The Territory Between Us
The Story of a Mask
photo by Arctic Char, mask by Bracken Hanuse Corlett
In 2018, I approached Bracken Hanuse Corlett (Wuikinuxv/Klahoose) to ask if he would carve me a mask. We then spent a year talking with each other—over coffee, via text messages and emails. These conversations were between two artists getting to know each other. They touched upon our relationship to the land and waters where we live, to art, to traditions, and to our families and loved ones. We talked about our respective relationships to masks in general.
I was born and raised in Malaysia, where I was indelibly marked by teachers and mentors trying to figure out what it meant to make contemporary Asian performance out of the remnants of colonialism and ruptured traditions. As a teenager, I decided I wanted to be a dancer while watching my first dance teacher, Marion D’Cruz, rehearse her mask solo Bacchanale (first performed 1981) in her mask-lined living room. Some years later, Marion taught me this solo as a gift to take on my journey away from home to Paris, where I was going to pursue my dreams of becoming a dancer. While I never performed this work in public, I carried it, along with the mask and costume that Marion had given me, like a talisman, to keep me grounded amid new adventures.
Masks carry deep significance for Bracken as well. He tells me:
My art practice is interdisciplinary and collaborative. It is also rooted in the material visual culture of the Wuikinuxv and Klahoose Peoples. The guiding ethic and aesthetic of the process is Wuulhu. “Wuulhu” means “to fuse together” in the Wuikila language. To me, this means the process of making is always connected regardless of medium. It is being unapologetically in love with the stars, the sky, the water. and the land. . . . Around fifteen years ago I started to learn carving and design from my relatives, the Heiltsuk artists Bradley Hunt and his sons Shawn and Dean. This time at their studio gave me a better technical understanding of the art, but I was also encouraged to choose my own conceptual path with it. To me, a mask is a vessel that is meant to be concealed, shared, activated, and listened to. This mask for Su-Feh came from a red cedar tree that had fallen in a forest fire in 1890. The journey of this mask started before European contact. It transformed from a small sapling into a towering giant. It survived an inferno and rested in the ground while seasons changed on its skin for more than a hundred years. This mask is an exchange between artists that lives outside of commodification. It was created from the ground, water, fire, and the conversations between us.
We talked of the mask as a representation of the territory between us: me, an immigrant and him, Indigenous to the west coast of Turtle Island. We would refer to the mask as “The Territory Between Us”.
photo of Bracken Hanuse Corlett with the mask, by Dean Hunt
At this point the question I was interested in was: how might the human body write choreography into a mask and then, how might the mask write choreography onto human bodies? In a way, I was asking Bracken, the carver to choreograph me.
My sole task on receiving the mask was simply to submit to it, to be guided by it.
This mask was the starting point of my second year’s research as artist-in-residence at Toronto’s Dancemakers Centre for Creation: a residency that involved a cohort of Toronto artists Supriya Nayak, Naishi Wang, Francesca Chudnoff, Omar Rivero, David Norsworthy and Nyda Kwasowski. I had imagined a process where I would put on the mask, listen to what it demanded from my body and simply make a dance for it. I wanted to create a score for the mask, in collaboration with the other artists: a score that came out of us all listening to the mask - so that the mask along with this score, could eventually be danced by anybody willing to submit to its demands.
The mask, however, had other ideas. It said no. Or, no, not yet.
I heard the no as a feeling of unease in my body when I put it on in front of other people. I heard the “no” in the questions and uncertainties of the artists who put on the mask. I heard the no in the look of uncertainty I noted in colleagues to whom I showed the mask.
“Should I be wearing this mask?” “Should you be wearing this mask?”
Questions both spoken and unspoken.
photo by Arctic Char
These uncertainties were already present in my conversations with Bracken. We talked about the complicated territory of who had a right to wear this mask: despite being carved specifically for me and not bound by traditional ceremonies and protocols, it was still informed by Bracken’s West Coast training and traditions. We wondered if he even had a right to give me this mask. We talked about the politics, the permissions, the historical hurts that have happened in a long history of settlers taking things that weren’t theirs to take. I didn’t want to be a settler who stole things.
photo by Lee Su-Feh
What struck me most was listening to Bracken talk about carving as an act of responsibility to the life-giving energy in a raw piece of cedar. When he handed me the mask, he was handing me the responsibility to continue taking care of it, to listen to the cedar. The mask is, after all, a part of a fallen cedar. It is part of the land, and when I listen to it, I am listening to my responsibilities to the land and to the relationships that are part of it.
photo by Arctic Char
I decided to listen to this “no”. I stopped trying to “make” a dance with the mask; and recognized the mask instead as a being with a life of its own, not an object for me to impose my will upon. This was the submission I had originally been looking for, even if it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind! But I went with it. Because going with it is part of dancing.
And so the mask has become a witness to my process. I invite its presence as a witness to all that I do, and as something I have to be accountable to. The mask is after all, a part of a fallen cedar. It is part of the land and when I listen to it, I am listening to my responsibilities to it and to the relationships that are part of it.
I have what I call “consultation” dances with the mask: these dances are private moments of intimacy with the mask, sometimes in studio, but most often in the forest, by the ocean.. To learn about what I don’t know.
I look through its eyes but they do not line up with mine.
I have to move my body in response to this new view of the world. I have to listen harder. Feel more through my skin, my feet, my whole body. I make sounds in the mask as a way of echo-locating myself. I listen harder to the sounds around me as a way to figure out where I am.
These dances are to figure out my next step in my query.
A query about what I don’t know about myself.
A query about what I don’t know about the land I am on.
A query into all my relations.
SCORES FOR DANCING ACROSS DISTANCES
When I am behind the mask, I feel quite far from humanity. Sometimes this feels like loneliness; and so I reach out to others. I learn to ask for the support and connection I need. Out of this need has come a set of writings - scores for dancing across distances. These scores get shared with other people - sometimes artists, sometimes not - and they have become a way of being in relationship with one another across time and distances.
Some things that have come out of listening to the mask: