Caithream! A Conversation with a Rogue Inventor on the Margins of Celtic Dance by risa
Caithream is a shout of joy or triumph or a battle cry. It’s a sound that sits on two sides of human experience, and so in a way it echoes back some information about the connectedness of opposing things. The Ottawa (Ontario, Canada) based Caithream dance company performs a similar smiling function, stitching traditional Scottish Highland to whole other forms and stories.
Caithream Celtic Dance Fusion was founded in 2002, by Andrée Charlebois and Jenn Macquarrie, as a professional performance company. This is, already, an unconventional move: beyond the hours of kicking in a line lovingly supplied by Riverdance, there aren’t really any Celtic professional performance companies out there. Because, as Jenn Macquarrie recently explained to me over a weekend in the Ontario countryside, Highland dance has been a rigid and closed system. Hoping to preserve its heritage it has become, in many ways, a museum dance. For Jenn and Andrée, good Canadians, raised with our rhetoric of Multiculturalism, this traditional structure called out to be opened up. And once they set their sights high on this kind of mind-blowing bit of Scottish hubris the ideas started to fall into place:
The Company’s goal is to lead a revolution in the dance world by defying conventional categorizations. Through the fusing of styles such as highland, jazz, contemporary dance, and traditional dances of many cultures, we are creating a new form of dance that is uniquely Canadian.
I got to extend my conversation with Jenn Macquarrie in an email interview and so to get a little more information about what these wild gals have been up to, and how the Highland world is responding.
I was wondering If you’d describe a few of your dances, and where they diverge from traditional highland.
Traditional highland is very technical; it’s locked in its form for history’s sake, so it can’t be corrupted. We try to respect that – all of us are trained in it, as well as other forms of dance – and all of us love it, or we wouldn’t be doing this. But it can be very stagnant after a while, and we feel that art has to move forward, and to reflect the times it’s in. So we take the vocabulary from highland and fuse it to other forms of dance. So, a propelled pivot turn with a salsa move. Or a strathspey with a turning leap at the end. Just to see what would happen. Because Andy is trained in modern (contemporary dance), we use that a lot. But we also use ballet, jazz, ballroom, hip hop, French stepdancing, African dance – whatever we can get our hands on.
You’ve seen our website, right? Well, there are some photos of our dances there that might help give you a kind of idea about the sort of stuff we like to do. We’ve got a whole set about women, and what it means to be one, with three dances ranging from the power of a woman, to love between a couple, to the sheer joy of being a young girl. Or we’ve got a kick-ass version of the Can-Can. Or Brave Newfoundlanders, which makes us cry every time we do it.
As for differences between that sort of thing and traditional highland – well, all highland dances are short, to start with. The Fling is less than a minute, the Reel is only a couple. Our longest piece is 10 minutes (so far), and we routinely put on full-length (hour and a half) shows. The next obvious difference is that most of highland dances are done solo, performed by individual dancers (except for the Reel, which is done with four dancers). So, when you have anywhere from one to fifteen dancers on stage, the dynamic changes immensely.
I think that those two factors, combined with our attempts to take something old and make it new and relevant, have really been key to our success with audiences. Unless you’re a highland dancer yourself, or related to one, or perhaps just excessively obsessed with all things Scottish, highland dancing isn’t really a spectator sport. No one really wants to see identical little girls performing identical little steps to a bagpiper for a judge. But boy do they like to see DANCE.
Could you compare your dances to others that you’ve performed alongside? Could you talk about how audiences react to you?
When we competed Because We Can at the national competition, the judges HATED it – and the crowd actually went wild. And we’re talking about the most uptight traditionalists you can get. We go to the nationals as often as we can (last three years running) just to see if we can shake a few things up. There are other highland choreographies out there, but they’re still in the stage of taking whole steps out of the highland syllabus and performing them to celtic music – without taking the risks of innovation – although there are more and more of our kind of thinkers out there all the time.
If you had unlimited funding what kind of an event would y’all put on?
If we found a patron angel to fund us, I know exactly what we’d do: something we plan on doing anyway, only we’d be able to do it a whole lot sooner. We’re intrigued by the idea of the Celts throughout the world – the notion that they were such travellers. Pieces of Celtic culture can be found almost anywhere – and culture survives in dance longer than most things. We want to go to Gaul, and Tuscany, and Wales – to outposts of Ukraine, to North Africa, to Turkey, to find out what lingers in the blood of their dancing there. And then we’ll bring back what we find, and create a full-length show – a massive production – about the roots we’ve found, and the new places they’re growing now. The Gathering of the Clans. Only not just the Macs of the Hebrides – the clans reach a lot further now – in both time and space.
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