Crossing the Cultural Divide

Growing up in British Columbia’s Okanagan region with two mothers, the Canadian choreographer Cameron Fraser-Monroe learned about the European side of his heritage, participating in Ukrainian folk dance from age three. But his mothers also stayed in close touch with Fraser-Monroe’s father, their college friend and sperm donor. Summers were spent with Fraser-Monroe’s paternal relatives on the coastal lands of the Tla’amin First Nation, north of Vancouver. Back in Okanagan, Fraser-Monroe studied Indigenous grass and hoop dancing—and then, at 15, he left home to train full-time at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, eventually joining the company.

Through it all, he lived out his traditional First Nation name: sinkʷə.

Cameron sinkʷə Fraser-Monroe in rehearsal with Ballet Kelowna. Photograph by Abigail Sawchuk

“It means ‘wide ocean’,” Fraser-Monroe said recently via video call, as he prepared for a long day of tech rehearsal for his newest ballet, “Cikilaxʷm: Controlled Burn,” which premieres May 1 and 2 with the Okanagan-based company Ballet Kelowna after more than two years in the making.

“My Auntie Betty gave me a big name to live up to,” he laughed, a characteristically calm and confident smile spreading between his cascades of brown curls. “It connects to the water’s ability to bridge vast distances and cultures. And that’s ultimately what a lot of my work does.”

Over the last five years, Fraser-Monroe’s work has been gaining widespread notice for this.

His “T’əl: The Wild Man of the Woods,” created as choreographer in residence at the Royal Winnipeg, was the first full-length ballet for a major company by an Indigenous choreographer. New York paid attention to its 2024 premiere: the city’s high-profile “Fall for Dance” festival subsequently commissioned Fraser-Monroe and the Royal Winnipeg, resulting in “šɛgatəm,” presented in conjunction with Bard College’s Center for Indigenous Studies.

Both “T’əl” and “šɛgatəm” worked thoughtfully with a particular challenge: Fraser-Monroe did not want non-Indigenous dancers portraying Indigenous people, as he had seen in the landmark 2014 Royal Winnipeg commission by Mark Godden, “Going Home Star.” Produced with funding from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that ballet told the story of First Nation descendants who survived the abuse and forced cultural assimilation imposed by the Canadian government’s residential schools for Indigenous children. “Going Home Star” was a breakthrough at the time, Fraser-Monroe says, “but we’re past that. We don’t need that. I don’t cast non-Indigenous dancers as Indigenous characters because they don’t have access to that worldview.”

Instead, Fraser-Monroe’s “Fall for Dance” premiere took inspiration from his Tla’amin nation’s cultural values, but explored these in an abstract dance. In the Tla’amin’s language, Ayajuthem, “šɛgatəm” means “to lift someone up,” and the ballet featured a weary central dancer supported by the ensemble. This abstract approach is similar to that of Fraser-Monroe’s commission from the National Ballet of Canada, 2023’s “payɛčot yɛχət,” which drew on the movements and patterns of hoop dancing without telling a literal story.

Meanwhile, “T’əl,” a Royal Winnipeg commission that toured Canada last year, took an even more interesting tack. The ballet draws on a Tla’amin legend about an evil woodsman who abducts children in the forest. Fraser-Monroe made the dancers fictional characters, and added narration voiced in both English and Ayajuthem by the oldest living elder in the Tla’amin nation, Elsie Paul. The storytelling strategy of “T’əl,” Fraser-Monroe said, was not so much a “work around” to the problem of the Royal Winnipeg not employing any Indigenous dancers, but rather a natural extension of ballet’s traditional conventions: “’Swan Lake’ doesn’t have to be literally set in Germany,” he pointed out.

Cameron sinkʷə Fraser-Monroe in rehearsal with Ballet Kelowna. Photograph by Abigail Sawchuk

It’s especially notable then, that Fraser-Monroe’s new full-length ballet, “Cikilaxʷm: Controlled Burn,” does feature Indigenous characters. It can do so because Ballet Kelowna, where Fraser-Monroe made his first-ever professional ballet back in 2021, employs two Indigenous dancers.

In “Controlled Burn,” one of these dancers, MacKye White, will portray a character inspired by Fraser-Monroe’s real-life younger brother, a BC firefighter who has served as “a young Indigenous man fighting fires in a colonial context,” Fraser-Monroe said. Ballet Kelowna’s other Indigenous company member, McKeely Borger, will play Mothkʷ, a keeper of ancestral knowledge who practices controlled burns, an ancient method of careful land stewardship.

The story is timely and deeply relevant to Fraser-Monroe’s own people. The Tla’amin nation, which counts about 1200 members, regained sovereignty over their lands only 10 years ago, when a treaty was ratified in 2016. Elders Betty Wilson and Elsie Paul have since passed the startling backstory of this treaty—and the tragic loss of ancestral stewardship—onto Fraser-Monroe. In 1918, “six years after the provincial government took over the wildfire management of our province, along with the ownership of all the lands, the village burned to the ground,” Fraser-Monroe recounts. “This is lush, wet land on the coast of BC.”

But while Fraser-Monroe could have drawn on just that personal connection to the subject, he was also mindful that he was making this work outside the Tla’amin’s lands. Ballet Kelowna is located on the ancestral home of the Syilx Okanagan. Fraser-Monroe reached out to their knowledge keepers Tara Montgomery and Elliott Tonasket to learn their burn practices, and attended a cultural controlled burn conducted by the Syilx First Nation. He talked with fire scientist Dr. Amy Cardinal Christanson, who is Métis—a distinct group of people with both Indigenous and European ancestry—as well as with conventional firefighters trying to put Indigenous knowledge into action.

These extended conversations, Fraser-Monroe said, were essential. “There’s as many reasons to burn as there are First Nations,” he said, “but we’re telling a story rooted here.”

“Controlled Burn” makes this story visceral and cinematic, drawing on the trench-digging, hose-hauling labor of firefighting for the ensemble choreography, and incorporating video footage of recent devastating fires from the BC Wildfire Service projected onto 12-foot high scaffoldings. The music is by Cris Derksen, a classically trained Cree composer and frequent Fraser-Monroe collaborator who debuted in Carnegie Hall in 2024. Just as important as all these elements, though, is Fraser-Monroe’s core choreographic ability, which Ballet Kelowna artistic director Simone Orlando said she saw clearly in his first commissioned work. “It was based on the traditional Tla’amin story ‘Raven Returns to the Water’,” Orlando recalled. “And in that 20-minute work, I could see that Cameron could easily describe narrative through dance, a skill that usually takes years to develop as a choreographer.”

McKeely Borger and MacKye White in “Cikilaxʷm: Controlled Burn” by Cameron sinkʷə Fraser-Monroe. Photograph by Emily Cooper

Currently, Fraser-Monroe is continuing to develop through an artistic residency at the National Theatre School of Canada, whose head of playwriting, Andrea Romaldi, contributed “Controlled Burn’s” dramaturgy. Theater work has reconnected Fraser-Monroe to the liberating ways that knowledge can be excavated from embodied experience.

“Often in choreography, it can be about me imposing an aesthetic on artists saying, ‘do this’,” he said. “Theater is the opposite. It says, ‘Here’s the character, here’s the information, what does the character feel? What do they say? What’s their relationship to other people? It’s from the inside out.”

It’s because Fraser-Monroe approaches his art from the inside-out that his choreography can now, like the ocean, bridge distances and cultures. But of course, societal structures have shaped his path. More than a decade ago, Fraser-Monroe made the choice to train at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s school because “I knew I needed to be a working artist. And ballet was one of the few avenues, and continues to be, where you can receive healthcare benefits, and guaranteed work for most of the year, and a retirement fund.”

Today, he says, holding his Indigenous knowledge within the European form of ballet “isn’t so much an ideological approach,” he said. “It’s who I am.” At the same time, he is very aware that “what sets my work apart is the ability to bring people together and connect many different artists at the top of their game in this one story.” And he hopes that in the future, Indigenous dance artists working outside of ballet will get the same opportunities he’s enjoyed.

“In dance, we have this mythology of the singular responsible genius,” Fraser-Monroe said. “And I think when you actually get into the rooms where the works are made, you see that yes, the people there are very smart, they’re technically brilliant, but just as importantly they are resourced. They have the time, the connections, and the money to invest in their work.”

As Fraser-Monroe spoke, his calm smile remained, but his eyes grew firm with resolve. “Ultimately, the dream here is to have those same resources allocated to Indigenous stories, not just ballet,” he said. “And that’s what I have to say about that.”

Rachel Howard

Rachel Howard is the former lead dance critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her dance writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Hudson Review, Ballet Review, San Francisco Magazine and Dance Magazine.

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