Karen's compelling and deeply reflective story highlights some of the artistic challenges and creative struggles that characterize community-engaged art practice. Through her experiences as a resident choreographer at the Roundhouse Community Centre, working with diverse groups and multiple agendas, Karen conveys how a time of confusion and conflict ultimately led to resolution and transformation for participants, organizers, and Karen herself, in terms of her dance-making process. - D.D.D.

One of the things that I love to do is to occupy a place: to create a dance within an architectural space and let that space, its history and its present life, work itself into the process, shaping the piece. The audience, occupying the same space as the dance, experiences the dance as energy or what I think of as the spirit of place.

I just loved the Roundhouse from the moment it came into being. Its history went all the way back to the beginning of time. It sat on the edge of what had once been an inlet full of life, including those ancient fish, the sturgeon. Indigenous people had a village close by. Not only did the Roundhouse have a sense of place, it had architecture too, a gorgeous piece of vernacular, early B.C. architecture from the time of the steam engines. It was a railway terminus. I wanted to work in that building because it spoke to my desire to root dance in a sense of place, to root it in land, in history, and in geography. But I also loved it as the centre of a new community coming into being, and I felt I could be part of this transformation.

The Roundhouse also held the promise of an opportunity to work with a group of non-professional dancers. It enabled me to question the nature of the boundary between professional and non-professional. I wanted to explore the possibilities of what professional dance has to offer the non-professional world besides letting them sit passively and watch the dance. I was intrigued by the many possibilities of the Roundhouse. It was so many things, a ferment of potentiality for me. So I approached the Roundhouse and the Roundhouse approached me.

The Roundhouse programmers, Elizabeth Kidd and Amirali Alibhai, approached me to become a resident choreographer, to work towards the development of a community dance group. And I approached them to form a partnership in the creation of a site-specific productioninvolving professional and non-professional dancers. None of us foresaw the potential conflict lurking within our different visions.

My role as artist-in-residence, working with the community dancers, emphasized process without a goal. While my role in the partnership, the site-specific piece I was creating with professional dancers, had a clear goal of performance. From the perspective of the Roundhouse, these two roles were seen as completely separate. I experienced a painful tension in this separation of roles. I felt suspended and torn between the two. What I wanted was to bring them together as a single, integrated whole. It was initially difficult for me to reconcile a vision that is formulated in words and literal ideas with a vision that is formulated in the non-verbal language of dance and non-literal ideas.

Elizabeth was interested in the idea of storytelling and envisioned my role as resident choreographer to be one of storyteller in dance, telling the story of the Roundhouse, its history, its transformations through time and the personal stories of the people who presently inhabit it. Elizabeth saw my task, in working with the community dancers, being to gather all their stories together, to gather together the stories of the Roundhouse itself and then through a choreographic process, we'd dance out all these stories. I could see that this was a model that had been the basis for some great works of community theatre, and I tried to find a way to realize it in my work with the people who became the "Community Dancers."

Yet I felt a growing sense of uneasiness that this model was not the right one, but I had no words to describe an alternative model, only a gut feeling that it was another route that would take us to our destination. Paradoxically, the struggle I went through led me to truly understand that dance is a different language, accessing and giving voice to a different place in the body and mind. I understood finally through the difficult process of this project, that dance stories are not interpretations of verbal stories but can only be told and understood in the language of dance.

I went through a painful process where I tried to realize all the different visions that were swirling in the space of the Roundhouse: Elizabeth's ideas, my gut desires, and the longings of the community dancers, the agendas of the First Nation collaborators and the energy of the professional dancers. I tried to fulfill what everyone wanted, and lost sight of what had pulled me to the Roundhouse in the first place. But I came to realize that I had to follow the dance itself, follow something that was bigger than all the needs and wants and ideas and agendas around me. I was becoming increasingly disconnected from my creative source, and it became clear that unless I pulled these two sides together into a single work and served the dance before all else, I was incapable of serving anything.

The people who came and who were attracted to this idea of the "Community Dancers" came from all over the city. The only thing that brought them together was the word "dance," but it meant something different to each one of them. I found I was not interested in having them verbalize their stories, but I was interested in dancing with them. It was a process of discovery over time, of slowly understanding what we had to offer each other. When I was working in a verbally driven story process with this group, I had difficulty engaging. It wasn't until I could bring them together with the professional dancers, the architecture and the masks into one singular metaphor of transformation that it began to work for me and for the dancers. From the moment we all began to work on Raven of the Railway, the energy began to build. We could engage with the architecture of the space, the masks, and the railway history running through the space as tracks and using the metaphor of this community centre as a kind of many-roomed journey, a rite of passage.

What excited me was to take the community dancers through the processes of creation and performance, but at the level they were at. For the community dancers, it was a process that would initially consume them once a week, increasing to several times a week as we got closer to the show. It was a transformative process and that, I realized, was what I was there for. As we began to build this performance, I saw the dance revealed through a process of discovery. It didn't start from words but began far below the level of verbal consciousness and gradually through the choreographic process, emerged up into consciousness where it can be verbalized. The piece ended up being about a process of revealing process itself.

I was, in the end, deeply grateful to Elizabeth Kidd and her determination to see her mandate fulfilled. It provided a context for a real struggle that was profoundly creative. We were both deeply committed to this project which we had undertaken, and I feel this determination got us through the difficulties. Our understanding of the range and potential of community-engaged art grew immensely through this experience.

Sometimes the best thing that can happen is to have conflict in the process of creation. With many artistic collaborations, people have different agendas. People often want to work with you for reasons that are perhaps not yours. The challenge is to define these agendas and then find the place where they all intersect, and where the created work really lives. This is a very interesting process for me. I have learned that I must be rigorous and remain connected to that source that originally inspired me and brought me to the project. The moment I let go of it, I'm useless. But if I do hold onto it, and we can find those places where we cross, we find the work that is bigger than all the separate agendas and is the creation force itself.

Through the process of creating Raven of the Railway, each one of us was not the same at the end as we were at the beginning. It was a fabulous process in many ways. A lot of it was really difficult. If there hadn't been that difficulty I don't think I would understand some of the things that I understand now about what I can or cannot do in community-engaged art making. I found out that I was not interested in a dance process that did not include creation and performance. I feel the artist has to be engaged, as does the community, whoever they are. Each artist is different. Each community is different. There has to be that place where they genuinely cross. Then there's an explosion of energy.

One of the parts for the community dancers was a piece called the Iron Horse. We spent months creating this five-minute piece. During the performance, the dancers progressed through the doors from the outside, passed down the railway tracks imbedded in the floor of the interior space, and out another door. Each time that happened I would get tears in my eyes, thinking, "They're transformed." They were stunning. I would look at Elizabeth and there would be tears in her eyes too. Through it all, we ended up with something that was a significant piece of work and which everyone was extremely excited to be a part of.