Today, we are witnessing enormous population displacements from the Near East and Africa toward the Mediterranean and Western Europe; from South and Central America toward the United States and Canada, and across South East Asia from places such as India, Pakistan and Myanmar toward destinations from Bangladesh, to Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Australia, for example. Religion and ethnicity, as well as economic survival has always played a large role in these transnational migrations. This research identifies two main axes of movement; one that runs in an East/West direction between Europe, the Far East, and the Americas, and another that runs in a North/South direction connecting Canada and the USA to Mexico and Central and South America. Contemporary Nomads seeks to investigate patterns in these large-scale movements of bodies across international spaces by thinking of them as a transnational choreography, one that speaks to the deep fragmentation that exists between communities within as well as outside national borders, between nationalized and personalized bodies, and between social and political institutions and the ordinary people they were meant to serve.

As a Caribbean-born artist and scholar with an international career in dance, theatre, and performance studies, I attempt to present my own experiences as well as those of other 'wanderers' within the larger arc of what cultural theorist Stuart Hall called a "contemporary travelling, voyaging and return as fate, as destiny […] as the prototype of the modern or postmodern New World nomad, continually moving between centre and periphery” (Hall in Rutherford, J. 234:1990).

Working across disciplinary platforms but prominently featuring dance, theatre, performance, film, installation and new media technologies, Contemporary Nomads investigates the dynamic organization and re-organization of movement(s) along and around these two axes, with Vancouver as a key hub in some kind of imagined future. The research investigates five stages of the ‘traveler’, ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee’s journey (in the broadest sense of these terms), seeking to find out how, when, and why individuals and populations move from place to place.

These stages are as follows:

1. Home - beginning with the conditions that one lives under and calls home, but which one also thinks of leaving.

2. The Parting – remembering the moment that one decides to leave, and when one actually begins the physical journey.

3. The Journey – the particular route taken, and any event, experience, situation, landscape marker (a mountain, a body of water, a person, a path, a fellow traveller, a spoken word, etc.), or other experience that was unique to or crucial for the journey.

4. The Arrival - the feeling of making it, or conversely not making it to the desired destination.

5. The Settlement/Return – the process of making a new ‘home’, and the dream of finding one’s way back - the (im)possibility of return.

The key objectives of the project are:

i) To explore some of the large and small-scale international migration patterns we are currently witnessing through the lens of choreography and performance.

ii) To investigate performative body practices at both micro and macro scales to understand how complex economic, socio-political, geo-physical, and neuro-biological forces act on human beings so that they are driven to cross difficult borders.

iii) To extend my long-term objective of having dance, choreography and performance practices seen as valid research activities within an academic context.

nómadas 2018_excerpts was presented at the MIGRATION AND MULTICULTURALISM Conference on September 28-29, 2018 in the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theater, SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts. It is a complete re-imagining of nómadas - which was premiered on November 22, 2017 - but with a different cast and music score. nómadas 2018_excerpts is supported by the Cambridge Music Society, SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts and the Woodward’s Cultural Unit, and is part of Henry Daniel’s larger Contemporary Nomads project that is funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant (2017-2021). The music for nómadas 2018_excerpts was commissioned by the Cambridge Music Conference.

Choreography: Henry Daniel, Full Performing Bodies

Dancers: Marc Arboleda, Nelle Lee, Kaylee Louie, Eden Solomon, Juan Villegas, Seana Williams

Musicians-Fringe Percussion: Luke Hildebrandt, Brian Nesselroad, Greg Samek, Daniel Tones

Music/Text: "StoneMetalSkin" - Nigel Osborne (composer) Ch:The Boat

"Kwakwala Prelude" Interview with Chief Robert Joseph 2010. Used by permission of Chief Robert Joseph Ch:Of Place and Language

"Limology" I - Swell, II - Flight, III - Limbo - Peter Nelson (composer) Ch:Prison, Escape, The Border, A Vision.

nómadas. Text written and performed by Montserrat Videla Samper. Recording Engineer – Jeremy O’Neil, Matthew Horrigan. Ch:Stay, Return, Keep Moving.

"Displacement" - Owen Underhill (composer) Ch:A New Direction

"Afterward" - Owen Underhill (composer) Ch:Another Boat

Production Stage Manager – Kim Plough. Lighting Designer – Sophie Yufei Tang. Videographer – Asad Yahya.
Assistant to the Videographer - Fegor Obuwoma. Cameras – Asad Yahya, Matthew Koropatwa, Colin Williscroft, Rithica Devireddy, Gregory Sparling.