Seonagh Odhiambo - Healing Water

A dance was developed through a community process on Salt Spring Island from November 2009 through June 2010 under the direction of Seónagh Odhiambo.

The project began by inviting contributions from members of the community in development workshops for adults and high school students. Movement discovered in these guided explorations was created by both non-dancers and dancers. Bringing these movement ideas together with information from restoration ecology on healing water and wetland ecosystems, a dance was developed by the choreographer and expanded by Salt Spring dancers for performance by the lake.

Seónagh Odhiambo dancing in Sand and Bone

Seónagh Odhiambo defines dance as a point of contact through which ideas, inspiration, movement, and meaning travel. Working with dancers from diverse backgrounds, she brings movement traditions, pedestrian gestures, and ideas into contact with one another, calling for audience reflection on one’s own agency in social issues. Over the past 20 years Odhiambo has worked with indigenous cultural groups in Canada, Africa and the United States as a choreographer, dance professor, researcher, administrator, and curriculum developer. Originally from Vancouver, Odhiambo received her MA in Curriculum and Instruction from UBC where she explored dance and theatre as methods of teaching about social concerns. After graduation in 2000 she taught dance history and choreography at a university in Massachusetts. When living out east she worked and trained with various New York choreographers before getting her PhD in Dance from Temple University in Philadelphia (2009).

Now an Assistant Professor in Dance Education at CSULA, Odhiambo’s research examines theories of the body through dance processes. She developed numerous choreography projects as an award recipient over the last several years, while presenting works in London, Edinburgh, and throughout the United States. As the Fisher Center Pre-doctoral Fellow in Gender, Arts and Activism (2006-2007) and recipient of a Leon and Thea Koerner Foundation Grant-in-Aid (2006-2007), she choreographed “Sand and Bone” during a year-long artist’s residency at a New York college. There she worked with 11 dancers to explore the boundaries of community, national and global culture, and historical consciousness about issues like homophobia, racism and sexism. Odhiambo was invited to present a discussion of this process on National Public Radio (2007), and recently re-staged part of the dance at Stanford University (2009). While in Hawaii (2007-2009) she worked as an Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Communications and received a Youth Project Grant to work with the Next Step homeless shelter in Honolulu. There she brought Japanese theatre students together with the Micronesian-Hawaiian homeless and developed a performance about Hawaiian homelessness, partly the result of historic US nuclear testing in Micronesia.

© Karolle Wall, Photo of dancers Robbyn Scott, Seonagh Odhiambo, Anna Haltrecht, Isabel Ma

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $15 million in dance throughout Canada.
Nous remercions de son soutien le Conseil des Arts du Canada, qui a investi 15 millions de dollars l'an dernier dans la danse à travers le Canada.