Benjamin Kamino

Benjamin Kamino is a dancer and curator whose work undertakes dance as armaturge for ulterior modes of study. His endeavours in performing, making-dance, and dance pedagogy are enmeshed as a continual research of "what is dance?" His recent interest concerns dance and choreography as distinct ideas towards the possibility of a languageless condition.

We spoke with Benjamin to learn more about what he does. 

I was at a wedding when I was 12 or 13 where everyone was dancing, and I was really embarrassed to dance. It wasn’t because I didn’t know how to dance, it was because I was an awkward teenager. So I asked my mom to put me in a dance class. I thought that going to a dance class would make me cool.

What’s your approach to dance?

It depends. I work with a lot of artists, but I also make my own dance. I like to make dance that asks the question: what is dance? So the dances I work on are sort of ontological projections of dance itself. But when I work for other people like Peggy Baker, I don’t have to ask that question, I can just dance.

In addition to being a dancer, do you consider yourself a performance artist?

I would say that I work in the field of performance. But I call myself a dancer because that’s where my training is, and I worked so hard in my life to become a dancer. I definitely get billings in performance art festivals, but I didn’t grow up thinking that I wanted to be a performance artist. I grew up thinking I wanted to be a dancer.

With some of your more recent work, you like to involve the audience in the performance, either through props or movement. Was this a conscious shift? What do you like about working this way?

I feel like all of my work has always involved the audience; it’s just that my most recent work asks the audience to do something other than sit down. The question of what is dance has always been huge for me: if dance is a space for pre-linguistic communication, then dance is about the relationship between a body and a spectator. I think all of the dances I’ve ever made are about the connection between you and I, and my most recent performance [m/Other + dark meaningless touch] took some more initiative in that. But it wasn’t a big shift from the rhetoric that I’ve worked on before. Even in the solo work I do, I spend a lot of time connecting with people and inviting them in - maybe not with their body, but with themselves.

In your works ‘Nudity. Desire’ and ‘m/Other + dark meaningless touch’ you explore nudity. Can you explain why you’re drawn to this?

I think of dance as this sort of space before language. If breath is to voice is to language, then nudity is to body is to dance. Nudity is a way for me to access empty space before the communication of a body in a performance. I was just trying to strip everything away from my dancing in order to make a dance that was about what dance is, and being naked was important for that.      

You also teach dance. What do you gain from teaching?

Everything! I’ve been teaching at Etobicoke School of the Arts since I graduated from there, so it’s been about a decade now. When I teach I’m trying to enliven the passion for discourse and dance within the students. I try to show them that dance is not just what has been given to them so far, that dance is endless.  You can go into whatever field you want, but dance will never leave you and dance doesn’t ever have to leave you. All of the ideas we work on when we’re in a dance class will transfer to anything else you’re going to do… I’m always spiritually rejuvenated after I teach. 

Where can we find you when you’re not working?

At the common on College, or in Montreal at Club Social. 

vimeo.com/benkamino