#yegdance

Photo credit: Daniel Wood

As we get older, our work often becomes more contemplative. That’s definitely the case for Brian Webb—and it’s exactly what he’s looking for. As an accomplished dancer, choreographer, and artistic director of the Brian Webb Dance Company, his artmaking has been both a journey of collaboration and a portrait of self. Today, that portrait reflects Webb’s commitment to the three practices that guide him: faith, dance, and martial arts. Amalgamating them is his new passion, as he asks the question, “Do I have the guts to be who I am today?” This week’s “I Am YEG Arts” story belongs to Brian Webb.

What keeps you choosing Edmonton as your place to live and work?

Edmonton is my home. Even though I danced in New York, which I loved doing and it really changed my life, I decided to come back to Canada, and Edmonton is where I ended up—particularly because I was offered a job at MacEwan. And that was very fortuitous because, right away, I started a dance company, and from the very beginning, it was a company in residence at MacEwan. Such an opportunity—and I tried to make the most of that.

Living in Edmonton has been great for me, and I am an Edmontonian through and through. I believe in this community and am thankful for the huge amount support I have received from the public sector and the private sector. For over 43 years I’ve had a community organization with my name on it—and how lucky for me—but I, of course, can’t do this by myself. This is a community organization, and that includes a huge number of hours of volunteerism.

When you were 17 and first starting out, what was it about the arts that made you feel it could be your community?

All through my childhood and youth, I studied piano and earned my Grade 10 Toronto Conservatory Piano. In doing so, I got an inkling I wanted to be in theatre, so I auditioned and got in to the drama program at the University of Alberta, which in those days was a most respected theatre program in Canada. There I took the first movement class, which was from a woman named Dorothy Harris. And I have to say that changed my life because I went, ‘Oh, this is me!” And from that moment, I’ve danced for the rest of my life. Now I’m 70 years old, and I’m still dancing.

As a choreographer, what narrative or inspiration do you find yourself returning to?

It’s always, ‘Who am I?’ I believe that all artmaking is a self-portrait. When you are creating art, I think you’re in a big dialogue with one’s self, with yourself, with myself… So I think that the topic I constantly return to is, ‘Who am I today?’

Tell us about the importance of mentorship in the dance community and how it has influenced your path.

We never do things alone. There are people who become important in one’s life, and I think it really has to do with what one learns from them. I was very fortunate when I started out to have some very good teachers, both in the drama department at the U of A and in the community. In particular, there were two women who hugely influenced me and my decision to go to New York, and those women were Jackie Ogg and Charlene Tarver. As a matter of fact, by the end of the first year of their dance company, which I was part of when I was 18/19 years old, I had choreographed my first dances—one of which was a full-length dance. I mean, who gives you that kind of opportunity? That is huge mentorship. As a teacher of dance, I think I learned to be a mentor for young artists, and I continue to mentor today. There are people across the country I’m in dialog with all the time about the creation of work. I think as one matures, it’s especially important to be open and generous with younger people—and peers.

How important has collaboration been throughout your career?

Along with mentorship, what’s important in artmaking is collaboration. When I did a Master of Fine Arts degree at California Institute of the Arts, which is still one of the great art schools of North America, I was introduced to feminist art theory, which basically says that we all have a story to tell, and each one of our stories is of equal value. And what that really then encourages is democracy. Well, that too can be applied to dance. And there’s one person who influenced me that way hugely, and that’s the visual artist Blair Brennan, with whom I collaborated nine times.

Blair and I defined collaboration as the democratic exchange of ideas to make something new. So, when you’re collaborating the first time, you learn who each other is and how you are going to communicate with this person. By the ninth time you’re collaborating, it’s hard to tell who is doing what because you’re doing everything together in a very democratic way. Blaire just had amazing influence on me that way, and it showed in our work. We performed those dances across Canada—and some of them in the US. He was just a major, major influence on me.

Tell us about a lesson you’ve had to learn more than once.

I think when you make a career of performing before people, it takes a lot of ego to do that. At the same time, I think I’ve learned to be humble in that process, and being humble was a big lesson for me. I think, too, that I’ve also learned to be who I am: very critical of myself and very ambitious—always working to make the best work I can. But as a friend of mine said to me the other day, “you are one of the most ambitious people I know, but you are not competitive.” And I’m not. I just do what I do.

BWDC Production of “PLACE”. Photo credit: Bottom Line Productions.

What excites you most about the YEG arts scene right now?

I think it’s most important that we recognize diversity in our community, so I’m excited that I’m seeing artmaking from so many more points of view than I once did. I like that very much. Over the years, the BWDC has produced the premiere of all of Usha Gupta’s dances. It has taken time and commitment from both her and me to develop her place in the Edmonton and the Canadian dance community. And I have learned from her! Our relationship is most important to me. She’s a very important artist now in our setting, and I have loved that relationship a lot. As excited as I am about diversity, there’s a part of me that worries that sometimes there is more political correctness than there is honesty in our efforts to celebrate pluralism. That’s a big statement, but I do believe it’s the truth. I think that as a community we still have a huge amount of work to do. It’s not enough for us to say we believe in diversity—we need to truly invest and reinvest in it long-term to make meaningful change. Anything less than that does a disservice to the importance of diversity and—ultimately—to the art itself.

What are you currently working on/exploring?

I am working—and on a really big piece—and my collaborators are Brad Necyk and Gary James Joynes. Garry is an AV artist, and Brad is a virtual reality artist. So, as someone only interested in contemporaneity, and I think that’s been a constant in the BWD scene, I’m only interested in today. So what I’m working on is a big piece about time.

I think about time a lot, and what time means, and how time is almost impossible to define—and yet I’m very aware of my age and finite time. In other words, the one thing we all have in common is that for each of us, time ends, and then we have the inconceivability of eternity. And as a practicing Christian, that makes me consider a lot of things about time and take interest in what other people have written about it. For instance, Saint Augustine and his 11th Book of Confessions, which is a discussion of time. In it, he describes present time as a perception of time, past time as memory, and the future as expectation. Now those are very personal things because who can really define time? It’s a wild one. So that’s what I’m looking at in this piece. And I’m having so much fun doing it.

Who’s someone inspiring you right now?

One of the people I’m working with in my new piece is a fellow named Deepak Paramashivan. Deepak does an ancient form of carnatica chanting—and—he’s currently at the U of A working on his third PhD. How can that person not be inspiring! Deepak also loves that old rock band, The Doors, which I also love. So one day we entertained people in India by singing Doors songs. In other words, we can talk and we can play. He’s just a very giving person.

What makes you hopeful these days?

Certainly my faith makes me hopeful. Hope is part of faith. But when I am working with artists like Brad and Gerry and see how they are really using technology and are super interested in it, that makes me hopeful too. I don’t know how people can call themselves a contemporary artist without some sort of interaction with technology, because technology is defining our world. And if we can make art in some sort of interaction with it, we can create some kind of positivity. But if we are only interested in technology for the web… well, that’s sad because it’s not creative.

In an interview a few years back, while reflecting on your dance career, you commented that “you have to dance who you are today.” Who are you today, and what is your dance?

I’m an artist. But I’ll tell you a little story. There was a period of time when I came back from California through to the beginning of the 90s that I described myself as a queer artist. Eventually, I realized I had put myself in a box, and I just couldn’t do that work anymore, artistically, politically, etc. It is then that I became an artist who is queer. There is quite a big difference between being a queer artist and an artist that is queer. So that’s kind of the intro to the answer, “who am I?” There is no question that my faith is determining very thoroughly who I am today, and that I’m interested in other contemporary artists who are very involved in a dialog with their faith. I mean, I ain’t unique. There are many people that way!

But on a secular side, dancing who I am today as a 70-year-old person is humbling, it’s hard work, it’s fun, and it opens me to communication with people in a different way. And I like that. I think back to how I was when I was a young dancer and how interested I was in my presence in a physical way, and in my “beauty” as a dancing human being. Now if I were interested in that today, it’d be pretty pathetic! So I’m interested in how I can dance—really dance—who I am.

Want more YEG Arts Stories? We’ll be sharing them here all year and on social media using the hashtag #IamYegArts. Follow along! Click here to learn more about Brian Webb and the Brian Webb Dance Company.

About Brian Webb

Brian Webb has developed a national reputation as a contemporary dancer, choreographer, and artistic leader. He has brought an international array of contemporary dance companies to Edmonton through the BWDC, which he founded 34 years ago, and his collaborations with Edmonton artists have toured across Canada and in the United States, including New York and Los Angeles.

Among many other honours, Brian won Edmonton’s prestigious Artistic Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 and has received the Queen’s Golden and Diamond Jubilee Medal for his volunteer work in the community.