By: Phone Min Thant, Arts & Culture Editor  

It was a cold October afternoon for myself and many other Southeast Asian studies scholars attending the 2025 Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies (CCSEAS) Conference. In the momentary relief of a catered lunch, I had my first introduction to Alvin Erasga Tolentino, whose speech piqued my interest, prompting me to network with him later on. A month later, I found myself speaking to Tolentino again — this time on Zoom — to learn more about his life and experiences in dance, and about his dance company, Co.ERASGA.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Please tell me a little bit about yourself and a short history of Co.ERASGA.

I am a Filipino Canadian contemporary choreographer, dancer, and founding director of Company ERASGA Dance, based in the Coast Salish lands. In 1999, I founded Co.ERASGA, which officially became a non-profit dance company in 2000. The company reflects my interests in the work of Asian Canadians in the diaspora, especially in the performing arts, and my desire to highlight the cultural heritage of other artists in Canada working in the same intersection. A large part of our big mandate is to support artists of colour, especially the Asian artists in the community. 

What are the artistic and cultural inspirations behind the Dance Society and behind your inspirations to start Co.ERASGA in 1999?

I was always drawn to dance as a child, and a lot of that had to do with the fact that dance is so embedded into the culture of Filipinos. When I immigrated to Canada in 1983, I wanted to continue the practice of dance, and it was here that I was introduced to contemporary dance. I really enjoyed the experimentation that is inherent in the work of contemporary dance, and I built the company because I felt that I was the very first Filipino Canadian who had a contemporary dance company. The company is a platform where different artists of all generations can come in and collaborate to do different kinds of work.

We’ve done huge work on community outreach that really serves the Asian diaspora, and to dismantle the notion of art as an elite thing. That’s something that I’m trying to instill in the company, to allow a space for community members and share stories of migration and immigrants.

– Alvin Erasga Tolentino, Founding Director of Co.ERASGA

The milestone that celebrated Co.ERASGA’s 25th anniversary was the performance of Eternal Gestures at the Dance House. Could you tell me about the performance and your experiences performing it back in October?

For the 25th anniversary, I really wanted to offer something that is quite deep in terms of my great respect and interest towards Indigenous ways of knowing and learning. I’ve had a lot of great relationships with some renowned contemporary Indigenous artists here in our community, and with them, I wanted to honour the notion of respect for mothers, matriarchs, sisters, and women. And so, I worked alongside three Indigenous female contemporary choreographers based on Coast Salish lands: Michelle Olson and Starr Muranko, directors of Raven Spirit Dance, and Margaret Grenier, the artistic director for the Dancers of Damelahamid. Eternal Gestures is also a continuation of the work that I do towards environmental stewardship in exploring how art can be a voice for climate action, and how we can take care of this land that we’re in. 

Throughout your time at Co.ERASGA, what did you find the most rewarding for you personally?

I think that building relationships with fellow artists is so critical to me, because we’re all in the same pathway, but we’re also carrying very different ways of understanding the work that we do for ourselves, the community, and the international platform. And so I get to know more about people and their culture when there’s collaboration. To me, it’s really been a very fruitful, nurturing, and enriching experience building relationships and collaborations with a lot of artists. It’s a real education for me when I can collaborate with other people, because there’s always something to learn in collaboration. And I’m just amazed about that and discovering ways of working in the studio, in the theatre, and on tours. It’s also really important for Co.ERASGA to acknowledge that we have this reciprocity with the community that is really integral — that’s one of the important parts of why I make art, because I have an audience.

Are there any future events that our readers should look out for?

We are about to go on a tour in Yokohama, Japan for a three-night performance from December 8 to 10. 

Keep track of Tolentino’s and Co.ERASGA’s activities in the new year by visiting their website and following them on their social media: @alvinerasgat and @co.erasga.

By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer 

Be True to Your School is an online exhibition and silent auction celebrating SFU’s School of Contemporary Arts’ (SCA) 50th anniversary. Launched online on November 12, it features the work of 50 visual artists whose practices have emerged from or were shaped by the SCA. All proceeds from the silent auction will go to supporting student-led programming at the Audain Gallery. 

The works on auction are rich, intimate, and politically attuned. Sena Cleave’s And Such Matter (2024) is an inquiry into the forms of care and labour that sustain life. The blue mesh used to weave this piece is taken from Cleave’s grandparents’ fruit-farming work, while the pine needles draw on Japanese symbolism, where pine, plum, and bamboo stand for resilience through the winter. As the pine needles dry and warp over time, the piece becomes a dynamic material record of both impermanence and continuity. 

A different visual grammar shapes Lauren Crazybull’s Red Selfie in measuring cup (2023) of red-filtered paintings exploring the constraints placed on Indigenous representation. Crazybull reflects how Indigenous Peoples continue to be seen through projections that flatten the complexity of lived experiences. And even so, she suggests that these inherited signs can be negotiated and that colonial legacies can be transformed into space for new understandings of Indigeneity to emerge. 

Some of my other favourites are Aakansha Gosh’s Rooms Inside Me 1 (2021) and Elizabeth Milton’s FPA 111 Changed My Life (2025). Susan Schuppli’s Nature Represents Itself (2018) also stands out. It is a reprinted Landsat satellite image originally part of installations examining the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Her work asks what becomes visible or invisible in a slow ecological catastrophe, and how visuals distribute attention, responsibility, and justice. 

Taken together, Be True to Your School prompts a difficult question. Is this exhibition-turned-fundraiser an indication that cultural institutions are now being asked to justify their own existence? That SFU’s SCA is celebrating its 50th anniversary while also crowdsourcing support for student programming feels painfully on the nose for Canada in 2025. And I wonder, what does it mean when even the institutions historically upheld by wealth and empire now crowdsource support for emerging artists? 

I see this exhibition as both a warning and an invitation, a reminder of what is at stake, and what we stand to lose if we fail to imagine more sustainable futures for cultural education. In this sense, this exhibition/fundraiser also offers possibilities: where art institutions reclaim their role not as bastions of prestige but as generative spaces for critical cultural dialogue and experimentation.

If we choose to reimagine the future of art and cultural production as a place where student-artists are supported in breaking disciplinary boundaries, and where political and aesthetic questions can be freely asked, then exhibitions like this one become more than measures of austerity.  

Perhaps the value of this exhibition is not only in the funds raised but also in the questions invoked. It is an invitation for SCA and the Audain Gallery to reimagine their role in Vancouver’s cultural space. 

The exhibition and auction are live online until December 13.