✦ Origins ✦
Canadian choreographer Aszure Barton created Awáa in 2012 for her company, Aszure Barton & Artists, premiering it that June at the Canada Dance Festival in Ottawa. The title comes from a Haida Gwaii word meaning "one who is a mother," which Barton used as the work's central image and a starting point for a work about the maternal and feminine body.
Rather than depicting motherhood through narrative or character, the piece approaches it through the body itself — through weight, vulnerability, and endurance — danced by a mixed ensemble whose movement is deliberately grounded and physically demanding rather than delicate or decorative. A closely integrated vocal element, woven through the score, gives the work a ritual, almost incantatory quality throughout. Barton has described her choreographic process as beginning in the studio with her dancers rather than from a fixed concept, building movement material collaboratively and only later shaping it into the piece's larger structure, an approach that keeps the choreography grounded in the specific physicality of the dancers performing it rather than in an abstract idea imposed from outside.
Structure
The piece unfolds in continuous, rolling ensemble sections rather than a series of discrete scenes. Dancers frequently work close to the floor and in direct contact with one another, forming and dissolving group shapes that suggest lineage, mutual support, and weight passed between bodies. Solo passages emerge out of the group and return into it rather than standing apart, an echo of the way individual experiences of motherhood sit within a larger, shared, and inherited history. The live or closely recorded vocal line running through the score rarely resolves into legible lyrics, functioning instead as another wordless instrument alongside the dancers' bodies, so that voice and movement build the piece's emotional register together rather than one illustrating the other.
Reception & Legacy
Awáa was praised for its physical intensity and for showcasing Barton's distinctive choreographic voice, which sits between contemporary dance and a more theatrical, ritual sensibility. The work helped cement her international reputation beyond her extensive career as a commissioned choreographer for companies including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Nederlands Dans Theater, and it has remained a signature repertory piece for her own company since its premiere. Writers on the piece have also noted how unusual it was, at the time, to build a major contemporary ensemble work explicitly around motherhood and the maternal body as subject matter, a theme that had received comparatively little sustained choreographic attention from major contemporary companies before it. The piece's grounded, weighted physicality also stood apart from much contemporary ensemble work of the period, which often favored lightness and speed, and that difference has become one of the more frequently cited hallmarks of Barton's broader choreographic signature across the companies she has since worked with.
That grounded physicality places Awáa closer to the earthy, collaborative aesthetic Barton has built across her whole career than to the lighter, more overtly balletic vocabulary of choreographers working within a single company's classical tradition — a contrast worth keeping in mind alongside more institutionally embedded works like This Bitter Earth.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer Aszure Barton.