With Arts Umbrella's Season Finale, Rena Narumi returns to source of artistic independence and community

In the midst of an international career, the Kidd Pivot dancer is setting a short Crystal Pite work for the student showcase

By Janet Smith

Rena Narumi (left) in Crystal Pite’s Revisor, by Kidd Pivot. Photo by Michael Slobodian

Rena Narumi in Crystal Pite’s The Statement. Photo by Rahi Rezvani

The Arts Umbrella Dance Company presents Season Finale from May 22 to 24 at the Vancouver Playhouse

RENA NARUMI HAS CIRCLED back to Arts Umbrella after more than a decade and a half of dancing around the world. Since graduating from the Granville Island–based program, the Japanese-born artist has performed some of Crystal Pite’s most celebrated works with Kidd Pivot; danced pieces by the likes of Mats Ek and Ohad Naharin with both the Royal Swedish Ballet and Nederlands Dans Theater; and taken the stage in venues from the Paris Opera Garnier to London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre.

When Stir finds her in an Arts Umbrella studio, she’s setting a new excerpted study of Pite’s Figures in Extinction [3.0] requiem on the facility’s next generation of dancers. Vancouver audiences will get a rare first glimpse of the work—originally created for Nederlands Dans Theater—at Arts Umbrella’s Season Finale. The three-part creation with Simon McBurney has never been performed here before, and this excerpt joins pieces by the likes of Marco Goecke, Sharon Eyal, Aszure Barton, Roy Assaf, and Felix Landerer on a program for more than 60 dancers.

In the studio here, Narumi is digging into the intricate details of a work that explores time, mortality, and loss on a dying planet through deep lunges, reaching arms, and trembling limbs.

The artist pops up regularly and energetically to show the class what she means. She explains that the choreography demands a distinct mixture of rigorous detail and personal intuition. “The dancer can play with it. And they can always go deeper with that motivation and research.” 

Narumi has had a long time to familiarize herself with the Vancouver choreographer’s distinctive movement. Just a year or so after graduating from Arts Umbrella, in the 2010–11 season, she apprenticed with Kidd Pivot for The You Show. She reconnected with Pite at Nederlands Dans Theater for the creation of iconic works like The Statement. Then she joined Pite’s own company again in 2018 for the exhilarating challenge of Revisor and other groundbreaking, lip-synching works. She’s just back from touring the recent Olivier Award–winning Assembly Hall.

Arts Umbrella Dance Company. Photo by Michael Slobodian

Narumi knows the intense technical and emotional demands of this choreography—but she’s finding the students are eating it up.

“It’s a pleasure to work with them, because they’re always hungry, in the sense that they always want more,” Narumi says of setting the new piece on the class. “I just dump so much information on them, but then they take it: they’re like a sponge.”

Returning to Arts Umbrella, Narumi, who will also teach at the program’s in-demand Summer Dance Intensive, has the distance to appreciate how much the school formed her into the dance artist she is today. 

Long-time Arts Umbrella Dance Program artistic director Artemis Gordon was on a teaching stint in Japan when she spotted the talent, and convinced Narumi, and her parents, that she should cross the Pacific to attend the unique contemporary-dance program in Vancouver.

Narumi remembers the “culture shock” upon arrival: “I had always been told what to do,” she says of her previous dance training, “but the first day I remember I came in and they said, ‘This is a school but we treat you as a company member. You’re an adult. You need to know who you are and work.’

“The class is like a small company size where you can really learn how to make things together,” she explains. “Something I learned from Arts Umbrella is it’s not just about you.”

Gordon, sitting with Narumi on a break from rehearsal, is happy to welcome her former student back—as she has others over the years. “I have to say there’s nothing really more gratifying than having graduates of a program who have gone on with the ideas and the values and all of the things that we stood for, and really use them in the real world, and then bring them back,” she comments. “What works, how does it work, and how do you use it? You come back and then you say to the dancers, ‘This is the way.’”

Since Narumi’s years, Arts Umbrella has seen big changes—most dramatically, the new facility in the former Emily Carr University of Art + Design building, with its bright, vastly expanded dance studios. In Narumi’s grad class, only a few students went directly into international contemporary companies; today, grads regularly get professional contracts across the world. But Gordon says little has actually changed at the class level.

“We haven’t done anything different. We started Day 1 with this rigorous base of excellence. We haven’t changed the attention to the discipline, the rigour, the excellence, the thought process, and the development of self. Because you can’t work in these amazing companies unless you have a sense of who you are.

“That’s really what the program is,” she adds. “Yes, the byproduct is the training, but the training is just the tool. You create a level of awareness, a cognitive ability to be able to read the room and figure out where you want to go. What do you need to do to get what you want?”

As she’s travelled through Europe pursuing her art form, Narumi regularly finds herself bonding with Arts Umbrella grads. 

“Even if you didn't spend time with each other in school, I still feel like, when we meet, we can just share the same language,” Narumi explains. “So that’s a really beautiful thing. I feel like I have this big, extended family, with so many brothers and sisters. 

“And then also so many of us come back to teach,” she adds. “It’s a beautiful cycle where we can share our experience to the next generation.”  

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