Dan
Belgue

My early childhood days were spent among the forests and coastlines of southern Vancouver Island. Some of my earliest relationships with place were formed among rainforests, beaches, mountains and ocean, and the natural world has remained a constant thread throughout my life. It is where I feel most at home, and where I continue to find play, curiosity, grounding, reflection and connection.

I began playing instruments and writing songs as a teenager. During my university years, music started to occupy a much bigger place in my life. I found a community built around playing and sharing music, met collaborators who would become lifelong friends, and began to understand music as something I wanted to build my life around. During that time I also completed a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies with a minor in Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

For close to a decade, I pursued music full time, travelling extensively across Canada while busking and playing festivals, bars, cafes, markets, house concerts and all kinds of spaces in between. Music became both a livelihood and a way of moving through the world, offering a practice in creativity, improvisation, connection and learning to meet people where they are.

Movement and time outdoors have developed alongside music throughout my life. I grew up playing sports and later found cycling, running, hiking and camping. Cycling became especially formative, including long distance and multi month journeys that brought together movement, travel and life outdoors. Distance running, triathlon and strength training offered other ways of exploring endurance, rhythm and the body through experience.

My movement practice continues to evolve. More recently, movement play, dance and contact improvisation have opened up new ways of exploring curiosity, responsiveness and connection. They have also deepened my relationship with listening through movement: listening to myself, to another person, and to what emerges through shared attention. The forms continue to change, while movement remains one of the ways I learn about my body and reconnect with myself.

Time in forests, mountains and along the ocean has been woven through all of these experiences. The natural world is a place for movement and play, listening and meditation, curiosity and reflection. Living on the Pacific coast continues to shape how I understand rhythm, rest, effort, attention, change and connection. Time outside remains vital to how I orient myself in the world and to many of the questions that run through my work.