This year, the Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Society (VAHMS) had the esteemed opportunity to once again collaborate with Shaw Multicultural in order to engage in a conversation with Andrea Nann, an artist from Dreamwalker Dance Company, regarding her latest performance entitled “Firehorse & Shadow.”
Situated in Vancouver’s Historic Chinatown, Firehorse and Shadow is an autobiography charted in gesture, storytelling, ink painting and shadow puppetry. This dance memoir works against and alongside the hearsay of family stories, Chinese medicine cycles, and zodiac animal signs. Two performers weave together passages of re-membering and releasing, inviting the audience into an intimate reanimation of familial memory. The work unfolds the yin and yang elements expressed within the bodies, lives and choices of four generations of Chinese Canadian women.