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Winnipeg Free Press

Emotional edge

Sahel Flora Pascual's dance career has taken her all over the world: Ballet Manila, the School of American Ballet in New York City, Ballet Austin in Texas and, for the upcoming 2025/26 season, London City Ballet. In April, it brought her to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Pascual, 22, is a choreographic fellow in the Pathways to Performance Choreographic Program at MoBBallet (Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet), which links ballet companies to Black choreographers and those of colour so they can engage in a meaningful way. Ryan-Rogocki photo Choreographer Sahel Pascual leads Aspirants students through her new piece. Pascual was commissioned by the RWB to choreograph an original work for the students in the Anna McCowan-Johnson Aspirant Program in the Professional Division at the RWB School. The piece will be performed as part of On the Edge, the Aspirants' mixed-rep showcase this week. Pascual participated in the inaugural MoBBallet Symposium in Philadelphia in 2019 as a dancer. Lately, though, she's been considering ways she could contribute to her art form as a choreographer. 'I've always seen choreography as a way, not only to create my own artistic vision and exercise my own authorship of my voice and my idea of what art can do, but as also a way to facilitate growth within the artistic community, whether that's through creating more holistic dance spaces for mental health or for diversity's sake,' she says from London, England, via Zoom. The as-yet-untitled work she created on the Aspirants was inspired by the barrier-breaking American-born French dancer, singer and actress Josephine Baker. It's a dialogue, she says, between Baker's legacy and her own experience, informed by her African American, Jamaican and Filipino heritage. 'My choreography draws from my own positionality as an expatriate artist and emerges as a physical meditation on displacement, trauma, discrimination and the reverberations of the colonial gaze,' she writes in her choreographer's note. 'What was really important to me was the piece itself is not a re-creation of her in any way, but it is a meditation on the things that were important to her, the parts of her that were significant, through the shared language of human emotion,' she says. Working in the studio with the Aspirants in the spring was 'truly just a beautiful experience.' 'They're young dancers, they're dancers of a lot of different backgrounds, and they want to engage. Something that was just lovely was that each one of those dancers wanted to engage with this work,' Pascual says. 'And it's difficult, because one would say, 'How can a group of dancers that does not have African American or Black heritage work within this framework that centres a Black woman?' And my response to that was,' Yes, it is about a Black woman, but each one of us, through whatever part of our life, can empathize in certain ways with her rebellion, with her love of not only people but of animals, of community, with her fieriness, with her desire to change things, with her desire to care and to break down barriers.'' Founded in 2015 by consultant, educator, advocate and former ballet dancer Theresa Ruth Howard, MoBBallet is an archive that preserves, presents and promotes Black ballet history. The RWB joined MoBBallet's Cultural Competency and Equity Coalition (C2EC), a membership-based organization that will see peers work collaboratively to become anti-racist, in 2022, and has previously commissioned works by MoBBallet Pathways fellows Meredith Rainey and Portia Adams. That commitment stands in contrast to what's happening south of the border, where many organizations are rolling back anti-racist and DEI initiatives. 'It's important for us to keep this relationship, because I have worked very hard on building that trust so when we bring choreographers in — it's a little bit cliché — but it's a safe place to be,' says Tara Birtwhistle, the RWB's associate artistic director. The fact that Pascual is working with the next generation of dancers on the precipice of their careers in the Aspirant Program is also significant. Wednesdays Columnist Jen Zoratti looks at what's next in arts, life and pop culture. 'We talk a lot about changing the culture of ballet, and we can't just talk about it anymore. We have to do something about it, and really, to lean in to these young people who have so much to teach us and guide us through a different lens,' Birtwhistle says. Pascual would agree. 'Why it's important that these kinds of stories that choreographers like myself are being engaged with is because we are the art that is current. We are the people who are dancing. It is the population that we are dancing for,' she says. 'If you think about ballet's audience now, there are many conversations about how it's diminishing, and although that in some ways is true, I think what we've seen from the dance world and the art world as a whole is an understanding that the audience must be broadened, and that the art that is being encountered, that is being created, must reflect the world as a whole.' Jen ZorattiColumnist Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen. 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