Life Moves: During the pandemic, Labrador City is the place to be - Vancouver Ballet Society
By Jenn Edwards
In big cities, if you’re a dancer and dance instructor, you’re a dime a dozen. When my partner, Philip McDermott, and I arrived in Labrador City last year, with contracts to teach the entire schedule at the only studio in the small mining town, people we’d never met stopped us on the street, exclaiming, “You’re the dance teachers!” I have never been the anything before, and it was lovely. It also felt like a big responsibility.
Labrador City sits up north in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Surrounded for hours in every direction by vast forestlands dotted with lakes, it’s a remote community founded in the 1960s to accommodate workers at the Iron Ore Company of Canada, most of whom came from Newfoundland. Iron ore mining is still the main industry, with most employees working seven days on, seven days off, giving the town a steady rhythm that you can feel. Winters are long and wickedly cold, but the crisp air, abundance of snow and frequent sunshine make up for it. Also, the people here are warm and generous, evident from the first day we arrived. While walking our new bed frame from the post office to our apartment, in no time flat a stranger with a pickup truck pulled up and offered a ride.
For a place ripe with East Coast accents, the town is farther west than one might think — only a 20-minute drive from the border it shares with Northern Quebec. Because a career in the mining industry is so lucrative, and living costs here so affordable, most residents are able to “get out,” as they put it, at least a couple of times a year to see family in Newfoundland, escape the cold in a tropical vacation spot or see their favourite band play in concert in Montreal or Toronto.
We had both been hustling as dance artists in Toronto when this unexpected opportunity popped up. It was a chance to get our feet on the ground, have some steady work for a year or two and experience an environment completely out of the norm for us. Having a studio at our disposal during the day to work on our own choreographic projects was another plus. We both specialize in contemporary and modern dance, but also teach ballet, jazz and hip hop at the studio, which is administered remotely by the owner from St. John’s, the province’s capital.
Six months after moving to Labrador, COVID presented a whole other angle to the experience. After classes were cancelled in March, we spent most of the lockdown in St. John’s and Vancouver, where our families live. This September, returning for the reopening of the studio, the pandemic seemed to have created a kind of reverse polarization, making small town life far less isolating than a big city. Because there is no community spread in the area, dance classes can be taught in person, modest-sized gatherings are possible and the local brewery — the aptly named Iron Rock Brewing Company — is open and a great venue to hear live music. In all facets of life, we can live with a little bit less fear than those in crowded urban centres.
It’s also easier to feel connected to the rest of the world now that working, teaching and performing online has become so normalized. Last fall, Philip and I performed together twice via livestream from the studio, with financial and presentational support from Arts NL in St. John’s, and from The Response, a contemporary dance company in Vancouver. This would not have been a viable option pre-pandemic, as virtual performances were not common, and even less commonly paid. If a second lockdown happened, we could teach dance to students anywhere in the world from our living room.
This all begs the question, in a post-pandemic, increasingly digital world, how much does where you live matter? Artists in all disciplines are starting to flee expensive cities for lack of work, and even the most established organizations are struggling to cover operational costs, such as Toronto’s Dancemakers, which recently announced its permanent closure after 46 years. The art world’s relationship to geography is changing, and for the moment, the middle of nowhere feels like the place to be.
