Who deserved to be memorialized? Dance film New Monuments explores Canada's hidden history
The film uses the language of dance to talk about slavery, colonialism, and the possibility of a better future
When curator Umbereen Inayet and award-winning director Julien Christian Lutz (professionally known as Director X) first started conceiving of New Monuments in mid-2020, they had two goals in mind: to give dancers work during a time where the pandemic was preventing them from working, and to make something that spoke to this particular moment in time.
"The first thing that came to our mind was protest," says Inayet. "George Floyd's murder had just come to the surface. All of these truths were coming out. All of the injustices were almost, like, spilling out from the cracks and coming out like a volcanic lava ... We wanted to create something where art mirrors reality."
New Monuments is a film and dance piece put together by Inayet, Lutz, and choreographer Tanisha Scott in association with Luminato and Canadian Stage. It tells the story of the piece of Turtle Island now called Canada, starting with the First Nations of the land, through European colonization and right up to today. It shares the history of Chinese railroad workers, Black Americans who came as both Loyalists and escaping slavery, and the early South Asian migrants. And it forces us to ask: with all that history, who do we choose to memorialize and why? Who got monuments built to them — and what should we do with those monuments when we realize they tell a false and incomplete history? What should we replace them with?
The story is told by dozens of dancers and incorporates ballet, jazz, Indigenous hoop dancing, hip hop, and styles from across Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia, and more. All these influences come together to create one very clear, very tangible narrative.
"Treating it like almost a story with books and chapters was the way that we approached this in terms of our ideology," she says. She adds that by telling the story through dance, they were able to tell a very heavy story about subjects like settler colonialism and chattel slavery without being heavy-handed or engaging in what she refers to as "trauma porn."
"[Dance] allows you to feel the message without us having to say the message," she says. "This stuff is very hard. It's very complex. There are a lot of triggering aspects of it. And so using the body to convey the emotion is appropriate, because what words do you use to actually translate what happened?"
"There are no words that can actually validate that experience of genocide — being subjugated, being treated like you were, you know, chattel. Right? What word can be used? You can't. It's just way too painful to say anything. And so we decided to just not say anything and use the body to illustrate what happened instead."
Originally, New Monuments was meant to be performed in front of an audience, in the middle of Yonge Street in downtown Toronto, but the continuing pandemic meant that idea had to be scrapped. Eventually, it was shot on the shore of Lake Ontario, at Marie Curtis Park in the city's west end. Inayet says that forced change turned out to be for the best.
"Being on the beach is absolutely tied to the settlers and different waves of migrants who were brought here via the water," she says. "Also, it provided something that was grounding. You're on the sand; you're underneath the sunlight. You're in nature. You're surrounded by trees. And because the content is so heavy, it really provided almost like, this cradle that was holding these truths that we were about to unravel."
Ultimately, Inayet says, New Monuments is "really about thinking about how are we going to reset humanity and what does that look like post-2020?"
"The idea is we create an empathetic society that looks at each other and says we all have the same hearts," she says. "Let's focus on taking care with each other, and let's also focus on our planet, right?"
Stream New Monuments now on CBC Gem.
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