CA: I have a question for you Santee, in terms of putting together your traditions of ballet and Mohawk dance. It seems like you went a long way from being on pointe to being in your bare feet. Can you talk about that physical change?

SS: Well, what happened is that I was on pointe for a long while, but I stopped ballet. I just cut and left. When I was asked to choreograph, it was the first time I went back to dance. I had the music and thought, “What am I going to do?” The next summer I went to the “Evolution” dance program at Banff. Alejandro [Ronceria] was teaching there. There was Inuit drumming, and Sadie Buck, who's from Six Nations. So I had traditional dance. Also, I went back to doing ceremonies in the community. I had to relearn things. I had to learn the dances. I probably did them in a very balletic way. Raoul [Trujillo] was teaching some those first classes in Banff; they were a mixture of everything in his own style. I remember the first time we did an exercise where we had to roll on the ground and I couldn't make it down. I could not get down without feeling really awkward or falling. So it was a time of relearning, retraining my body and feeling comfortable with the ground, rolling around on it and trying to turn my legs in. Really working my legs because everything that we were doing was in parallel. At the Banff Centre, a whole mix of people came in to do the program, the majority without any formal dance training, or with just traditional dance. So it was interesting – all these people coming together to figure out how to move and working on some of Alejandro and Raoul's choreography. It was really self-discovery, and continues to be. Now I'm comfortable going to the ground and working on the floor and dropping my weight down.

Q: Do you see yourself as a person who is very much open to communicating with the world? Giving and listening all the time? In the pieces gestures of “I'm expressing” and “I'm receiving” seem predominant. I was wondering if that comes from a personal point of view or a movement training background?

SS: That's interesting because my work is very expansive in the chest. I think maybe my body enjoys doing that. It's a personal preference.

Movement definitely has many levels of meaning for me. When I was doing Kaha:wi, I tried to make things meaningful – if the arm goes up it is not just because the arm is supposed to go up, but because you are reaching for the sky world. When I'm talking to my dancers I say you're giving thanks to the ground; we must be really conscious of what we're doing. When you're shuffling you're looking up and you are seeing something here; it's your ancestor or somebody who is gone. When we are dancing very low and the body is almost horizontal and trying to get in rhythm, it is like lying on the earth. For us the earth has a pulse and by trying to get into that pulse, that breath, you're moving like corn or wheat on the horizon. Most parts of the choreography have very specific content and imagery. This helps when I'm talking to dancers because then they can respond to find the style or the movement I want to see. That is important for me. Part of stepping away from the ballet world had to do with the fact that the movement had to be meaningful. Movement has to have meaningful resonance – I think that comes from personal preference, and from discovering cultural meanings for myself.

CA: Santee, thank you so much.

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