Chinook Winds: Aboriginal Dance Project

Susan Free teaches movement in the drama program at the University of
Toronto.

A sleek little book, Chinook Winds documents a multimedia dance event,
of the same name, produced by the Aboriginal Dance Project in 1996.
Sponsored by The Banff Centre for the Arts and the Aboriginal Film and
Video Art Alliance, the event brought together storytellers, musicians,
dancers, and choreographers from diverse Native cultures. The
performance pieces drew from traditional arts but recast them with
contemporary techniques and sensibilities to lay bare the complex
stories of Native people at the end of the 20th century.

The book features interviews, essays, journal entries, and photographs
of the Chinook Winds dance project. Like the performance itself, it is a
potent mixture of old and new, a crystallization of where Native people
now reside within the larger context of history. In their own words, the
artists reveal how their people suffer and survive, adapt and remember,
and suggest how their stories are meaningfully embodied through dance.

Chinook Winds is a beautifully produced behind-the-scenes record of the
dance event. However, its principal value is as a record of 20th-century
history and the process by which Native people have re-created
themselves in a modern context.