Photo by Pat Holloway
“The Key to Time Travel (Toronto Premiere) is a theatrical duet inspired by the groove, strength, and shape of breakdance. It treads the brilliant borderland between reality and magic, as the dancers travel through time by dropping memory markers/keys in specific moments in the past, present, and future.”
JAMES STRECKER: Please tell us about one or more projects that you have been working on or have recently completed. Why exactly do they matter to you and why should they matter to us?
ALLISON ELIZABETH BURNS: When creating, I love to work with a magical idea that explores a very real part of the human experience. For example, the mystical power of womanhood as witches; equating living in the moment to living forever; time traveling through memories and projections of the future. I make dances to explore and express complicated ideas and feelings in a visceral way. Just because words fall short doesn’t mean we can’t access these places inside each other and ourselves. We all learn and process things in a different way. I am offering another method of communicating and connecting.
JS: How did doing these projects change you as a person and as a creator?
AEB: I have become clearer in my vision in the last three years. Each project that I take on tells me more about what I find interesting about dance and observing bodies. It tells me more about what subjects inspire me, what things are not only on my mind, but tucked into my body. In some way or another, all my recent works deal with love and death. My beloved father recently passed away after a long, valiant battle with a life-long illness. I want to create a feeling of safety through these difficult journeys. For myself, but also for the audience and my collaborators. Integrating magical themes while tying them to real struggles is my way of doing that.
JS: What might others not understand or appreciate about the work you produce or do?
AEB: I pack my work full of symbols. I like starting with research, books, pictures, and videos. I want the content, the dance vocabulary, to be as relevant as possible. For example: beating hearts, crowns, snakes, the hands of a clock. I often wonder (and ask) if the individual symbols come across, or only add to the general impression of the work. It is not important to me that the observer sees all the elements at play, but I am always looking to hone my ability to communicate through my choreography. Does my goal match what is coming across?
JS: What are the most important parts of yourself that you put into your work?
AEB: Emotions. I feel very vulnerable when I am at the stage of my work where I understand what emotions my performers need to be expressing. It feels vulnerable because it is often unclear and layered. I work collaboratively with my cast, so I start with a theme and some ideas and exercises, but who they are and how they relate to what we are exploring together shapes their characters and the structure of the work. Once I see where the journey is going, we can talk about strategies for them to honestly invest emotion in the performance. The emotional element creates the opportunity for the audience to mirror the feelings of the performer(s), which for me is more valuable than a logical understanding.
JS: What are your biggest challenges as a creative person?
AEB: Time. Time is our most precious non-renewable resource. The more time I need to spend in other places, the less I have to create, research, train, and seek opportunities. This is unfortunately intertwined with money.
In a less pragmatic sense, infusing my work with honest emotion is the biggest challenge. It’s also the most important!
JS: Imagine that you are meeting two or three people, living or dead, whom you admire because of their work in your form of artistic expression. What would you say to them and what would they say to you?
AEB: I feel very fortunate to have had many mentors share their time and guidance with me over the course of my career so far. One choreographer whom I admire, but have not yet met, is Crystal Pite. I would also love to have had a conversation with Pina Bausch while she was still with us. I would want these women to know how much their work has moved me, and inspired me. I know they are both determined, hard-workers, and trailblazers, and I imagine we would talk about that too. You can have the gift without the tools to turn it into action, and these women had both. Someone who knew Pina once told me that she would find my tiny ears an indicator of intelligence, I would like to ask her to size up my ears herself.
JS: Please describe at least one major turning point in your life that helped to make you who you are as a creative artist.
AEB: At the beginning of 2016 I was on an adventure in Costa Rica with my mother and sister. It was an eye-opening experience that championed self-care. Upon returning home I suddenly developed a very low tolerance for wasted time. I began by eliminating useless things from my life and running full speed to fill my life and time with things and people that I love. My career blossomed because I was taking care of the details, and the big picture evolved in a significant way. I moved back to Ottawa, started creating more often, increased my physical practice, and sought new opportunities. All the works I described above were created after this trip.
JS: What are the hardest things for an outsider to understand about your life as a person in the arts?
AEB: Honestly, my finances. I believe in proper compensation for artists, and I am hooked on initiating projects. This means I self-fund a lot. It is not a sustainable path, and I know things need to change.
JS: Please tell us what you haven’t attempted as yet that you would like to do in the arts? Why the delay so far?
AEB: Building singing into my work. This is a new domain for me. I spent the majority of my life resigned to the idea that I would never play an instrument well, after attempting to learn a few. Only as an adult did I decided to learn to use my primary creative tool, my body, as my instrument. I have been taking private singing lessons to develop my voice, and an understanding of what I can do with it. I would love to be able to incorporate it into my work one day. I think that is still quite a few years away though.
JS: If you could re-live your life in the arts, how would you change it and why?
AEB: I see my journey in the arts as a balancing act between comfort and risk taking. There have been times in my life where I prioritized a steady job over an artistic pursuit. I try to make the right choices day to day, but I think I could have handled making riskier choices more often.
JS: Let’s talk about the state of the arts in today’s society, including the forms in which you work. What specifically gives you hope and what specifically do you find depressing?
AEB: There is more and more interest in (and proof of) the power of the human body, and the connections between us. I think dance very elegantly approaches these ancient truths that are finally being verified and validated. I for one have used dance to “self medicate” and heal from trauma. Dance builds communities and confidence in individuals. I have hope that the many ways in which dance is valuable will become more and more apparent in the mainstream, and it will be valued unquestionably by our society.
I am upset by the financial landscape of dance in Canada. Audience members, the general public, and artists alike have seemed to accept that being a dance artist means struggling to get by. We need a new system following a new frame of mind.
JS: What exactly do you like about the work you create and/or do?
AEB: I like making new connections between ideas. When choosing a subject for a new piece, I do a lot of research, and what I learn often surprises me. Then I can unite disparate concepts by using bodies and relationships. The end result is a work that transmits feelings that are hard to describe with words. That’s my favourite.
JS: In your creative life thus far, what have been the most helpful comments you have heard about your work?
AEB: Any comment that tells me whether I am achieving my goals. I always show early versions of my work to mentors and colleagues. I ask them what they saw and weigh that against what’s in my head. Then I course-correct. It is a bit painful, especially when some of my favourite moments aren’t reading. But it’s an invaluable process.
JS: Finally, what do you yourself find to be the most intriguing and/or surprising things about you?
AEB: That I am still doing this. No other member of my immediate family is an artist. I was not the top student in my ballet class. There are so many struggles in this field. Yet, I continue to dance, make dances, and support other dance makers.