SUDDENLY, the only way of being with Miles Lowry and David Ferguson
-Linda Rogers, Focus Magazine, July 2006

“Étonne-moi,” Diaghilev ordered Jean Cocteau when he commissioned the poet, artist and filmmaker to create the ballet “Le dieu bleu.” “Surprise me” could be the credo of Suddenly Dance Theatre's Miles Lowry and David Ferguson's life in art.

Living in a former opium den and brothel in old town definitely has a certain cachet. I am lost in the maze of corridors leading to David and Miles aerie with a view of the Chinatown markets and L'École Brasserie , the bistro my husband insists on calling “the brassiere school,” words that jar the ear of a bra-burning feminist. At last, at the end of a long hall resonating pipe dreams and ghostly pulchritude, I catch the dynamic principals of Suddenly Dance Theatre in the act of brewing their morning pot of fragrant tea, which we drink at the round table where some of their best ideas are hatched.

For the past few days I have been watching the above mentioned husband inlay geese in the head and fingerboard of the guitar uxorious choir director Dennis Donnelly intends to give his wife Lynn for her birthday. Canada Geese mate for life. “How” I ask this long time couple right off the bat, “do people who work together successfully nest together?”

At first my question is met with laughter, but, as the two artists perform their morning rituals and answer my questions, it is clear they are gifted navigators. Why am I surprised? David, born in Brandon Manitoba, was a swimmer before he forsook the water for the air and became a professional dancer. The business manager of Suddenly Dance Theatre knows how to stay on course no matter what the obstructions, and there have been a few.

“Dancers,” Miles agrees with David, as he pours from their Chinese teapot, “are the bottom feeders of the art world. Because dance is an ephemeral art form, funding for us is elusive. The popularity of dance is growing in our community much faster than the ability of the angels to respond to our needs. Because Suddenly Dance Theatre is an innovative company that challenges the status quo, we are constantly justifying our existence.”

I decide to steer away from sensitive political problem because the sun is shining outside and we are all feeling good about present/tense, the sell-out collaborative event at the Metro Theatre the night before, when David and his colleagues danced to the words of ten Victoria poets. Why rain on the parade while its hardworking organizers are still waking up?

“David, since your life is about movement, how was it that you moved from swimming to dancing?” I ask.

“When I was a child I was also involved in Ukrainian folk dance because of my mother's heritage. She gave me an enduring love of bright colours, especially red; and I wanted to wear the red boots.” David, who had two older sisters, says dancing the polka with his mother, until he was “falling down dizzy,” is one of his favourite childhood memories. “That and Christmas. The Ukrainians love Christmas and Christmas music.”

“How important has music been in your life?”

“It is huge now, but when I was a child our exposure was limited to folk music and Christmas songs.”

Dancers are by definition athletes. Both swimming and dance are serious disciplines, requiring fitness, focus and grace. The transition from sports to interpretive dance was as simple and complex as breathing - something even writers can comprehend. Last night one of the poets made a joke about the dancers warming up by stretching their bodies while the writers simply had a drink or two to relax their voices. At thirty-three, the tall and graceful David is at the top of his form.

“Tell me how you two met.” I ask Miles, who is eager to tell how he was surprised by love.

“David was dancing his first solo at Lynda Raino's student recital. We fondly call the piece ‘The Jesus Solo,' as the title is lost in time. I should have been prepared because I had a poster with his photograph on my wall.” We take a moment to recover while David groans. In retrospect, he is amazed at the effrontery of electing to dance a solo when he had only been in the school a few months. “He was blindfolded and very lyrical.” Miles picks up. “I was stunned and for once at a complete loss for words.” I try to imagine a bird with Miles' visage flying into a window and falling to the ground. “That was the beginning of our collaboration.”

The dancer, who left home abruptly at the age of seventeen, found his new element with his mentor Lynda Raino and with his life partner. These affectionate friendships endure in a matrix of mutual respect. As artists, David and Lynda have worked intuitively over the years, both of them intelligent and fearless dancers who take both themselves and their audiences to new frontiers of feeling and meaning. The night before he had danced with his hands on her breasts. That is the level of comfort they have with one another.

“I really appreciate that David can dance with a woman and not come across as a gay man,” the famously candid Raino told me.

“So Lynda was more or less your second mother?” I ask him.

“She was my dance mother.”

Miles has a different story. He was born, he tells me, in the year China invaded Tibet , and grew up in James Bay with siblings Deborah and Gregory. His parents both worked at the Century Inn and his first magical memory is of the hotel's Ali Baba room, a child's exotic kingdom of Kubla Khan . Of course, rooms like that are theatres, places where a child's mind would be free to invent. That was the macrocosm of his imaginary world. The microcosm was birds.

“As a child, I read and drew obsessively. The natural world was my subject matter.”

Miles' family had an aviary at their farm in Saanich and his mother was chief aviculturalist and curator at the Crystal Garden. There were many opportunities for the introspective boy to study the details that still inform his art. His home with David is a museum of artifacts found and created in their life together. Just like birds, they have brought beautiful things from the phenomenal world into their aerie and transformed the found objects into the texture of a home for art making.

Their lives are all about transformation, as humans morph into creatures that live in the air and the sea. All this shape changing involves the movement of ideas into different aspects of matter, the willingness to risk losing one identity to discover the next.

“We love to travel,” they say in unison. The inspiration for ‘A Dance in 500,' five hundred still photographs that are framed movements, a collaboration with photographer Vince Klassen, came as they were flying home from London . Movement is essential to transfiguration. Discovery is the impetus for their evolution as artists in the small city at the end of the Western world. “I was about to move to Toronto when I met Miles,” David says. “But we realized that Victoria presents unique possibilities. It is possible in this milieu to collaborate with amazing artists and to innovate apart from the mainstream influences of Central Canada .” Suddenly Dance Theatre lives on the edge of the continent and new waves that bring fresh ideas to artistic invention.

Miles explains how Suddenly Dance Theatre has been dedicated to exploring the many ways of being ever since it its inception fourteen years ago. They never stand still. With Artistic Co-Director Lori Hamar, the pair has challenged Victoria audiences to push beyond a colonial acceptance of the status quo to a willingness to experience the boundaries of art.

Amongst the books, masks, life sculpture and works in progress in their work and living space, there are several computers, one of which is programmed for film editing. “We love film because, even though it captures the moment frame by frame, it endures beyond the limitations of live performance.” David calls these inter-disciplinary collaborations “preservatic dance.”

They show me the trailer for the film Opium , first produced as a theatrical performance in the nineties and now an exquisite film based on the writing of Jean Cocteau, who became an addict after the death of his beloved. The film is currently the property of ARTV Quebec and Bravo Television, but Miles and David eventually hope to see it screened in festivals. Cocteau's France is a world away, but his opium experiences are a mirror to the early social and economic reality of Victoria . Opium was the whispered elixir of the British Empire and Victoria was its' gateway to North America . If the walls in their apartment could talk, they would provide enough material for many films.

“The problem we have,” says Miles, “is over-saturation with ideas,” explaining that their feet leave the ground too easily, as their inspirations take flight, carrying them to impractical realities. Film is expensive. I ask them what they would do if I were an angel who had brought an envelope containing a million dollars. “A film” they say in unison and within minutes the treatment is fully visualized.

Miles and David are about to fly to Annaghmakerrig , Ireland , a frequent destination, where they will work at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. Surrounded by the quiet border lakes, forests and drumlins (little hills) of County Monaghan , Miles will continue his series of paintings called “Breathing Spaces” and David intends to work on a play about Agnes Bernelle, the German-Jewish 50's cabaret star they knew in Ireland . Agnes, whom they met when she was seventy–six years old, “Would make a marvelous film subject.” Like them, she was challenged by history and required to transform herself. The frequent flyers are sympathetic to outsiders, the position they have assumed in their eclectic life. Surprise is the benefit of risk, and they have taken many.

Miles, who has designed many beautiful books for Victoria publishers Ekstasis Editions, has described the life of another outsider in his forthcoming book, Blood Orange , an imaginary autobiography of the American expatriate author Paul Bowles, who spent many years in Tangiers . Bowles remains an enigma, and that is the sort of challenge Lowry cannot resist. No doubt his poems and illustrations will illuminate new facets of this rare and interesting character when the book is released next fall.

Richard Olafson of Ekstasis Editions, who insists Miles is one of Victoria 's treasures, described their first meeting as ecstatic. “We were both wearing white aviator scarves,” says the editor with the trademark yellow tie. “I was carrying my Blood of the Moon poems and Miles dove into them with enthusiasm and ideas. The result was a beautiful cover for the book and a long association.”

Ekstasis means to stand without oneself and Olafson believes his friend Lowry is one of the few artists with that kind of compassionate objectivity. His vision has been integral to the development of the press, which has gone from a basement operation to legendary status as one of Canada 's enduring literary presses.

“Miles is the closest I know to a Renaissance man. He has the grace of a good collaborator, a willingness to connect with and learn from others. He knows instinctively that art is bigger than himself and what is most striking in his personality is his utter conviction, the absolute certainty of his vision, yet without a trace of arrogance because he knows that he does not own inspiration, it does not belong to the ego, but is from the Creator Spirit, to which we owe our authentic selves, the morning light, the artistic impulse, our being.”

Miles and David will keep moving with the speed of light, surprising themselves and us with every change in direction. This summer Miles is teaching a class in relief paper casting at the Metchosin Summer School of the Arts. No doubt his students will be experiencing the treeness of paper in ways they had never before imagined. As I reluctantly leave the artists, we brush past the paper castings hanging in the hallway and stumble over an envelope that has just been delivered. “Oh” David exclaims, opening the pages of a delicate volume. It's the Agnes Bernelle children's book he ordered on the internet, “What a surprise!” Suddenly, they are in another world.

Watch for David Ferguson and Miles Lowry's film Opium on Bravo Television. Ecstasis Edition will launch Lowry's book Blood Orange in the fall.

Linda Rogers loves the cover Miles designed for her book, Say My Name . Cormorant Books will publish her next novel, The Empress Letters, the story of a family connected to the opium trade, next winter.