fieldwork is durational in nature, so I have another 6+ months of research-mode, and then the next mountain to summit will be the dissertation (eek!)! In the spirit of slowness, I’m just showing up and letting myself be glamoured by the world.

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Learn more about The Dance Centre’s Choreographic Projects and Partnerships.

Photos: David Cooper; courtesy of the artist