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From the Toronto Star 

For youth on Ojibwa reserve, show much more than a performance

Susan Walker (DANCE WRITER) - Dec 08, 2007

LAC LA CROIX, ONT.–There's a skim of ice on the puddles, a whistle to the wind off the lake and a young buck, gutted down the middle, hangs from a tree next to the water, shot through the head a few days earlier.

The music of Timbaland is blasting inside the gym of the brand new school on this Ojibwa reserve of just under 400 people. About 20 teens in socks or running shoes are going through the hip-hop routine they've been diligently practising for the last few weeks. They turn and bend and break to the floor. They remember to smile as they throw out a hip or thrust a leg. These kids are impressive; they're moving in unison for the most part and everyone knows all the moves.

In May, they will be doing this routine, and others yet to be created, on the stage of the Jane Mallett Theatre in the St. Lawrence Centre in Toronto, when a show that is much more than a performance comes to town. It's called Outside Looking In.

Tracee Smith and Levi Claiborne watch the students with pleased looks on their faces. They get the dancers to do the number over and over. No one complains. Even teachers Carla Gibson and Maureen Hatherly are on the floor, learning along with their students.

Smith, a 28-year-old dancer, choreographer, manager of aboriginal affairs for a national investment adviser and MBA candidate, is realizing a dream – literally.

She studied ballet, jazz and modern dance at York University, then at Ryerson, but outside of school she was attracted to hip hop. She left Toronto to pursue her dream in L.A. But around the time in 2004 when she was realizing she wasn't suited for the American dance and music industry, Smith woke up from a dream with tears in her eyes. In her dream she had seen a group of native kids. Right then, she said, she knew she should leave L.A. Her career path lay elsewhere.

The dirt and gravel road that leads to Lac La Croix runs for 76 slow and winding kilometres through thousands of hectares of uninhabited scrub southwest of Highway 11. Getting there takes a four-hour drive from Thunder Bay. Hugging the north shore of a lake that sits on the U.S. border, with Minnesota on its south shore, the reserve is home to Lac La Croix First Nation, an Ojibwa band that is a tight-knit community of families whose elders have lived here all their lives, as did their parents. Before the road was built in the 1990s, the only way in and out was by air or water.

The steady jobs here are limited to the band office or the clinic. Many residents do seasonal work for the Ministry of Natural Resources, or for the resorts nearby where they're hired as fishing guides. In the winter months, there's trapping and hunting, and EI.

Smith, whose mother is Missanabie Cree, first connected with the Lac La Croix community through Hatherly, who is her uncle's partner. "When I was up here a year ago, the students performed for the community. I saw the magic in their eyes and how much self-confidence they had after they walked off stage and the whole community was clapping. And I thought God, imagine if I could get them to perform on a big stage with lights and everything: how amazing they would feel."

Lac La Croix residents welcome overnight visitors with a meal of deer meat and gravy served with bannock and fried bread. The following morning in the reserve's school gym, when students show how far they've progressed under Smith's guidance, it seems as if all the energy in the community is focused on these young people and their chances of making it in an outside world they experience only through TV, films and the Internet.

"There's a lot of talent here," says principal Wayne Potts, of his 85 elementary and high school students. The Outside Looking In project will, he hopes, lead to more arts programming. "Programming like this is very exciting and very hands-on and it hooks them in to staying in school and getting their diploma."

Clearly, the students enjoy what they're doing. "I came out of myself. I was shy before," says 12-year-old Lance Geyshick, who has the steps down pat. "But it can be nerve-wracking, when you fear you might forget all the moves on stage."

Some, like Cody Ottertail, are natural movers, with flowing movements and their own sense of inner rhythm.

But for Levi Claiborne, the 38-year-old Harlem hip hop dance instructor, they are all teachable. Raised in the Crown Heights neighbourhood of Brooklyn, Claiborne was "a geek," he says, until he entered high school.

After he found his own style and learned to dance, he started getting gigs performing with musicians. He danced on the Fantasy tour with Mariah Carey, and performed with R&B singers Joe and Jaheim, and Eminem with D12.

Then Claiborne found his true calling: teaching. Smith met him during her three years studying dance in New York City. She came to his classes at Steps on Broadway, where the popular teacher conducts at least 20 sessions a week.

Teaching has taken him as far away as Israel and Japan, but this is his first trip to an Indian reserve.

"These kids are great," says Claiborne, who has been indoctrinating them into the value of working at their craft, being disciplined and not neglecting academics. "Because if you don't learn basic business mathematics you'll get ripped off."

In any case, the students are well aware that a condition of their getting chosen to perform in Toronto is to show good school attendance.

The point of Outside Looking In is not just to entertain, but to enlighten. "There are so many misunderstandings between first nations people and Canadians," says Smith. "They don't know enough about each other. I wanted the show to be educational in some sort of way. I want people leaving to feel their lives have changed a little bit because of seeing the show."

Smith's plans for the multi-media production that will be performed May 21 in the St. Lawrence Centre are ambitious. The students will dance their hip hop numbers while other segments of the show will feature professional dancers. Outside Looking In is envisioned as a unique show, at once a way of displaying the talents of the Lac La Croix youth and strengthening their own sense of identity.

The video component of the show will document the lives of Ojibwa youth on the reserve and the process from first dance lessons to final rehearsals for the show. Torontonians will get a glimpse of reserve life that few non-natives ever get to see.

Smith has a website and is working to get corporate sponsors to help cover the travel and production costs for the show. She hopes to take the project to more reserves in future years. The Canada Council has given her a $30,000 grant to get the project up and running.

This is all happening while Smith completes an MBA from Cape Breton University and travels to Indian bands around the country for her employer, helping them design community investment strategies.

She's impressed with the commitment shown by the youth of Lac La Croix, well aware that "they've been disappointed too often by projects that fell through."

For elder Alma Ottertail, who teaches at the school, Outside Looking In has great potential. "I think it gives the kids incentive to be whatever they want to be, and get in touch with the outside world. It's giving them a lot of inspiration."

Already Smith is amazed by what the teens have accomplished, and how much discipline they've acquired. "I'm not suprised by their abilities, but I am surprised by how they're loving it and how they're really getting into it."